I find that those with any significant degree of PUA competence are not particularly inclined to try to excuse themselves to others. Apart from being an unhealthy mindset to be stuck in it sends all the wrong signals. They would instead bock out any hecklers and go about their business. If people try to shame the specifically while they are flirting or socializing they may need to handle the situation actively but it is almost certainly not going to be with excuses.
So far in this conversation those I have mentally labelled pro-PUA have inevitably introduced scenarios where both parties are using “seduction techniques”, which I think is a term which is dangerous since it conflates honest signalling with spoofed signalling, or by claiming (as you did) that the idea of spoofing social signals “barely makes any sense”. I take those arguments to be excusing the act of spoofing social signals on the basis either that all women also spoof their social signals and that two wrongs make a right, or that there is in fact no such thing as social spoofing and that hence PUAs cannot be morally condemned for doing something which does not exist.
Acting confident and suppressing nervousness is not rape.
In and of itself, it seems to me that at least potentially it is deliberately depriving the target of access to relevant facts that they would wish to know before making a decision whether or not to engage socially, sexually or romantically with the suppressor.
However unless you believe that pick-up targets’ relevant decision-making would be totally unaffected by the knowledge that the person approaching them was a PUA using specific PUA techniques, then concealing that fact from the pick-up target is an attempt to obtain sex without the target’s free and informed consent. If you know fact X, and you know fact X is a potential deal-breaker with regard to their decision whether or not to sleep with you, you have a moral obligation to disclose X.
I really don’t think naivety is a significant failing of mine.
″ In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know”.
Socrates
Edit in response to edit: I was asked what I thought the most important ethical questions were with regard to PUA, and answered that question with two ethical questions. You responded by asking two factual questions of your own, which if answered in the negative would make my second question redundant, and stated that your money (which since you are posting here I took to mean that you have a Bayesian conviction that your answer is more likely to be right than not) was on the answer to those questions being negative.
You must have some basis for that probability estimate. Saying that it’s not an “appropriate demand” to ask for those bases doesn’t solve the problem that without access to your bases we can’t tell if your probability estimate is rational.
It is also a category error to put ethical questions and factual questions in the same bin and argue that because my ethical questions are not “scientific proclamations” that this means you don’t have to provide support for your factual probability estimates.
So far in this conversation those I have mentally labelled pro-PUA have inevitably introduced scenarios where both parties are using “seduction techniques”, which I think is a term which is dangerous since it conflates honest signalling with spoofed signalling, or by claiming (as you did) that the idea of spoofing social signals “barely makes any sense”. I take those arguments to be excusing the act of spoofing social signals on the basis either that all women also spoof their social signals and that two wrongs make a right, or that there is in fact no such thing as social spoofing and that hence PUAs cannot be morally condemned for doing something which does not exist.
In and of itself, it seems to me that at least potentially it is deliberately depriving the target of access to relevant facts that they would wish to know before making a decision whether or not to engage socially, sexually or romantically with the suppressor.
However unless you believe that pick-up targets’ relevant decision-making would be totally unaffected by the knowledge that the person approaching them was a PUA using specific PUA techniques, then concealing that fact from the pick-up target is an attempt to obtain sex without the target’s free and informed consent. If you know fact X, and you know fact X is a potential deal-breaker with regard to their decision whether or not to sleep with you, you have a moral obligation to disclose X.
″ In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know”.
Socrates
Edit in response to edit: I was asked what I thought the most important ethical questions were with regard to PUA, and answered that question with two ethical questions. You responded by asking two factual questions of your own, which if answered in the negative would make my second question redundant, and stated that your money (which since you are posting here I took to mean that you have a Bayesian conviction that your answer is more likely to be right than not) was on the answer to those questions being negative.
You must have some basis for that probability estimate. Saying that it’s not an “appropriate demand” to ask for those bases doesn’t solve the problem that without access to your bases we can’t tell if your probability estimate is rational.
It is also a category error to put ethical questions and factual questions in the same bin and argue that because my ethical questions are not “scientific proclamations” that this means you don’t have to provide support for your factual probability estimates.
I certainly wouldn’t say is true either.