Beware Morality Porn

“Porn” stimulates strong sexual desire and satisfaction in ways detached from many of the contextual features that usually accompany such desire and satisfaction in real and praiseworthy sex. Critics complain that this detachment is often bad or unhealthy.

Metaphorical applications of this porn concept include food porn, gadget porn, shelter porn, and chart porn. “X porn” refers to stimuli that induce desires and/or satisfactions usually related to X, but detached in possibly unhealthy ways from context that ideally accompanies X. Food porn, for example, might entice you to eat foods with poor nutrition, or distract you from socializing while eating.

Of course how fair it is to call something “X porn” depends on how bad it is to desire X detached from some ideal context. For example, isn’t it ok to sometimes eat really tasty but unhealthy food, as long as you don’t do that too often? And what’s so wrong about loving cool-looking gadgets, even ones that aren’t very useful – everyone’s gotta have a hobby, right?  In fact, many use “X porn” terms not as criticism but to say they like a stimulation even though others may disapprove of its detachment.

But there’s one case where the “X porn” criticism seems to me especially solid: morality.  Let us call a stimuli “morality porn” if it gives people a strong desire to act morally, and a feeling of satisfaction of that desire, but without their actually acting morally. It seems an especially bad idea for people to feel moral, without actually acting moral.

For example, the Lord of the Rings movies are some of my favorites. They let viewers vicariously feel Frodo’s moral quandary – whether or not to sacrifice himself for the greater good – and then vicariously feel Frodo feeling good about himself for doing the right thing. Many war movies function similarly as morality porn.

But is this good? First it might be bad for people to feel good about their morality when they haven’t actually been moral – maybe this will make them feel like they’ve done enough when they’ve hardly done anything. Second, it is way too easy to imagine from the comfort of your seat that you would do the heroic thing in the situation on the screen, when in fact you would do no such thing.

Third, movie morality is often unhealthily detached from important moral context. For example, movies usually focus more on whether characters have the strength of will to do what is obviously right than on whether they have the wisdom to discern what is right. And movie characters rarely have to choose between the praise of associates and doing the right thing – key associates usually support doing the right thing.

I’m not saying all porn is bad, or even that any porn is bad. Or even that morality is good. But if I was going to worry about some sort of porn, I’d worry most about morality porn.