Ethics and Erotica

[AG31]

I'm very much in the camp that thoughts should not be policed, and fictional books are naught more than thoughts given form.

Hear. hear!!!!! (Here, here!!! ?????)

And thanks for that bit about your father. I'd forgotten that science could give us answers on both sides of the question.

 

[ElectricBlue]

So yes, dark writings can have a positive effect on the world in the most unforseen ways, and therefore I support it.

That is true, and on the individual level, we see that often - writing acting as therapy. Those folk are thinking about it, though, and their fantasy has a direct purpose - they're looking after someone, themselves; they're writing their own safe haven, because the alternative might be far worse. And their writing, because it comes from trauma and recovery, might just help someone else.

But I think there are many writers who aren't doing that, they're just indulging themselves, publicly, but only thinking about themselves.

 

[SimonDoom]

Well.... This does seem to cross the boundary. Normally I disapprove of hi-jacking a really good thread, but this seems to rise to the level of "immoral." My grandson asks for pineapple on pizza. I'm thinking about disowning him. Or at least having a serious talk...

Let's just say you and I could have a pizza together without coming to blows, and leave it at that.

 

[AG31]

Simon has often said, cite evidence for an opinion, which is fair, but for an ethical stance, a personal belief structure, a world view, empirical evidence is irrelevant. I am who I am, I don't need to prove myself to anyone.

Generally, yes, I do, in all of my stories. Words have power - I do believe (no evidence, it's a belief), therefore, that writers should at least think for a microsecond beyond themselves. By publishing, you're putting words out there, so think about what you're writing about. It might not matter at all, but at least think about it, because it just might.

That's all I'm saying here. Think about the affect your words might have on other people, because you're part of the society we all live in.

That's been said to me many times, firstly by therapists working in the disability sector (in the context of Rope and Veil, mostly), most recently by a blogger who works with male impotency as a consequence of prostate removal. I got a mention in a podcast (well, my writing did). So yes, that feedback has affected my views about my own writing, and influences what I write.

I've never suggested that people will act out "forbidden stuff". I'm not asking that people adopt my standard.

What I am asking is that people think beyond themselves and their own needs and desires for just a moment, and consider the possible impact on others, who might be less well equipped than you, when living their lives. When reading your words.

This forum frequently demonstrates the impact of triggers on people with mental health issues, fragile people. Frequently and often, but many people seem to be blind to that.

My simple premise is that words can have power, so writers should take some responsibility for that (on the assumption that they write powerful words).

Of course not. People can push their own buttons however they want, but if they going to push someone else's buttons, at least think about it first, and get out of their own head for a second.

Triggers are important to people who get triggered - writers should, I believe (that word again), know how their content might trigger other people, and at least be aware of the potential for harm.

People have said, "You have a gift, you have a gift for writing," (the safe haven), and "Thank you for the gift of this story, thank you both for sharing."

That is, people have thought some of my fiction was real life - when it wasn't. Which is evidence enough for me that some people cannot separate fiction from reality, which is why I apply the ethics to my writing that I do.

OK, so I think I've been reading you as prescribing for everyone. But I should be reading you as describing yourself. Is that correct?

 

[SimonDoom]

I'll give my quick, overview answers to my own questions:

1. I struggle with the idea of whether there are any limits to what an artist can create or an author can write. I'm not sure. I begin with a foundational belief that it is the right of the artist to use the full range of human experience, good and bad, real and imaginary, as the stuff from which the artist creates their art. I believe there's a valid purpose in creating art that treats "bad" subjects. But there are some things even I feel queasy about. I don't write pedophilia, for instance. I don't write torture or snuff erotica. I would be cautious about writing something that could be used as a "how to" guide to do bad things in the real world. I'm not sure what my limits are.

