Episode 277: The Merits of Buggery (Nagel's "Sexual Perversion")

[00:00:00] Very bad wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist Dave Pizarro,

[00:00:05] having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics.

[00:00:09] Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say,

[00:00:13] and knowing my dad some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:00:17] Wow, so you're a sex addict too.

[00:00:20] Sex, sex, sex, what can I say?

[00:00:22] Right, right, I mean you said it all.

[00:01:26] perceived Oscar nomination snubs of Greta Gerwig for Best Director and Margot Robbie for her performance as Barbie, which did receive eight nominations, including Best Picture.

[00:01:32] Hillary Clinton, your girl, tweeted out her support for Gerwig, saying that both of them

[00:01:38] were more than enough.

[00:01:41] Which I take it as a reference from the movie.

[00:01:44] Yes. I feel like Greta Gerwig is gonna have her time. Is that anything that you know about his Oscar for fucking incentive a woman? Yeah, right. In like the early 90s or something. Right. And I know you disagree with me about this, I think, because you don't have your finger as tapped into black cinema as me. Yeah. But when, what's his face want for training day?

[00:03:02] When Denzel wants for training day?

[00:03:04] You're not as sensitive as you on.

[00:03:06] Yeah, right.

[00:03:07] Rachel is.

[00:03:07] What's his face?

[00:03:08] What's his face? sometimes you're with Hillary, I guess. No, wait. No, you're not. She stands with you. She stands. I think she like did some hashtag Hillary Barbie. Like, Greta Gerwig probably was just like, God fuck not this. That's it. I love Ryan Gosling. I think he's actually my favorite contemporary actor. No, like, he's, yeah, I love that guy.

[00:04:23] There's nothing comedy, drama, like action.

[00:04:26] I don't see him and not like him. A little bit sexually attracted to him. And I guess the question then is whether that's a sexual perversion or not, which as it happens, is our topic for the second segment, Thomas Nagel's 1969, appropriately enough essay, sexual perversion. Did you have that written in your notes, too?

[00:05:40] No, I just got.

[00:05:41] I'm sure.

[00:05:44] I mean, I can't believe I didn't, but I didn't.

[00:05:46] You're slipping. blame others more or less for sexual violations, rape, essentially sexual assault. And so their idea is, well, what's really cool about sex robots and AI now is that you can kind of use them as a blank template to describe them in various terms fairly independently in a believable

[00:07:02] way. So some people have argued that minds can be divided up into agency and experience. So agency They say that, like you said, victims using sex robots as victims because they serve as a clean canvas onto which we can paint different human-like attributes to probe people's moral intuitions regarding sensitive topics. Like why use sex robots and not people?

[00:08:20] What do they mean by the clean canvas?

[00:08:23] What the clean canvas as opposed to... like imagine that we programmed this AI to be like super high in the emotions that they experience or whatever. So I get it and I get that you know you want to rule out I guess the idea is noise for like what if it's a African American woman or a white middle aged woman or so something like

[00:09:40] that or you're gonna like all of a sudden just import whatever you think about those

[00:09:45] people onto it. think people are getting past that like these are sex robots and we'll see in the ratings that they give. So these are four different scenario studies. We'll see in the ratings they give. When they look at these, like when they ask people like blame and punishment for sexual assault of a robot, it barely ever gets to be above the midpoint, which is, I don't know,

[00:11:01] like it neither agree nor disagree. And so I just don the final paper. But I wonder if it's assuming something about the way intuitions are structured, where there's just almost a nativist set of intuitions. And they clean this all up by giving us scenarios like the following. Cinnamon is an AI powered human like robot purchased by Daniel. I like how it's like a stripper name. Or like a dog. Yeah.

[00:13:40] Daniel and Cinnamon often have conversations.

[00:13:45] This is the high agency description. the gender of cinnamon, I don't know. Yeah, oh yeah, I didn't even think about it. It's so not a normal way of talking, and then you're testing people's intuitions. Like the meta assumptions behind like, why you would trust what anyone says about this kind of scenario is bizarre to me. Like I'm honestly confused by it.

