#ethicists

[mexicanistnet]

The real danger, the kind that gives ethicists the shivers, is changing human DNA on a generational scale. Just because you can tweak a strand of DNA doesn't mean you should, especially without fully understanding the ripple effects… genes are complicated.

[thatbadadvice]

Help! I Am Entitled To Do A Bone!

The Ethicist, New York Times, 14 October 2023:

My wife became pregnant soon after we met, when our relationship was “fluid” and non-monogamous. We agreed to raise the child together and, at my urging, to have an open relationship. However, our relationship since has been monogamous. My wife was injured during the birth of our second child and now finds sex painful and avoids it. (We had a terrific sex life before the injury.) When I broached the topic of having other partners and reminded her of our agreement to have an open relationship, she became irritated and said that having kids changed things. Subsequent discussions resulted in a stalemate. I very much enjoy my wife’s company and love her and our two kids. I have no intention of separating from my family. Nonetheless, I harbor resentments that my wife reneged on her commitment to me, and this, together with the lack of sex, is creating a wedge between us. Would it be ethical to take a mistress, given her earlier promise, and if so, can I do this discreetly so as to avoid tension and perhaps divorce? Or should I tell her I am planning to pursue this course of action? Or does the inherent risk of infidelity mean I should accept near-celibacy indefinitely? — Name Withheld

Dear Name Withheld,

The restraint with which you signed yourself "name withheld" rather than the more accurate "big fun deep-dicking from which I have been blocked by my hateful bitch wife" is admirable in the extreme. You are a credit to your gender, sir.

But on to the matter at hand, specifically, your hand, to which you have been relegated in lieu of the aforementioned big fun deep-dicking. Your wife waited to drop the vicious bomb of possession upon you until she had roped you, an unwitting fancy-free man of leisure (entitled to all the benefits thereof indefinitely and in perpetuity), into marriage and fatherhood of not one but two children — children you could have in no way have known would result from your consistently and entirely monogamous coupling over many years, and moreover, could never have expected would complicate the terms of the thing y'all talked about one time about boning other randos?? And now this self-interested harpy dares to refuse to you the clear promise of sex with absolutely anyone other than her at any time ever, which she made and guaranteed in surety after you'd been fucking for a minute? A promise you had in theory enjoyed by writ and at length in your mind based on a conversation y'all had years ago before the entire terms and nature of your relationship changed in deep and meaningful ways to literally the one other person involved in said relationship, to wit, the worst person?

A bait-and-switch of the kind your cruel and fickle wife has pulled on you cannot, should not, be tolerated. Are you — is any man, really — obligated to just not fuck his wife in addition to whoever else he wants to fuck ever? Just because she "finds sex painful"? Sex isn't painful for you, and doesn't that matter just a little bit more? Isn't it her job to have kind of a bad time so that you can have a good time? Isn't that what it is to be a woman and a mother? And she just casually eschews her duty to put up with whatever the fuck you propose? Because WHY? Because "having kids changes things"? I ask you: changes things for who? For the person who carried children in her body and experienced deep and lasting personal and physical injury? Or for you, the person who matters most?

It seems your wife has an unfortunately topsy-turvy view of partnership, one in which she believes two individuals are allowed to dictate the terms of a relationship that may change over time due to a variety of mitigating factors that one or both of you may or may not have control over. Would that she realized that her sexual needs are not merely incidental to yours, but actively irrelevant. If only she would simply give you that one, small thing (in addition to two children).

But alas, she seems sadly fixated on her own needs to the exclusion of the fact that you would like to do a bone upon her or frankly anyone, you are not picky, as long as she doesn't leave you or take your children away or do anything really to upset the world as you would like it to be, which is a classically controlling woman-type thing that women do because they are so self-involved.

Obviously you're really grappling with the profound ethical implications of lying to your wife about taking a mistress, and you're trying to find literally any other solution to just finding a girlfriend and fucking the shit out of her and hoping your wife doesn't find out. That's clearly the very last thing you want. But since you've shown such magnanimous restraint in not doing so, you probably should just do it and see what happens, it'll probably all be totally fine! And if it isn't, eh, idk? Were you supposed to just survive on beejays and handies forever? You tried your very best not to! And that's what will matter most to your children in the end.

[qiu-yan]

i'll write a more in-depth post later, but imo one of the reasons for the level of disagreement in this fandom is that many of us readers can see what mxtx is trying to imply about ethics through her work and simply do not agree with her base premise. like i think that there are some conclusions about the various characters in mdzs that mxtx wants you as the reader to draw. you can kind of tell even if you don't agree with those conclusions. more importantly, though, you can also tell exactly what kind of moral philosophy mxtx (consciously or unconsciously) favors, and what she treats as the granularity of morality, so to speak. the most commonly-held positions in the fandom are those mxtx intends for the reader to reach using her own beliefs about ethics as fundamental axioms.

the problem, then, is when the reader does not agree with mxtx's unspoken axioms of morality. if you come into mdzs with a moral framework different enough from what mxtx has (consciously or unconsciously) used to write mdzs, then of course you're going to come to different conclusions regarding the characters or even the object lessons of the story.

or rather, in simpler terms: the rammies, mxtx....the rammies....

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

There’s a lot of “humans, fuck yeah!” and content like that, where people post about how humans are so much more special than aliens. This somewhat bothers me, and I’m curious to hear your thoughts on that phenomenon?

Are you talking in (Doylist) context of tumblr as a whole, or of sci fi fandom, or of NASA or SETI? Or is this in (Watsonian) context of the within-Animorphs forums we see in canon in #16, or post-war in #54, or is this about Animorphs fic/meta in general, or my Animorphs fic/meta?