2. I know that my stories have an impact in the sense that people like or don't like them. I know that some have been offended by my stories. I don't care. My view is that one person's offense is no more important than another person's pleasure. I don't write with the goal of offending, but if the collateral result of my writing a story that gives me and others pleasure is that someone is offended, I am unconcerned. That doesn't mean that I'm unmindful of the possibility of triggering someone with my story. Triggering and offending are two different things. I see being triggered as an involuntary response caused by a psychological condition, usually involving past trauma, while being offended is a choice. Being offended by a story is very common; being triggered is not. While I know that my stories sometimes offend people, I can only speculate whether my stories might cause the more psychologically significant and harmful result of triggering someone. Beyond creating an immediate reaction to my story, I have no idea whether my stories have any further impact, and I see it as 99% speculation. I could noodle over the issue to my heart’s content and still probably be no closer to figuring it out.

3. Personal experience--not really. I have some professional experience with the subjects of freedom of speech and Internet regulation, and I studied freedom of speech in graduate school and have researched free speech issues in my career since then. In the 1980s I read a fair number of works regarding both the feminist and right-wing critiques of pornography, and it’s a subject I’ve read about to some degree ever since. One of the things that struck me about the works of Catherin McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin is that they were completely fact-free. Their views were pretty much based just on how they felt, or on anecdotes cherry-picked to support their positions.

4. My knowledge of evidentiary sources on these questions is haphazard and non-systematic, although over the last four decades I've sometimes sought out and read articles and studies on the question of the real-world impact of speech, including pornography.

5. Might I change my mind? Theoretically, yes. My bias is that the case for free speech and artistic freedom is strong enough that the person advocating for limits on artistic expression bears the burden of proof, and that burden must be met by producing real evidence and not just personal feelings and conjecture. But theoretically, it's possible that someone could produce evidence and I like to think I'm open-minded enough that I would pay attention to it and that it might change my opinion. I have yet to see persuasive evidence produced on this question.

6. Do I write with an ethical goal? Not really. I write primarily for aesthetic/erotic purposes: I want my stories to give aesthetic pleasure and erotic pleasure. I don't write to teach lessons, and I don't write with a strong sense that "I shouldn't write that because it might bother someone or prompt someone to do something bad in the real world." I'm not completely unmindful of this concern, I just don't see it as likely in the case of written stories published in this platform.

Having said that, there IS an ethical message of sorts that I think underlies my stories: I generally promote sex positivity, and I generally take the view that as long as people act consensually they can do what they like and that indulging in wild kinky sexual activity that is frowned upon by society is a good thing if it’s consensual. I’m not going to pronounce moral judgment on it. I think my work also embodies the idea that there is a perfectly legitimate place for the transgressive in art: it is perfectly ethical to read and write about people doing unethical things.

 

[vagrantx]

Hear. hear!!!!!

And thanks for that bit about your father. I'd forgotten that science could give us answers on both sides of the question.

Sure thing, talking about it hasn't hurt for several decades, I'm just glad it was actually an on-topic talking point for once.

But I think there are many writers who aren't doing that, they're just indulging themselves, publicly, but only thinking about themselves.

Of course, people are generally selfish. Personally, I don't believe this is enough reason to outright ban certain topics from going into print though; even those selfish writers may hit home with someone and help them even if it wasn't their intent.

This whole topic brings to mind how we're gradually loosning the noose around writers. I remember when American Psycho was released, the book was outright banned in several neighbouring countries and sold shrink-wrapped in others to not let anyone underage browse it in the store. Nowadays the book is pretty tame.

 

[djrip]

I think people like John Hinckley are aberrations and it's not the job of creators to try to anticipate how some crackpot is going to react to their art. Art would be much poorer if everyone was worrying about that kind of thing. Strong art can be transgressive. Offensive. Its whole point can be to challenge political correctness or notions of acceptability. Or bad, trashy art with no pretensions, no challenge, no ethical concerns, just pure filth of one form or another, can be a nice indulgence.

We wouldn't have Seven if all artists were bent into knots about this kind of thing. We wouldn't have Lolita or I Spit On Your Grave or Gwar or Cannibal Corpse or It. And we wouldn't have whole rafts of shittier art that isn't name-drop famous but that people enjoyed or were shocked by or got a laugh out of the outrageousness of.

There are lots of stories here on lit that are way darker than anything I'd ever want to write (or read). But I support their existence. If something can make me go 'Jesus Christ that's fucked up,' can make me feel revulsion, that's powerful writing. I usually prefer emotions other than revulsion, but I can be impressed by how well a piece of writing achieves revulsion. And the ones that go even farther than I'm willing to follow, may be at just the level it takes to make someone else get that emotional reaction that I got from something milder. So it may not be for me, but it could be appreciated by someone else.

