People make a moral case for free markets — that people have a moral right to be left free to pursue their own interests as they see fit — and there’s something to that, but it’s easy to make too much of the moral case, too. The case for free markets is mostly instrumental: The possibility of profit causes people to self-organize in such a way as to focus the maximum human attention on solving the problems that people care the most about. Notice there is no should in that sentence: People in the communication business wryly observe that every major advance in communication technology in the past hundred years has been driven at least in part by pornography. That’s a joke, but it isn’t just a joke. There’s what people want, and what you or I think or Senator Snout thinks people should want. They aren’t the same thing. If you want to figure out what people think they should want, give them a survey. If you want to figure out what people actually do want, try selling them something. Vast amounts of capital — including human intelligence, the most valuable of all resources — have gone into making food plentiful, automobiles safer and more reliable, housing more affordable and more comfortable . . . and reality-television shows, artificial-intelligence–enabled face-swapping porn, the Super Bowl, and any number of things that do not strike me as obviously valuable. People value what they value.
What I bin sayin
Kevin Williamson on how to tell what people want, not what they wish they wanted:
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9 comments:
Williamson missed two other moral arguments for free markets. There's far more than something to that.
One is that a free market exchange leaves all participants better off than they were before the exchange: each has something of value to him that he didn't have before, and he got it for a price he found acceptable.
The other is that it turns an immorality--personal greed--to good ends. That's Smiths invisible hand moving animal spirits.
Eric Hines
The face-swapping porn thing probably deserves a moment's more attention before we wholeheartedly endorse this argument. :)
Is there an alternative economic system we can adopt that will make us want better things?
If you're taking him to be arguing that the free market is good because it lets us work for bad things, I'd suggest something different: it's the best system for achieving our aims, but it doesn't choose our aims for us. It makes us acknowledge that that's our own job, that we're responsible for bringing good aims to the economic system. We can't farm that part out to other people.
I'd make his first suggested argument differently, in the negative: that we have no moral right to prevent people from pursuing their own interests as they see fit (and that forcing them to pursue what we think their interests ought to be is a moral abomination).
Tex, your formulation of that idea is less of a problem than jaed's, but both of them are attractive. It's not that I want to disagree. It's that it leaves us saying either:
(T) It's up to us and no one else to determine if we should spend our time and resources creating face-swapping porn;
or, stronger,
(J) No one has any moral right to prevent people from pursuing the creation of face-swapping porn, and indeed the real moral abomination is if we should force them to pursue something else instead.
Face-swapping porn strikes me as philosophically very interesting. It's a sort of technical aid to the imagination. Imagination means 'making an image,' i.e. in the mind; so ordinary erotic fantasies, should they involve a person one knows, are a kind of primitive version of the same thing. Most people probably have such fantasies, and probably don't think there is much wrong with them provided they don't entertain them too long and don't make them public. Add in the technical aid to that same imagination, and it's suddenly very clearly wrong to everyone. Even the redditors who are engaging in it remind themselves occasionally that it's wrong.
Yet the real issue with swapping your favorite co-worker's face onto a porn star isn't the creation of a (potentially public) artifact; at least, I don't think anyone would say that. I think they would say that the wrong is in humiliating her by depicting her as engaged in shameless sex acts to which she never consented and in which she never engaged (at least not on film). But the ordinary imagined fantasy does that too.
There are also a range of intermediaries to which people don't object: what if I write a romance novel in which I imagine that same woman while writing the love scenes, but I use a different name and a different time and place so no one knows? What if someone else wrote a similar novel, but used the woman's real name such that everyone knew?
What if a person were to swap her own face, not into porn but into a lusty sex scene with her favorite movie star? The star did consent to being filmed in this scene, only not with her.
It's probably worth exploring at length, because it might help us to understand sexual ethics better than we do. It seems like most of the principled approaches ban even having fantasies without obtaining consent, or ban fantasizing at all; and the less-principled approaches turn on levels of masking one's interest.
