what term you would use in place of “goal-oriented mating behavior” that applies to what you find repulsive about both men and women choosing their actions with an intent to influence attractive persons of an appropriate sex to engage in mating behaviors with them?
I’ve been using “objectification” to label the set of behaviors of which I disapprove. (It isn’t the only one, but it’s the most important here.)
I claim that it is unethical to objectify people. By “objectify”, I mean to think of, talk about as, or treat like a non-person. A good heuristic is to see how easily a given sentence could be reworked to have as a subject something inanimate instead of a person. For instance, if someone says, “If I were rich, I’d have a nice house and a sports car and girls falling over themselves to be with me”, the fact that the girls appear as an item in a list along with a vehicle and a dwelling would be a giant red flag. The sample substitute, “If I were a millionaire, my money and status might influence people to think better of me”, would not make sense if you changed “people” to “cars”, because cars do not think. This heuristic is imperfect, and some statements may be objectifying even if their applicability is limited to persons. Likewise, there are statements that can be made about people that are not really objectifying even if you could say them about non-people (e.g. “So-and-so is five feet six inches tall”; “that bookshelf is five feet six inches tall”.)
The behavior that I am repulsed by is the behavior of objectification. The fact that people objectify is simply true. The action of people actually objectifying causes me to castigate the objectifiers in question, whether they are doing so in the course of actively seeking mates or not.
I claim that it is unethical to objectify people. By “objectify”, I mean to think of, talk about as, or treat like a non-person. A good heuristic is to see how easily a given sentence could be reworked to have as a subject something inanimate instead of a person.
Ultimately each person’s ethics are probably axiomatic and impossible to justify or discuss, but this injunction seems extremely odd to me, and trying to follow it would seem to have very bad consequences for the kind of thinking we could do.
For instance, consider the sentences “if falling freely, a car will accelerate at 9.8 m/s^2” and “if falling freely, a person will accelerate at 9.8 m/s^2″. We are not allowed to say or think the second one. But that means that it is impossible to work out the answers to problems like “how long would it take me to fall from a building”—which surely is a question which almost everyone has considered one time or another, and which seems intrinsically harmless.
The fact of the matter is, people are objects, and we ignore it at our peril. Some questions are best considered working “inside-out” , starting with and reasoning from our subjective experience, and some are best considered “outside-in”, starting with what we know about our material make-up. (Especially questions about bias seem to fall in the latter category!)
Nor is there are clean separation between subject matters which requires “person-specific” reasoning and ones that do not. For instance, the topic of clinical depression brings in considerations about happiness and unhappiness, things that go to the core of the experience of being human. But even so, studies about serotonin—a neurotransmitter with we share with common ants—turn out to be very relevant.
The same actually goes for the “falling from a building” example. The reason I was originally interested in the question is of course from imagining the subjective experience—what would it be like, hurling towards your death, how much would you have time to think, etc—but even so, to get the relevant information we have to take the objective viewpoint.
And, I would argue, exactly the same applies to dating. The whole reason we are interested in the topic of dating in the first place is because of the associated subjective experiences. Even so, in thinking about certain aspects of it, it is useful to take the objective viewpoint.
I still have very little idea what you mean by ‘objectification’ and ‘objectify people’.
I was momentarily off-put by Roko’s comment on the desire to have sex with extremely attractive women that money and status would get. This was because of:
the focus on sex, whereas I would desire a relationship.
the connotation of ‘attractive’ which in my mind usually means physical attractiveness, whereas my preferences are dominated by other features of women.
the modifier ‘extremely’ which seems to imply a large difference in utility placed on sex with extremely attractive women vs. very attractive or moderately attractive women, especially when followed by identifying this desire as a generator for desiring high social status rather than vice versa or discussing both directions of causation. (The latter would have made more sense to me in the context of Roko saying we should value social influential power.)
I had negative associations attached to Roko’s comment because I started imagining myself with my preferences adopting Roko’s suggestions. However, I wouldn’t have voiced these negative associations in any phrases along the lines of ‘objectificaton’ or ‘objectifying’, or in terms of any moral concerns. The use of the word ‘get’ by itself did not strike me as particularly out of place any more than talk of ‘getting a girlfriend/boyfriend’.
I’m sorry you don’t understand where I’m coming from. I don’t have any bright ideas about how to make it less ambiguous.
the focus on sex, whereas I would desire a relationship.
Is there some reason you are put off when others don’t share your desires? If the desire in question was something like “I desire to behave ethically” that would be okay, but there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with wanting sex but no relationship. There are ethical ways to pursue that desire.
the connotation of ‘attractive’ which in my mind usually means physical attractiveness, whereas my preferences are dominated by other features of women.
It’s certainly nice that your attraction isn’t dominated solely by physical features, but that isn’t actually what “attractive” means on a reliable enough basis that I thought it was worth bringing up. Even if “conventionally physically attractive” was what Roko meant, there doesn’t seem to be anything obviously wrong with that in light of the focus on sex over a relationship. One person can want to have no-strings-attached sex with multiple conventionally physically attractive women and I can want to settle down in a long-term relationship with a bespectacled dark-haired person with an IQ over 120 and there is no reason to think that these desires can’t both be okay simultaneously.
the modifier ‘extremely’ which seems to imply a large difference in utility placed on sex with extremely attractive women vs. very attractive or moderately attractive women
I don’t see this as any more problematic than the mention of attractiveness in the first place. If it’s okay for me to want a spouse with an IQ over 120, presumably it’d be okay for me to want a spouse with an IQ over 140, it’d just make a person satisfying my criteria trickier to find; the same would be true if Roko or anyone else wants to have sex with women several standard deviations above the physical attractiveness mean.
