Ethics and Erotica

[SimonDoom]

Thanks for that.

I think Voboy is right and I regret sounding like I wanted to inhibit what you wanted to say.

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

I hope you don't think I'm making too light of this subject, but the silliness and moral inconsistency of some Literotica readers is such that if I wrote a story about an incestuous mother who had a transgender friend, I'd probably get a comment from somebody saying, "No self-respecting mother would put up with a friend like that!"

No, not at all. That was directed at everyone, not just you. Threads get sidetracked by all kinds of things.

I guess you could write a story about an incestuous mother that had a transgender husband. Then you could piss off the LW crowd, too.

 

[Cagivagurl]

I have no objection to your questioning the ethics of what I did, but when you accuse me of being "void of ethics" you are making an outrageous personal attack that is unwarranted. It is not a "statement of fact." Telling someone "you did something unethical" is completely different from telling someone "you have no ethics."

I am not at all uncomfortable with my actions. I felt then, and still feel, that I acted ethically in that particular case based on the abusiveness of the comments made. I suspect if someone used personal messages to attack you in a personal way, you might feel similarly.

The site never got back to me to tell me I should have not have disclosed that remark, but if it did, I would remove it and not do that again. I respect the site's rules. They trump my ethics.

The site has never deleted any of my comments. It has deleted some of yours as being personal attacks, and you are making them again.

I don't want to get into a tit for tat. It spoils the thread. I would request that if you have objections to certain things that are said you should address the substance of the comment and refrain from attacks on me or on others as being unethical people.

Besides, that comment was made two months ago, and it's irrelevant to this discussion. If we limited ethical discussions to the perfectly ethical, we'd have a lot of silence.

I'm afraid there's no time limit on bad behaviour.
Once you cross the line, it's there forever.
That conversation was the only one I have ever had with you.
I based my opinion on that conversation.
I did say, it is only my opinion.
I can say that I have never, and would never reveal to anybody what was said to me in private.
If you feel comfortable with your actions, then so be it.
When somebody calls you out in private, it is a personal statement, and should remain so.
You are the one who wanted to discuss ethics, so here we are.
Let me ask a simple question. Would you be happy if somebody sent you a private and confidential email. Regardless of content and displayed it to the world.
I think you would not.

Ethics... Interesting subject isn't it?

Cagivagurl.

 

[Voboy]

I'm afraid there's no time limit on bad behaviour.
Once you cross the line, it's there forever.
That conversation was the only one I have ever had with you.
I based my opinion on that conversation.
I did say, it is only my opinion.
I can say that I have never, and would never reveal to anybody what was said to me in private.
If you feel comfortable with your actions, then so be it.
When somebody calls you out in private, it is a personal statement, and should remain so.
You are the one who wanted to discuss ethics, so here we are.
Let me ask a simple question. Would you be happy if somebody sent you a private and confidential email. Regardless of content and displayed it to the world.
I think you would not.

Ethics... Interesting subject isn't it?

Cagivagurl.

Look... without coming down on one side or the other (because I have no idea what you're talking about), can we not agree that you've made your point and the OP's made his, and then all admit that you're going to keep disagreeing about your interpretations of whatever happened? And then stop posting about it?

I get it. He did something bad that has nothing to do with the ethics of writing smut. I don't particularly care, because this is an interesting thread and it becomes less interesting when it descends into a squabble.

JMO.

 

[Paul_Chance]

Do you guys think you need consent from them to use real people as inspiration?

As inspiration, no. Simply change the name of the character and it's fine. We can draw inspiration from anywhere or anyone and as long as you're using the inspiration to create your own work, you're on ethically solid ground.

If you are going to use the identity of a real person, or a character created by another writer, then you should seek consent. That would be the ethical thing to do (and in many cases, the legal thing to do).

Ethics and legality are two separate things, though they often have significant overlap. Many laws are an attempt to codify an underlying ethical framework.

 

[SimonDoom]

Look... without coming down on one side or the other (because I have no idea what you're talking about), can we not agree that you've made your point and the OP's made his, and then all admit that you're going to keep disagreeing about your interpretations of whatever happened? And then stop posting about it?

I get it. He did something bad that has nothing to do with the ethics of writing smut. I don't particularly care, because this is an interesting thread and it becomes less interesting when it descends into a squabble.

JMO.

Well said. I was working on a response, saw your post, and deleted it. Cagivagurl has a right to an opinion on that issue, and I have mine, but it doesn't have a damn thing to do with this thread.

 

[Cagivagurl]

[No personal attacks or trolling - including creating accounts for this specific purpose. Heated discussions are fine, even welcome. However, personally attacking / kink-shaming a fellow author or reader is not allowed within the Author's Hangout. Threads which devolve into the exchanging of insults will be closed and repeat offenders will be given a timeout, per the AH rules.]

 

[ronde]

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?

The ethics I use in my writing are my own developed beginning with being raised in a very fundamentalist religion and progressing as I experienced more of life and more people than in that religion. Yes, I have limits to what I write and those limits are much the same as the rules for Literotica and I'm more strict in a few areas. For instance, I've read some BDSM stories that seem to me to be more sexual abuse than an agreed upon conduct during the activity. I don't write water sports or anything like that because I can't. I also can't write about underage sex because my moral code won't let me.

The age-old question of whether the written word has an impact is easily answered, in my opinion. It isn't what you read or see on TV that forms your character. Rather, it's your basic character that interprets what you read. Sometimes that interpretation runs counter to the rules of society, but only if the basic character is flawed in some way. There will always be some people who can't adapt to social norms and end up being the people you read about in the news. To believe otherwise is to believe that correlation equates to causation. The several teachers who have been found guilty of having sex with their underage students didn't get the idea from reading about it. The reading may have confirmed the mindset they already had, but it didn't cause it. It was already there and waiting for the opportunity.

My personal experience is that if reading about violence and seeing it in the movies and on TV caused one to commit violence, my entire generation should be heartless killers who are imitating the westerns and war movies we saw and read about. We didn't have the availability of porn that people have today, but we still had magazines and a few books that got passed around, yet none of us ended up being serial rapists. Put simply, it's not what the person reads. It's the person doing the reading. I don't think the kids who grow up playing video games or reading or watching porn are any different. The vast majority of people have a sense of right and wrong that develops by about the age of 5. If they don't they probably need professional help.

At this point in my life, it would be pretty hard to get me to change my mind, but then, I'm pretty liberal as far as writing topics are concerned. I don't write incest stories, but if people want to fantasize about sex with their parent or a sibling, far be it for me to tell them they can't have the fantasy. I think most of us do at some point in our lives. I would add that as long as it's just fantasy, I'm OK. It's if it presents in real life that I'd have a problem with it for all the various reasons that have been true for centuries. I feel the same way about beastiality. I think it's a little odd to permit a story about sex with a tentacled space monster but not allow a farmer to have a tryst with his cow, but then I grew up a rural area and in the era where "stump-broke cows" were a pretty popular joke.

I write to entertain my readers, and any sex I write into my stories is there because it's a natural progression of the plot. I don't really consider how a reader might feel about that. I often write abut the wife with an unloving husband who seeks out from another man what she's not getting at home. I think that's more common than a lot of people believe and in my opinion, totally understandable. Women have libidos too, at least in my limited experience they do, and the sex drive is right up there with eating as a motivation. Some readers would crucify the wife is she did that, but wouldn't think anything if the husband did. As I said before, it's not what is read, it is the interpretation by the reader. Some readers will comment that there's too much plot and not enough sex, while others will comment on the same story that I made the story about the characters instead of just about sex. It just goes with the territory.

 

[joy_of_cooking]

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.

I am a minority that is not often seen in mainstream media. I used to not believe that representation mattered. One of the things that changed my mind was seeing the reactions when people who are used to being the center of attention have not been centered to the degree they feel appropriate.

I got a very mild taste of this when I wrote some Chinese swear words using Chinese characters. Talking about that in the forums got me some wild stories. I think there was one comment to the effect of, "leaving these words untranslated ruined the story for me." Where these words were, like, nine sentences and their relevance to the plot was that the narrator didn't understand them. (Details are probably wrong. I'm going from memory.)

 

[joy_of_cooking]

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

Circumstantial, but I happened to be reading this recently: https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2023/02/social-media-body-image

Summary: A randomized controlled study found that reducing social media usage improved body image. Caveats: The study was short, the sample was small and undoubtedly weird, social media is not exactly the same as porn, etc.

But, yeah, I'm pretty inclined to believe this. Propaganda works. Marketing works. Putting things in front of people's eyeballs repeatedly in more or less any form, works.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Citation? Sounds right up my alley.

Should've qualified, not a Literotica story. Courtney Milan's "The Marquis Who Mustn't". Second book in her "Wedgeford Trials" series, with very mild spoilers for the first one ("The Duke Who Didn't").

That series is set in a predominantly-Asian town in Kent, in the late 19th century; as she mentions in an author's note, the fiction there isn't that such places existed but that they were allowed to continue existing. "The Duke Who Didn't" has an ADHD-coded heroine of Chinese ancestry, as does "The Devil Comes Courting" from another of her series.

(Despite the Dukes and Marquises in the titles, they are definitely not stories that uncritically embrace aristocracy.)

 

[Bramblethorn]

Definitely. And to be completely clear, the intent of my thread is to address only the first question. This isn't about what should be legal, it's about what's ethical.

But there's a significant amount of overlap between the two that distinguishes both of them from matters of mere taste.

When we enter a dialogue and say, "Here's what I think is ethical," we're not just saying, "Here's how I choose to do things." We are saying, "Here's how I believe people, generally, should do things, and if someone acts against this principle, that person is doing wrong." That's what makes it ethics as opposed to mere personal taste, like pineapple on pizza.

Agreed so far...

So when people enter a conversation and say, "Here's what I think is the ethical approach to writing erotica on this particular subject," I think they should be prepared to defend why they believe this should be a universal rule, applicable to everyone, the violation of which might entitle others to criticize or censure a person for violating that rule ("censure" not "censor").

Not sold on this step, because everybody is already entitled to criticize or censure one another for anything they please. That's just freedom of opinion and expression. I absolutely can criticize somebody for their opinions about pineapple on pizza, and in turn people can criticize me for being a judgemental asshole about choices that aren't my business, and somebody can criticize them for the tone of that criticism and so on ad infinitum.

My believing everybody should live by some particular rule doesn't make anybody else more or less likely to inflict that rule on others, AFAICT.

 

[mirafrida]

I'd argue that most stories are founded, for good or bad, on some kind of ethical principle. At a base level, we want to see good triumph against evil. Even in those stories where evil wins, we're usually able and encouraged to look at them and decide why evil won in that case

This "good must prevail" sentiment definitely seems like an 'ethic' that many LitE readers bring to the table. I'm afraid my stories often leave them frustrated.

Back before we knew about his dubious personal attributes, I liked various funny / arty Woody Allen movies, but one of my favorites was Crimes and Misdemeanors. I appreciated how, along with some humor, it also engaged earnestly with the idea that truth and virtue is not guaranteed to prevail, and if we want to approach life with open eyes, we need to reckon with that precarity.

Then again, we see who Woody Allen turned out to be, and... IDK, draw what lessons from that you will.

For me personally, I have never had any problem believing both the ideas that:
- in the world, good behavior is often not rewarded, and bad behavior is often not punished
- I should, personally, do my best to behave with respect and compassion toward other people

both of these feel like common-sense. It'd be nice to believe that there's some divine thumb tilting the karmic scales toward the good, but I don't need that to underwrite my everyday morality (and thank goodness, given what we see around us some days!)

and nor, for that matter, do I really need - or want - authors putting their thumbs on the karmic scales in what they write either

 

[tenyari]

People write for different reasons and to different effect.

I would never write a horror novel, but I'm not going to freak out wanting to call the police if Steven King walks by despite the fact that he writes characters and stories that are shockingly horrible and engage in dramatically unethical conduct.

So...

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'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?

For me yes. Because I am writing to explore my own fantasies. I am writing to explore the things that turn me on. Some people write to explore things they would never want to experience or see someone else suffer through - but the topic fascinates them in some way. That doesn't work for me; if a topic is something horrifying to me that is a turn off.

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?

My erotica almost always mixes in a lot of deep social analysis, sometimes abstract political analysis (not specific modern issues, but ways and systems of thought), and examining ways of thinking about problems. I've gotten comments letting me know it's had an impact on readers, and it's also had an impact on me. My stories can work as a way to get me to think about topics.

I write socio-political dramas, into which erotic elements are heavily placed. So I hope what I write has an impact. I frankly wish writing non-erotic literature appealed to me because I'd reach a greater impact that way.

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

I believe we should always have lightly held strongly argued opinions. Argue your stance with passion and reason, but be willing to drop it at a moment when discussion and research shows a better choice.

Most of humanity works the other way around: lightly argued strongly held beliefs - dogma. We don't want to debate our beliefs, and resent challenges to them, and will reshape facts to match what we already believed.

I am very grateful for two degrees in debate heavy social sciences that taught me to always desire to challenge my beliefs.

It's worth noting that we often believe ourselves to be much more open minded and accepting of new ideas than we actually are. Being willing to self analyze and change your stance is not itself just a stance you can take. It's an active trained process of consciously breaking your own ideas down and forcing yourself to engage non-dismissively with things that challenge your worldview. And that is extremely hard to do even when you've have something like a law degree that has specifically trained you to do it.

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

Yes. My stories always exist in a weird mix of erotic fantasy I've been musing over and ethical drama I want to play out to see where my mind will take it.

 

[BobbyBrandt]

I think that's too simple.

Ethics is not personal taste. When you say, "These are my ethics," you are saying, "These are rules I believe all people should follow." If you're talking about rules that only you want to follow, those aren't ethical rules. They're just matters of taste and personal preference, like "I prefer my coffee with cream." That's not an ethical rule. Some might say, "You shouldn't eat pizza with pineapple" is an ethical rule, but as sympathetic as I am to this as a matter of taste, it's just a matter of taste.

For example, is it ethical to use products that contain aerosol?

Personal, subjective beliefs provide no guidance on that question. Facts do. If we know, as science tells us, that aerosol products cause harm to the ozone layer, and that this damage could adversely affect the welfare of all people, then we have an ethical issue. But the ethical issue doesn't come up unless we have an empirical basis for believing that our action might cause harm to others without their consent. Searching your soul won't tell you whether it will.

There's another nontrivial consideration. Suppose we DO know that our story will be repugnant to 90% of the reading populace, but that 10% will like it a lot. Do we have an ethical obligation not to publish it? I would say no, because it is perfectly ethical to be part of a minority and to have and to express and to share minority points of view with others who have the same point of view. The members of the majority are perfectly free not to read our works.

I don't think you disagree with me on that point, as I have phrased it, so then the question becomes, what exactly is your position? How do you distinguish when it's ethical to publish a story that will offend many people and when it's not ethical? My challenge to you, and to others who think similarly, is that I don't see a principle at work. I see an endlessly slippery slope, that is sure to be abused once anyone appropriates to themselves the right to say when it's ethical to publish a story and when it's not.

This is the basic problem with trying to ground the ethics of speech or art on one's own personal beliefs--your personal beliefs don't matter more than anyone else's, and it doesn't matter whether you are in the majority. An ethical rule requires a more objective basis than that. That's where my call for evidence comes into play.

I've been waiting for someone to draw the distinction between ethics and morals.

I think that you framed your original post specifically towards "ethical" beliefs based upon your request for proof of a person's belief in that regard. Moral proof is personal and short of quoting scripture or other similar tenets, relies entirely on the individual's principles regarding right and wrong.

Adhering to my own morals, my writing will always remain ethical. Whether something is legally or ethically allowed will not trump my moral stance on the subject.

 

[TheRedChamber]

I am a minority that is not often seen in mainstream media. I used to not believe that representation mattered. One of the things that changed my mind was seeing the reactions when people who are used to being the center of attention have not been centered to the degree they feel appropriate.

I got a very mild taste of this when I wrote some Chinese swear words using Chinese characters. Talking about that in the forums got me some wild stories. I think there was one comment to the effect of, "leaving these words untranslated ruined the story for me." Where these words were, like, nine sentences and their relevance to the plot was that the narrator didn't understand them. (Details are probably wrong. I'm going from memory.)

There's a sensible discussion to be had about including foreign languages in a story (which obviously your commentator wasn't having). The issue is that while you've established that your PoV character doesn't understand the language, you're creating two classes of readers - those who understand the foreign speach and those who don't. If there's a substantial amount of it, the non-comprehending reader needs basically to scan quickly over it to start to pick up the English again which can break flow. The reader who does understand now is broken out of the perspective of the MC that they are supposed to be in with the extra information.

In fairness, it's not that big of a deal. It happens all the time in film where the direction can decide not to subtitle foreign languages and leave the average viewer guessing. It's generally more avoidable in text.

But equally sometimes, as a frustrated linguist I just like to stare at a language I don't understand and imagine how it works and the middle of a story often has good context for guessing.

(FWIW I could probably take a stab at understanding your Chinese text, but have seen similar issues recently in other stories where there was reams of Spanish text than I'm guessing a US High School graduate could take a stab at, but me with only my French GCSE was lost for whole paragraphs of plot.)

 

[TheRedChamber]

(Continuing from before with an eye on some things that have been said since)

One of the things about modern ethics is that it also contains the idea of tolerance. We acknowledge that others may have different ethics/morals from us and have to draw lines between what differences in ethical behaviour we tolerate in others. I may personally decide that I am not going to eat meat, but what behaviour am I to exhibit to other people? Not serving meat at my own dinner party to guests who would eat it? Probably fair enough. Punishing my own child (lets say age 17) for eating meat at their friends house? Getting extreme. Murdering a farmer because he in turn kills cows? Probably not going to be accepted by the rest of society.

Anyone with a developed sense of ethics with have thought about what they will tolerate in others. And also how others might see their own beliefs, which they believe are well founded.

When it comes to literature, tolerance for stories which embody ethical ideas other from the ones we hold should be pretty wide, we'd expect. They are after all stories and while whether or not they have a direct effect on real life is one of the questions being asked here, the effect is probably more muted than actual violence, destruction or other real world behaviours. Writing a story about, say, murder is always going to be more acceptable that actually murdering someone.

(Gah, interrupted again. Can't catch a break today...)

 

[Stimtheone]

Oh boy.

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?
There are always ethical limits. But they are the kind to exist in spirit but not in letter. In letter, one can do plenty of unethical things while following the rules, and do plenty of ethical ones while not following them. They are mostly about intent and what you WANT to do rather than what you achieve. And those limits can only be seen on a case by case, though the spirit is to not want to hurt people.

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?
Always. How big is the question. What kind is outside one's control. And I believe writings have an impact because others' writings had an impact on me. Not all, but they did.

3. Do you have any personal background or knowledge, or professional experience, that bears on the question?
Probably not, as I actually failed lit several times. I'd say that maybe my rp experience on a website showed me that it can change people.

4. Do you know of sources of evidence or analysis elsewhere that bear on this question in a significant way?
Precise one might be a work to find, but I think there is evidence all around that literary works of all kinds had an impact.

5. Are you open to having your mind changed on this question?
I am ready to receive compelling arguments to drive me in one way or the other. Staying in one mindset is for zealots.

6. When you write stories, do you do so with an ethical purpose in mind?
Honestly, I do. My works are not just me showing the wonders of a casual sex world, but also showing that such worlds will not be created if one waits.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I think that's too simple.

Ethics is not personal taste. When you say, "These are my ethics," you are saying, "These are rules I believe all people should follow." If you're talking about rules that only you want to follow, those aren't ethical rules.

I missed this. What bit of "personal ethics" did you miss here? As an individual, I have a set of personal ethics that guide what I do. I am NOT saying my ethics apply to anyone else, and I have no clue where you get that notion from. This might be semantics, I don't know, but "When you say, "These are my ethics," you are saying, "These are rules I believe all people should follow," those are your words, not mine. I'm not saying that at all.

Dictionary definition:
ethics - noun
moral principles that govern a person's behaviour or the conducting of an activity.

Please note: a person, singular. Me, mine, my own, my behaviour. Not yours.

Ethics have nothing to with personal taste, either, that's something entirely different.

 

[SimonDoom]

Ethics have nothing to with personal taste, either, that's something entirely different.

How do you perceive the difference? If the type of ethics you are talking about is purely personal, then in what sense is it ethical as opposed to just personal preference?

For instance, let's say you believe it's wrong to write stories about incest. What makes that belief "moral" or "ethical" as opposed to just a preference? Usually, we think of something backing up an ethical principle beyond our own subjective ideas. For instance, the Golden Rule: you should do unto others as you would have others do unto you. This is a meta-ethical principle. If a behavior satisfies this principle, then it is ethical. It's also a principle that allows us to judge someone else's behavior as wrong, i.e., "Other people should not write incest stories, because it is wrong for people generally to write incest stories." The universality and reciprocity make it ethical. If those elements are missing, then how is the principle "ethical" as opposed to being just like "no pineapple on pizza"?

