Newsgroups: bit.listserv.politics
Date:         Sat, 5 Sep 1992 11:34:00 EDT
From:         rf35 <Richard_A_FYFE@UMAIL.UMD.EDU>
Subject:      Re: homosexuality
Comments: To: Forum for the Discussion of Politics <POLITICS@ucf1vm.cc.ucf.edu>

Greetings:  To Missy

> You have it backwards.  Bad comes first.  Bad things *tend
> to be* harmful (as we perceive them; they *are* harmful,
> even when we cannot yet see the harm).  But they are not bad
> because they cause harm; they cause harm BECAUSE they are
> bad.

        How about: You're both right.  (Or, you're both wrong--
however you prefer.)

        In order to define badness in terms of harm, or harm
in terms of badness, and not have a circular definition, it is
necessary to find a way of defining either harm or badness in
terms of something ELSE--something outside of the circle.  In
common language, harm is a species of badness.  To say that
something caused harm is to say that it caused something bad
(though there are many more types of badness than harm).  Do
you have any suggestions?  I have one--it understands 'harm'
in terms of thwarting desires. [See Joel Feinberg: HARM TO
OTHERS: THE MORAL LIMITS OF THE CRIMINAL LAW, (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1984) esp. chaps. 1 and 2.]

> Try this.  Let's say I have an affair.  I do so, believing
> (as does my lover of unspecified gender and species--just to
> make you aversion theorists happy) that my husband is not
> harmed by it.  I have no reason to believe that he is harmed
> by it, since such a thing does not occur to me as something
> that could conceivably cause harm.  I also believe that my
> children (children by choice, just to keep things all up to
> date), being smart little things, are not harmed by it
> either.  My children, quite fond of my lover, begin having
> sex with this person.

        We desire theorists recognize a distinction between
beliefs and desires (actually, we also prefer to speak about
desires rather than aversions--that is, we kind of have an
aversion to 'aversion'.)  The fact that you believe that your
activity will not create a state of affairs to which your hus-
band has an aversion does not imply that your husband does not
in fact have such an aversion.  My belief that somebody is not
afraid of water does not imply that he is not afraid of water.
In order to determine whether your husband will be harmed you
need to determine if IN FACT IT IS THE CASE that your action
will not (directly or indirectly) thwart your husband's desires.


> My husband, however, is, unbeknownst to me, unhappy with the
> situation.  In fact, he is so unhappy that his work begins
> to suffer.  Eventually, he kills himself.

        See, he DID have an aversion.  All you have demonstra-
ted here is that your husband's actual desires and aversions
are independent of your beliefs about his desires and aver-
sions.  You have made a mistake in understanding the desire-
theorist as holding that value must depend upon BELIEFS about
desires and aversions.  But a desire-theorist holds that value
depends upon ACTUAL desires and aversions, and as your example
plainly illustrates, a person's beliefs about such things may
be mistaken.  You have not here provided an example of value
which is independent of affective psychology.  It is on the
grounds that your husband actually has an aversion to the sit-
uation you created that harm was done.

        Assume that, instead of the scenario you painted here,
assume that your husband LIKED the fact that you and the kids
were being entertained elsewhere so that he could get some work
done.  He's productive, gets several promotions, obtains fame
and recognition, and still sleeps comfortably knowing that his
wife and children are happy as well.  In this case, where is
the badness of the action?  Where is the harm?

        [Warning 1: This discussion is actually too tightly
focused on an individual action.  Wrongness can be found in
the fact that this is a highly unusually case; an aversion to
having affairs may GENERALLY be good; and this will have an
impact on the wrongness in an actual society.]

        [Warning 2: Missy stipulates that she has no reason
to believe that her husband would be harmed (would have no
aversion to her conduct or its possible consequences).  If
this assumption is to be accepted, then we must assume that
Missy lives in a culture significantly different from our own.
It would have to be a culture where displeasure resulting from
affairs was quite uncommon.  Otherwise, it would take blatant
disregard for the obvious to fail to have a reason to believe
one's spouse will have such an aversion.  In the culture which
Missy imagines, I would say that there was nothing wrong with
her behavior.  The fact that it generated such wildly unfor-
seeable results (note the distinction between 'unforeeable'
and 'unforseen') can not be blamed on her.]

> When my children grow up . . . they cannot seem to be happy
> either.  Long after they have been institutionalized, I learn
> from their friends that they were tremendously traumatized by
> the situations I put them in (me? I was just doing what I
> wanted to do!  No one was being hurt!)

        People were being hurt.  Desires were being thwarted,
and situations to which people have aversions were being created
by your behavior.  The fact that you did not believe this does
not make it true.  You are saying as much above.  What you have
done is creating a straw man argument by making desires and
aversions dependent upon beliefs about desires and aversions.

>  My children hate me, their friends hate me for destroying
> their lives, my lover hates me because my children are so
> depressing, and I hate them all for blaming their problems
> on me.  All *I* was doing was living my life the way I wanted
> to without hurting anyone.

        Here, your claims are inconsistent.  You believed that
you were living a life the way you wanted, and that you were
not hurting anyone.  However, you were not in fact living that
kind of life.  And the reason is because you were in fact act-
ing so as to thwart the desires of and create aversive situa-
tions for others.

> No.  What I was doing was ignoring that what I was doing was
> BAD, regardless of whether there was a direct, perciptible
> harm involved or NOT.

        Nobody says that a prohibition on causing harm to others
has to be understood only in terms of causing direct, perceptible
harm to others--as if indirect harm or harm imperceptible to the
person causing the harm does not matter.  Again, you have created
a straw man--creating a rediculous and superficial interpretation
of a theory and, in knocking down this flimsy structure, claiming
you have scored points against the real theory.  You missed the
target.

> Because I had NO MORAL VALUES.

        Exactly.  Your desires and aversions were not what they
ought to have been.

> And, to be perfectly frank, I deserved *exactly* what I got.

        I would agree.

                                        Richard A. Fyfe
                                        rf35@umail.umd.edu
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