Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
Nolan got kicked off the Pizza Party Podcast almost three years ago, so it's certainly "old news" at this point, but a comic someone made about the incident surfaced on my Twitter feed this weekend, as someone was using it to illustrate the concept of fetish mining to people who are unaware.
The first link is the original posting (AFAIK) of the comic. The second is what appeared on my feed. I'm including the second because the person's bio says "Transmale Aro Ace/ He-They", which is interesting given the circumstances.
I'm starting to lose track of grooming and why it's bad.
My understanding is that grooming is the act influencing kids to make decisions they're not prepared to make, with the implicit understanding that they technically won't make these decisions until they've reached the age of consent, even though they've already been acclimated to the concept for years prior. This is why some consider teaching kids about gender to be a form of grooming, and why an adult talking to a minor with no clear intent of romance is seen as potential grooming.
Commissioning an underage artist to draw a character wrapped in a spiderweb is so many steps removed from sex that, regardless of whether the commissioner gets off on it, I don't know why it's any worse than just talking to the child about cartoons. Nolan was openly talking to children on social media before he was #cancelled because most of the fans of the podcast were children. It only became a problem when he commissioned artwork for his niche fetish from them.
If anyone can provide a steelman against Nolan that isn't based on disgust, I'd be interested in hearing it.
(Also, I don't think grooming is a black or white thing, a "you did it or you didn't do it" thing. There's no clear line that makes something grooming or not grooming. Defining it by intent is pointless, because you can't prove intent, and defining it by outcome means that you can't identify grooming until it's come to pass. It's always a judgement call, unlike actual child molestation, which I'm sure we can all agree refers to engaging in a necessarily sexual act with a child.)
This isn't the first time I'm seeing this 'moral disgust / aesthetics' dismissal in this kind of space, and it's nothing more than the intersection between a strawman, question begging, and isolated demand for rigor.
Are you interested in following the causal logic of an outcomes and effects argument? Then ask that plainly. Are you interested in hearing someone defend the issue deontologically? Then ask that plainly Are you're really intereted in someone's basic beliefs in their moral framework? Then why conveniently begin the discussion, dismissively, with an issue you disagree with.
All moral arguments will ultimately fall into essentially 1 of 4 categories, beneath the level of basic beleifs: theological / deist, arbitrary nihilism, aesthetic, or motivated self interest.
Even if you are Mr. Consequentialist, you eventually have to argue 'why' the good outcome deserves the term 'good', and you have one of the four options to pick from above. And all four of these can arguably collapse into the others (or lack of other).
"Ha! Your perception of good and bad is based on 'aesthetics'!" Isn't quite the trump one might thing it is.
What about group interest? Even if I'm selfish enough to prefer "I get to steal stuff and my targets get to suck it" as a moral rule, I obviously can't negotiate for that, and "nobody gets to steal stuff" is a much better Schelling point for me than "everybody gets to steal stuff". Technically "nobody gets to steal stuff" is still motivated by self-interest, since I'm picking what's better for me among realistic alternatives, but it still seems like it belongs in a different category than the "I get to steal stuff" rule.
Though this still seems true, for all five of these. In particular in this context, we can have evolved to feel disgust at things we expect to violate group interests, and we can have negotiated group interests that include effort to avoid triggering group members' innate disgust reactions.
I'm not sure I have enough of this context, though. I don't know who any of these people are, and when I google
nolan "pizza party podcast" fetishthe top video hit is "The DIAPER FETISH SONIC Special", which appears to open with the "Superfuckers" theme song. This is the show where "most of the fans of the podcast were children"? Perhaps I'm not giving it a fair shake, closing that window 10 seconds after clicking the Youtube link, but frankly I'm just hoping that Google and Youtube respect my incognito window and don't corrupt future search results or algorithm recommendations.I'll start by saying I'm no philosopher. But as you describe since, these can all collapse into eachother (in postive or negative formulation), I don't see why you couldn't have five. I'm going to flippantly call these all different faces of "The Axiom", some starting point of the good that's self-justifying in some way.
That said, I was personally thinking of group interest as essentially in terms of self-interest. Where I was going with self-interest was "this moral / value proposition" isn't based on some extrinsic good, but on what outcome I prefer. So if one thinks that said given moral proposition isn't based on some theistic derivation, isn't arbitrary, isn't derived from some evo-psych or naturalistic attraction, then it's motivated self-interest.
That said, again, I see no reason, this couldn't be expanded out as a fifth face.
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I appreciate your response and aspire to your level of rationalism. I'd say I'm most interested in following the causal logic of an outcomes and effects argument, though I wouldn't mind the other three.
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