 

[AlinaX]

There may be academic "answers" to that, but I would suggest that the same question could be raised about the budding bank robbers who were pushed over the edge into action by "that movie." Whatever the answer, to that, it's clear that society has decided to take the risk and allow fiction free reign.

There are two points here.

Stories about bank robbers, etc., can be fun, but it's one thing to have an honest portrayal of bank robbers, and quite something else to have many romanticised portrayals of bank robbers. The latter says, "Bank robbers are cool and only rich bastards get hurt."

Arguing that 'society has decided' is more or less saying that others are content to gloss over ethical considerations and therefore so should we be.

 

[djrip]

There are two points here.

Stories about bank robbers, etc., can be fun, but it's one thing to have an honest portrayal of bank robbers, and quite something else to have many romanticised portrayals of bank robbers. The latter says, "Bank robbers are cool and only rich bastards get hurt."

Arguing that 'society has decided' is more or less saying that others are content to gloss over ethical considerations and therefore so should we be.

And yet The Italian Job is awesome.

 

[AlinaX]

And yet The Italian Job is awesome.

The original, yes, and I don’t think it romanticises anything.

 

[djrip]

The original, yes, and I don’t think it romanticises anything.

I only saw the new one. Tiny cars vroom! There's a place for Scarface, and there's a place for tiny cars vroom.

 

[Winter_Fare]

That's where my call for evidence comes into play.

In my opinion the evidence suggests that censorship is unethical. That is, the more proscriptive society is, the more misery it inflicts on its people.

Evidence suggests that far above the fictional literature people are exposed to, poverty, poor education, zero mental and physical health care, lack of social safety net all do orders of magnitude more harm. Freedom of creativity and expression are more valuable to society than preventing offence.

 

[Bramblethorn]

1. Do you accept the idea that there are ethical limits on what kind of erotica you should publish? Why or why not? What are those limits?

Yes. I believe that writing has the power to change the way people view the real world - even when that writing is understood to be fiction - and that change can be harmful or beneficial. Where there's reasonably foreseeable harm, not outweighed by some other consideration, that would be a limit.

I don't find it helpful to propose "never write about X" type rules; it's far more in how one writes those topics and how they sit within their context.

For instance, if I'm writing about characters from a minority group, I'd try to be aware of harmful stereotypes about that group and avoid repeating those stereotypes without challenging them.

2. Do you believe that your stories are likely to have an impact beyond the space of this forum? What kind of impact? Why do you believe what you believe on this question?

Yes. For instance, I've heard from several people who read "Anjali's Red Scarf" and came away from that realising that they might be autistic. I know from personal experience that that can be a life-changing revelation. They might have got to that realisation eventually by some other path, but presumably it would've been later, and that delay has consequences. I also heard from non-autistic people who told me it had helped them understand autistic people in their lives and to support them better.

On another story, I had a comment to the effect of "as somebody from a country where [group of people] are perceived as the enemy, this made me rethink my attitudes".

I've also had several in this vein:



For folk who are used to seeing people like themselves as the star of the story, it might be hard to understand how important that kind of recognition can be to people who don't get to take it for granted... but it really, really is.

3. Do you have any personal background or knowledge, or professional experience, that bears on the question?

When I grew up, my main exposure to the term "autism" came through the character of Raymond Babbitt in "Rain Man", who's described as an autistic savant. To the best of my knowledge, nobody involved in the creation of Raymond was autistic - not the writers, nor the actor, nor the two real-life people on whom he was based. (One was believed to be autistic at the time, but that was subsequently revised.) And despite being the title character, Raymond isn't even the protagonist of his own story; he's merely the catalyst who provides an opportunity for his brother Charlie to learn important life lessons and grow into a better person.

Raymond? He starts the story institutionalised, he gets a few days outside the institution when Charlie thinks he might be able to exploit Raymond's abilities to make money, and then he goes back to the institution.

