Morally Good Stories

And there, we completely agree. Self-righteousness often leads to the mindset that their way is the only right way and they won’t listen to other opinions or even facts that contradict those beliefs. That, to me, is scary and is very good reason to be wary of self-righteous people. (And while many on the left side of the political spectrum will see this as describing the right, I’ve seen it on both sides, and it’s equally scary to me, even when our basic underlying belief is the same.)

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but I stand by my feeling that it’s a trait in people that I’m cautious of for very good reason

That reads like a retreat back to “what you feel” without giving due refutation of what I presented. But I’m not saying that to be rude or confrontational, I’m just saying it to be academic. Thank you of course for the high-quality discourse.

In my opinion, having the right opinions would include a healthy sense of humility!

This is true, and I agree with it.

Well you said that you did not consider what I said a refutation, and I didn’t want to belabor the point but it very much was.

Who gets to decide what is good and just? The self-righteous person? The oppressed people obviously disagree.

Oh also, you probably aren’t accounting for the sincerely held belief (by many people) that simply being left alone is of utmost importance (high moral value). The busy-body automatically conflicts with those people - and will ardently insist that their moral values are misplaced.

So if you were setting up some sort of philosophy major thing where we’ve agreed that there is a “good” and that the busybody has it, I didn’t agree to that premise and don’t acknowledge its real-world existence. Someone’s good is always going to be someone’s bad, and trying to dig down into that gets into weird places where everyone has to accept communism or the NAP or whatever. I’m a simple man and I’m perfectly happy to not get into that level of philosophising (is that even a word?).

Self-righteousness often leads to…[etc]

that is a tendency though (“often”), not an absolute (“always”) and that’s the point. What you’re describing — is thee bad kind of self-righteousness.
It’s like saying “I don’t like Bigots who are self-righteous because bigots who are self-righteous tend to be bigoted and self-righteous.”

Is superman a bigot? he’s definitely self-righteous. How dare he assume people who need saving need saving. How dare an Alzheimer’s nurse assume that old person who’s just shit themselves will benefit from being cleaned up again, even if the experience will be invasive, alarming and uncooperated with.

If you villainize self-righteousness itself, because of “the bad kind of self-righteousness” (the kind paired with misinformation, ill intent, self-service, arrogance, dogmatism, etc) then morality — as it is lived in — falls apart because now you’re left with no way to defend the morality of unsought acts of goodness, (which, would be absurd).

Sorry, I can’t reply to everything (I’m a slow typer)

If the disagreement is from an oppressed anti-5G AntiVaxxer activist, (thus, scientifically irrefutable) then literally any qualified intellect in a position of responsibility gets to decide what is good and just and be content in their righteousness i.e., a medical doctor, a working government official, a member of ​that countries police force, a court judge etc.

If a six year old child has an operable kind of terminal illness. The surgery has a 98~100% success rate. However, due to religious beliefs, those parents refuse to give leave to the operation, as it will involve a blood transfusion, which is against their faith, and they will instead bring the child home and pray for her.

Then that child’s Doctor, has the moral right (and I would say duty) to utterly overrule those parents and battle against them with every available power (medical, legal, law-enforcing) to force that child to receive that treatment.

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I included that last comparative because the parents in it would also be acting self-righteously, albethey, the bad kind.

All those situations you described are why we have courts - which are imperfect and acknowledged to be imperfect even by their most ardent advocates.

And those qualified people do not get to just decide what is right based on their own internal moral righteousness, they actually have to obey laws which are created by a system that requires the input of - even in the worst case scenario - at least multiple busybodies not a single fruitcake.

It is now. :blush:

I’m the opposite; I do deep dives. I’m not claiming I’m correct all the time, but I do willingly explore. I have some fun/interesting challenges to the rest of what you posted there specifically, but I fear they might only be fun for me, and maybe rather grating and petty for you or others, considering the scope we’ve already covered here.

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All those situations you described are why we have courts - which are imperfect and acknowledged to be imperfect even by their most ardent advocates.

I wouldn’t dream of claiming otherwise.

And those qualified people do not get to just decide what is right based on their own internal moral righteousness, they actually have to obey laws which are created by a system that requires the input of - even in the worst-case scenario - at least multiple busybodies not a single fruitcake.

We’re getting to the sematic crux here.
What you’ve said here, is a different way of explaining something I agree with already.