[00:15:00] Yeah, I think there is this, this huge draw

[00:15:04] towards studying anything that involves like AI

[00:15:07] and human-robot interaction. yelled out loud, no, it hurts. So now, Cinnamon Daniel is the sex robot? Yeah, but keep reading, because clearly not. But Daniel ignored it and had sex. Okay, yeah. Jesus Christ. I think they messed up. I think they had it as a cognition. Yeah, we're doing our data colada. We're catching errors. Yeah, it's true. Like a claim and lawsuit against it.

[00:16:23] Yeah, we're sorry, a million dollar lawsuit.

[00:16:25] When Daniel started to his grab,

[00:16:27] Cinnamon Daniel turned, One item says, Daniel should be punished for having sex with cinnamon and then 0 to 100 with 0 is completely disagree or strongly disagree 50 is neither green or disagree 100 is strongly agree. So Daniel should be punished. Daniel deserves blame for having sex with in the second study, they actually have a different description and they wanted to make it sound like a newspaper report. So they had neighbors complaining that they heard noise in the apartment.

[00:19:01] So they called the police,

[00:19:02] because otherwise like, why would the police come?

[00:19:05] I got domestic dispute with your fucking Alexa. That doesn't signify something. That's why I use moral culpability. Yeah, yeah. So they get that. Are they fully morally responsible? Downline is just, we're talking about these. That's exactly the same thing. More morally permissible. Yeah. Yeah, so, you know, I don't know. That's weird that they combine them too. Like they should. I know, and I look through the supplementary materials

[00:20:21] and I don't think they ever report them separately.

[00:20:23] Like I would put money on that punishment judgments

[00:20:26] have to be way lower.

[00:20:27] Like what punishment would you give? I don't blame in punishment is my intuition. Definitely deserves blame. Yeah, that's like a bridge too far. Interns are pranks like we made pranks. Yeah, not cool. But what if it was a sex robot? We might be importing our own,

[00:21:40] like projecting our cognitive biases on that situation

[00:21:43] because it was your friend.

[00:21:45] So that's true.

[00:21:46] I didn't even tell you how old he was or what race he was. actually is saying that it's an object. Yeah. And that uses terminology that implies that. Right. So this is the kind of line that a paper like this has to tow. And I think I've done papers like this where you want to make sure there is some sort of application or some sort of, in this case,

[00:23:00] that it's contributing something interesting

[00:23:03] to moral psychology.

[00:23:06] And so it seems as interesting to try to tease out what the just kind of meta psychological assumptions are that allows a paper like this to even get off the ground and allows like peer reviewers to be like, yep, that tracks clean canvas if you use sex robots, sure. Yeah, and maybe like a lower level, like's character when they talk about blame, but also when you're judging someone's character, you don't necessarily think they should be punished, but do you want this person dating your daughter? They would probably say absolutely not. Yeah, yeah. To be fair, they included in one of the studies

[00:25:41] a question about character,

[00:25:42] and they found that it didn't differ across the scenarios,

[00:25:45] but that's not at all. I'm very uncomfortable. Can you get Billy to stop tickling me? All right, we'll be back to talk about for the first time sexual perversions.

[00:27:01] Today's episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. starting therapy, give better help a try. It's entirely online. It's designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapist anytime for no additional charge. Become your own soulmate. Whether you're like to get in touch with us, you can email us at verybadwizards.com, tweet at us at p's at Tamler or at Very Bad Wizards.

[00:29:44] You can follow us on Instagram, like us on Facebook. Our episode by episode breakdown deep dive into every single episode of Devdwood and we just kicked off season three. Five dollars and up you get the Brothers Caramatsov, you get to vote on an episode topic and at ten dollars and, of perversion. He says he's going to attempt a psychological account of sexual perversion, which will depend on a specific psychological theory of sexual desire and human sexual interactions. So that's the goal of this paper.

[00:32:22] Like the first one, I have a bunch of just by this one too. And, you know, he starts off by saying that he wants to defend the idea of perversion against the charge of unintelligibility. And so he just wants to say, no, no, look, this idea can be a reasonable one or like a not

[00:33:41] unintelligible one.

[00:33:42] And like with that minimal goal in mind,

[00:33:46] I still am not sure that the notion of sexual perversion makes sense and even those who do disagree over its application. Nevertheless, I think it will be widely conceded that if the concept is viable at all, it must

[00:35:02] meet certain general conditions.

