Michael Shermer: Provisional Pornography

Here is the ADD version:

Porn is, for the most part, GOOD.

hahahaha. I am a new convert to the church of LE.

It was an interesting article, although not exactly groundbreaking and a bit dry. The difficulty is that although from a pure ethical standpoint, some of that adds up, marketing changes everything. Even SG is fairly vehement that it's not porn, yet a google search for 'goth porn' yields SG first, due to search term seeding and meta tags. That's no accident. That's not a jab, it just points out that sometimes folks seem to want to be shelved next to things they claim they don't approve of, and therefore compromise themselves. They stamp a label on themselves and then issue press releases rejecting the label. Obviously, people would generally rather align themselves with the more positive and artistic connotation of 'erotica', we certainly don't need an essay that long to point that out. But, it was still and interesting read I suppose.

Just as a note of clarification, the reason I mentioned the terminology was mostly in reference to Shermer's summation. He asserts that people should adapt the terminology 'Erotica' rather than 'pornography', even though artists in the field have already been doing that for a very very long time. It was also a funny article to me, since a really really hot friend of mine was a huge brain groupie for Shermer, haha. She used to go to his meetings and come home all jazzed, yet unable to explain a damn thing he said.

OK, I was going along for the ride on this one up until a certain point, at which time I believe Mr. Shermer veered a tad bit off course.

His writing is, on the whole, quite excellent, and his points are generally well-constructed and explained well. However, he commits the same mistake that virtually everyone does when they discuss morality: they assume it has some sort of universal validity or necessity.

He talks about how would could use a scientific approach to classify the moral status of things, or to "come up with an ethical theory." This is inherently preposterous because if one is approaching something from a purely scientific (and thus secular) standpoint then the basic concept of "morality" has not meaning. I

If you remove the idea of a god, divine wrath, and any other spiritual "supernatural" (a word that is arguably a contradiction in terms) forces from the universe, then what exactly is the significance of labeling something as immoral?

Mr. Shermer bases some of his classifications on ideas such as "does this thing harm anyone?" but does not seem to feel the need to justify why that is of any relevance. Virtually everything harms someone or something else in some capacity. If I open a hardware store down the street from your hardware store and put you out of business, that's "bad" for you but "good" for me. Am I immoral now? Of course not, that makes no sense.

Essentially, Mr. Shermer seems to be doing what a great many so-called atheists try to do, which is to try and shove the square peg of morality and ethics into the round hole of a godless, scientific, logic-centered universe. The end result is invariably the deformation of the idea of morality into essentially a synonym for "what I think is and isn't a positive influence on our society," which is little more than opinion and is inherently dependent on ones particular goals or desires.

In short, to try and "objectively" justify or reinvent morality does little more than fuel the confidence of theists that they are right and that morality is indeed a static component of the universe and that it is innate and essential to human life, all of which is false.

Pornography, rape, murder, and war aren't any more moral or immoral than Oreo cookies, country music, ice cream, tile floors, or tartar control toothpaste. It's all totally and complete relative to one's basic assumptions about existence. If you're truly a scientist than to the greatest extent that is possible you would have no assumptions, and therefore would have no justification for believing in the divine and, by consequence, no logical reason to attach any validity to the idea of morality, good, evil, or any similar notions.

This is minor to the point of nit-picking, but I still feel I must offer the correction whenever it comes up:

Atheism is not "not believing in God." Atheism is "concluding that there are no gods."

Seems minor, but it is awfully important, especially if you're seguing out of how Rush Limbaugh and his ilk have turned "feminist" into a dirty word.

Great article. The more of Michael Shermer's work I read, the more of a fan I become.

You're admittedly taking a moral-relativist standpoint, but the subtext of this whole article was based around a rejection of moral relativity. He sited studies to provide a factual basis for some outlooks (not viewing violent pornography or raping women) being objectively better than others (viewing violent pornography and raping women). This isn't arbitrary; it is better for human beings not to rape people because if we did, eventually someone would come around and rape me. I'm simplifying, but my point comes across I hope.

The argument that we cannot be moral in a godless and uncaring universe without ultimate consequences is a bit of a straw-man. Wether the universe cares if we are moral is not the point - we have to live with eachother. Being moral for its own sake might be academic, but like it or not some form of moral ponderance has to be an essential feature of humanity for survival reasons alone.

Sam Harris takes a lot of heat because of his recent studies and stance on moral relativity. I find myself agreeing more and more with him though. There are certain truths to be known about what makes a human being healthiest and happiest, and from that factual basis we can draw real conclusions about what kind of behaviour promotes that.

IMO anyway.