(I gotta take a break and go to bed, tho :cry:)

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Seriously, this does actually hit an important note about the difference between fiction and real life. Viridian’s work (as does most of our pov-controlled stories) goes in to at least a little the details of what changes when something like this goes down and it’s usually not the sex that is the most intrusive thing. Translation of a homophobe into someone with empathy and compassion who then is willing to have sex with someone who helped with the translation is a very different thing in multiple dimensions even if the fundamentals are similar.

Obviously corrective rape is awful. It should be excised from the human experience. But a lot of people do get off on the idea of being punished in the context of sex. Writing erotica, we can give them that outlet in a very low-risk way.

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Sex / punishment / abuse / love / kink / emotional fulfilment is so intrusive and important in the adult human psyche. They’re like the Queen and Rook pieces of our consciousness, (metaphor being, it’s often the same piece-on-the-board that are the most formidable pieces, that are also our most valuable-and-therefore-vulnerable pieces.)

The ‘fine line’ between love/hate, abuse/care, trespass/charity, is not a fine line because of similarity; they’re not even that similar if you think about it.
It’s a fine line because they are equally significant in how deeply they affect us. They are ‘equally high stakes’.
“Am I being loved here or abused here” is a massive question to need to ask oneself, and both answers have hugely disparate consequences to the thinker’s reality.

It’s no wonder there is such a sense of seriousness about it. It’s almost as if treating it lightly is in itself evil, separate from the act, and this is where writing about it in fictional scenarios becomes fascinating.

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I’m not sure I care for the use of the word “immoral” in this context. A number of my fics (maybe all of them so far) fall under category #1, with guys who are to some extent obnoxious jerks or worse getting mind controlled in some way as a form of punishment. But of my fics, “Frustration’s Peak” is explicitly a horror story, while “Grand Theft Penis” and “The Losers” are borderline horror stories about guys who piss off a magical person (who may or may not be a demon) and he inflicts what is clearly meant as a disproportionate revenge. “Bullies” is also about four violent homophobic frat boys that piss off a mind controller who inflicts disproportionate revenge, but the mind controller only does it because he’s in a bad place emotionally and is also drunk. He flatly admits that the temptation to abuse his powers is an addiction he struggles against, and at the end, he comes to his senses and lets the boys off relatively lightly. Finally, the “Dare Me More” series is about guys who are subject to a curse that forces them to obey any dares given, but it also explores the corruptive power of mind control, because those guys can also curse people who’ve taken advantage of them with the same effect. Overall, the story is about the conflict between the desire for an escalating (and potentially self-destructive) cycle of revenge and the impulse to use mind control to responsibly and resist the temptation to exploit people.

And honestly, at the end of the day, it’s fiction, and erotic fiction at that. “Bad guys getting their comeuppance” is narratively fulfilling for a lot of, if not most, readers. I find stories about mind controllers punishing the sort of people I dislike by humiliating them and or sexually exploiting them with mind control to be arousing and enjoyable, but if I actually had mind control powers in real life, I think I would be disgusted at the thought of having mind-controlled sex slaves. I’d be more likely to use them on conservative politicians and mind control them into acting like decent, empathetic, and generous people.

“Immoral” is a loaded word, I won’t argue that. I didn’t intend it to be judgemental in any way; I was using it mostly to anchor both ends of a line between moral and not moral in a black-and-white sense. The scenarios you describe are all examples of the shades of gray I was talking about. Or maybe because of their nuances, they don’t fit nicely anywhere on a strict moral/immoral line.

My view is that often the character is punished by a curse or treatment because of his homophobic actions. Some come to accept that they were wrong to prejudge and others actively choose to live a gay sex life. If they have the choice on how to live their life after the treatment it is morally ok. Many things we go through in life shape our character that we didn’t choose to happen. I wouldn’t be who I am without some of the ‘difficulties’ I faced. I think widening their perspective is a good way of changing their minds without permanent forced change. I am of the mind that changes should be temporary unless the person wants to keep some or all of them. A homophobic jock, for instance, might choose to stay gay because of how good it feels and how less burdened they are by their own fears. Writers are always playing God. If the rules they go by are fair the writing is acceptable as well.

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Also, there’s:

Immoral as in: It is immoral to write this (i.e., propaganda, and material that cause real-world damage or evil)

and

Immoral as in: these actions would be immoral were they acted in real life.(i.e., fictional violence, abuse etc)

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