The use of the word ‘get’ by itself did not strike me as particularly out of place any more than talk of ‘getting a girlfriend/boyfriend’.
Not more than, but “getting a [girl/boy]friend” isn’t unloaded language either… (I have been known to use the word “obtain” with respect to a hypothetical future spouse myself, but that’s mostly because “marry” would sound redundant.)
Not more than, but “getting a [girl/boy]friend” isn’t unloaded language either… (I have been known to use the word “obtain” with respect to a hypothetical future spouse myself, but that’s mostly because “marry” would sound redundant.)
Then why is “getting” objectionable? I (obviously) don’t “get” it, no pun intended.
Is there some reason you are put off when others don’t share your desires?
Read Roko’s comment again and you’ll realize that Wu wei is quite justified in being put off by it. Roko was implying that people who do not adopt these specific values are setting themselves up for failure at their goals due to not being motivated enough.
In my opinion, Roko’s whole argument reeks of availability bias. People who have attained more wealth and social status are certainly more salient to us, but this doesn’t make them more influential by real-world measures. Still, money makes the world go round and having more wealthy philanthropists who can look beyond warm fuzzies to actual utilons created would be a very good thing.
I had negative associations attached to Roko’s comment because I started imagining myself with my preferences adopting Roko’s suggestions.
This sentence was meant to explain why I was momentarily off-put. I did not mean to imply that I have any ethical problems with the desires mentioned (I don’t), though now that you mention it, I wouldn’t be too surprised if I do retain some knee-jerk ethical intuitions against them.
For instance, if someone says, “If I were rich, I’d have a nice house and a sports car and girls falling over themselves to be with me”, the fact that the girls appear as an item in a list along with a vehicle and a dwelling would be a giant red flag.
Um, that example actually fails your heuristic: “If I were rich, I’d have a nice house and a sports car and cars falling over themselves to be with me” makes no sense.
This heuristic is imperfect, and some statements may be objectifying even if their applicability is limited to persons.
That appears to contradict your earlier definition:
By “objectify”, I mean to think of, talk about as, or treat like a non-person.
If the applicability of a statement is limited to persons, then how can that possibly be “like a non-person”?
The entire thing sounds like bottom-line reasoning—i.e., the specific thing is something you find repulsive, therefore it’s objectification.
(I’m not even going to touch the thoughtcrime part where you’re classing speech and thoughts to be unethical in themselves, except to mention that this is the part where having such a repulsion is objectively non-useful to you or anyone else, since all it can ever do is cause you and others pain. Of course, I expect this comment to be widely downvoted for that idea, since the right to righteous indignation is itself a religious idea around here, even if it’s more usually wielded in support of Truth or Theory rather than gender sensibilities. All very on-topic for this post about atheist/rationalist denials, as it turns out!)
Um, that example actually fails your heuristic: “If I were rich, I’d have a nice house and a sports car and cars falling over themselves to be with me” makes no sense.
Perhaps you are trying to be funny. If you’re not, I’ll just point out that I did say it was an imperfect heuristic, and anyway to apply it with some finesse means that you might have to replace a whole noun phrase (gasp, shock, alarm).
If the applicability of a statement is limited to persons, then how can that possibly be “like a non-person”?
Because grammar is like that. For instance, most sentences that use gendered pronouns would be deeply strange if applied to non-boat inanimate objects, but that doesn’t stop some such sentences from being objectifying.
The entire thing sounds like bottom-line reasoning—i.e., the specific thing is something you find repulsive, therefore it’s objectification.
No, sometimes things I find repulsive are non-objectifying, and are bad for some other reason. Occasionally, I’m even repulsed by things that are not unethical.
having such a repulsion is objectively non-useful to you or anyone else, since all it can ever do is cause you and others pain.
Not so. By having and announcing this repulsion I can influence anyone who happens to care about my opinion.
By having and announcing this repulsion I can influence anyone who happens to care about my opinion.
...and how is that useful?!
That’s like saying that it’s good to dislike chocolate because then you can make sure nobody gives you any, or that banging your head on the wall is a pleasure because it feels good when you stop. It’d be more useful to just not bang your head, unless there’s something else you’re getting from the activity.
Perhaps you are trying to be funny. If you’re not, I’ll just point out that I did say it was an imperfect heuristic, and anyway to apply it with some finesse means that you might have to replace a whole noun phrase (gasp, shock, alarm).
Then kindly point out what noun phrase you would have replaced. Or in the alternative, please provide a definition of “objectification” that doesn’t boil down to, “I know it when I see it.”
I really have no clue what you’re talking about in the first bit. Do you think that having ethical opinions is useless because if one didn’t have them it would save one a headache? Do you think being repelled is not an appropriate response to detecting an ethical violation? Are you even trying to understand what I’m typing?
Second bit:
“If I were rich, I’d have a nice house and a sports car and girls falling over themselves to be with me.” → “If I were rich, I’d have a nice house and a sports car and real silverware and crystal dishes.”
Do you think being repelled is not an appropriate response to detecting an ethical violation?
What I was saying was that I think considering people’s words and thoughts (as opposed to their behaviors) about their goals and opinions as having ethical weight is ludicrously unuseful.
