Sunday, October 19, 2008
hmm
Hurka makes it clear that his view of fantasy values, though they still hold value towards virtue and vice, do not have same moral weight. I may have misread some of the rest of the chapter but I do not see any attempt to decide how the intensity of fantasy values relate to real values. Hurka states on pg. 165 "Someone who takes pleasure in a merely fantasized rape has a less vicious attitude than if he took equal pleasure in a real rape". If someone takes great pleasure in a fantasized rape and other take small pleasure in a real rape, is the first person more vicious? If I am not mistaken, I believe Hurka would say that the first person was more vicious due to the largeness of the pleasure taken in an intrinsic evil. If I were to be persuaded by Hurka's argument, I would need him to make the claim that all reality based beliefs will always carry more moral weight, regardless of the intensity of the belief.
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Hurka states that fantasy values relate to real values in the following ways, fantasy values depend on the value of the object. For example, fantasizing about rape would be far worse than fantasizing about punching your friend (large pains are more intrinsically evil than mild pains). He also states that the degree of value depends on the reality of the fantasy. The less real a fantasy becomes the less evil it is. So if you were to fantasize about something extremely unrealistic and painful, it would be less intrinsically evil than a very realistic fantasy about pain. Another thing Hurka talks about in the fantasizer’s own presence in the fantasy, the less a person imagines themselves to be present in a painful/evil fantasy the less evil it is. So for the case you proposed it would depend on the reality of the fantasized rape. If the rape was extremely unrealistic and the fantasizer was not at all present, it would not be more vicious than the small pleasure in the real rape. I suppose if you clarified your case by saying that the fantasy rape and the real rape were identical both involving an outsider doing the raping, then this might pose a problem for Hurka.
This is where I think Hurka’s ideas become fairly complicated and actually dangerous in a way. In the beginning of the chapter he talks about false belief and how it really doesn’t affect value. But what Hurka doesn’t seem to grasp here (and I don’t think he realizes this throughout the whole book) is that there are consequences for everything. He brings up the Stanley Milgram experiment and says that the same amount of sadistic evil would exist whether the person was actually inflicting pain which he wasn’t. But what also affects something’s value is what repercussions and consequences it brings about. If that person were to see the actually physical pain they caused to the subject a day later then their reaction to the experiment would be drastically different than if that person was perfectly fine because no pain was really administered. If that were the case, then I feel the intrinsic value of the experiment would have to be different if the person was inflicted real pain or false pain on a subject. And I feel fictional fantasy and horrors would have to be the same. Assigning degrees to certain acts of fantasy violence only complicates the issue. If someone fantasizes about a rape of a specific person and has a large amount of pleasure from it, then he will obviously view that person in a different light. Regardless of whether or not that person commits the rape, his actions towards the victim of his fantasized rape will be altered. Fantasies and false beliefs have consequences and I don’t really think Hurka is taking those consequences into account in categorizing the value of these virtues and vices.
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