To illustrate another example where the “avoid buyer’s remorse” principle is overbroad (which may or may not be the principle you are advocating), let’s talk about cookies.
You’re having a dinner party, and everyone is stuffed. You bring out some freshly baked cookies for dessert. Guest: “Oh no, I’m stuffed.” You: “They are warm and soft!” Guest: “Well, that does sound good, I’ll have just one.” Guest eats a cookie. Later, Guest looks a bit queasy and is obviously regretting eating so much.
This is another case that falls afoul of the “avoid creating buyer’s remorse” principle, but doesn’t deserve such a negative term as “manipulation.”
The fact is that a lot of people enjoy taking actions that they may later regret. It’s not a moral requirement to protect people from themselves. As long as they are making the decision with free will (or the closest thing to it that humans have), and informed consent exists, then it’s valid for people to take responsibility for the risks of their behavior. We should assume that people can assess their best interests, unless we have reasons to believe otherwise (for instance, if you know that Guest is on a strict diet that they committed to, offering them a cookie would be unethical). But in the absence of such information, you should assume that Guest knows what’s best for them.
There isn’t a perfect duty to protect Guest from himself, but of course empathy is a different subject. You might decide as a matter of empathy that you don’t want to risk Guest being queasy from dessert, even if Guest would be willing to take that risk.
To continue the sex example, if the woman’s initial impression is negative, but the man gets her to want to have sex and afterwards she’s glad she did then he’s just good at attracting women, not a harmful manipulator.
The problem with this principle is it judges the ethics of taking an action in the present, based on the consequences in the future. That’s a similar temporal error to Roissy who said it was OK to slap his girlfriend because she turned out to be massively turned on by it and hump him. You can’t know whether someone will regret sex with you, just as Roissy couldn’t have known that his girlfriend would like being slapped without any prior discussion of consent.
The intuition I would like to extract from your quote is that whether someone regrets sex is potential evidence that the person who initiated the sex did so unethically. This is true, but it’s weak evidence: there are all sorts of other things that cause people to regret sex other than miscreancy by their partner, such as conservative parents, physical discomfort during sex, judgmental/jealous friends, or reflecting on STD/pregnancy risk.
On the other hand, the fact that someone gives consent to something is evidence that they believe that they won’t regret it (or that it is worth a try even if they might). As long as that consent is sufficiently informed, given with a sound mind, not forced, and not coerced by some unethical threat of punishment, that’s good enough… right? To create stricter perfect duties gets into infantilization territory. However, there are a lot of extra measures that are good for people to take, even though we can’t actually require them all the time:
If someone gives enthusiastic consent, that’s extra strong evidence that they have shouldered the risk of buyer’s remorse. Attaining a standard of enthusiastic consent is what I personally aspire to in seduction; I don’t want to just be the tasty cookie that someone regrets eating later. It’s probably not a perfect duty that people absolutely must go for (if someone who is lukewarm about sex with you decides to go for it with you, you don’t have an absolute obligation to stop it), but it’s an imperfect duty that’s a good thing to attain if you can manage it.
The primary responsibility of avoiding buyer’s remorse must fall on the buyer in typical situations that involve informed consent; this is still true in situations where someone’s mind has changed during a relatively short period of time, because people do change their minds.
If the moral principle of protecting others from buyer’s remorse were followed as a perfect duty, it would destroy a lot of the types of spontaneous purchases and sex that many people enjoy (including, but not limited to guilty pleasures); this fact needs to be weighed against the need to protect people from the types of purchases and sex that they might regret.
Making people scrutinize their decisions more to avoid the possibility of buyer’s remorse is not necessarily more ethical; you can probably psych someone out of taking any action with you that they might enjoy, if you try hard enough. At some point we need to step back and let adults make decisions for themselves. And yes, adults can still make valid decisions under the influence of sales hype or sexual arousal; I think the folk concept of “free will” is good enough here. Badgering people with “are you sure you don’t want to?” is the other side of the same coin of badgering people with “are you sure you actually want to?”; both of them fail to accept an adult’s stated preference.
If someone knows that they are vulnerable to influence leading them to do things they will regret, then perhaps they should take measures to avoid situations where they will encounter such influence, instead of walking into them, getting tempted, and then blaming the other person. For instance, if you are trying to diet and find cookies hard to resist, the burden shouldn’t be on cookie-offerering friends to prove that you aren’t on a diet before they can ethically offer you cookies; such a principle would simply destroy the practice for offering cookies to friends for everyone who gives a crap about the ethics. The solution is to tell people that you’re on a diet and that they shouldn’t offer you anything; you have a comparative advantage at making this information known. They should respect your wishes until you give them reason to believe that you’ve changed your stance.
Overbroad moral standards are actually very dangerous, because they will cause the scrupulous people who follow them to fail and get selected out for no good reasons. Furthermore, shifting all the moral calculations to one party in social transactions is both infantilizing and unfair (exception: certain transactions with massive informational asymmetry, like financial services). Even worse, the results are corrupt, because when the moral calculations and burden of proof become impractical (e.g. having to prove that friends aren’t on diets before offering them cookies), people have an incentive to cut corners on their moral calculations and be biased, otherwise they will get outcompeted by people who ignore the morals.