I also think repulsion is not an appropriate response to “detecting an ethical violation”, since that emotion motivates signaling behavior rather than useful behavior. For example, it encourages one to communicate one’s beliefs in a judgmental way that communicates entitlement, and discourages co-operation from others.
“If I were rich, I’d have a nice house and a sports car and girls falling over themselves to be with me.” → “If I were rich, I’d have a nice house and a sports car and real silverware and crystal dishes.”
So, how do you arrive at this substitution? You keep removing the part that only a person can do, so if that rule is applied consistently, you end up with any statement being objectification.
Words are verbal behavior. If you don’t think people can be held ethically responsible for verbal behavior, I’m sure I could come up with some persuasive examples, but I’m no longer sure this discussion is worth my attention, as you’re very persistent in missing the point.
considering people’s words and thoughts (as opposed to their behaviors) about their goals and opinions as having ethical weight is ludicrously unuseful.
Sure, there are unethical verbal behaviors. Truthfully expressing opinions or discussing one’s goals are not among them, however.
Even if somebody opines that their goal is to do something awful to me, then if that is a true statement, it is actually ethically good for them to give me advance warning! So considering someone’s (truthful) verbal behavior about their goals or opinions as unethical is simply not useful to me, regardless of what opinion I may hold about what behavior may result from that opinion or goal.
But what if somebody, in opining that their goal is to do something awful to you, solicits ideas on what awful things to do and how to accomplish them, and encourages others to do awful things to you themselves?
I think that situation is closer to what Alicorn is objecting to.
That is verbal behavior that goes above and beyond just truthfully stating things.
How so? If the first one is what the person actually means, then blowing smoke up my ass about it doesn’t help me.
AFAICT, you are still arguing a bottom line: that truthful verbalization about one’s internal state can be ethically bad. I won’t claim that NO such verbalization can exist as a mathematical absolute, but I haven’t yet seen you offer an example that’s bad by anything other than your own definition of “ethics”—i.e., what makes you feel bad.
So, how can something be wrong that has no bad results, probabilistically OR actually?
For instance, if someone says, “If I were rich, I’d have a nice house and a sports car and girls falling over themselves to be with me”, the fact that the girls appear as an item in a list along with a vehicle and a dwelling would be a giant red flag.
I’m not sure objectification is the cause of the red flag here : would you get the same impression if he said “If I were rich, I’d have a nice house and a sports car and a gardener”?
I’m not sure if a gardener is “objectified” (I find that an confusing word). He or she certainly is a substitutable unit of gardening skill. Another gardener with the same skill would be just as good. Similar does apply to “attractive woman”. Another attractive woman would fit the job just as well. Leaving aside “objectified”, it’s certainly impersonal.
You make a very good point. I’m tempted to draw a distinction between referring to a hypothetical member of a profession as opposed to a hypothetical member of a gender, but until I’ve given this more thought all I will say is that it’d probably be better to say “a garden” than “a gardener”.
It is perhaps a salient distinction that people choose their profession, but not their gender.
However, I disagree; both are objectifying to some degree, but it is considered socially acceptable to objectify people in the context of employment, presumably because both parties are getting some explicit value out of the transaction.
It’s certainly something that mid-20th-century radicals would object to. The language of ‘objectification’ that we’ve inherited primarily from radical feminists grew out of the intellectual framework of the Marxists, who were explicitly objecting to that sort of treatment of employees; cf Marx (or better yet Hagel)’s notion of alienation.
That said, I don’t think we have any radicals here in that sense, and I agree with Alicorn’s characterization that it would have probably been fine for OP to say (roughly speaking) “get lots of prostitutes”.
Marx’s equivalent to objectification is actually called “commodity fetishism” (seriously—no pun intended). It corresponds to replacing social relations between human beings with mere exchange of commodities. In Marxian analysis, this obscures the social and exchange relations between producers and consumers, since e.g. a worker becomes utterly unaware of the people who will consume his products, except to the extent that his “labor-power” is valued as a commodity.
Of course, as Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek observed, commodity fetishism (or the “commercial production process”) is what makes modern-day specialization and complex supply chains possible: even something as humble as a cotton shirt might incorporate designs sketched out in Italy, cotton grown in Africa and plastic buttons made in China. Requiring human contact or conscious agreements between so many agents would clearly be infeasible.
The benefits of sexual objectification are far less clear, except to the extent that (as some empirical evidence bears out) some people are positive towards being objectified in a sexual context.
Well, it is somewhat tacky to blatantly objectify employees—it tends to make one sound like a pompous, entitled jerk. But that’s a much shallower sort of objection than what Alicorn is raising. At a general social level, objectifying in the context of employement is on the “acceptable” side, whereas objectifying in the context of personal relationships, especially sexual relationships, straddles the line and is probably drifting toward “unacceptable”.
As for me, since I figure it’s heading that way, I’m getting in on the ground floor on avoiding such language, so that when I’m 70 years old I don’t embarrass younger family members with quaint objectifying language.
I’m not sure objectification is the cause of the red flag here : would you get the same impression if he said “If I were rich, I’d have a nice house and a sports car and a gardener”? [writes Emile]
until I’ve given this more thought all I will say is that it’d probably be better to say “a garden” than “a gardener” [writes Alicorn].
Alicorn, I am curious what is your answer to Emile’s question if we replace “gardener” with “butler”?