At the time I finished high school, and for some years after, that movie was my main reference point for "autism". For some people, it still is; one of my readers on Red Scarf told me that all they knew about autism came from "Rain Man", more than thirty years later.

That's not to say that Raymond was the only "autistic" character I encountered in my childhood, just the only one labelled as such. There were others who, in hindsight, were patterned on autistic stereotypes - absent-minded professors, men with obsessive interests in one or two topics, that
kind of thing. (I say "men" deliberately; I can't recall any female examples.)

What they all had in common, apart from being male, was that they were two-dimensional characters. They were comic relief, suppliers of McGuffins and gadgets; I can only think of one who was the protagonist of his story, and even he was very much a caricature. In particular, none of them had anything approaching a love life. And they were the only people like me who I could find in fiction.

Fiction is fiction, but we learn many truths from it. I learned a good deal of physics and astronomy from Clarke; I learned about WWI fighter aircraft from W.E. Johns; I learned about early Australian settlers from Mary Grant Bruce, all of that long before I studied those topics in school. I learned a fair bit about distinguishing the fictional elements of a story from the real ones; I understood that Captain James Bigglesworth was presumably fictional, a character who appeared only in one author's works, but that Sopwith Camels and the Red Baron were probably real because they showed up in stories as disparate as Biggles and Peanuts, and because I could look them up in an encylopaedia. The more I saw of an element across multiple stories, the more consistently they presented it, the more likely that this was something I could believe.

The idea that people like me could never aspire to be more than the background nerd, could never have any kind of social skills worth having, could never be sexual beings who might be desirable to others... that was presented very consistently across very many stories.

Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie has an excellent talk on this kind of thing: The Danger of a Single Story.

I grew up thinking of myself as weird, broken, unlovable. (In a romantic sense, that is; my parents were there for me.) It's a perception that caused me a great deal of completely unnecessary pain and missed opportunities as a young adult. I fell in love without believing in any possibility that it could be reciprocated, so I kept my feelings to myself and went home and cried in my room. Not to bore y'all with early-twenties angst, but it just might be the closest I've come to dying.

I had the great good fortune to find a kindred spirit some years later, and in my thirties I started encountering more information about autism that finally helped me understand who I was. That knowledge has helped me find ways to deal with the things that are hard for me, to find my own people. But it's a lifetime's work undoing the consequences of 30+ years of not knowing those things.

Recently I read a story where the heroine spills her rice and apologises for her clumsiness, something she's long been self-conscious about. Instead of giving her some "your inner beauty is what counts" cliché, her love interest - a potter - talks about how English bowls aren't designed for eating rice, goes off to his kiln, and makes her a bowl that's designed for rice and sized for her hand. Had I read stories like that as a child, teaching me to ask whether it's really me that's broken or if it just might be the world, and stories where protagonists similar to me got to have happy and loving relationships, I think I would've saved myself some very bleak times in my twenties.

So, yes: fiction matters, and bad portrayals can be damaging.

As to professional experience: I'm limited in what I can say about my work, but I take a strong interest in the topic of neurodiversity in the workplace, I've done some career mentoring for neurodivergent people, and what I've seen is consistent with the above. In that context it's usually about real stories rather than fictional ones, but they work in much the same way. It's not entirely true that "you can't be what you can't see", but it is vastly easier if you can.

4. Do you know of sources of evidence or analysis elsewhere that bear on this question in a significant way?

[Fair question, one which I don't have time to answer adequately at the moment.]

5. Are you open to having your mind changed on this question?

Not sure which of your many questions above is "this question".

I am very much open to persuasion about exactly what kinds of stories are helpful or harmful; I'm always keen to hear how stories have affected others.

Having been significantly affected by fictional stories myself (or perhaps by the lack of certain kinds of stories), it would take a great deal to convince me that stories have no power to influence their readers and hence the real world.

If somebody did manage to convince me of that, I'd probably give up writing fiction altogether.

6. When you write stories, do you do so with an ethical purpose in mind?

Sometimes. I don't think it's ever been the sole driver, but it's certainly been a major consideration for things like "Red Scarf".