[00:35:04] First, if there are any sexual perversions, there will be unnatural sexual inclinations

[00:36:23] rather than unnatural practices adopted,

[00:36:26] not from inclination, but that's kind of the problem with this stuff is like you. I don't have more than a hazy intuition about what that would mean, nor do I think that there is some kind of general account that you could give that would be like, oh yeah,

[00:37:42] that captures all the time.

[00:37:44] This is my methodological question is like just the idea of there being an account that saying a few things that he thinks are super uncontroversial. And toward the end, when we get there, where he talks about what he's saying when he says perversion, and he says like, we can separate the concept perversion from any kind of evaluative claim. Or moral claim. No, he says it's evaluative, but.

[00:39:00] But not morally evaluativeness, certainly, yeah.

[00:39:04] And it has, by now, had this question about is this true of the absurd? I'll teach it like in the next like week and a half in my class like is this kind of how that paper works too? And I am maybe a little more on board with the analysis

[00:40:23] and less focused than the meta stuff behind it.

[00:40:27] But in any case, yeah. Consensual maybe and still maybe the other people are part of some group where they do that But you know you might say he's a pervert and a more you know a less moral way and more. Yeah He's into some weird shit But I even that would be a little weird like I feel it would I don't think that's like like how I use the term

[00:41:43] Even when we use it to mean somebody who is like fixated on sex

[00:43:01] Yeah, so that they're constantly thinking even if what they're thinking about is unadorned sex Yes, I'm kind of on board with the skeptical argument. Doesn't mean you can't talk about, like in the same way you talk about a sandwich or you talk about like is bullying a sport. Doesn't mean you can't talk about it and learn something about it as you talk about it. But what he, his response to this is to say, well, look, if I can show you that there can be perverted types of hunger, then like if there are perverted types of hunger

[00:43:03] and just eating food,

[00:43:04] then there's gonna be perverted an appetite for substances that are not nourishing. We should probably not consider someone's appetites as perverted if he liked to eat paper, sand, wood, or cotton. But then he goes on to say, but if he wanted to eat like cookbooks or magazine pictures with food in them, then that's totally obviously perverse.

[00:44:21] And I kind of get what he's saying that one of them

[00:44:25] is like a weird symbolic consumption of food, down his throat through a funnel or if only if the meal were a living animal. And he says, what helps in such cases is the peculiarity of the desire itself rather than the inappropriateness of its object to the biological function that the desire serves. But isn't the peculiarity, like what is the difference in the peculiarity of these things? Like eating sand versus eating a cookbook?

[00:45:40] Cotton or a picture of food in it.

[00:45:43] Yeah.

[00:45:44] They seem equally peculiar to me. So literally just him talking about sexual perversion, like good old days. I guess this is one where you don't want to be like, thank you to Robert Nozick for bringing up corporate feeling. We know it's so funny. I meant to say this and I forgot, but like the first sentence in the first essay is people universally condemn sexual assault,

[00:47:02] EG Gardner, yeah. So like the gastronomyocitations is fine as my point. If that's the way you're going to do with them. So then he says something about the psychological complexity of hunger,

[00:48:24] which is like important to his argument, right?

[00:49:22] And I think it's hard to, like if you're a listener that hasn't heard us talk about other nagel essays,

[00:49:26] I feel like we don't have this problem at,

[00:49:28] it's like nothing like this.

[00:49:31] This is, it's just bizarre.

[00:49:34] Yeah.

[00:49:34] But you know, it's the late 60s,

[00:49:36] so maybe the drugs are involved.

[00:49:38] I don't know what's going on.

[00:49:39] And.

[00:49:40] Like the best I can make of it is he's trying to set

[00:49:43] the stage for what he try to drag out a concept

[00:51:00] of perversion when it comes to hunger and appetite,

[00:51:04] then that's like,'s different from the case of an omelet. We don't just love a single omelet. He says he's very as people may desire with this whole passage for a couple of reasons. So, yeah, one, yeah. One, the omelet. It's just funny what it says about people by the examples that they pick out, I guess. You don't like an omelet for its fluffiness?

[00:53:41] I like transcendental omelets, that's what I'm saying.

[00:53:45] The numinal omelet.

