Are our fantasies immune from morality?

a post by Anna Cremaldi and Christopher Bartel for the OUP blog

“Light, colour, bright and neon” by Efe Kurnaz. CC0 via Unsplash

Immoral fantasies are not uncommon, nor are they necessarily unhealthy. Some are silly and unrealistic, though others can be genuinely disturbing. You might fantasize about kicking your boss in the shins, or having an affair with your best friend’s spouse, or planning the perfect murder. Everyone enjoys a dark little fantasy at some time. Which leads us to wonder, is it ever morally wrong to do so? Or, a better way to put the question, under what conditions is it morally wrong to fantasize about something?

A natural response to these questions is to answer flatly: no. It can never be morally wrong to fantasize about something simply because it is a fantasy. My imagination is not a space where morality intrudes. Rather, what happens in my imagination is my business, and no one else’s moral qualms should have bearing on this most personal space.

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Legal rights are not all right: when morality and the law collide

a post by Jens Beckert and Matias Dewey for the OUP [Oxford University Press] blog

In early November 2017, media outlets hailed the Paradise Papers as a major scoop: 13.4 million leaked documents revealed the financial details of some of the world’s leading brands, politicians, sports stars, and musicians. But this was to be no repeat of last year’s Panama Papers, in which well-known names appeared relating to criminal acts like “corruption,” “tax evasion,” and “money laundering”; the Paradise Papers failed to reveal a single crime.

So why was it considered news?

The general public’s views of “right” and “wrong” are on this and many other occasions at odds with lawful definitions of “legal” and “illegal.” While the latter express a state’s interests in sanctioning certain exchanges or behaviours (i.e., are an expression of power and an attempt to manufacture a specific type of social order), the former are social beliefs about the legitimacy of certain acts, which may or may not coincide with the legal definitions.

Bono buying a stake in a Lithuanian shopping mall, or Lewis Hamilton importing his private jet to the Isle of Man might be perfectly legal, but the general public does not accept it as moral or legitimate. These are extraordinarily wealthy people who, with the help of tax advisers, avoid their public duty of contributing the same rate as lower earners to the common pot.

When a private estate acting for the Queen invests in offshore private equity funds, operating in infamous tax havens like the Cayman Islands and Bermuda, it appears that she is maximizing financial gains by using a service closed to, and at the expense of, the majority of her own subjects.

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