Please do not take my question as a dismissal of your concern. In fact, I think it is probable that you have a valid concern. I ask my question not in the spirit of a debate but rather in the spirit of a cooperative quest to understand. I am planning more top-level posts about sex, and I do not want my ignorance of your concerns and similar concerns to cause me to alienate female Less Wrongers.
I think what I’m going to wind up saying to both the gardener and butler examples is that those individuals are explicitly selling their work, so it’s okay to refer to the profession as a stand-in for a semi-objectified human representation of that work. I’ve said elsewhere that when people want to have sex with women, it’s “at least honest” to purchase it outright from prostitutes who are selling it; I imagine it’s no less honest to purchase the work of a gardener or a butler. It’s when random “attractive women”/”girls”/whatever are said to be taking action other than the actual, literal sale of some sort of work as a result of hypothetical millionaire-ness that it stops being acceptable.
I think the problem is that you need to think though what it is you’re protesting. Objectification, to me, doesn’t mean wanting to get, acquire or obtain a girl. Buying a girl, raping a girl—that’s objectification, because the rapist ignores the fact that the girl has free will. It’s still true that she is ALSO an object, though. And a chordate animal. And an ultra-feminist.
Buying women, kidnapping women, shotgun wedding, buying off the cops to cover up your rape—these are no-nos. But what’s wrong with attracting girls by being more awesome?
(Also, it is immoral to abuse bugs in people’s decision-making algorithms.)
The first Google result for this is the parent comment. I have no idea what you mean. From what I gather, it’s supposed to be invoked when someone calls one’s opponent a Communist. Did that happen?
“Please explain to me how being rich is any of these things.
It’s not.”
Then what DO you mean? Minutae of phrasing?
When I said “more awesome”, I meant “richer”. That is also what Roko said—that money gets you girls. He didn’t say that money gets you girls on the black market. Money gets you all sorts of girls—from sex slaves to true love. Not being a jerk is a separate problem.
Nothing, unless by “more awesome” you mean “more deceitful, depersonalizing, and piggish”.
Some people (of both sexes) have a sexual preference for depersonalization or being depersonalized. Are you saying that they are wrong to have that preference, or that it is wrong for anyone to participate with their enactment of it?
I assume here that by “wrong” you intend to ascribe some higher form of wrongness than merely your own disgust. But even if it’s just your personal disgust, I find it hard to see how that disgust is any different from say, homophobia.
Some people (of both sexes) have a sexual preference for depersonalization or being depersonalized. Are you saying that they are wrong to have that preference, or that it is wrong for anyone to participate with their enactment of it?
If you’re talking about the ilk of BDSM, I do not think those desires or their enactments are wrong, but there is a difference between (for instance) person A calling person B depersonalizing names in situation X, where this is a scene and B has a safeword and they’re going to go have scrambled eggs at a café together later or something, and in situation Y, where this is an abusive relationship and A is really and continually thought of as an object rather than a partner—even if in situation Y as well as X, B happens to be turned on by the depersonalizing names. By a similar token, battery is wrong even if you just so happen to perpetrate it on a masochist; murder is wrong even if you just so happen to perpetrate it on someone who was about to commit suicide; etc. Information, not luck.
The next logical thing to bring up is 24⁄7 BDSM relationships, but responsibly conducted those at least begin with a personal and consensual ceding of control.
But there is a difference between (for instance) person A calling person B depersonalizing names in situation X, where this is a scene and B has a safeword and they’re going to go have scrambled eggs at a café together later or something, and in situation Y, where this is an abusive relationship and A is really and continually thought of as an object rather than a partner—even if in situation Y as well as X, B happens to be turned on by the depersonalizing names.
The question was, is it then “wrong” (as you suggested it was) for person B to think person A is “more awesome” in situation Y?
In situation Y, person A is an abuser, and no one should think abusers at all awesome, at least not at being ethical people (I suppose they could be awesome at something else, like curling or origami). To think an abuser is awesome at being an ethical person is to be mistaken and, probably, to be mistaken about facts of morality.
The comment of yours I’m referring to is the one where you said:
Nothing [is wrong] unless by “more awesome” you mean “more deceitful, depersonalizing, and piggish”.
And it was in reply to a comment asking what was wrong with attracting people via awesomeness, so switching it to “being ethical people” now is a complete red herring.
You still haven’t said what it is that’s “wrong” here with someone having a different definition of awesomeness than you.
So when you say:
In situation Y, person A is an abuser, and no one should think abusers at all awesome
My question to you is, what are you saying about person B thinking person A is awesome, in the sense of being attractive? (as was the context of this thread) You implied that it is “wrong”. How so?
I’m asking you simple, straightforward questions about your comments.
Perhaps it will be clearer if I give a personal example.
When I was a lot younger, I was in a relationship with a woman who, well, largely held me in contempt, except as a vehicle for satisfying certain of her sexual desires. Was I wrong to find this depersonalizing piggishness of hers awesome, despite the fact that her contempt was not part of a negotiated BDSM scene, nor any sort of playacting on her part? Was her attitude somehow morally wrong? Was mine?
My point here is that this sort of bright-line moralism invariably ends up depriving other people of choice, or framing them as second-class humans. The very attempt to codify objective criteria for “objectification” ends up objectifying and oppressing people.