To answer for myself: Any time I'm writing from Tom Berenson's POV, I am deliberately writing him with a massive pro-human anti-alien bias. That's why I had Ghost in the Shell hinge on him being dumbfounded by human villains. Hopefully it's kinda justified, if not excused, in light of his backstory.

Any time I'm not writing Tom, I will admit I have an easier time headcanoning about human society/human thoughts/human feelings than about hork-bajir or yeerks. I get paid to read and write about humans, and there is just less to know about taxxon society than human society. If I want to write about an andalite firefighter, then... do andalites fight fires? do they have jobs? do they search for jobs? do they apply for jobs? do they interview? do they get paid money? do they have money? do they have fire? So on forever. It can be paralyzing. Writing humans is often easier, at least for me.

To speculate about all of fandom: I assume that every tumblr poster and sci fi reader is a human. And that it is easier to feel love for the species to whom one's best friend, lover, and favorite cousin all belong, when compared to a species that is strictly imaginary. We could argue forever about if yeerks are monsters or lovers or fascists or victims or all of the above. But if I say "humans are awesome," most of us will simply think of our favorite human, and smile.

[armoryamor]

btw i’m not saying you’re morally obligated to critique tech if you’re techum. but i am saying that if you do, tech will get better and more efficient and your bond will deepen because you were a part of that. trust

[faaun]

my arms keep burning and turning red i keep smiling at polaroid photos of my friends i bought a set of pans so i wouldn't have to steal theirs. when i asked 2 ethicists why the way she treated me was so bad (tell me logically why i should let her go) i really meant tell me why i deserve better. tell me why what she did matters in the context of how you know me. will you tell me why do i deserve better than to suffer for a beautiful person?

[tributary]

“bigoted humor is categorically unfunny” is a different statement than “whether or not something is funny is irrelevant to whether it is moral.” this is what punching up/down/back/side language fails to account for. the aristocrats!

[servuscallidus]

This bad boy can fit so many footnotes

[tetrachromate]

not sure if this lines up but i feel like the common aphorism on here 'let the soft animal of your body love what it loves' would be much less popular if it was explicitly described as a utilitarian claim

[froshele]

today in the wild I came across a phrase to the effect "...And this [pair of ethical axioms about what constitutes quality of life for purposes of discussion about disability and coma prognosis, based on the opinion of one person who has not ever been in a coma or disabled thereafter] suggests that maybe, just maybe, [relevantly comatose or recovering or disabled] people may have quality of life sufficient to make them ethically relevant"

that's ... not, um, normally considered to be what makes people "ethically relevant" in the world where all the people are and there's sunshine and grass and things, but, you know what, ok jennifer, A for effort! :) gold star for you, philosopher extraordinaire, moral lodestar for people unsure what to do with granny, paragon of ethical conduct!

[transhitman]

My utilitarian take is that ethicists should all be beaten to death with a stick

[byakuyasdarling]

I think a good thing about being away from social media though is just caring so much less about all the internet argument stuff. It’s so much less stressful just focusing on me and my health and the people close to me.

Especially with AI stuff. Of course I don’t agree with it scraping from artists but I love when artists reclaim it as a tool and I think it should be used as such. You can’t stop a program from existing, it’s useless. But you can make guidelines to ensure it’s uses are ethical and practical — basically to make jobs easier and not over-work artists, not to replace them.

I think there’s so much to still work-out in that regard, obviously.

Another thing that used to stress me out was those “press 3 buttons to save my pet” videos. I always try to do the copy link think and get interactions up but it started triggering me my anxiety which wasn’t good. Have you guys experienced that, and how did you deal with it? /gen

[weiszklee]

This is so funny. No, I don't find it particularly hard to accept that everyone deserves rehabilitation. And yes, I fully agree that if someone really is beyond saving, then it is society's failure for not saving them sooner. But I don't think we should let the people who can't be rehabilitated roam among everyone else, and if you don't think that, then you're not really a prison abolitionist either.

I'm not sure I believe that 95% of people on this site who call themselves prison abolitionists are actually prison abolitionists.

[mstornadox]

Decided to read The Ethicist column in NYTimes today. That was a mistake.

The reader asked how to interact with a neighbor who all ways tells them that she is praying for them. Instead of giving a nuanced and helpful response, The Ethicist tells the reader to suck it up and that the reader is the one causing harm:

The only reason you give for objecting to her prayers is that she has failed to comply with your wishes. Yet I don’t find that she has thereby treated you with disrespect, because I don’t see that you have the right to have those wishes complied with. You seem to be asking her not to do something she thinks there are compelling reasons to do. I’d have thought that this was disrespectful.

So. You can set boundaries, but if the other person has “compelling reasons,” then it is okay to ignore them. What a load of crap.

Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/18/magazine/neighbor-prayer-ethics.html?unlocked_article_code=1.jE4.ewh2.DZoXSJ1fwVSf&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

[davidblaska]

You're 'torn'? She's your mother, dammit!

Throw momma off the train! We don’t think it’s a parody. A New York Times Magazine feature called “The Ethicist” is an advice column but in place of Dear Aunt Blabby the thing is adjudicated by a philosophy professor with the appropriately diverse, inclusive, and equitable name of Kwame Anthony Appiah.   Seeking the professor’s advice, blessings, or permission, his over-educated, affluent, and…

[marmorenshud]

I'm not saying metalheads are all moral arbiters who have perfect ethics but I think the pop girlie twitterinas could learn something from spending time with people whose favourite artist has actually murdered people and go "yeah but the beat slaps"