fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #6133 ]

[ SECRET POST #6133 ]

⌈ Secret Post #6133 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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[Void Stranger]

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 41 secrets from Secret Submission Post #877.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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Does the existence of the "fuck or die" trope in fanfiction prove that rape is sometimes ethical in real life?

No.

LOL

Tell me you don't understand philosophy without saying you don't understand philosophy.

Does the existence of the trolley problem in philosophy prove that public transport is evil in real life?

It might if the trolley problem were about public transport.

Considering that random people are tied to the tracks, meaning the tracks are accessible, and a random person has access to the switch to change the tracks, which means that is also accessible, then yeah... it's about public transport.

My general view on counterfactuals and morality is that it's generally possible to come up with some elaborate fantastical or science-fictional or just wildly implausible hypothetical scenario where X is justified, for all X. And the correct response to those hypotheticals is that yes, in those hypothetical situations, X would be justified.

But this is generally not a very useful thing to do at all. It's not a useful way to spend your time. Because those wild hypothetical scenarios don't really have any bearing on the real world, so it's basically a meaningless exercise, and it's generally fucking weird and harmful to obsess too much about weird alternate universes where despicable things could actually be moral.

It's useful training for real world situations. We're seeing it now with Republicans banning all abortions, no exceptions. They never thought of the counterfactuals, and so women are dying of preventable issues stemming from complications of pregnancy. Unlike anon who decided to derail an attempted discussion of Loki with unfounded claims of someone lying has decided, absolute morality cannot exist in a functioning society.

DA

They DO know about the counterfactuals, they just don't care. The women who die are acceptable collateral damage to them.

AYRT

I included a bunch of adjectives in my post modfiying the word "counterfactuals" for a reason. There are some hypothetical situations that are more hypothetical and less plausible than others. At the point where you're talking about things like sex pollen, things like that aren't going to help us develop heuristics about moral judgments that are going to be relevant in actual real world situations.

The point I'm making is that training yourself to think of counterfactuals, even for weird stuff, trains your brain to make it less likely that you will miss things that can cause horrific real world consequences. It also trains your brain to recognize that you must consult with experts in whatever field you're looking at. As well, it makes you comfortable with the idea that nothing is guaranteed and nothing is set in stone. As circumstances in the real world change, the counterfactuals will change as well. Basically, it boils down to training people to have a flexible mindset with regards to stated goals.

A counterfactual exercise is exceedingly useful because that's how a lot of these discussions go:

Assertion: "We've added a ramp for wheelchair users! It's accessible to ALL disabled users."

Counterfactual: "There are no rails, what about people who need rails to go up a ramp?"

Right but the distinction I'm drawing here is that, while thinking in counterfactuals can be useful, thinking in terms of *wildly implausible* counterfactuals is not. Asking questions of the form "can you imagine a situation in which immoral act A is justified" is not useful.

The "wildly implausible counterfactual" was a throw away line that had nothing to do with the actual discussion. I was TRYING to start a discussion of the metaphysics of Loki when liar!anon accused me of lying about having a degree in philosophy to try and make myself seem important (?) and then accused me of using my degree in philosophy (that I don't have, apparently??) to justify rape, which had nothing to do with anything I was trying to discuss. Now they have come down here to try it again.

So. In the interest of an actual philosophical discussion, since apparently I'm not allowed to talk about the metaphysics of Loki, counterfactual discussions, regardless of plausibility, have the aforementioned usefulness for mental flexibility training.

It actually IS useful to ask questions in the form of "can you imagine a situation in which immoral act A is justified." I had many an assignment in philosophy class which is basically just that. Most memorably, when we were asked to write essays on when/if murder is ever justifiable. So, yeah, this is a very common training tool in philosophy and has many uses, even when wildly implausible.

It's especially fun in fandom circles because you can use the most wildly implausible circumstances in the arguments and have actual canon backing you up.

Yeah OK I have absolutely no idea about all of this drama and no particular feelings on it

I just think that the value of asking those kinds of questions is incredibly limited and it should become clear real quick that you can come up with these kinds of narratives but that they don't have much significance. But people, especially in fandom, get really worked up about them and there is a lot of discourse and discussion that is colossally stupid.

There are better ways to train for real world situations, like... applying thought experiments to actual real world situations, rather than unlikely hypotheticals.

Real world situations are waaaay too complicated to train people on. That's like saying we should stop teaching kids physics by using a frictionless surface, because no such thing exists....

That illustrates an actual concept in physics. "Some people find rape hot in porn and develope tropes around it" doesn't illustrate an actual ethical dilemma wrt to rape; it points to an entirely different set of psychosocial dynamics that generally have nothing at all to do with literal rape.

I wasn't trying to illustrate an actual ethical dilemma. That was all you're-a-liar anon up there. I only answered that there are possible counterfactuals for basically everything and absolute morality doesn't work in the real world. So I'm not going to try to defend a position liar!anon gave me that I do not hold.

Well, it sure comes across like you're arguing that this is useful for illustrating real-world ethical dilemmas.

Re: Asking for a friend

(Anonymous) - 2023-10-22 03:55 (UTC) - Expand

"something in fiction proof of something in real life"

No.

No, the trope itself doesn't. In a real-world situation, because there have been some seriously messed-up psychosexual killers, if, say, a known killer was holding two people hostage and said they would kill hostage1 unless hostage2 fucked them, could it be argued that rape is a less unethical choice here than it normally would be? Yes.

No. In that hypothetical scenario, death is the more ethical choice. It is a choice of pain inflicted upon yourself or upon others to spare yourself pain. Now you see it written out, you see the problem?

I know you're probably trolling, but death is a lot more than "pain inflicted upon yourself." And this narrative is actually very harmful to rape victims because it implies that being dead is preferable to being raped. You can survive rape, you can't survive death.

WTF are you on about? Dying rather than raping someone is not a harmful narrative to rape victims. You are defending rape by saying that the existence of a rapist is worth more than than a potential victim's right not to be raped. Fuck off.

The internet was a mistake.

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