Alan Soble questions the widely held Kantian view according to which human dignity is something that people have. He argues that objectification is not inappropriate. Everyone is already only an object and being only an object is not necessarily a bad thing. In one sense, then, no one can be objectified because no one has the higher ontological status that is required to be reduce-able by objectification. In another sense, everyone is vulnerable to objectification, and everyone can and may be objectified, because to do so is to take them to their correct ontological level.
(That paragraph is quoted from the Wikipedia article “Objectification”; why not credit your source?)
That seems to me like a rather silly argument. Sure, everyone and everything is an object and in that sense treating someone as an object, or thinking of them as an object, can’t possibly do any harm. But that obviously isn’t what people are complaining about when they complain of “objectification”. It couldn’t be.
Whatever your ontology, whatever you think of Kant, etc., it is generally agreed that people have minds, preferences, personalities, etc. When someone complains of “objectification” they generally mean (don’t they?) that people are being treated in ways that neglect those specifically-personal features; in ways that treat them as objects-that-are-not-people. (Perhaps “depersonalization” would have been a better term.)
For what it’s worth, I am inclined to agree with Luke’s analysis: what it’s reasonable to complain of in cases of “objectification” is generally something else other than “objectification” itself as such. (But if there is a systematic pattern that some sorts of person get objectified much more than others, or get objectified in ways that consistently result in others getting a distorted view of what they’re like, that could be worthy of complaint.) Regardless, there’s no way an observation as trivial as “everything, people included, is an object; therefore ‘X treats Y as an object’ carries no information” can possibly tell us anything useful about ethics.
it’s redundant. It’s not attributable to me, hence the quote. If someone is interested in attribution they can google it.
after all:
“we don’t do any good by creating satisfied extra preferences. What matters about preferences is not that they have a satisfied existence, but that they don’t have a frustrated existence.”
minds, preferences, personalities
These are abstract objects themselves. They are the map to a mental territory.
Regardless, there’s no way an observation as trivial as “everything, people included, is an object; therefore ‘X treats Y as an object’ carries no information” can possibly tell us anything useful about ethics.
That’s not true. Here’s a more formal statement to help you understand the paradox that tells us one of the logical steps below is falsely specified:
objectification is treating something as an object (agreed)
everything is an object (agreed)
therefore everything is objectification (agreed)
if everything is objectification, and objectification is absolutely bad, then everything is absolutely bad (agreed)
the false assumption is that:
objectification is absolutely bad
It’s not. If I hadn’t been treated as the object of human and civil rights, I may not have the quality of life I have today, for instance.
Only in the sense in which everything is redundant that can be found by googling. I don’t find this a very useful sense.
after all [...] frustrated existence.”
Sorry, but I don’t know what relevance that bit of your comment has.
These are abstract objects themselves. They are the map to a mental territory.
Yup.
Your apparent expectation that I’ll disagree with that, and the argument you go on to present, make me think you have a wrong idea about what we disagree about. I am not denying that people are objects. I am saying: yes, of course, people are objects for at least one reasonable definition of “objects”, but it should be obvious that no one complaining about objectification is complaining about treating people as objects in that sense.
objectification is treating something as an object (agreed)
No, that is not “agreed”; it is the very point I am disagreeing with you about. Well: either that or “everything is an object”, your next bullet point, depending on what definition of “object” we use.
Suppose someone says this: “The Nazis treated Jews like animals: they transported them by rail to concentration camps where they were herded and given serial numbers and killed at will.” and consider the following response: “But Jews are animals: they are, like all the rest of us, members of the species Homo sapiens, and as such animals rather than plants or fungi or archaeobacteria or rocks or whatever”.
Every actual statement in that response is perfectly correct, with an “inclusive” definition of “animal”, but it completely fails to engage with the original statement which uses “animals” in its (very common) sense of “non-human animals” (one might say “mere animals”). Probably not even most Nazis would say that Jews are animals in that sense.
Similarly, when someone complains that, say, some instance of pornography treats women “as objects”, they obviously don’t mean “objects” in the same sense in which all of us are objects. You can paraphrase their complaints by inserting words like “non-human” or “subhuman”, or you can just accept that they’re using “objects” in a more restrictive sense. But if you treat them as saying only that humans are objects in the sense in which everything that exists is an object, you are making the same mistake as you would be by saying “But Jews are animals, just like everyone else”.
