The Nature and Reality of Objects of Attraction

Hot take: monogamy is good, child porn is bad

1. Nonsense Is Dumb

Recently, I was exposed to Hegel.

“Esse is percipi,” said the million-year-old philosopher with the thickest-rimmed glasses I’d ever seen, and I began to panic, thinking back to all the superfluous I-It relationships I’ve had, all the slaves I’ve mastered and masters I’ve slaved, and I felt my brain begin to melt, so I looked around for anything, anything, to moor(e) me to reality, and I saw a pen, and holding the pen was my right hand.

And I paused.

Slowly, I raised my hand. I looked the professor dead in the eyes, and I said, “Here is one hand.”

He gasped.

Shaking, feeling the material power coursing through my very real veins, I raised my left hand. “And here is another.”

The poor old coot slumped forward onto the table. A dozen copies of The Second Sex fell to the floor as students rushed to his aid. I simply stood up on my non-spiritual, atomically-composed, motile legs, and I left the classroom. I went outside. I breathed in the fresh air. I kicked a rock.

And I smiled.

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2. What Is It to Love?

Way back on Valentine’s Day,

Amos Wollen

wrote In Defence of Being Monogamous. Why the need for defending?

As it turns out, a moral philosopher,

Harry Chalmers

, has been writing some pretty funky papers. He thinks that monogamy is bad, we should all be opening up our relationships, and life should just be one big sticky lovefest.

Chalmers wrote a compelling response to Amos’ piece, arguing that monogamy was analogous to a restriction on friendship—just as it would be weird if you told your BFF not to make any other friends, it’s pretty weird to tell your BF he can’t make any new love connections. In fact, it’s beyond weird—it’s quite nasty, quite at odds with this whole “caring about your partner’s wellbeing” thing.

But, jealous and nasty lover that I am, I couldn’t help myself from criticizing Chalmers’ view—first in a comment, then in a whole post of my own. I wrote that disposition toward your partner didn’t matter so much if it didn’t compel action—if your partner never happened to find a new love to connect with, then your disposition to not allow such a connection would hold no moral worth—and that “monogamy” is a bit more flexible than Chalmers gives it credit for—if you and your partner accept an Indecent Proposal, I thing you can still call yourselves monogamous. (And mutatis mutandis for a new love who happens to be worth $1 million in awesomeness, as opposed to cash.)

Recently, Chalmers replied to my reply to his reply to Amos’ reply to his first papers on the subject:

Love's true measure

And he argued that I was wrong about loving dispositions—that justified conditions on love are good, and unjustified ones are intuitively bad, even if they don’t end up mattering concretely.

Chalmers also wrote that if you only abandon monogamy for million-dollar love, you’ll be missing out on a lot of hundred-dollar prizes that are at least a little worthwhile. This is a good point, though I think that if people value stability and a mutual arrangement that avoids jealousy at more than a hundred dollars, we should probably just respect their choices.

…And that brings me to the point of writing all this, which is to throw out all the nonsense that’s come before, and do a little modus tollensing of Chalmers’ modus ponens.

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3. Prescribing Universal Polyamory Is Kookypants

Amos linked to Chalmers’ first response to him in an Astral Codex Ten hidden open thread a little while ago. Scott Alexander responded:

I am poly and my experience with the poly community has been mostly good, but there are obvious and frequently-observed failure modes for people who aren't suited to it (probably most people!) and Chalmers seems to think he can just sort of philosophize away their existence. I couldn't get much from his section on jealousy other than "don't be jealous, seems wrong". Well, great work if you can manage!

Deiseach

added, helpfully:

Guy is phrasing it as “restrictions on friendship” but most people do not go around banging all their friends.

Big if true!

I think Chalmers’ argument can be summed up in the following steps:

1. Romantic relationships are importantly analogous to friendships.

2. It’s wrong to restrict the number of friends your friends can have.

3. Therefore, by the analogy, it’s wrong to restrict the number of romantic partners your romantic partners can have.

“Here is one hand,” I say.

1. It is common-sensically true that many people benefit from and enjoy being in monogamous relationships.

2. Therefore restricting the number of romantic partners your romantic partners can have is permissible.

3. Therefore romantic relationships are importantly different from friendships.

As Deiseach points out: the banging probably has something to do with this difference! Our brains are mostly wired to prefer stable, uncompetitive, friendly-to-child-rearing arrangements. Even if some people can manage to open their relationships successfully, many cannot.

“And here is another.”

Among those who are successfully polyamorous, it’s fairly common for their relationship structure to look less like a no-holds-barred, crazy lovefest, and more like a mostly-monogamous primary relationship with a few less-important lovers on the side. Fundamentally, even jealousy-free, poly-capable brains are wired toward monogamy. (This also suggests that anyone who forgoes extra lovers isn’t really missing out on much.)

