Should society accept sex robots?

In early 2015, Kathleen Richardson announced the arrival of the world’s largest, organised resistance group against the production of sex robots in society: The Campaign Against Sex Robots (CASR). Since the birth of the CASR, Richardson and other feminists have manipulated a combination of radical feminist rhetoric and sex industry abolitionist narratives, in order to promote the criminalisation of sex robots. Moreover, the CASR and Richardson have also made some rather unique claims regarding the “similarities” between sex workers and sex robots, which have not previously surfaced within the narratives of radical feminists in recent years. This article seeks to analyse if their analogous reference to sex workers and sex robots has credibility and viability in the context of the digitalised sex industry and in the wider teledildonic and sex robot market. Furthermore, this article will also formulate solutions for the ethical and social contentions surrounding the merge of sex dolls and robots within the contemporary sex industry. In order to disentangle the radical feminist arguments surrounding sex robots and the sex industry, the following contentions will be addressed:Is moral objection to female sex robots using client-sex worker analogies from feminists justified?Is opposition to sex robots based on informed opinion about the digitalised sex industry?To what extent are the positive considerations around sex robots/dolls and sex-technology ignored in the narratives of radical feminists and the CASR?What practical applications recommendations can be made to the sex robot industry from the stipulations of the CASR and the current state of sex dolls/robots in the sex industry?

Treatment

We are sometimes justified in encouraging, pressuring, or requiring those with Scrupulosity to seek treatment, even if they object on moral grounds. The justification for treating OCD does not apply to Scrupulosity. Possible justifications for treatment over moral objection are harm to self or others, distress, future gratitude, community treatment standards, and internal incoherence of one’s beliefs due to arbitrariness, conflation, or fixation. All of these justifications avoid explicit appeals to the therapist’s own moral standards. Some forms of treatment raise no distinctive moral issues, but some raise ethical issues because they require the person to do things the person considers immoral. This can be alleviated in part by good communication with the therapist about the point of such treatment.

Clean Hands

Scrupulosity is a form of OCD that raises philosophical puzzles because of its superficial similarities to morally extreme, non-pathological motivation. Cases of Scrupulosity are first presented, then Scrupulosity is characterized as a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) because of its moral or religious obsessions and/or compulsions and its underlying anxiety. Scrupulosity is specifically characterized by perfectionism, chronic doubt and intolerance of uncertainty, and moral thought-action fusion. It is a mental illness and not simply religious devotion, moral virtue, or strength of character. Scrupulous moral judgments differ from genuine moral judgments because their underlying anxiety leads to systematic distortions and leads those with Scrupulosity to act in a way that primarily soothes their anxiety instead of responding to the morally relevant features of the situation. People with Scrupulosity are likely less accountable for harms they cause, which can be explained by reasons-responsiveness theories of responsibility. There is justification for treating Scrupulosity over moral objection without imposing the therapist’s own moral standards.

Conscientious objection should not be equated with moral objection: a response to Ben-Moshe

In his recent article, Ben-Moshe offers an account of conscientious objection (CO) in terms of the truth of the underlying moral objections, as judged by the standards of an impartial spectator. He seems to advocate for the view that having a valid moral objection to X is the sole criteria for the instantiation of a right to conscientiously object to X, and seems indifferent to the moral status of the prevailing moral attitudes. I argue that the moral status of the prevailing moral attitudes is relevant, and that a good faith disagreement between those who condone the relevant act and those who object to it is a criterion for CO. In this light, I suggest that CO is a sociopolitical device for managing differing ethical perspectives, particularly in the context of collective moral change. Thus, it is misguided to equate having a valid moral objection with the recognition of a CO.

The Morally Difficult Notion of Heaven

I will argue that Avicenna’s and Aquinas’s faith-based virtue ethics are crucially different from Aristotle’s virtue ethics, in that their ethics hinges on the theological notion of heaven, which is constitutively independent of the ethical life of the agent. As a result, their faith-based virtue ethics is objectionable. Moreover, I will also argue that the notion of heaven that Avicenna and Aquinas deploy in their moral philosophy is problematic; for it can rationally permit believers to commit morally horrendous actions. Finally, I will present a Kantian notion of heaven which is immune to the aforementioned moral objection. The Kantian notion of heaven, nevertheless, cannot ground any view of ethics as it is constitutively dependent on the ethical life of the agent.

God, evil, and occasionalism

In a recent paper, Alvin Plantinga defends occasionalism against an important moral objection: if God is the sole direct cause of all the suffering that results from immoral human choices, this causal role is difficult to reconcile with God's perfect goodness. Plantinga argues that this problem is no worse for occasionalism than for any of the competing views of divine causality; in particular, there is no morally relevant difference between God directly causing suffering and God indirectly causing it. First, we examine Plantinga's moral parity argument in detail and offer a critical evaluation of it. Then we provide a positive argument, based on the doctrine of doing and allowing, to show why there is a morally relevant difference between God's direct and indirect causation of suffering.

Tolerance, Professional Judgment, and the Discretionary Space of the Physician

Arguments against physicians’ claims of a right to refuse to provide tests or treatments to patients based on conscientious objection often depend on two premises that are rarely made explicit. The first is that the protection of religious liberty (broadly construed) should be limited to freedom of worship, assembly, and belief. The second is that because professions are licensed by the state, any citizen who practices a licensed profession is required to provide all the goods and services determined by the profession to fall within the scope of practice of that professional specialty and permitted by the state, regardless of any personal religious, philosophical, or moral objection. In this article, I argue that these premises ought to be rejected, and therefore the arguments that depend on them ought also to be rejected. The first premise is incompatible with Locke’s conception of tolerance, which recognizes that fundamental, self-identifying beliefs affect public as well as private acts and deserve a broad measure of tolerance. The second premise unduly (and unrealistically) narrows the discretionary space of professional practice to an extent that undermines the contributions professions ought to be permitted to make to the common good. Tolerance for conscientious objection in the public sphere of professional practice should not be unlimited, however, and the article proposes several commonsense, Lockean limits to tolerance for physician claims of conscientious objection.