In my next reply, I will propose an alternative demarcation criterion between ethical and unethical social influence in the area of sex.
To illustrate another example where the “avoid buyer’s remorse” principle is overbroad (which may or may not be the principle you are advocating), let’s talk about cookies.
You’re having a dinner party, and everyone is stuffed. You bring out some freshly baked cookies for dessert. Guest: “Oh no, I’m stuffed.” You: “They are warm and soft!” Guest: “Well, that does sound good, I’ll have just one.” Guest eats a cookie. Later, Guest looks a bit queasy and is obviously regretting eating so much.
This is another case that falls afoul of the “avoid creating buyer’s remorse” principle, but doesn’t deserve such a negative term as “manipulation.”
The fact is that a lot of people enjoy taking actions that they may later regret. It’s not a moral requirement to protect people from themselves. As long as they are making the decision with free will (or the closest thing to it that humans have), and informed consent exists, then it’s valid for people to take responsibility for the risks of their behavior. We should assume that people can assess their best interests, unless we have reasons to believe otherwise (for instance, if you know that Guest is on a strict diet that they committed to, offering them a cookie would be unethical). But in the absence of such information, you should assume that Guest knows what’s best for them.
There isn’t a perfect duty to protect Guest from himself, but of course empathy is a different subject. You might decide as a matter of empathy that you don’t want to risk Guest being queasy from dessert, even if Guest would be willing to take that risk.
The problem with this principle is it judges the ethics of taking an action in the present, based on the consequences in the future. That’s a similar temporal error to Roissy who said it was OK to slap his girlfriend because she turned out to be massively turned on by it and hump him. You can’t know whether someone will regret sex with you, just as Roissy couldn’t have known that his girlfriend would like being slapped without any prior discussion of consent.
The intuition I would like to extract from your quote is that whether someone regrets sex is potential evidence that the person who initiated the sex did so unethically. This is true, but it’s weak evidence: there are all sorts of other things that cause people to regret sex other than miscreancy by their partner, such as conservative parents, physical discomfort during sex, judgmental/jealous friends, or reflecting on STD/pregnancy risk.
On the other hand, the fact that someone gives consent to something is evidence that they believe that they won’t regret it (or that it is worth a try even if they might). As long as that consent is sufficiently informed, given with a sound mind, not forced, and not coerced by some unethical threat of punishment, that’s good enough… right? To create stricter perfect duties gets into infantilization territory. However, there are a lot of extra measures that are good for people to take, even though we can’t actually require them all the time:
If someone gives enthusiastic consent, that’s extra strong evidence that they have shouldered the risk of buyer’s remorse. Attaining a standard of enthusiastic consent is what I personally aspire to in seduction; I don’t want to just be the tasty cookie that someone regrets eating later. It’s probably not a perfect duty that people absolutely must go for (if someone who is lukewarm about sex with you decides to go for it with you, you don’t have an absolute obligation to stop it), but it’s an imperfect duty that’s a good thing to attain if you can manage it.
The primary responsibility of avoiding buyer’s remorse must fall on the buyer in typical situations that involve informed consent; this is still true in situations where someone’s mind has changed during a relatively short period of time, because people do change their minds.
If the moral principle of protecting others from buyer’s remorse were followed as a perfect duty, it would destroy a lot of the types of spontaneous purchases and sex that many people enjoy (including, but not limited to guilty pleasures); this fact needs to be weighed against the need to protect people from the types of purchases and sex that they might regret.
Making people scrutinize their decisions more to avoid the possibility of buyer’s remorse is not necessarily more ethical; you can probably psych someone out of taking any action with you that they might enjoy, if you try hard enough. At some point we need to step back and let adults make decisions for themselves. And yes, adults can still make valid decisions under the influence of sales hype or sexual arousal; I think the folk concept of “free will” is good enough here. Badgering people with “are you sure you don’t want to?” is the other side of the same coin of badgering people with “are you sure you actually want to?”; both of them fail to accept an adult’s stated preference.
If someone knows that they are vulnerable to influence leading them to do things they will regret, then perhaps they should take measures to avoid situations where they will encounter such influence, instead of walking into them, getting tempted, and then blaming the other person. For instance, if you are trying to diet and find cookies hard to resist, the burden shouldn’t be on cookie-offerering friends to prove that you aren’t on a diet before they can ethically offer you cookies; such a principle would simply destroy the practice for offering cookies to friends for everyone who gives a crap about the ethics. The solution is to tell people that you’re on a diet and that they shouldn’t offer you anything; you have a comparative advantage at making this information known. They should respect your wishes until you give them reason to believe that you’ve changed your stance.
Overbroad moral standards are actually very dangerous, because they will cause the scrupulous people who follow them to fail and get selected out for no good reasons. Furthermore, shifting all the moral calculations to one party in social transactions is both infantilizing and unfair (exception: certain transactions with massive informational asymmetry, like financial services). Even worse, the results are corrupt, because when the moral calculations and burden of proof become impractical (e.g. having to prove that friends aren’t on diets before offering them cookies), people have an incentive to cut corners on their moral calculations and be biased, otherwise they will get outcompeted by people who ignore the morals.
In my next reply, I will propose an alternative demarcation criterion between ethical and unethical social influence in the area of sex.