We can be considerate of individuals, but trying to be considerate of classes of people doesn’t scale: just segregating people into classes in the first place is half the problem! (e.g. stereotype priming)
Edit to add clarification: one reason defining classes and labeling people members of them is depersonalizing is because it downplays their individuality to merely a set of footnotes on the ways in which they are or are not like the class they are being seen as a member of. For example, saying that a woman is a good programmer “for a woman” is depersonalizing, despite the superficial positive intent to compliment. In the same way, Alicorn’s classing other people’s activity as “abuse” or “wrong” is depersonalizing, despite the superficial positive intent of that labeling.
For example, it labels me as a victim of abuse, regardless of how I choose to see myself. By Alicorn’s own definitions (as I understand them) this is morally “wrong” for her to do—which appears to me to demonstrate the self-contradictory (or at least inconsistent) nature of her definitions.
My own resolution to such a paradox is to assume that it’s good to be considerate to individuals, but also to accept that others do not have a corresponding obligation to be considerate to me. I don’t expect that Alicorn must refrain from stating her opinions about my past relationship, just because it might be inconsiderate of her to do so, nor do I feel a need to make her feel bad for implying something bad about me. And if I did feel bad about it, that would be my responsibility to fix, not hers.
And if I couldn’t simply fix the problem by changing my feelings, and chose to ask Alicorn or anyone else to be more considerate in their speech, I certainly wouldn’t do it by starting out with the implication that they were morally wrong and that it was unquestionably a good idea that they should take my feelings into consideration! If I was going to ask at all, I’d ask for it as what it is: a favor to a specific person.
I’ve been using “objectification” to label the set of behaviors of which I disapprove. (It isn’t the only one, but it’s the most important here.)
I claim that it is unethical to objectify people. By “objectify”, I mean to think of, talk about as, or treat like a non-person. A good heuristic is to see how easily a given sentence could be reworked to have as a subject something inanimate instead of a person. For instance, if someone says, “If I were rich, I’d have a nice house and a sports car and girls falling over themselves to be with me”, the fact that the girls appear as an item in a list along with a vehicle and a dwelling would be a giant red flag. The sample substitute, “If I were a millionaire, my money and status might influence people to think better of me”, would not make sense if you changed “people” to “cars”, because cars do not think. This heuristic is imperfect, and some statements may be objectifying even if their applicability is limited to persons. Likewise, there are statements that can be made about people that are not really objectifying even if you could say them about non-people (e.g. “So-and-so is five feet six inches tall”; “that bookshelf is five feet six inches tall”.)
The behavior that I am repulsed by is the behavior of objectification. The fact that people objectify is simply true. The action of people actually objectifying causes me to castigate the objectifiers in question, whether they are doing so in the course of actively seeking mates or not.
Ultimately each person’s ethics are probably axiomatic and impossible to justify or discuss, but this injunction seems extremely odd to me, and trying to follow it would seem to have very bad consequences for the kind of thinking we could do.
For instance, consider the sentences “if falling freely, a car will accelerate at 9.8 m/s^2” and “if falling freely, a person will accelerate at 9.8 m/s^2″. We are not allowed to say or think the second one. But that means that it is impossible to work out the answers to problems like “how long would it take me to fall from a building”—which surely is a question which almost everyone has considered one time or another, and which seems intrinsically harmless.
The fact of the matter is, people are objects, and we ignore it at our peril. Some questions are best considered working “inside-out” , starting with and reasoning from our subjective experience, and some are best considered “outside-in”, starting with what we know about our material make-up. (Especially questions about bias seem to fall in the latter category!)
Nor is there are clean separation between subject matters which requires “person-specific” reasoning and ones that do not. For instance, the topic of clinical depression brings in considerations about happiness and unhappiness, things that go to the core of the experience of being human. But even so, studies about serotonin—a neurotransmitter with we share with common ants—turn out to be very relevant.
The same actually goes for the “falling from a building” example. The reason I was originally interested in the question is of course from imagining the subjective experience—what would it be like, hurling towards your death, how much would you have time to think, etc—but even so, to get the relevant information we have to take the objective viewpoint.
And, I would argue, exactly the same applies to dating. The whole reason we are interested in the topic of dating in the first place is because of the associated subjective experiences. Even so, in thinking about certain aspects of it, it is useful to take the objective viewpoint.
I still have very little idea what you mean by ‘objectification’ and ‘objectify people’.
I was momentarily off-put by Roko’s comment on the desire to have sex with extremely attractive women that money and status would get. This was because of:
the focus on sex, whereas I would desire a relationship.
the connotation of ‘attractive’ which in my mind usually means physical attractiveness, whereas my preferences are dominated by other features of women.
the modifier ‘extremely’ which seems to imply a large difference in utility placed on sex with extremely attractive women vs. very attractive or moderately attractive women, especially when followed by identifying this desire as a generator for desiring high social status rather than vice versa or discussing both directions of causation. (The latter would have made more sense to me in the context of Roko saying we should value social influential power.)
I had negative associations attached to Roko’s comment because I started imagining myself with my preferences adopting Roko’s suggestions. However, I wouldn’t have voiced these negative associations in any phrases along the lines of ‘objectificaton’ or ‘objectifying’, or in terms of any moral concerns. The use of the word ‘get’ by itself did not strike me as particularly out of place any more than talk of ‘getting a girlfriend/boyfriend’.
I’m sorry you don’t understand where I’m coming from. I don’t have any bright ideas about how to make it less ambiguous.