 

[Bramblethorn]

There is something seriously wrong with the morality of a person who doesn't at least ponder about the possible consequences of the stories they present to the public. That being said, I do believe in freedom of speech and thought, and in that sense, I feel that there should be no censorship in fiction.

I'm glad this was said, because it identifies a very important distinction that often gets muddied when discussing this topic. "Is it wrong to write X?" and "should people be prevented from writing X?" are not the same question.

 

[Voboy]

I'll throw out some questions to get the thread going:

1. Do you accept the idea that there are ethical limits on what kind of erotica you should publish? Why or why not? What are those limits?

Writers have self-imposed limits (I certainly do; not so much things I'm squicky about, but things I've written that I won't post because I think they push a line I don't wish to push). To the extent that those limits can be labeled "ethical," then yes. I do accept the idea.

2. Do you believe that your stories are likely to have an impact beyond the space of this forum? What kind of impact? Why do you believe what you believe on this question?

Likely, and I think it's positive: I have heard from readers that my stories have inspired them to write their own (nothing is more gratifying), that my stories have gotten them off (very gratifying, too), and that my stories have encouraged them to go learn something (especially my historical or SF stuff).

3. Do you have any personal background or knowledge, or professional experience, that bears on the question?

No, other than a very deep grounding in Kohlberg and his theories. And I've read Crime and Punishment a time or two.

4. Do you know of sources of evidence or analysis elsewhere that bear on this question in a significant way?

Not particularly. It's not a professional interest of mine. The ethics training I've occasionally gotten as a public employee has not generally covered erotic literature, lol.

5. Are you open to having your mind changed on this question?

Certainly.

6. When you write stories, do you do so with an ethical purpose in mind?

I wouldn't say I think about it too carefully at any point, but I'll remind you of my answer to #1: there are stories I've written that I have not and, probably, will not post. Meaning, I do think I've written ethically suspect tales. Thing is, I've usually made that decision AFTER the story is written and prepared for submission. So it's not something I think about "when I write stories."

 

[Voboy]

There is something seriously wrong with the morality of a person who doesn't at least ponder about the possible consequences of the stories they present to the public.

I'm not certain morality and ethics are the same thing.

 

[alohadave]

1. Do you accept the idea that there are ethical limits on what kind of erotica you should publish? Why or why not? What are those limits?

No. Besides legal restrictions, it's a personal thing. You write to your personal ethics and morals, and they are very dependent on you as the writer.

2. Do you believe that your stories are likely to have an impact beyond the space of this forum? What kind of impact? Why do you believe what you believe on this question?

I doubt it. My feeling is that most people use the stories for entertainment and titillation, but that's as far as it goes.

The kinds of things that I write are not particularly inflammatory, so it's not something that I think is a concern.

3. Do you have any personal background or knowledge, or professional experience, that bears on the question?

Personal experience decades of reading. I've read a lot stuff over the years, but I don't think that anything I've read has ever made me feel like I've been influenced to act in any particular way.

I have been influenced by thinking about the things I've read and I feel that I am more open-minded to alternate and non-mainstream lifestyles and relationships. IMO, this is a good thing, as I feel like I can empathize with people outside my demographic and life experience. From my experience, the people who don't read or explore things outside their experience tend to be more close-minded or less sympathetic to people who are different than they are (and this is a generalization. I'm not saying that sympathy and empathy to others requires reading anything in particular. It's exposure to others that makes this work, for me reading is how I get my exposure).

4. Do you know of sources of evidence or analysis elsewhere that bear on this question in a significant way?

AFAIK, there are no conclusive studies that show, one way or the other, that porn, violent games, violent movies/TV, comic books, etc cause people to be more violent, or more sexual, or whatever target crusaders are fighting against.

IMO, most people are well-enough adjusted to be able to put their entertainment in context and not to use them as the basis for their morals or actions. The people who are unduly influenced will be influenced by anything that reinforces their tendencies.

5. Are you open to having your mind changed on this question?

Not really. I'm pretty set on them and feel comfortable on my position.

6. When you write stories, do you do so with an ethical purpose in mind?

No. I don't consider ethics when writing other than how situations may affect a character and how their personal morals and ethics drive the story. There are times where I put characters in situations that would be problematic IRL. The characters are put in those situations to prompt them in certain ways. It's not that I'm advocating for things that I write about to happen IRL.

