Yes. What is immoral is not pictures of naked people (at least, no one in this thread ha asserted that as far as I can tell). What is troubling is that certain artists, and their publishers, seem incapable of depicting (and perhaps conceiving?) of women in their fiction as anything but sexualised objects of male desire.
It's not a question of capability - there's no reliable way of reading the creator's intent, let alone their abilities, from what they've created. To say that you see it that way says more about you (I'm using the generalized "you" here) rather than them.
I'm not suppressing creative expression. I'm (i) telling them they're not very creative, and (ii) telling them that I don't particularly care fo what they're creating. That's not suppression.
I've previously stated that personal opinions on something are not acts of suppression. I'm pointing out that if you hold that there's a positive duty (I'm paraphrasing here) "to portray women asexually unless the context has a sexual dimension" (something that I find much too ambiguous), then that's going to run afoul of a negative duty to "not suppress creative expression."
To be fair, so long as one holds that positive duty only in regards to themselves (e.g. the work you create, and no others), there wouldn't be a conflict. It's when you start applying that duty to the work done by others that you'd likely have a problem.
I'm not talking about mesages the artist may be trying to communicate - we're not talking Michelangelo or Gaugin here, we're talking about fantasy illustrations.
You seem to be trying to indicate a qualitative difference here, which is a completely subjective realm where art is concerned. Who the artists are or what their particular nature is is, I believe, immaterial.
As far as the PHB is concerned - the back of the book says "The world needs heroes", and the subtitle on the front cover says "Rules for playnig Arcane, Divine and Martial characters". (I'm paraphrasing from memory here, but I think not very loosely.) Given that, those figures on the cover are heroes, the heroes the books gives you rules for playing. Are they approaching a place or leaving it? I don't know, and don't especially care - unless that place is a cocktail party, why is she wearing that dress?
The place could very well be a cocktal party; plenty of adventures have a social component, wherein such attire would (presumably) be appropriate. Or any of a thousand other explanations. Even if we take your presumption at face value (that the meta-contextual elements are good for contextual evaluation of what's happening), that doesn't say anything specific regarding the characters or their situation.
Even suppose she was an enemy mage, why is she wearing that outfit? I don't care if the artist's conception of that character is that she is a seductive flirt who always wears minimal, revealing clothing - that just pushes the issue back one step, to a question of why this allegedly professional illustrator doesn't have any more nuanced conceptions of women in his mental palette. ("He" is Wayne Reynolds for both the PHB and the DMG2 cover.)
Again, this strikes me as your opinion here (e.g. what's "nuanced" and what's not). Likewise, it's not the artist's conception that matters - the viewer can draw virtually any conclusion from what's being presented, and all of them are equally valid. You're questioning his credentials ("allegedly professional") is purely because you don't care for what you see.
To be clear - the women in these pictures are not real people. They are the creations of the artists who draw them. If those artists can't conceive of women and feminine personalities except in these sexualised terms, that tells me nothing about real women, but potentially quite a bit about those artists.
Again, that's one way of looking at it. The entire idea of characterization is to hold realistic qualities to fictitious characters; beyond that, it's simply a question of how much the art in question supplies that can be used for that purpose (which will also be something of a personal question, though it seems fairly self-evident that still images will give us less than, say, text). Beyond that, you're going back to assigning intent to the creators (e.g. their ability to conceive of something).
The question is rhetorical. Let me flip it around into an assertion: suppose you are correct, that the artist has drawn the woman arching her back and projecting her breasts because he is depicting her having just stumbled and regained her balance; then I assert that there is no good reason to depict that scene on the cover of the DMG2. I mean, presumably she urinates too, but I haven't yet seen any RPG go there except for FATAL, and even it held off as far as its artwork (rather than text) was concerned.
That's just another question of personal interpretation regarding what constitutes a "good" reason, something which I don't see as having any value in a debate since it's going to necessarily devolve into a matter of personal aethetics. Now, we can certainly talk about the marketing potential of such imagery, but that's a different discussion, regarding demographic research and sales projections, etc.
This is what WotC has market researchers for.
See above; the issue of marketing is certainly a worthy topic of discussion, but it's not the debate we're having (largely because it involves a lot of information that we're not privy to).
For all I know, WotC have worked out that many women won't buy their gamebooks anyway, and many of the men who buy their books will only do so while they contain hypersexualised illustrations of women. (Though I personally would be surprised if that was so. Even for those who enjoy a bit of fantasy soft-porn, I'd be surprised if it was a major determinant in purchasing decisions.)
