Against Moral Totalism

Keywords: spanking, spankers, bias, prejudice, stereotypes

I watched this video by Jillian Keenan the other day. In case you might misunderstand the title, it's not about safe technique but, rather, keeping oneself safe from bad actors in the spanking fetish community:

Spanko Safety -- YouTube

For the most part it's a great video, but I have to disagree on one point, where she calls it a "red flag" if someone defends the spanking of children. She doesn't elaborate on why, but I would presume it's because they "don't believe in consent."

This is an example of a kind of totalistic thinking: either you have my morality, or you have no morality, because no other kind is possible. Or, to put it another way, it reflects an inability to comprehend that different people organize their moral thought in accordance with different categories.

For instance, someone who calls herself pro-life may think her position is adequately explained by the statement, "Killing is wrong," and therefore assume that anyone calling himself pro-choice must think that killing isn't wrong. She might consequently conclude that she can't trust him to babysit her children, because he "doesn't care" if they're killed.

Her error would be that she's failing to comprehend that the pro-choicer puts born children and unborn fetuses in separate moral categories -- in fact, his position is explicitly based on this distinction -- and so he most certainly isn't going to defend killing born children, since that would be at odds with the ideological basis of his pro-choice position.

In like manner, when Keenan views people who defend the spanking of children as untrustworthy play partners, she's failing to recognize that for them, an essential ideological premise is that children and adults are morally distinct categories, with different rights and responsibilities. The very distinction on which their position rests, therefore, militates strongly against their disregarding consent when it comes to adult play partners, since to do so would mean negating the ideological premise on which their position rests.