You can paraphrase their complaints by inserting words like “non-human” or “subhuman”, or you can just accept that they’re using “objects” in a more restrictive sense. But if you treat them as saying only that humans are objects in the sense in which everything that exists is an object, you are making the same mistake as you would be by saying “But Jews are animals, just like everyone else”.
Paraphrasing or recategorising aren’t the only valid options. That is just one strategy people who use to resolve dissonance between the tone someone may use when saying:
pornography treats women “as objects”,
that attributes negative affect to the treatment, and the innocuous formulation of syntax when that tone is disregarded and the truth value evaluated independently.
I reckon the issue with objectification is more about human tendency to self-pity, seek validation and such. Historically women where happier than men until steady declines from the 1970′s till today. This coincides with the birth of second wave feminism, which seems to have taken an important human rights movement and turned it into a circlejerk of bitching about trivial things like objectification, while neglecting the important mission of first wave feminism in the less well off parts of society and the world.
I reckon many people, particularly socially incompetent people feel the need to pander to social movements and their world views, and particularly gravitating around women, in order to compensate for their confusion. We don’t see posts about ″colonialism‴ or race to the same extent as gender on LessWrong for instance, because we have sex drives and not ″impress exotic people drives″. An example of pandering to social movements controlling for the gender effect is Wahabist Islam, which ignorant regular folk will strongly defend (aggregated under the banner of things like “”islam is peaceful″ or ″most muslims aren’t like that″, when the real issue is a subset of them from a specific set are consitently like that, regardless of region (from Thailand to China to Africa), regardless of the character of the leader or whatever.
Paraphrasing or recategorising aren’t the only valid options.
Do feel free to present others. (I confess that I’m not quite sure what you mean: aren’t the only valid options for doing what? I say you should paraphrase or recategorize because if you keep the words and keep their meaning then you end up representing people who complain of “objectification” as saying something absolutely 100% ridiculous, which it is not reasonable to suppose they are doing. Are you saying there are other options for interpreting their words that don’t require them to be total morons? Or are you saying that you’re quite happy treating them as total morons, and that’s what your other options are for?)
The remainder of your comment appears to me to have nothing to do with the point at issue, being more a general complaint that feminists are unreasonable and socially incompetent people pander to social movements. Whatever truth there may be in that, it has very little to do with what people mean when they talk about treating people “as objects”.
Wahabist Islam, which ignorant regular folk will strongly defend
I do not believe you.
(Of course there are some people ignorant of what “Wahhabi” means, but it is not honest to take whatever they may say about Islam generally and pretend that they are saying it specifically about Wahhabism. If you give an accurate description of Wahhabi Islam to those regular folk they will mostly not defend it. If they happen to be regular folk who know what Wahhabism is, they will mostly not defend it.)
(That paragraph is quoted from the Wikipedia article “Objectification”; why not credit your source?)
That seems to me like a rather silly argument. Sure, everyone and everything is an object and in that sense treating someone as an object, or thinking of them as an object, can’t possibly do any harm. But that obviously isn’t what people are complaining about when they complain of “objectification”. It couldn’t be.
Whatever your ontology, whatever you think of Kant, etc., it is generally agreed that people have minds, preferences, personalities, etc. When someone complains of “objectification” they generally mean (don’t they?) that people are being treated in ways that neglect those specifically-personal features; in ways that treat them as objects-that-are-not-people. (Perhaps “depersonalization” would have been a better term.)
For what it’s worth, I am inclined to agree with Luke’s analysis: what it’s reasonable to complain of in cases of “objectification” is generally something else other than “objectification” itself as such. (But if there is a systematic pattern that some sorts of person get objectified much more than others, or get objectified in ways that consistently result in others getting a distorted view of what they’re like, that could be worthy of complaint.) Regardless, there’s no way an observation as trivial as “everything, people included, is an object; therefore ‘X treats Y as an object’ carries no information” can possibly tell us anything useful about ethics.
it’s redundant. It’s not attributable to me, hence the quote. If someone is interested in attribution they can google it.
after all:
These are abstract objects themselves. They are the map to a mental territory.
