Is sadism immoral?

Comments

Yes, especially if it involves the actual infliction of pain on someone else, not just getting pleasure from watching real or fake depictions of people in pain. On every theory of morality, gratuitous or unnecessary pain is wrong and should be avoided. Some theories try to ground that moral claim in more fundamental moral claims, while others, such as utilitarianism, treat "pain is bad" as a fundamental fact from which to derive moral conclusions. If you believe there are no moral truths, then sadism is not immoral because nothing is, but in that case, there's nothing special about sadism except that, like rape or murder, it is a particularly counterintuitive case for people who think there are no moral truths.

A more interesting question is whether masochism is immoral (i.e., deriving pleasure from the experience of pain, though this definition itself is philosophically perplexing if one defines pain and pleasure as opposites!). Or what to think about a sadist and a masochist getting together--a case that is sometimes used to suggest utilitarianism is counterintuitive, since one can stipulate that getting these two people together is, according to some forms of utilitarianism, a good thing since it maximizes pleasure. I think there are probably ways to argue that sado-masochism is also immoral, but such arguments will be more complicated than the ones that conclude sadism is immoral.

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