In Introducing the pervert’s dilemma, Carl Öhman proposes a mode of philosophical inquiry to solve, at least partially, what he calls the pervert’s dilemma. This problem focuses on the seemingly contradictory moral intuitions we have about sexual fantasies and Deepfake pornography as a society. The dilemma is framed as follows. Consider conditions A and B, where if a person is being fantasized about, A) that person will never find out they are the subject of a fantasy, and B) it is impossible to ever share the contents of the fantasy with anyone. Herein lies the dilemma:
1. Creating pornographic Deepfake videos based on someone’s face, without their explicit consent, is morally impermissible.
2. Having private sexual fantasies about someone, without their explicit consent, is morally permissible.
3. If conditions A and B are true, there is no morally relevant difference between creating a Deepfake video based on someone’s face and having a private sexual fantasy about that person.T1
In order to solve this dilemma, Öhman employs the use of Levels of Abstraction (LoA). LoA defines a context in which we can think about moral comparisons. LoA offers a formal analysis to situations where “it depends” by recommending perspectives considered to be morally salient to the problem at hand. At a high LoA, Öhman suggests we cannot see any morally relevant difference between Deepfakes (under conditions A and B) and self-contained sexual fantasies. On a lower LoA, however, we can consider the problem in terms of it’s outcome as a result of the aggregation of individual behaviours. Here, Öhman considers the role of pornography as a societal phenomenon which systematically reduces women to sexual objects. Even if no individual instance of pornography can be held to cause this, the collection of pornographic material has undoubtedly played a role in the systematic degrading of women. The same cannot be said about sexual fantasies. At this level, not only is clear that there are morally relevant considerations that differentiate Deepfakes from sexual fantasies, but Öhman points out exactly where these considerations lie. At the end of the day, Deepfake pornography still propagates the same harmful societal attitudes towards women that regular pornography does. While Öhman does not necessarily mean to convince the reader of his position in the dilemma, his ultimate goal is to propose Levels of Abstraction as a useful tool to think about ethical dilemmas. LoA’s give us a way to reason about seemingly contradictory moral intuitions and a framework to identify moral significant elements in a problem.
