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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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I tried to answer the 'yes, and' in the rest of the paragraph - men imagine sex because they want to have sex, and having sex is good because (if you are a progressive) sex is fun or (if you are more right-wing) sex leads to children, and either way 'men desiring sex' is good, even in a reactionary society men desiring sex motivates them to get married.

Can you elaborate on why such fantasies are immoral? Your post read like "If a female friend knew about it, she would be creeped out and it'd damage the friendship". But this is just argument by "other people believe it" - if my great-great-grandparents were alive, and they knew I was atheist, that'd damage our friendship - charitably this is because they'd hold incorrect beliefs about the relationship between "being atheist" and morals or character. You might claim that 'a person's feelings matter even if they're wrong' ... but them knowing and being upset is a hypothetical. This points at some wrongness that these women understand ... but presumably you understand it too, so why not just say it?

Consequences don't even come into it for most systems of morality

[tangential] This isn't true, because the list-of-virtues or list-of-good-things was either (usually both) intentionally designed to lead to good outcomes (like a religious or legal code), or culturally evolved for said good outcomes. Like, if 'thou shalt not kill' is on your list-of-virtues, it's there because killing leads to death, which is a ... consequence. Ofc many disagree with that. My point wasn't exactly 'consequentialism always' though, just - even if 'don't kill people' is moral not because of its consequences but because it's a moral fact, like a law of physics, 'kill' still means 'when you cause somebody to die', and death is a consequence of actions. There's clearly a relationship between "it's immoral to kill people" and "don't drive while drunk", but that's because the consequences of 'driving while drunk' is 'you're worse at driving' which leads to 'sometimes you crash into someone'. And that's all you need for my 'morality is about actions and their consequences' bit. And then the way that 'imagining a naked woman' is actually immoral becomes very relevant - is it immoral because constitutes improper desires that might be followed through on? Is it as immoral to imagine someone in very revealing clothing, but not exactly naked, as them naked? What if you've already seen then in that, say at the beach? Naked as immoral as having sex? These all matter if one wants to reduce you or others doing these potentially immoral acts. But it also makes the proposition seem less plausible - why do the laws of moral physics reach into imagination?