This entire paragraph can be boiled down to "I have suspicions, but I don't know for certain." That's fine, which is another reason why I think the issue of relevance to marketing is tangential to what we're discussing.
I don't understand why you think that it is permissible to make such decisions without regard to moral considerations, though. I cannot think of a single mainstream moral philosopher, deontologist or not, who would agree with you on that point.
Then I would suggest that you need to study a great deal more moral philosophy, of any stripe.
I'm simply saying that there are some actions that don't have a moral dimension to them. It doesn't matter, morally, if I choose vanilla or chocolate ice cream. It doesn't matter, morally, if I choose to listen to the radio or watch television. It doesn't matter, morally, if I choose to paint a picture of a sailboat or a bowl of fruit...or anything else that I paint on the canvas.
It's permissible to make those decisions without considering a moral dimension because any virtue injected into those actions is, by definition, above and beyond the call of duty (e.g. it's not immoral if you fail to act virtuously there). There are times when it's not "bad" to not do the most good you can (e.g. go home instead of volunteering).
For backing, I refer you to a bibliography of Tasioulas that I found via google (though it's a bit out of date): http://philpapers.org/s/John Tasioulas.
As to your suggsetion that I wasn't at his paper: I've never made any secret of the fact that I'm an academic lawyer and philospher. I go to many papers - it's part of my job. Tasioulas's paper (delivered at Melbourne University on April 12th) was one such. (If you're wondering what he was doing in Melbourne - he's from here. He's a graduate of Melbourne University.)
I'm not questioning his identity, or your profession. I'm saying that if you want to cite his answering a specific question as an authority for your position, show that. Don't just say "I was there when it happened."
By "legal ethics" I assume you mean sometrhing like "lawyers' professional ethics". I didn't mention that. I refereed to criminal law theory. When I think of mainstream criminal law theory I think of John Gardner, Antony Duff, Andrew Ashworth, Victor Tadros and the like (Tasioulsas has written on this stuff too). All take the view that it is the aim of a criminal justice system to track moral responsibility and liability to punishment. If it didn't, in their view, it would be radically illegitimate. (Of course there are rival theories of the criminal justice system which see it very differently - eg Durkheim or Foucault. In English-speaking philosohy I wouldn't call these mainstream, however.)
That's also quite different from deontological ethics, though there are points of intersection (e.g. the presence of absence of intent). That said, they're also still different methods of moral philosophy. The aforementioned difference in beliefs regarding the degree of consequences as a determinant of morality when judging an action is one such example. The best statement you can make there is that the two are related schools of thought, but that's true for virtually any system of moral philosophy.
This isn't true. For intance, if an action is a killing, then it is necessarily the case that one of its consequences is a death. There is no "question mark". If an action is a lie, then one of its consequences is the assertion, and hence the communicative defence, of a falsehood. Again, there is no "question mark".
You're confusing a lack of specificity in the action for a necessity on calculating the consequences in order to make a determination. When you define a category of action that broadly, it's understandable that you'd think that you needed to look elsewhere in order to more narrowly determine just what sort of action (and hence how moral) it was. The issue there is simply not setting your actions quite so broadly (e.g. hence the difference between "killing" and "murder").
You seem to be confusing "results" with "contingent downstream consequences", and therefore confusing a rejection of consequentialism with a rejection of the relevance to value of all results of action. I can thinkof no contemporary or historical moral philosopher who agrees with you on this point - even if a philospher like Socrates thinks that everything turns on intention, it is still intention with respect to an action the character of which is undertsood in part by those results which are internal to it (such as the internal relationship between killings and deaths).
You're falling into a consequentialist trap here, which is understandable given where you admitted you're coming from in approaching this question, but still makes the mistake of conflating various "types" of consequences, with some being "contingent" parts of the action itself in an attempt to reconcile the difference between them. Personally, I disagree with that particular philosophy, as I find it to be disingenuous at best (e.g. "consequences don't matter, except when they do").
I think there's a pretty strong argument, in fact, that reference to results is one of the main ways of individuating actions (given that we don't have epistemic access to the internal processes that produce our muscual movements, and in any event the moral significance of something like my moving my finger turns very heavily on external considerations, like the fact that it is siting on a trigger and the fact that I am perceiving someone and hoping to kill them with my gun).
Again, I disagree. The consequences of an action, whether you consider them "contingent" or not, don't define the nature of the act itself. Now, you can make a case that there's doubt as to what the act actually
was, but that's a different question altogether.