If people take lessons from the story, or feel a connection to the story because of the situation that I present, then I would feel like I have had an impact. But I'm not looking to influence people to feel any particular way. What they take from the stories is dependent on them.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

I'm not certain morality and ethics are the same thing.

Oh, I agree. Unless I am confused about the meaning of the word, morality is about your own personal moral values, which I see as the more important ones and the ones that are relevant in this case, while ethics I see more as the values of the wider community, the external values, so to speak.

 

[Voboy]

Oh, I agree. Unless I am confused about the meaning of the word, morality is about your own personal moral values, which I see as the more important ones and the ones that are relevant in this case, while ethics I see more as the values of the wider community, the external values, so to speak.

I kinda think of ethics as being more about fairness or equity or, as you say, community standards. Not so much about right and wrong.

I think both are personal. Probably more nurture than nature, though I don't think anyone can say that definitively.

 

[Bramblethorn]

My father is a pedophile. Bonafide. He went to prison when the rather alarmingly large ring he was part of got busted. This was many, many years ago, and I haven't spoken to him since.
I do still talk to my uncle though, who in turns speaks to his brother, and I've been told that pedophilic literature has helped "quench his urges" as he so politely puts it. Great, he's not actively seeking out real life imagery or, for that matter, real life people.

Something that occasionally comes up in discussions about obscenity law here: there have been a couple of cases in recent years where people went to jail for operating websites containing fictional, text-only stories about sex with children. The kind of stories that could be seen as helping people with pedophilic leanings "quench their urges" without harming real people.

But in both those cases the site operators also were involved in things harming real people. Thomas Alan Arthur, who ran the mrdouble website, had also sexually assaulted a woman and a young child; Frank McCoy had "approximately 20,000 images and almost 200 videos of child pornography on his computer". In McCoy's case, the assaults predated the website, so I guess it's possible that the website replaced his RL violence. But in McCoy's case, he'd been running the website for years when he was busted with porn of real children.

I think it's likely that there's potential both to exacerbate and to mitigate RL behaviour, but figuring out which of those dominates is a difficult question. One complication is that pedophiles are not necessarily trustworthy sources on the matter - are they saying such fiction helps them avoid RL harm because it genuinely does, or just because they want to preserve access to that fiction?

 

[Cagivagurl]

The question "Should I write that?" often arises in this forum, but usually in the context of threads started for other purposes, so efforts to answer this question, and to engage with it, often come across as unwelcome intrusions on someone else's thread.

I'd like to start a thread that invites people to discuss this question in a non-adversarial and non-political way, so contributors can say their piece without being insulted and can keep an open mind about others' perspectives.

I'd also strongly encourage anyone to introduce evidence that's relevant to the issue.

My goal is to create a dialogue where the issues are engaged with in an interesting way, rather than just "I believe this" and "I believe that."

The idea is for this to be a conversation about creative ethics, rather than a debate over what the law actually is or what Laurel's rules allow and forbid. Laurel has her own preferences for what she does and doesn't want to allow and as the owner of a private website she has the right to do that. I'm not interested in using this thread as a soap box to praise or complain about Laurel's rules.

If you want to participate, please be mindful of the site's rule against trolling and making personal attacks. Please do not accuse others of being bad people because they want to read or write material that you do not. Stick to the non-personal issues raised by the thread.

I'll throw out some questions to get the thread going:

1. Do you accept the idea that there are ethical limits on what kind of erotica you should publish? Why or why not? What are those limits?

2. Do you believe that your stories are likely to have an impact beyond the space of this forum? What kind of impact? Why do you believe what you believe on this question?

3. Do you have any personal background or knowledge, or professional experience, that bears on the question?

4. Do you know of sources of evidence or analysis elsewhere that bear on this question in a significant way?

5. Are you open to having your mind changed on this question?

6. When you write stories, do you do so with an ethical purpose in mind?

Anybody who would make public a private email, has no right debating ethics...
In my humble opinion.

Cagivagurl

 

[SimonDoom]

Anybody who would make public a private email, has no right debating ethics...
In my humble opinion.