Is there some reason you are put off when others don’t share your desires? If the desire in question was something like “I desire to behave ethically” that would be okay, but there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with wanting sex but no relationship. There are ethical ways to pursue that desire.
It’s certainly nice that your attraction isn’t dominated solely by physical features, but that isn’t actually what “attractive” means on a reliable enough basis that I thought it was worth bringing up. Even if “conventionally physically attractive” was what Roko meant, there doesn’t seem to be anything obviously wrong with that in light of the focus on sex over a relationship. One person can want to have no-strings-attached sex with multiple conventionally physically attractive women and I can want to settle down in a long-term relationship with a bespectacled dark-haired person with an IQ over 120 and there is no reason to think that these desires can’t both be okay simultaneously.
I don’t see this as any more problematic than the mention of attractiveness in the first place. If it’s okay for me to want a spouse with an IQ over 120, presumably it’d be okay for me to want a spouse with an IQ over 140, it’d just make a person satisfying my criteria trickier to find; the same would be true if Roko or anyone else wants to have sex with women several standard deviations above the physical attractiveness mean.
Not more than, but “getting a [girl/boy]friend” isn’t unloaded language either… (I have been known to use the word “obtain” with respect to a hypothetical future spouse myself, but that’s mostly because “marry” would sound redundant.)
Then why is “getting” objectionable? I (obviously) don’t “get” it, no pun intended.
Read Roko’s comment again and you’ll realize that Wu wei is quite justified in being put off by it. Roko was implying that people who do not adopt these specific values are setting themselves up for failure at their goals due to not being motivated enough.
In my opinion, Roko’s whole argument reeks of availability bias. People who have attained more wealth and social status are certainly more salient to us, but this doesn’t make them more influential by real-world measures. Still, money makes the world go round and having more wealthy philanthropists who can look beyond warm fuzzies to actual utilons created would be a very good thing.
This sentence was meant to explain why I was momentarily off-put. I did not mean to imply that I have any ethical problems with the desires mentioned (I don’t), though now that you mention it, I wouldn’t be too surprised if I do retain some knee-jerk ethical intuitions against them.
Um, that example actually fails your heuristic: “If I were rich, I’d have a nice house and a sports car and cars falling over themselves to be with me” makes no sense.
That appears to contradict your earlier definition:
If the applicability of a statement is limited to persons, then how can that possibly be “like a non-person”?
The entire thing sounds like bottom-line reasoning—i.e., the specific thing is something you find repulsive, therefore it’s objectification.
(I’m not even going to touch the thoughtcrime part where you’re classing speech and thoughts to be unethical in themselves, except to mention that this is the part where having such a repulsion is objectively non-useful to you or anyone else, since all it can ever do is cause you and others pain. Of course, I expect this comment to be widely downvoted for that idea, since the right to righteous indignation is itself a religious idea around here, even if it’s more usually wielded in support of Truth or Theory rather than gender sensibilities. All very on-topic for this post about atheist/rationalist denials, as it turns out!)
I feel your pain… I think I lost about 40 karma in this discussion…
Perhaps you are trying to be funny. If you’re not, I’ll just point out that I did say it was an imperfect heuristic, and anyway to apply it with some finesse means that you might have to replace a whole noun phrase (gasp, shock, alarm).
Because grammar is like that. For instance, most sentences that use gendered pronouns would be deeply strange if applied to non-boat inanimate objects, but that doesn’t stop some such sentences from being objectifying.
No, sometimes things I find repulsive are non-objectifying, and are bad for some other reason. Occasionally, I’m even repulsed by things that are not unethical.
Not so. By having and announcing this repulsion I can influence anyone who happens to care about my opinion.
...and how is that useful?!
That’s like saying that it’s good to dislike chocolate because then you can make sure nobody gives you any, or that banging your head on the wall is a pleasure because it feels good when you stop. It’d be more useful to just not bang your head, unless there’s something else you’re getting from the activity.
Then kindly point out what noun phrase you would have replaced. Or in the alternative, please provide a definition of “objectification” that doesn’t boil down to, “I know it when I see it.”
I really have no clue what you’re talking about in the first bit. Do you think that having ethical opinions is useless because if one didn’t have them it would save one a headache? Do you think being repelled is not an appropriate response to detecting an ethical violation? Are you even trying to understand what I’m typing?
Second bit:
“If I were rich, I’d have a nice house and a sports car and girls falling over themselves to be with me.” → “If I were rich, I’d have a nice house and a sports car and real silverware and crystal dishes.”
What I was saying was that I think considering people’s words and thoughts (as opposed to their behaviors) about their goals and opinions as having ethical weight is ludicrously unuseful.
I also think repulsion is not an appropriate response to “detecting an ethical violation”, since that emotion motivates signaling behavior rather than useful behavior. For example, it encourages one to communicate one’s beliefs in a judgmental way that communicates entitlement, and discourages co-operation from others.
So, how do you arrive at this substitution? You keep removing the part that only a person can do, so if that rule is applied consistently, you end up with any statement being objectification.
Words are verbal behavior. If you don’t think people can be held ethically responsible for verbal behavior, I’m sure I could come up with some persuasive examples, but I’m no longer sure this discussion is worth my attention, as you’re very persistent in missing the point.
Please reread:
Sure, there are unethical verbal behaviors. Truthfully expressing opinions or discussing one’s goals are not among them, however.
