"But with a close personal matter, one has to wonder whether anyone else is in a position to tell someone else that they should not ‘want what they want.’”I liked this point:
Comedian Dana Donnelly, who is Asian, recently addressed this apparent paradox in a tweet, writing, “White people who exclusively date white people? bad. white people who exclusively date non-white people? bad. white people who date a mix of white and non-white people? bad, but for reasons unrelated to their dating practices.”Is it wrong to prefer people of only the same race? How about only of a different race? How about of the same religion, or same politics? How about only people who are older? Or younger? Or richer? If you'd "discriminate" in real life, is it wrong to do so on an app?
Donnelly — who, again, is a comedian — is obviously joking (so please calm down). But she raises an interesting point: while I, as a white woman, am by no means here to rail against some imagined plight of white people on dating apps, there are certain ethical paradoxes at play that are worth interrogating.
Academically these are interesting questions. In the real world no one else has any business telling anyone else who to like, date, have sex with, or marry. Mind your own beeswax. If you filter out someone who, in reality, would have been a perfect match for you, well, no one will ever know, will they?
As someone who learned in college about John Stuart Mill's "utilitarianism" and Immanuel Kant's "categorical imperative", I found the penultimate paragraphs to be interesting:
“For the last hundred years, ethicists have been engaged in a furious debate between the ‘utilitarians’ — who claim that the ultimate goal of ethics is to maximize individual happiness — versus the Kantians — who believe that there are overriding questions of right and wrong,” McIntyre tells InsideHook.Is anyone surprised that the author seems inclined to the "I'll filter however I want, but I might feel pangs of guilt for doing so" belief? Me, either.
“If ethics is just about maximizing happiness, then filtering — either in person or on an app — may not be a concern,” he says. “But if ethics is about enshrining a set of ‘absolute values’ — which may include judgments about whether we ‘should’ want what we what — this is a more troubling question.”
Either way, the question isn’t necessarily “Should we filter?” as much as it is “Should we want what we want?” And perhaps, why shouldn’t we?
2 comments:
When it comes to the results of wanting what you want, I always come back to this article from 2002. A researcher created a simple computer simulation: red and blue dots are randomly placed on a field. Each dot is at the center of a group of nine dots, so has 8 neighbors. Each dot is happy to live in a neighborhood with mixture of colored dots, but doesn't want to be the only one in its group of 9 of its color. As the simulation runs, the dots start moving around:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/04/seeing-around-corners/302471/
Right now in the UK there's a sordid lawsuit because a man didn't want to have sex with a still intact transexual. Liberals are intent on taking away all individual choice from everyone. These are the same people who tell young teens they must dance with anyone who asks them, which incidentally flies in the face of the whole MeToo ethos.
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