morality as a social proxy
There’s a fun thought experiment that goes like this: Someone goes to the grocery store and buys a chicken breast, then goes home and, instead of eating it, has sex with it. Is this act morally worse than if they had eaten the chicken breast? Millions eat dead chicken, I imagine far fewer fuck them.
There’s an argument that it isn’t worse. I mean, who is this person harming?
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you find it morally ok. Let’s think of another thought experiment: Someone is also at a party you are at and is loudly talking about how they take chicken meat home and have sex with it. Is this the kind of person you want to follow up with? The kind of person you want to invite into your social circle?
I imagine no, not because they necessarily did anything wrong, but because the fact that they’re so loudly and casually talking about it at a party indicates that they don’t understand social norms. That they’re fine making people feel uncomfortable, and that they may be unpredictable or even immoral in different ways.
Similarly to expressivism, I think a lot of statements of morality are a sort of implicit gatekeeping. The abnormal things people label as immoral aren’t actually ethically wrong, but display a lack of social awareness, willingness to be an outcast, or imply other immoral actions in a way that causes people not to want to be associated with them.
One more example, though content warning for sexual abuse (and a couple of spacers to prevent people from idly scrolling into it)
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Someone draws pictures of underage girls for their own sexual pleasure and shares those pictures with nobody. We would be tempted to label this person as immoral, not as an indication that this act by itself has caused harm, but because it’s an indication that it may be unwise to let this individual be around underaged individuals.