Even if somebody opines that their goal is to do something awful to me, then if that is a true statement, it is actually ethically good for them to give me advance warning! So considering someone’s (truthful) verbal behavior about their goals or opinions as unethical is simply not useful to me, regardless of what opinion I may hold about what behavior may result from that opinion or goal.
But what if somebody, in opining that their goal is to do something awful to you, solicits ideas on what awful things to do and how to accomplish them, and encourages others to do awful things to you themselves?
I think that situation is closer to what Alicorn is objecting to.
People can phrase things in many ways. There is a difference which may be ethically relevant between:
“So-and-so is a [profanity] and I’m going to lose it and [threats of violence] if he doesn’t leave me alone!”
and
“I don’t like so-and-so and I wish he’d go away. I might do something really regrettable if he doesn’t; he just gets on my nerves that much.”
Even though the goals and opinions might be just alike. That is verbal behavior that goes above and beyond just truthfully stating things.
How so? If the first one is what the person actually means, then blowing smoke up my ass about it doesn’t help me.
AFAICT, you are still arguing a bottom line: that truthful verbalization about one’s internal state can be ethically bad. I won’t claim that NO such verbalization can exist as a mathematical absolute, but I haven’t yet seen you offer an example that’s bad by anything other than your own definition of “ethics”—i.e., what makes you feel bad.
So, how can something be wrong that has no bad results, probabilistically OR actually?
I’m not sure objectification is the cause of the red flag here : would you get the same impression if he said “If I were rich, I’d have a nice house and a sports car and a gardener”?
I’m not sure if a gardener is “objectified” (I find that an confusing word). He or she certainly is a substitutable unit of gardening skill. Another gardener with the same skill would be just as good. Similar does apply to “attractive woman”. Another attractive woman would fit the job just as well. Leaving aside “objectified”, it’s certainly impersonal.
You make a very good point. I’m tempted to draw a distinction between referring to a hypothetical member of a profession as opposed to a hypothetical member of a gender, but until I’ve given this more thought all I will say is that it’d probably be better to say “a garden” than “a gardener”.
It is perhaps a salient distinction that people choose their profession, but not their gender.
However, I disagree; both are objectifying to some degree, but it is considered socially acceptable to objectify people in the context of employment, presumably because both parties are getting some explicit value out of the transaction.
It’s certainly something that mid-20th-century radicals would object to. The language of ‘objectification’ that we’ve inherited primarily from radical feminists grew out of the intellectual framework of the Marxists, who were explicitly objecting to that sort of treatment of employees; cf Marx (or better yet Hagel)’s notion of alienation.
That said, I don’t think we have any radicals here in that sense, and I agree with Alicorn’s characterization that it would have probably been fine for OP to say (roughly speaking) “get lots of prostitutes”.
Marx’s equivalent to objectification is actually called “commodity fetishism” (seriously—no pun intended). It corresponds to replacing social relations between human beings with mere exchange of commodities. In Marxian analysis, this obscures the social and exchange relations between producers and consumers, since e.g. a worker becomes utterly unaware of the people who will consume his products, except to the extent that his “labor-power” is valued as a commodity.
Of course, as Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek observed, commodity fetishism (or the “commercial production process”) is what makes modern-day specialization and complex supply chains possible: even something as humble as a cotton shirt might incorporate designs sketched out in Italy, cotton grown in Africa and plastic buttons made in China. Requiring human contact or conscious agreements between so many agents would clearly be infeasible.
The benefits of sexual objectification are far less clear, except to the extent that (as some empirical evidence bears out) some people are positive towards being objectified in a sexual context.
Well, it is somewhat tacky to blatantly objectify employees—it tends to make one sound like a pompous, entitled jerk. But that’s a much shallower sort of objection than what Alicorn is raising. At a general social level, objectifying in the context of employement is on the “acceptable” side, whereas objectifying in the context of personal relationships, especially sexual relationships, straddles the line and is probably drifting toward “unacceptable”.
As for me, since I figure it’s heading that way, I’m getting in on the ground floor on avoiding such language, so that when I’m 70 years old I don’t embarrass younger family members with quaint objectifying language.
Alicorn, I am curious what is your answer to Emile’s question if we replace “gardener” with “butler”?
Please do not take my question as a dismissal of your concern. In fact, I think it is probable that you have a valid concern. I ask my question not in the spirit of a debate but rather in the spirit of a cooperative quest to understand. I am planning more top-level posts about sex, and I do not want my ignorance of your concerns and similar concerns to cause me to alienate female Less Wrongers.
I think what I’m going to wind up saying to both the gardener and butler examples is that those individuals are explicitly selling their work, so it’s okay to refer to the profession as a stand-in for a semi-objectified human representation of that work. I’ve said elsewhere that when people want to have sex with women, it’s “at least honest” to purchase it outright from prostitutes who are selling it; I imagine it’s no less honest to purchase the work of a gardener or a butler. It’s when random “attractive women”/”girls”/whatever are said to be taking action other than the actual, literal sale of some sort of work as a result of hypothetical millionaire-ness that it stops being acceptable.
I think the problem is that you need to think though what it is you’re protesting. Objectification, to me, doesn’t mean wanting to get, acquire or obtain a girl. Buying a girl, raping a girl—that’s objectification, because the rapist ignores the fact that the girl has free will. It’s still true that she is ALSO an object, though. And a chordate animal. And an ultra-feminist.
