Ed note: Can we ever “unsee” or “unhear” things that we wish we hadn’t seen or heard? This can happen far too easily on the internet where live streaming a terrorist event can happen or when one trips over porn – which consumes 30% of the entire internet use. Are we constructing things such that the innocence of youth is a thing of the past? Just how are our minds being shaped? Is virtue obtainable for the average mortal?
From Aeon: “Imagine you work at a Latex glove factory. One night, you type ‘Latex’ into Google: you’re searching for competitors’ products, but you find other things too. Some of what you find turns you on. But some of it you wish you could unsee: prior to the search, it was morally unthinkable.
It’s easy to underappreciate the importance of the morally unthinkable. Discussions of ethics tend to focus on matters of conscious choice: which moral rules to follow, or advice on how to approach moral dilemmas. But a hugely significant part of ethics concerns what is unthinkable. You might, for example, be strapped for cash, but robbing the neighbours is unlikely to be an option for you. That’s because, whenever you deliberate, you have already ruled out all kinds of unthinkable possibilities. It isn’t that you consider robbery only to dismiss it: the idea never even crosses your mind.