However, that lengthy exploration isn't what I'm after here. What I'm after is a recognition that there are some serious ethical issues we haven't even hashed out, but that seem to imply some right to object (at least) to this use of one's time and resources (at least unless explicit consent is obtained). Someone else besides the individual with the interest has a valid ethical concern, even if it's hard to say exactly where the lines are.
Both the T and J principles seem to raise a bar to interfering with someone pursuing this interest. I'm not sure I'm ready to accept that.
I'm saying it's up to each of us to improve whatever is wrong with what we really want, and we can't expect anyone else to fix us by offering us only the alternatives we really should want. That doesn't mean each of us is the sole arbiter of right and wrong. You know I take a more transcendental approach to right and wrong than that.
I also agree with Jaed that the tyrannical impulse to control what other people may want is a very dangerous one, and quite different from our clear duty to uphold values of right and wrong to the best of our ability, by communicating them and by living them out in our own lives.
I resist the notion that an economic system can make us better people by restricting our choices. If we find that our economic system is reflecting bad choices, the place to fix the problem is in us, and is inescapable for each of us with regard to the evil in his own heart. As Solzhenitsyn said, the line between good and evil runs through every human heart, and has done since a certain episode in a garden. (OK, he didn't say that last part.)
Maybe this is a tangent, but... everybody's assuming that the "face swapping porn" will be used to put an unwitting bystander into the shot. In the case of celebrities, I'm sure that's true-- they already have to deal with pornographers hiring lookalikes for films now, so I'm sure the trend will continue. But, my guess is that the great majority of the time, the face-swapping will be to transplant the (male) customer's face onto a porn pro's body, so that he can watch "himself" do his favorite sex acts on a series of professional-porn caliber bodies (male or female, as the case may be). And I would expect that the porn films will be done on a special set to enable the data capture necessary, and so the performers will likely know that this is the purpose of the event.
Pornographers are also working on getting video gaming systems tied in to porn, to allow the customer to, in effect, make his own movies that are viewed from the first person perspective. The intent is to use HD 3D goggles
A larger problem, from a legal standpoint, is CG porn of acts which would be illegal in real life, like child porn or snuff films. The CG is getting so good that it's becoming very hard to tell fake from real-- how do you tell whether there were real victims, and should you allow faked images of crimes to be legal (or will this enable real crimes later)?
To address your example, Grim, I would say that the thing we have a moral right to prevent by force is the abuse of the person whose face you're swapping onto the porn.
(Probable side issue: In this case, since we're talking about harm to a specific individual (and in other circumstances that harm might not exist), that person decides whether to pursue a bar to further such action and/or recompense for the harm already done. Because of this it's properly a civil rather than criminal matter. But we can still force the face-swapping porn producer to stop, if and only of the targeted person objects. I think this also resolves things like your romance-novel-with-different-name scenario: no humiliation or breach of privacy, therefore no victim, therefore no civil action.)
There are other ethical issues in this scenario, of course. Lots! ;-) But none of them strike me as justifying the use of force.
I also want to highlight the differences between:
- What we acknowledge as wrong (or, more weakly, disapprove of), and what we have a right to stop by force
- What we generally discourage and deny our own resources to, and what we have a right to stop by force
I mention this because confusion on one or both of these points dogs discussion of libertarianism. The question in libertarian thinking is not "What is a good society?" or even "How should we bring about a good society?"; it's very specific to the ethics of one type of action: the use of force to prevent bad acts or require good ones. The view is that the entrance of force changes the ethical questions profoundly.
I can imagine libertarian societies that are quite libertine or quite restrained. But this would depend on the temper of the people, not on the wishes of their rulers.
The "Goldwater Principal" suggests we ask ourselves if a new situation and problem has any common features with any prior, solved, problem and if so, what was that solution.
It seems to me that the existing still photo technology and older audio recording technology has already established a body of both statute and case law that (more or less) regulated the use of a recognizable image in an unapproved work. I can't for instance, advertise with an apparent photo of Humphrey Bogart driving a Prius. I can't -- legally-- appropriate an audio clip of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech spliced over a video of a David Duke or Richard Spencer speech. All those "Hitler Learns About " videos -- probably not strictly legal under current law.
What distinguishes the pornographic face swapping offense from the King/Duke offense?
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