Buying women, kidnapping women, shotgun wedding, buying off the cops to cover up your rape—these are no-nos. But what’s wrong with attracting girls by being more awesome?
(Also, it is immoral to abuse bugs in people’s decision-making algorithms.)
Nothing, unless by “more awesome” you mean “more deceitful, depersonalizing, and piggish”.
Please explain to me how being rich is any of these things. Don’t make me invoke Godwinski’s Law.
It seems to me that you’re saying that merely wanting sex is dehumanizing.
The first Google result for this is the parent comment. I have no idea what you mean. From what I gather, it’s supposed to be invoked when someone calls one’s opponent a Communist. Did that happen?
It’s a term that was proposed on TV Tropes, but I forgot that, apparently, it wasn’t launched.
Is thomblake’s definition correct, then?
Yep.
Thanks!
It’s not.
What?
No.
“Please explain to me how being rich is any of these things.
It’s not.”
Then what DO you mean? Minutae of phrasing?
When I said “more awesome”, I meant “richer”. That is also what Roko said—that money gets you girls. He didn’t say that money gets you girls on the black market. Money gets you all sorts of girls—from sex slaves to true love. Not being a jerk is a separate problem.
Some people (of both sexes) have a sexual preference for depersonalization or being depersonalized. Are you saying that they are wrong to have that preference, or that it is wrong for anyone to participate with their enactment of it?
I assume here that by “wrong” you intend to ascribe some higher form of wrongness than merely your own disgust. But even if it’s just your personal disgust, I find it hard to see how that disgust is any different from say, homophobia.
If you’re talking about the ilk of BDSM, I do not think those desires or their enactments are wrong, but there is a difference between (for instance) person A calling person B depersonalizing names in situation X, where this is a scene and B has a safeword and they’re going to go have scrambled eggs at a café together later or something, and in situation Y, where this is an abusive relationship and A is really and continually thought of as an object rather than a partner—even if in situation Y as well as X, B happens to be turned on by the depersonalizing names. By a similar token, battery is wrong even if you just so happen to perpetrate it on a masochist; murder is wrong even if you just so happen to perpetrate it on someone who was about to commit suicide; etc. Information, not luck.
The next logical thing to bring up is 24⁄7 BDSM relationships, but responsibly conducted those at least begin with a personal and consensual ceding of control.
The question was, is it then “wrong” (as you suggested it was) for person B to think person A is “more awesome” in situation Y?
In situation Y, person A is an abuser, and no one should think abusers at all awesome, at least not at being ethical people (I suppose they could be awesome at something else, like curling or origami). To think an abuser is awesome at being an ethical person is to be mistaken and, probably, to be mistaken about facts of morality.
The comment of yours I’m referring to is the one where you said:
And it was in reply to a comment asking what was wrong with attracting people via awesomeness, so switching it to “being ethical people” now is a complete red herring.
You still haven’t said what it is that’s “wrong” here with someone having a different definition of awesomeness than you.
So when you say:
My question to you is, what are you saying about person B thinking person A is awesome, in the sense of being attractive? (as was the context of this thread) You implied that it is “wrong”. How so?
I don’t know what you’re talking about again, and probably shouldn’t have re-engaged with you in the first place.
I’m asking you simple, straightforward questions about your comments.
Perhaps it will be clearer if I give a personal example.
When I was a lot younger, I was in a relationship with a woman who, well, largely held me in contempt, except as a vehicle for satisfying certain of her sexual desires. Was I wrong to find this depersonalizing piggishness of hers awesome, despite the fact that her contempt was not part of a negotiated BDSM scene, nor any sort of playacting on her part? Was her attitude somehow morally wrong? Was mine?
My point here is that this sort of bright-line moralism invariably ends up depriving other people of choice, or framing them as second-class humans. The very attempt to codify objective criteria for “objectification” ends up objectifying and oppressing people.
We can be considerate of individuals, but trying to be considerate of classes of people doesn’t scale: just segregating people into classes in the first place is half the problem! (e.g. stereotype priming)
Edit to add clarification: one reason defining classes and labeling people members of them is depersonalizing is because it downplays their individuality to merely a set of footnotes on the ways in which they are or are not like the class they are being seen as a member of. For example, saying that a woman is a good programmer “for a woman” is depersonalizing, despite the superficial positive intent to compliment. In the same way, Alicorn’s classing other people’s activity as “abuse” or “wrong” is depersonalizing, despite the superficial positive intent of that labeling.
For example, it labels me as a victim of abuse, regardless of how I choose to see myself. By Alicorn’s own definitions (as I understand them) this is morally “wrong” for her to do—which appears to me to demonstrate the self-contradictory (or at least inconsistent) nature of her definitions.
My own resolution to such a paradox is to assume that it’s good to be considerate to individuals, but also to accept that others do not have a corresponding obligation to be considerate to me. I don’t expect that Alicorn must refrain from stating her opinions about my past relationship, just because it might be inconsiderate of her to do so, nor do I feel a need to make her feel bad for implying something bad about me. And if I did feel bad about it, that would be my responsibility to fix, not hers.
And if I couldn’t simply fix the problem by changing my feelings, and chose to ask Alicorn or anyone else to be more considerate in their speech, I certainly wouldn’t do it by starting out with the implication that they were morally wrong and that it was unquestionably a good idea that they should take my feelings into consideration! If I was going to ask at all, I’d ask for it as what it is: a favor to a specific person.