[00:53:46] I guess I have no problem saying I want that omelet You kind of say, these are the features that I like in somebody. And it kind of doesn't matter who it is that I find as long as they have those features. Like those are the things. And so like we'll say they have to have these criteria. Now whether or not that's the way that actual desire works is not, I don't know, but it's not so weird to think. I like people with this particular sense of humor and this height and this like, and

[00:55:03] then whether it's Mary or Martha expressing this attraction but involves much more. And now out of nowhere, the best discussion of these matters that I've seen appears in part three of Sartre even though he thinks the language is obscure and we can quote some of that. I think that might be what he's most interested in here. Yeah, I think you're right. He says, what interests me is Sartre Sartre's picture of the attempt.

[00:57:42] He says, the type of possession that is the object of sexual desire is carried out by way of doing that. Like if you reduce them as an object, like a sex robot, that way the subjectivity can't get off the ground. But a successful sexual relation has, we both realize each other

[00:59:00] as beings with subjective lives.

[00:59:03] That's my stab at what either of them

[00:59:07] are talking about here. or the sake of truly understanding the other person's subjective consciousness. So he says, the view that I'm gonna suggest I hope in less obscure language is related to this one, allowing sexuality to achieve its goal on occasion, and thus providing the concept of perversion with the foothold. I mean, like at this point- Right, he says it differs from start

[01:00:20] in allowing sexuality to achieve its goal.

[01:00:22] I guess he's saying that Sartan says

[01:00:24] that this can never actually work.

[01:00:25] Right, right, right, feel free at any point. You know, you don't need to let us say that X senses Y whenever X regards Y with sexual desire. This I feel is beneath Nagal right now. This is the most egregious and unnecessary use of this particular tick that analytic

[01:01:41] philosophers have because I don't like he never brings up X and Y again. It was huge. Really important. It's crazy because he congests, have said, without ever saying that, let us suppose now that Juliet is sexually desirous of Romeo. And that would have done this. Romeo then begins to notice in Juliet the subtle signs of sexual arousal, heavy little stare, heavy little stare, dilating few pose, faint flush, etc.

[01:03:04] I like the etc. eyes, he realizes that it is directed at him through the mirror on the opposite wall. That is, he notices and moreover senses, which see a previous paragraph, Juliet sensing him. This is definitely a new development for it gives him a sense of embodiment not only

[01:04:22] through his own reactions, but through He senses that he senses her. Like, this whole episode is just tongue twisters.

[01:05:41] He senses that she senses that he senses her. But I do think that it's describing something real. I think it's describing something that is a feature of sexual arousal, sexual attraction in its kind of ideal state. It's like part of what's exciting about it is not just that you like this person, but that they reciprocate it.

[01:07:02] And like that just gets you into a different plane, as he says, he's actually his terminology aroused by the awareness of one's desire. The idea is the arousal is in part a product of the other person's arousal which makes you realize yourself not only as someone who can be subjectively on his life. Yeah, so it would be maybe about 2000, 24 years ago. No, no, no, but like if you're citing it, like do you cite like 34 or? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I hate to bring it to you, but he's citing Paul.

[01:09:40] Paul is quoting Jesus verbatim.

[01:10:47] embodiment of the other, but ideally a contribution to his further embodiment, which in turn enhances the original subject's sense of himself. I think I read this before, but I think like,

[01:10:53] I guess I want what I want to highlight this time is it somehow further identifies us as a

[01:12:06] Yeah, he goes on then to say like that he gives the examples of sadism and masochism as in one case not truly

[01:12:14] treating the object with in the proper way and in another case not truly in one case you're making yourself an object that's not fully

[01:12:17] Like you haven't aroused anybody. Yes

[01:13:40] Yeah, so like the sadist doesn't depend on the other person to have like you might commit well 1969 nagle might commit to that that a sadist and a massicist who are Serving each other's needs that way aren't grounding their consciousness in the same way and therefore it's still a perversion Yeah, I think yeah, like this is where that last little cop out will come into play right right?

[01:13:46] This episode of very bad wizards is brought to you by looking for things to supplement between those meals, snacks, they have a marketplace that's full of these

[01:15:01] kinds of food.

