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Episode 277: The Merits of Buggery (Nagel's "Sexual Perversion")

Very Bad Wizards

Challenges in Writing a Morality Paper and Future Implications for Sex Robots

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This chapter discusses the challenges faced in writing a paper related to moral psychology and explores the potential future developments in sex robots. It questions the significance of the study, reflects on the journal's credibility, and raises curiosity about the underlying psychological assumptions that allowed the paper's publication.

David and Tamler play the old hits – Thomas Nagel and sex robots. In the main segment we talk about Nagel’s essay “Sexual Perversion”, a surprising essay on many fronts (Sartre, erotic fiction, conceptual analysis, much more). What’s the nature of sexual desires? Can we say that some sexual interactions are perversions? Which ones? Can we have a perverse form of a hunger? Plus, a new study examines attitudes about sexual assault by probing for intuitions on assaulting sex robots. It gets more confusing from there.

Links:

Grigoreva, A. D., Rottman, J., & Tasimi, A. (2024). When does “no” mean no? Insights from sex robots. Cognition, 244, 105687.

Nagel, T. (1969). Sexual perversion. The Journal of Philosophy, 5-17.

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