by Simon Smith
It’s about time we wrapped this
up and not just because the joke-titles are getting desperate.
The trouble is, even after all
this, the answer to our moral quandary remains unclear. Just what is morally
wrong with possessing a child sex doll? After all, it’s not as though the
possession of sex dolls in general is morally problematic, not necessarily nor
inevitably. At worst, owning a sex doll might be considered distasteful;
possibly – but not necessarily – indicative of an unhealthy attitude to sex, of
the sort which sees others as nothing but a means to satisfaction rather than
partners in any meaningful sense. Then again, it might not be any such thing;
it might, quite conceivably, be nobody else’s business at all.
Paraphilia perhaps? This too is
possible, although whether something that is generally regarded as
psychological or emotional disorder of some kind could be subject to moral
censure is debatable. Besides, it seems likely that sex toys are more commonly
a substitute than a replacement, that is, an object of desire in their own
right.
Clearly, however, there is something
amiss. The case of this man with the child sex doll doesn’t seem to be simply
distasteful; nor, for that matter, does it seem to be the sort of thing that just
makes one feel morally queasy. There is, surely, something very wrong with
having a sex doll in the shape of a child. But what is that something? What’s
more, there’s something quite odd about that moral judgement too, something
which I can’t quite put my finger on.
My feeling is – and I appreciate
this is not a very satisfactory answer – that it’s something to do with the
image and the way it’s being used. More than this, it’s something to do with
the role that all personal images play in the development of consciousness, in
our becoming persons at all.
Put simply, and far too briefly,
images of otherness play a crucial role in the dialectics of personhood. In
becoming a person, the other invests their image in us, we internalise it,
learning to speak and think for and by ourselves, learning how to participate
in our own development and, perhaps more importantly, the development of
others. That, in a nutshell, is what it means to be a person.
If it’s true that the ways in
which we appropriate and make use of those images makes a profound difference
to the kind of people we are – and it most assuredly is true – then how much
more care must we take when the images belong to the vulnerable, to those who
are themselves only begun on the journey of their own becoming? It is, I think
– if you’ll forgive the melodramatic language – a kind of sacrilege, a breach
of faith with ourselves and those who made us.
Perhaps that is all a bit too melodramatic.
Very well, let’s try one last thing, something which, I think, links up with
what we’ve already said.
Again, just to be clear, I’m not
pretending to have the final answer here. Evidently, however, the problem is,
in part at least, something to do with the desires, if not actual intentions,
revealed by possession of such an object. That said, we would not ordinarily be
held morally culpable for our desires, especially those that are not acted
upon, or at least not fully acted upon. After all, we do not deliberately have desires; it
might be more accurate to say that desires have us. Of course, we
may cultivate desires which are dangerous or which, if they were acted upon,
might prove morally problematic, profoundly so. By cultivating such desires, we
should then be morally culpable. Perhaps something like that is going on here;
it seems likely. In acquiring this sex doll, this man has begun to act on his
desires, to foster them and give them room to grow; he has begun to invest
himself in them and so manifest a personality-type, which is morally
unacceptable.
Perhaps, as has been suggested,
he was trying to control that desire in a way, trying to prevent it manifesting
itself fully. That may be true, but there are other and better ways of
controlling dangerous desires, which don’t involve cultivating them in this
very explicit way. True, one might be afraid to seek medical help before things
got to this stage, yet it doesn’t seem much of a defence to act upon that fear but
apparently to feel considerably less
afraid of allowing such a dangerous desire any rein at all and to act
accordingly. In a sense, then, what’s wrong with this situation, what
makes the hairs stand up on the back of the neck, is to do with the
objectification of others and the objectification of the self which necessarily
follows from it. It’s about allowing a desire to take possession of the self
which can only manifest itself as a damaging disconnection of the self from
others.
That leaves us with one last
question: has technology created a new moral problem for us? The fact that it’s
still quite difficult to say exactly what that problem is suggests that it might
well have done just that. Perhaps, but even if it has, two things do seem to be
quite clear. First, and going back to the discussion which started this series
of posts off, it’s not at all obvious that more and better information about the
processes and the technology involved in this case would help. I don’t really want
to know the technical details of how something like this is made and even if I
did know, I can’t see how that would help me understand my moral concerns about
it. Secondly, and getting to the real heart of all ethical thinking, whatever is wrong with this situation it almost
certainly has something to do with the multifarious ways in which people can and
do objectify one another. There’s nothing new in that. In that case, the difficulty
in identifying very precisely where the moral problem lies might reasonably be put
down to my not being a sufficiently sophisticated thinker; that doesn’t sound
too outlandish, I suppose.
In the end, however, the point
is that the fundamental moral issues don’t really change. Whether the particular
area of moral practice is the world of business, information technology,
neuroscience, or just bad puns, the question is, what are we doing to other
people and what are we doing to ourselves?
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