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4. Prescribing Universal Child Porn Is Also Kookypants

Aella

is an entertaining and interesting writer who often says crazy and counterintuitive things. I don’t think that’s virtuous in itself—though

Glenn

may beg to differ—but in Aella’s case, because she’s often straight-up right, I’d call it an instrumentally good tendency.

Recently, she said a thing that lots of people thought was very crazy and counterintuitive:

AI Child Porn Will Probably Save Real Children

She made some compelling arguments, though none were overwhelmingly convincing. And the top comment summed up most reactions well:

This is a complicated subject and as mentioned above I do understand what you're trying to accomplish. And it is also true that completely banning things and making things illegal absolutely does not stop them and can sometimes make them more interesting or desirable to some people due to psychology. Both are true.

But flooding the Internet with CP [child porn] would almost certainly cause more harm than good. I'm a very open minded person but things that harm children are not okay.

This is a very complicated subject because human psychology is very complicated, messy and varies widely. Most humans are reasonably good given the chance, but there are always (sadly) going to be some bad people out there that will do bad things no matter what.

Oh boy, can you feel it coming?—yep, time for another Moorean shift.

Aella’s argument is a bit more complicated than this, but basically she thinks:

1. Child porn is a market like any other: demand is fairly fixed, and there’s currently a strong incentive to produce it via harming children.

2. Child porn has strong satiation effects—pedophiles will consume it instead of going out and abusing children—and weak-to-non-existent conditioning effects—it won’t turn anyone into a pedophile.

3. Increasing the supply of child porn will reduce incentives to produce the real thing via harm of children, will cause pedophiles to offend less, and won’t cause many more pedophiles to be created—overall saving lots of children from abuse.

4. Therefore, we should be using AI to generate lots of child porn all over the internet.

“Here is one hand.”

1. Common-sensically, we know that flooding the internet with child porn is crazy and bad.

2. Therefore increasing the supply of child porn won’t save lots of children from abuse.

3. Therefore either child porn doesn’t satiate as well as it conditions, or demand for it isn’t so fixed, or both.

And so

Defending Feminism

wrote in a typically thoughtful reply:

The idea that people who get off to the abuse of children would *only* ever make “fake stuff” and not use actual child abuse images to create such images requires an unbelievable level of naiveté. For the record, AI child porn already exists; it's actually a huge problem, and it uses existing child abuse images. (source)

…

Second, the idea that consuming sexual abuse images will *reduce* the likelihood of offense against children or “dampen urges” is not supported by existing research. I'll just link to some of the major studies on this, which actually suggest that sex offense against children is *not* primarily a result of innate, inborn urges but quite frequently a socially constructed result of conditioning/exposure to child pornography. (source)

“And here is another.”

Lyman Stone

wrote up an even more comprehensive refutation of all of Aella’s main points, pretty conclusively showing what we already kinda knew to be true: child porn is bad! It would be bad to increase access to it, and it would hurt children.

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5. A Very Conclusive Conclusion

Sometimes counterintuitive things about the world are true. I think the importance of shrimp welfare is an example of this.

But, much more often, counterintuitive things are totally wrong. Our intuitions tend to be pretty trustworthy! If a crazy and convoluted line of reasoning leads to a ridiculous and scary result—like that AI should kill us all, or something—it’s good to initially doubt the process of reasoning that led to it.

We should start with a Moorean shift—draw up the modus tollens-ed version of the argument—and then decide which set of premises is more likely. Are we more confident that monogamy is beneficial for many people, or that it’s exactly like friendship-restriction? More confident that AI child porn will increase rates of abuse, or that it’ll reduce demand for the real thing?

And once we have initial credences, if the data’s out there, we should look at it and think about it and figure out which set of premises is actually better. Defending Feminism and Lyman Stone both did a good job of this—they found evidence confirming their Moorean intuitions, and then were able to assert them with more confidence.

In the case of monogamy, good empirical evidence is probably a bit harder to come by. Or, at the very least, I’m too lazy to go looking for it.

Still, I’m willing to call it strongly common-sensical that lots of people like being monogamous and benefit from it. Just look around! There are lots of happy monogamists all over the place.

And this certainly seems like a more reasonable premise than “monogamy is like friendship-restriction.”

Insofar as I continue to not bang my friends, and insofar as lots of people continue to have happy closed relationships, I have good reason to doubt that monogamy is wrong.

Now I know it's just one dream
All these others gonna tear me apart

Love is calling
It's time to let it through
Find a love that will make you
I dare you try

— Weyes Blood, defending common-sense monogamous intuitions.

Look at that: he got married instead of watching child porn. Thanks, G. E. Moore!

Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash