Tom Sawyer

sergeyvladimirovich,

I disagree with this totally. Yes, if you continually fantasize over something then there is mroe of a chance that you will do something about it. However, until you do there is nothing wrong with it.

As an example, I think that the receptionist at my work is really hot. However, I'm happily married and have no desire to cheat on my wife but I still have fantasies about having sex with the receptionist. I will never act on these fantasies and I make sure I never ogle the receptionist while I'm passing by. Having brief sexual fantasies about her from time to time makes me feel good, though, no one is hurt by it and I'm not in any danger of losing control, so why should I stop?

I don't think that this is weak or hypocritical at all. It is natural for men to have sexual fantasies about attractive women. There is a big difference between thoughts and deeds and the first does not necesarily lead to the second. If I chose to take action based on my thoughts, then I would be a) trying to cheat on my wife and b) making inappropriate sexual advances to a woman I work with, both of which would be immoral. Having harmless fantasies harms no one, so what rational is there for me to stop?


sergeyvladimirovich,

Why should we try to avoid the mental states? If no action is taken based on those mental states, why are they bad? Why should I go through all the trouble of training myself to avoid having fantasies when there is no adverse effect of having those fantasies?

I disagree that we have control over everything in our consciousness. Random thoughts and feelings continually make their way into our minds and some of these are good and some are bad. However, if we don't do anything about these feelings, ther is no moral element to it. If thinking about incest is immoral the same as committing incest, then someone who thinks that it would be a good idea to help feed the poor would be comparable to someone who actually takes hours out of their day to volunteer in a soup kitchen. Granted, people wouldn't volunteer in a soup kitchen without first having the desire to feed the poor, but until they take that action, there is no moral component to the situation, since it resides solely in their thoughts.

Yes, having thoughts about feeding the poor is better than having thoughts about sex with your teenage daughter. However, until some action is taken based on those thoughts, there is no moral element of right or wrong involved.

viscousmemories

I don't get that statement either. Perhaps someone trained in a mental health related field could shed some more light on this, but I'm nearly positive that if a man went to a psychiatrist and said, "Doctor, at the suggestion of someone on the Internet, I've come to seek help because I have been fantasizing about having sex with my teenage daughter", the doctor would ask the man a series of questions designed to determine if he had any intention of acting on his desire and/or suffered from an obsession with the idea. If both answers came up negative, I suspect he'd send him home.

vm

sergeyvladimirovich

Tom,

I believe: what you think is who you are. People can be moral or immoral and since people are what they think (in my belief), immoral thoughts make immoral people.

When you fantasize about the receptionist, you are being immoral as far as I'm concerned. "I'll never do it" excuse is weak-- in times of distress or passion you don't know what you'll do or not do. The inhibited may just float up-- plain psychology.

viscousmemories

I agree. To summarize (and I apologize if I mischaracterize your point): Our ideas and desires are beyond our conscious control, and hence cannot be immoral.

What exactly are you identifying as immoral with this hypothetical? Him watching her sunbathe, the thoughts that come into his mind as he watches her, the fact that he indulges those thoughts and allows them to become fantasies, or the fact that he uses those fantasies as grist for his masturbation?

I�m one of those people who disagrees with you on this. I know a lot of people who think masturbation is at least pathetic (what�s the matter, can�t get a woman?), at worst immoral (you�re spilling God�s potential children on that towel, heathen). As a result, I am not at all comfortable with telling people that I masturbate. Does that make it immoral for me to masturbate?

I think you and I are very similar in our opinion. In another forum, I broke down the life-cycle of a thought like this:

Idea � Beyond your control, can't be immoral
Desire (a subset of which is �impulse�, which can cause a person to skip from desire to action) - Beyond your control, can't be immoral
Fantasy - Maybe beyond your control or not, not immoral in either case
Intent - In your control, could be immoral
Action - In your control, could be immoral

I think that when you say he isn�t being immoral with his thoughts of incest, but is being immoral with his masturbation, you are essentially saying that his desire is not immoral, but his fantasy is. That is the only point on which I disagree. In my view, as long as his fantasies never cross over to intent or action, he is in no way acting immorally.

vm

viscousmemories

Do you have some evidence to support your assertion that �contantly fantasizing about doing something� makes a person �likely to do it�?

sergey, I can barely even follow your train of thought in this paragraph. I think you are using �dream� and �lust� as synonyms for �fantasize�, which unnecessarily obfuscates your point, and I don�t understand your use of the word �admonish�. In any case, I think what you are saying in brief is that people should make a conscious effort to sublimate any thoughts which contradict their moral standing or they are �hypocrites or weak people�. Perhaps you�re right. However, if I think an intention or action is immoral, but that a thought, desire or fantasy cannot be (which in fact I do believe) then your argument is baseless.

I�ve never heard of a �chain-reaction fallacy�, but that�s not a big surprise as I�m not generally a heavy debater. I would, however, classify your argument as a slippery-slope fallacy; perhaps incorrectly, but that�s what I understand that concept to mean. Anyway� your argument in this paragraph appears to be something along the lines of, �Actions are directly caused by fantasies, and you can tell me that there is no rational basis for my assertion, but since I firmly believe that it is accurate you should simply accept my view.� Sorry, but to my Mother�s great dismay, the fact that she named me after the doubter means that I require evidence before I accept that assertions are truisms.

You have provided no evidence for your first bullet point, which makes your second point mere rhetoric and irrelevant to the discussion.

vm

deano

in past civilisations incest was common place.
infact alexander the great's slept with his mother because it was his duty because his father died.

incest does no harm to anyone so how can it be a justified moral??.

sexual morality is immensly screwed up,if someone wants to sleep with a relative,it wouldnt bother me,but it isnt my cup of tea.

do not confuse emotions for fact.

Tom Sawyer

sergeyvladimirovich,

What exactly about this fantasy is immoral and why? Is it because it's somebody I work with or because I have sexual thoughts about someone who's not my wife? If it's the second, then every man I know is immoral because we all check out good-looking women when we see them walking by and often have brief images of what it would be like to have sex with them. We then keep walking and go on with our lives. If it's the first, then every man in my office is immoral, since we pretty much all think the same thing when we see her. Noticing beautiful women and having brief fantasies about those women is completely normal and there is nothing either moral or immoral about it. The element of morality comes in when an action is taken as a result of those fantasies.

The question of what I would do in a time of distress or passion is irrelevent. In that case, I'd take an action and the moral element would enter into the picture. The idea that a thought is immoral because there is a possibility that something that is related to that thought might happen in the future if a specific set of circumstances occurs is as nonsensical as saying that driving is immoral because one day I may drive drunk and hit a child. We're talking about what's actually happening now. If one day something happens where I cheat on my wife, then that would be immoral, regardless if I'd had fantasies about that woman beforehand or had never looked ather twice before the actual affair. Private thoughts that don't create any impact on the real world, however, have absolutely no moral element attached to them.

viscousmemories,

Out of those, I'd say that watching her sunbathe and using the fantasies for masturbation are the immoral ones. This is because in both cases, he is taking action in the real world. Standing around leering at one's daughter and masturbating to that image both involve him bringing the thoughts into the real world and taking some action. Just having the thoughts pop up in his head has no meaning in a moral sense. Indulging in those thoughts and letting them become fantasies is a tricky one; normally I'd say it's not a moral question, but the fact that it's his daughter and thus so highly inappropriate for him to dwell upon those thoughts that I'd say it pushes it into the realm of immorality in this specific sense.

OK, that's a very good point, so allow me to elaborate on my original statement. Sometimes people aren't comfortable talking about their actions because they're immoral and sometimes because they're not socially acceptable to discuss. If I'm out having dinner with someone and go to the bathroom, I don't come back and say, "Wow! That was one huge piece of shit I just shoved out". I wouldn't be comfortable discussing the details of my washroom visit. This is not because there is anything immoral about taking a shit, it's just not a topic of conversation that is considered socially acceptable to talk about.

Masturbation is the same. Like taking a shit, it's something that everyone does but it's not considered a socially acceptable topic of conversation. However, it is something that can be talked about with certain groups; I've sat around drinking with buddies and had conversations about masturbation. I cannot imagine, however, rational people sitting around talking about masturbating to thoughts of their teenage daughters sunbathing. I'd consider anyone who mentioned he does something like that to be very distured at the least and would likely contact children's services to get the girl out of the house.

That's basically how I'd distinguish between a man not being comfortable talking about masturbation and not being comfortable talking about masturbation to thoughts of his teenage daughter.

Tom Sawyer

deano,

It doesn't really matter what happened in past civilizations. Discussions of morality should focus on the here and now and what was considered acceptable for kings in ancient Macedonia has no bearing on the topic. Alexander also owned slaves and killed thousands of people who objected to his expanding his territory into their lands, but if I enslaved people or killed my neighbour because he didn't want me expanding my territory into his yard, the justification that Aleander the Great did it a couple thousand years ago wouldn't make either a moral act.

I agree with you that if relatives want to sleep with each other, it's their own damn business, providing that they are both consenting adults. In the OP, the daughter is 15, below what is considered the age of consent in our society, and a man would be hard-pressed to convince me that even if she did give her consent for her father to sleep with her, she wasn't coerced into it, due to the inherent imbalance of power in the relationship between a father and his teenage daughter.

Loren Pechtel

That's how I see it--so long as he's not going to try to act on them it's a non-issue.

I doubt there's anyone on here who hasn't had fantasies about someone unobtainable for whatever reason. So what if that unattainability happens to be because of a family relationship? How is that any different than having fantasies about someone on the silver screen?

Michaelson

Originally posted by Tom Sawyer: You haven't really made a distinction there at all. Most people feel uncomfortable talking about masturbation with others, though the act is not immoral. Even fewer people sit around and talk about their incestual fantasies... because incestual fantasies are immoral?

For one, I would have thought it perfectly possible that someone who was okay with their own incestual fantasies would refrain from talking about them for exactly the same reasons they don't discuss masturbation or taking a shit over the dinner table: out of respect for the sensibilities of whoever they are talking to.

But even if your distinction is a valid one, can I ask how it is we can determine whether we are uncomfortable discussing our actions merely due to social convention, or instead due to the immorality of those actions?