I see, broadly, different camps on this question of stories:

Camp one says, I see no ethical issues in writing whatever erotica you want, and people who write stories should be unconstrained not just by government rules but by the moral censure of the community and by their own consciences. It's not an issue.

Another camp says, I think some content is objectionable, and I personally wouldn't write it, but I don't object in any way to others writing it.

Another camp says, I believe some content is unethical, and that nobody should write it, and we should try to persuade others not to write it. But I don't think the government should criminalize it.

Another camp says, I believe some content is so bad that government should criminalize it.

I'm not quite convinced that Camp 2 represents an ethical position, as opposed to representing just personal preference, but this might be quibbling over people's definitions of morality, and I don't want to quibble with definitions. I'm more interested in exploring what people believe and why.

Personally, I'm mostly in Camp 1. On a very few issues my qualms are enough to shade into Camp 2. I could possibly be persuaded to be in Camp 3 on a tiny percentage of issues if I had enough evidence to believe in the probability of harm, which I currently do not believe in. I don't foresee ever being in Camp 4 on any question about fiction.

 

[alohadave]

How do you perceive the difference? If the type of ethics you are talking about is purely personal, then in what sense is it ethical as opposed to just personal preference?

Morals are how you live your life, ethics are how you act in a specific group environment.

 

[HordHolm]

I see, broadly, different camps on this question of stories:

Camp one says, I see no ethical issues in writing whatever erotica you want, and people who write stories should be unconstrained not just by government rules but by the moral censure of the community and by their own consciences. It's not an issue.

Another camp says, I think some content is objectionable, and I personally wouldn't write it, but I don't object in any way to others writing it.

Another camp says, I believe some content is unethical, and that nobody should write it, and we should try to persuade others not to write it. But I don't think the government should criminalize it.

Another camp says, I believe some content is so bad that government should criminalize it.

I think you've missed one that sits somewhere around Camp 2, and it goes something like:

I believe some acts are objectionable, but content containing it is not the same as the act. I personally wouldn't write it, but I don't object in any way to others writing it.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

Telling someone "you did something unethical" is completely different from telling someone "you have no ethics."

Even if this distinction should be obvious to everyone, I believe it should be emphasized all the time, since there are issues of this nature in this forum.
For example, saying that someone told a lie is completely different from saying someone is a liar, and not only because it is a personal attack, but because it implies completely different things. Someone could tell a lie, for whatever reason; It could be a white lie, it could be a manipulative lie, whatever. But it is one lie. Saying someone is a liar implies that the person is doing it all the time and that is nowhere near the same. If telling one lie makes us liars, then we are all dirty liars here, without exception.
I know all of this seems obvious but people seem to forget these things often when discussing.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

Do you guys think you need consent from them to use real people as inspiration?

This is actually an interesting question that does involve ethics. My own opinion is that, if it's some publicly known person, like an actor, singer, politician, sportsperson, or similar, then you can write your story without asking for consent, as long as you write a disclaimer that the story is a complete work of fiction and that it doesn't represent the values or opinions of the actual person. This of course should work for small-time stories such as we write.
But writing, say, a bestseller, something that could influence the public opinion of that person, regardless of the mentioned disclaimer, could potentially be seen as something that could smear the person in question and I believe it would be very problematic from the ethical standpoint, not to even mention the possible legal repercussions.
That is why fan fiction, such as the one that exists on Literotica, is okay in general, but that is also why it would be highly dubious if it were done on some larger, more publicly influential scale.

There was a local legal case in my town that I feel is somewhat relevant, where an activist used harsh vocabulary to describe a sleazy radio reporter and got sued for it, but the court decided that being a public person implies having to accept harsher criticism in comparison to a regular citizen, so the case was dismissed.

 

[AG31]

I don't think @SimonDoom is asking about your personal beliefs regarding what is good and what is bad. I think he's asking about whether you believe you need to take responsibility for your stories' affecting real life behavior.

"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."

@ElectricBlue, My point was that Simon wasn't asking for proof about THIS belief. Just whether you believed it or not.