That’s not true. Here’s a more formal statement to help you understand the paradox that tells us one of the logical steps below is falsely specified:
objectification is treating something as an object (agreed)
everything is an object (agreed)
therefore everything is objectification (agreed)
if everything is objectification, and objectification is absolutely bad, then everything is absolutely bad (agreed)
the false assumption is that:
objectification is absolutely bad
It’s not. If I hadn’t been treated as the object of human and civil rights, I may not have the quality of life I have today, for instance.
Only in the sense in which everything is redundant that can be found by googling. I don’t find this a very useful sense.
Sorry, but I don’t know what relevance that bit of your comment has.
Yup.
Your apparent expectation that I’ll disagree with that, and the argument you go on to present, make me think you have a wrong idea about what we disagree about. I am not denying that people are objects. I am saying: yes, of course, people are objects for at least one reasonable definition of “objects”, but it should be obvious that no one complaining about objectification is complaining about treating people as objects in that sense.
No, that is not “agreed”; it is the very point I am disagreeing with you about. Well: either that or “everything is an object”, your next bullet point, depending on what definition of “object” we use.
Suppose someone says this: “The Nazis treated Jews like animals: they transported them by rail to concentration camps where they were herded and given serial numbers and killed at will.” and consider the following response: “But Jews are animals: they are, like all the rest of us, members of the species Homo sapiens, and as such animals rather than plants or fungi or archaeobacteria or rocks or whatever”.
Every actual statement in that response is perfectly correct, with an “inclusive” definition of “animal”, but it completely fails to engage with the original statement which uses “animals” in its (very common) sense of “non-human animals” (one might say “mere animals”). Probably not even most Nazis would say that Jews are animals in that sense.
Similarly, when someone complains that, say, some instance of pornography treats women “as objects”, they obviously don’t mean “objects” in the same sense in which all of us are objects. You can paraphrase their complaints by inserting words like “non-human” or “subhuman”, or you can just accept that they’re using “objects” in a more restrictive sense. But if you treat them as saying only that humans are objects in the sense in which everything that exists is an object, you are making the same mistake as you would be by saying “But Jews are animals, just like everyone else”.
Yes I misunderstand your key point
Paraphrasing or recategorising aren’t the only valid options. That is just one strategy people who use to resolve dissonance between the tone someone may use when saying:
that attributes negative affect to the treatment, and the innocuous formulation of syntax when that tone is disregarded and the truth value evaluated independently.
I reckon the issue with objectification is more about human tendency to self-pity, seek validation and such. Historically women where happier than men until steady declines from the 1970′s till today. This coincides with the birth of second wave feminism, which seems to have taken an important human rights movement and turned it into a circlejerk of bitching about trivial things like objectification, while neglecting the important mission of first wave feminism in the less well off parts of society and the world.
I reckon many people, particularly socially incompetent people feel the need to pander to social movements and their world views, and particularly gravitating around women, in order to compensate for their confusion. We don’t see posts about ″colonialism‴ or race to the same extent as gender on LessWrong for instance, because we have sex drives and not ″impress exotic people drives″. An example of pandering to social movements controlling for the gender effect is Wahabist Islam, which ignorant regular folk will strongly defend (aggregated under the banner of things like “”islam is peaceful″ or ″most muslims aren’t like that″, when the real issue is a subset of them from a specific set are consitently like that, regardless of region (from Thailand to China to Africa), regardless of the character of the leader or whatever.
Do feel free to present others. (I confess that I’m not quite sure what you mean: aren’t the only valid options for doing what? I say you should paraphrase or recategorize because if you keep the words and keep their meaning then you end up representing people who complain of “objectification” as saying something absolutely 100% ridiculous, which it is not reasonable to suppose they are doing. Are you saying there are other options for interpreting their words that don’t require them to be total morons? Or are you saying that you’re quite happy treating them as total morons, and that’s what your other options are for?)
The remainder of your comment appears to me to have nothing to do with the point at issue, being more a general complaint that feminists are unreasonable and socially incompetent people pander to social movements. Whatever truth there may be in that, it has very little to do with what people mean when they talk about treating people “as objects”.
I do not believe you.
(Of course there are some people ignorant of what “Wahhabi” means, but it is not honest to take whatever they may say about Islam generally and pretend that they are saying it specifically about Wahhabism. If you give an accurate description of Wahhabi Islam to those regular folk they will mostly not defend it. If they happen to be regular folk who know what Wahhabism is, they will mostly not defend it.)