Cagivagurl

That's exactly the sort of ad hominem attack I'd hoped to avoid in this thread.

Please take it elsewhere.

I'll remind you that the person whose email I republished, and I won't rename them in this message, said this in the message to me:

"you turned out to be a vile creature, hardly human, and I will never speak to you again."

and

"Suck my dick."

I have never on any other occasion republished someone's private message content and don't expect to ever again, but I think messages like that are repulsive and abusive, and one forfeits expectations of privacy when one uses a site's features to talk that way to other site members.

You may disagree. But please stop making ad hominem attacks. If you don't want to engage substantively in this thread, then stay off of it.

 

[mirafrida]

One thing that strikes me as compassionate, from a certain angle, is to acknowledge the incredible diversity of ways that sexual desire and expression plays out in the minds and lives of different people.

If we start to advocate for shutting down particular avenues of expression, we are essentially choosing to foreclose (expression of) the fantasy lives of some people, while enabling others.

I would not categorically advocate a "no limits" line. However, I would tend to be very cautious about the potential for hypocrisy in saying "my fantasies can be expressed freely, but you need to keep yours to yourself."

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

Oh, I agree. Unless I am confused about the meaning of the word, morality is about your own personal moral values, which I see as the more important ones and the ones that are relevant in this case, while ethics I see more as the values of the wider community, the external values, so to speak.

You're spot on.

Ethics are the external rules we agree to as part of a society. Morals are our personal decisions on our actions. It actually raises a question about the validity of the premise of this thread since we all joined this society and by default agreed to the rules or ethics it prescribes.
While we draw the line at child porn, our collective ethics include Nonconsensual sex and incest which are both considered extreme taboos in the larger society as are, for that matter, a lot of the other categories.

So, I guess what we're discussing is how our morals deal with the conflict of our inner circle selective ethics that say, to an extent, rape is OK (NC/R), and the outer circle societal ethics that place it higher than murder on some scales of egregious behavior.

Am I as 'guilty' as the person that writes story after story in NC/R just because I paid my cover and am watching the dancers dance even though it makes me nervous to do so because one of the dancers looks like my teen age niece?

Is my personal involvement of writing stories in T/CD any less bad than NC/R, especially considering the epic kerfuffle going on in society right now around that same issue?

Lots of questions, and at some point someone is going to pop in here with a picture of a buxom redhead, but damn, that's sexist objectification, which we seem to have tacitly accepted in our inner circle ethics.

I agreed to the rules when I joined the game, so my ethics are fine. I choose not to go too deep into NC/R and I/T, but have dipped my toes in that end of the pool a coupe of times. I pretty much live in T/CD so that external kerfuffle is on my mind a lot as the risks presented by the outside larger circle ethics do bear on my real life.

My morals tell me that our right to freely express our art, because that's what this is, makes what you and I do here OK. In fact it almost makes it mandatory. If there's no one to push the boundaries, then those boundaries will collapse in on us and then where would we be? Sure, some, or maybe a lot of what we do would be offensive and perhaps reprehensible outside our circle, but so are so many other things when taken out of their proper context.

As an example, I lost both of my parents to different kinds of dementia. Their death certificates said, natural causes. The facts are we, me, my family, the doctors, drugged them and starved them to death because it was more humane than the alternative. Context.

So, I've come full circle. The issue here isn't ethics. That's been defined for us by the societies and groups we choose to belong to. As for morals, we each get to choose those for ourselves, and depending on context, well, each one of us is right.

EDIT: I really don't have an issue with NC/R or I/T they just seemed the best options to make my point.
EDIT: apologies for tagging a user without considering their willingness to participate. name removed.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Of course, people are generally selfish. Personally, I don't believe this is enough reason to outright ban certain topics from going into print though; even those selfish writers may hit home with someone and help them even if it wasn't their intent.

I don't think the discussion is about banning topics, it's more about the positions writers take towards their content and why they write in the first place - and any consequences their writing might have.

Some have well thought out principles, which range from absolute free speech and anything goes (and that's fine if they've actually thought about it, philosophically), and others have more limited stances, which can inform what they write (and what they do and don't read).