Four years ago the essayist Helen Andrews wrote a critique, for the religious journal First Things, of what she described as “bloodless moralism” — meaning the decay of public moral arguments into a kind of a vulgar empiricism, a mode of debate so cringingly utilitarian that it can't advance the most basic ethical claim (“Do not steal …”) without a regression analysis to back it up (“… because bicycle thieves were 4 percent less likely to obtain gainful employment within two years of swiping their neighbor's Schwinn”).
Since Andrews noted in passing that this tendency had infected not only proud utilitarians and explanatory journalists but even reputed conservative moralists like, well, me, I've tried to keep her critique in mind ever since. In last week's column, for instance, which argued that the #MeToo movement should turn its ire against pornography, I decided not to bore my readers with research papers and simply appealed to moral intuition and recent cultural experience, which make as strong a case as any study for the viciousness of porn.
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