Me said:
Who is saying that pictures of breasts, or thighs, are inherently immoral? The posts I've read are saying that sexualised depictions of women in the context of fantasy adventure RPG illustrations are politically/morally troubling.
Politics aside, the idea that something is "morally troubling" is the idea that the "troubling" aspect of its moral dimension is that it might be immoral.
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.
That also ignores the question of if there's a higher duty (e.g. a negative one) that says "do not suppress creative expression,"
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.
you're making presumptions about who the characters are and where they're going. Whether or not these are "reasonable" presumptions are a matter of personal interpretation. Are they approaching a place or leaving it? Are they adventurers, or are they enemy characters that the PCs will have to fight later?
Insofar as the "point" of the picture goes, I've mentioned earlier that the intent of the creator is exceptionally difficult to transmit through most artistic media; it's very easy for the reader to take away a message of their own choosing, as opposed to being able to flawlessly pick up on the message (if any) that the artist is trying to communicate.
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if we assume that the person depicted is a fully-formed character, then there's a reason she's chosen to dress that way, and that's her business
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.
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?
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.)
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.
I honestly don't think that the question is relevant.
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.
Me said:
In the context of commercial production in a market economy, their decision should be influenced by the views of potential customers (incuding me, but more importanty including potential purchasers who were put off by the artwork).
This strikes me as a gross oversimplification, since it involves figuring out who their potential customers are, what their views are, if their views on the artwork would influence their purchasing intent (and if so, how much), etc.
This is what WotC has market researchers for.
It also doesn't mention that if some of these are give-and-take scenarios (e.g. something that makes group X more likely to purchase makes group Y less likely to purchase) then there needs to be some sort of determination made. While it would be virtuous if that determination was made on ethics, it would not be immoral if it was not.
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.)
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.
leaving aside the issue of appealing to authority with no backing (as well as the idea that you were "at" a paper), that's not a strictly deontological principle so much as it is an off-shoot school of thought.
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 think we're really going to have to agree to disagree here. Legal ethics are not at all held to be moral ethics; that's one of the first things that legal ethics teach!
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.)
The morality of an action is never determined by its results, as that makes the action a moral "question mark" until its ramifications are known.
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 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). 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).