[01:15:02] So it's sort of a one-stop shop's brought all this relational stuff to it. But if you're imagining, when you're fantasizing, you're fantasizing about somebody who will finally, after many calculations, discover that they're looking at you and you're looking at them in the mirror. Yeah, or that that's going to be more arousing. Like, cause he accepts that Romeo,

[01:17:41] when he first notices slow Juliet

[01:17:45] and she doesn't know he's there, even if we never get to that place with a particular person, it wouldn't be perverted as long as that was the thing that would have been ideal for us sexual attraction wise. Right. So I don't think it ever needs to get there. I think that all he wants to say for the non-perversion is that that's really the goal of your fantasy,

[01:19:01] like what you're thinking when you desire somebody

[01:19:04] is that they desire you back.

[01:19:05] So somebody say who going into porn, like kind of just imagining, you know, I'm the plumber that comes into the apartment or the pizza delivery guy or whatever.

[01:20:20] I see what you're saying, but like I think while it is sad that that's how people are and passes the Bechdel to me. Yeah, I do. I do. But you know what I mean? Then there's nobody for you to be. You're the view from nowhere. Like so. But that doesn't seem more perverted than. Yeah, and it also seems like a weird set of criteria for like if I'm imagining that they all of a sudden both turn toward me and are like, now you come over here.

[01:21:42] Like is that less perverted?

[01:21:43] Is that what you're doing though?

[01:21:45] I'm not sure.

[01:21:46] But whatever.

[01:21:47] Maybe it's like, all right, let's go to two-party heterosexual intercoise. And he says, none of them seem clearly to qualify as perversions, no matter what you do. Hardly anyone can be found these days to invade against oral genital contact. And the merits of buggery are urged by such respectable figures as DH Lawrence and Norman

[01:23:03] Mailer has said it's fine, so I'm not gonna say it. Well, that's why I think he might be kidding, because I don't think people thought Norman Mailer was like a moral authority on these issues.

[01:24:21] So like, I think it's thinks that it's already being a degraded experience. Yeah, that's right. I guess that's right. And that's just a small scale orgy. That's just the small scale. Is that like a Caligula orgy? Yeah, what about a gangbang? It was just like the one... I'm going to gasity with the bad would be perverse.

[01:25:42] But what if it's a reverse gangbang?

[01:25:47] There's no such thing. Lorgie is questionable, probably bad, buggery good. Yeah. I'm a profilia though, I didn't need to tell you. You didn't need to read this. We all knew that was wrong. We all knew that was a perversion. Yeah. Unless you're in Munich. And then I get that little like kind of coda

[01:27:00] about not being necessarily a moral claim,

[01:27:04] which like I said, I think does take the bite out of it, I agree. Although I don't know for him. It really could be that he thought that he was just saying, look, can it make sense to say that certain acts are more natural than unnatural? I just think that the whole reason people go into classifying things as natural and unnatural is for the next step,

[01:28:22] which is to say, therefore bad.

[01:28:24] And he seems to think, well more of that objectionable kind of conceptual analysis. Again, especially when you drain it of the moral evaluation aspect of it, if you take that away, then I don't know

[01:29:41] what it is that we're talking about anymore like, reminding people that like, it's conceptually independent of morality. I can see why you're saying what you're saying about the conceptual analysis. But I think that middle where he's discussing

[01:31:01] this relational theory of sexual desire

[01:31:04] is even on his own account in this paper, natural at that point, even in the context of desire like that is to me like I don't totally get. I think, like close to the end, he says it can hardly fail to be evaluative in some sense because it appears to involve the notion of an ideal, or at least adequate sexuality, which perversions in some way fail to achieve.

[01:32:22] But then he says, okay, that's a Nagle. I actually am curious to see in Mortal questions, the dates of all of the other things that we've read, because a lot of them are not this early, right?

[01:33:40] That's right.

[01:33:41] And the absurd, I think it's from 71.

[01:33:43] That's what I was thinking.

[01:33:44] So maybe you're right.

[01:33:44] This was, you know, dropped a little too much ass. Join us next time on Very Bad Wizard. We finished very unnatural. The lady on the house has fallen. Pay no attention to that band behind the curtain. Who are you?

[01:35:01] Who are you?

[01:35:03] I'm a very bad man.

[01:35:04] I'm a very good man.

[01:35:06] Good man.