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Comment by spodek | Hacker News Reader

Many posts here critical of JFK so far, including one agreeing with link calling him a monster. Somebody posted here "Its not sexual abuse when you're either the President or in Hollywood," as if his position or location was relevant. The relevant point is everyone was adult and participated voluntarily.

We are all free to share our opinions, but different people have different values. 19-year-old women and 45-year-old men are adults free to decide to do what they want. If they choose to do something you disagree with, others disagree with what you do.

Name-calling and criticizing adults for doing what everyone involved consented to is opinion and they go both ways.

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Consent isn't such a simple concept. Just as in business, it is possible to use power differentials in ways that are legal but unfair and arguably immoral. The President of the United States telling a teenager to blow a member of his staff counts.

I'm interested to hear your reasoning for why it counts. Also at what point (age differential, position differential, gender differential) is it no longer unfair or immoral and why. Could we not argue that any sort of imbalance in a relationship makes it 'abuse'. If that's the case almost al social and commercial contracts are some sort of abuse of power.

You're asking for a clearly delineated line in the sand which I don't think is really possible with these kinds of things. Morals are just inherently fuzzy things. In other situations, this same behavior might be considered on the "crass, but reasonable" side of the line. In this case, I tend to agree that it was probably an abuse of power.

At what frequency is visible light no longer yellow but rather orange? If that line is not easily defined, does that mean there is no difference between violet and red?

Of course there's a difference. But in the case of morals who gets to decide? How do we know who is 'colour-blind' so to speak?

NB I'm not disagreeing necessarily with your assessment that it was an abuse of power. I'm just interested in your reasoning.

We get to decide for ourselves through educated dialogue with our community. That's why discussions like this are important.

Discussions like this get extremely emotional and dialogue reduces to the lowest common denominator. Tragedy of commons is very relevant to the forming of morals. This is evidenced by hundreds and thousand of years of various abuse of humans. And while humanity is arguably in the best shape ever, there is uncertainty if we are heading to global or only a local maxima.

So no. Argument from community consensus is a bad heuristic for searching global happiness maxima. Of course, if morals are means to an end, not a goal in itself.

I wasn't trying to make a plea for community consensus. I think individuals come to their own conclusions about morality, but those conclusions are informed by the information that they receive from their environment and community. A person who never experiences meaningful debate, thought, or contemplation is going to be morally stunted compared to those who engage in regular debate and discussion. That doesn't mean every person who argues a point is morally superior, but in the aggregate, engaging in moral discussions will enhance an individuals expertise in determining moral veracity.

If you treat community discussion as a search for optimal morals, I fully agree with you. However, I stand by my original point as top voted comment already decided on the immorality of the JFK-Mimi affair as immoral without meaningful debate.

I think you are improperly comparing community consensus with tragedy of the commons. Community consensus is more akin to regulation than it is to nash equilibria. It's the nash equilibria that has been a bad heuristic for finding the global happiness maxima, because it's through the nash equilibria that the tragedy of the commons occurs. In contrast, effective regulation can better ensure the global happiness maxima. So that's why community dialogue and a rough consensus of mores can be useful and productive towards the health of a society.

Juries.

So in other words particular people are unwilling to draw a specific line in the sand, but we nevertheless think that a democratic process is valuable?

Morality by committee. Wonderful.

Welcome to the world. It's been this way....forever.

There is a difference between recognizing the current state of reality, and embracing it.

Well, in so far as the episode by the pool was concerned, there was consensus among all three present--Kennedy included--that he should not have done what he did. Perhaps he was just shamed by Powers. That doesn't reflect well on him either.

This article from a while back supports your thesis: that Powers, who rarely gave heavy criticism to his boss, rebuked him. After accepting the fellatio, of course. Figures.

http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2012/02/12/mad-men/?sing...

If she had been a private citizen, I might agree with you. But she was an employee of the White House, which makes JFK her ultimate boss, with the power to promote or fire her.

I don’t care who you are, it’s always wrong to take one of your subordinates, ply her with alcohol, isolate her in a room, and then pressure her for sex. That would be an insta-fire at my workplace. (And it applies equally to male subordinates too, of course.)

That would be an insta-fire at my workplace.

You might be insta-fired for such conduct, but (assuming you are not the CEO) would the CEO? Especially a successful CEO? I would hope so, but I think it's quite unlikely.

CEOs are not like presidents. If you leak the story to the press, a CEO can't contain the story because they have no power over the media. A president has the power to do a lot of things, including killing citizens who prove to be troublesome in some ways, and get away with it. And yes, even in democracies.

>19-year-old women and 45-year-old men are adults free to decide to do what they want. If they choose to do something you disagree with, others disagree with what you do.

The president was actively betraying the trust of his wife and family, so in fact it wasn't as libertarian as you make it seem.

Beyond that, the memoir clearly shows massively inappropriate behavior for a sitting president or anyone with such a power disparity, to include significant instances of coercion and actions which denigrate the position and shame the relationship he had with his wife.

Shame on you for equivocating.

Shame is toxic as it silences opposing views with emotional arguments. Please refrain from using shame as strategy to win discussions.

I feel I made a cogent, reasoned point and topped it off with a forceful reproach.

Some people are more swayed by the former and others the latter.

What you call a "forceful reproach" is nothing more than name-calling. If your argument is convincing, you need add nothing more.

Emotional arguments are the only way to sway many people, everyone doesn't respond to logic.

That may be so, but the problem with that avenue is that often people think they've made a logical argument when it is full of value judgements. In this case the comment in question was full of value judgements and assumptions based on incomplete information (they may be true, but they may also not be), and the final appeal to emotion was nothing more than a strong emotional restatement of an argument that did not rest on logic to begin with.

If an argument doesn't resonate with you it's easy to simply say I respond to reason rather than emotion, or vise versa. Or point out the problems as you just did, perfectly fine approach, but you can't ban emotional arguments because sadly, most people are emotional, and those arguments tend to work better. It'd be nice if everyone only responded to non fallacious logical arguments, but it just isn't so.

Sure, emotional arguments are a vessel to deliver rational, logical conclusions to those who are not persuaded by logic itself. But rational conclusions and analysis come first.

Equivocating isn't a bad thing, and I don't see how OP can be described as equivocating. He made his position quite clear...

The reason I state that is because the OP glosses over the positions and power dynamics at play, turning the prime actors into just two regular old people.

Context matters and purposefully taking it out to make a point about moral relativism is disingenuous in my opinion.

He essentially told her to give oral sex to another man. That disgusted me enough to stop reading. The sex may have been consensual, but that was not - it was wrong.

How is it any less consensual or any more wrong than sleeping with JFK himself?

Perhaps one was more of a relationship than an instruction from an employer?

Every second thousands of much more disgusting things happen all around the Earth. You should thus never consume any media because the truth about the billions whose basic needs aren't satisfied show through various facets of human life if you dare to look. Your indignation adds little to the discussion, discourages readers to learn more by shaming those not feeling disgust and increasing the level of emotions in the discussion. I very much believe that emotional arguments should be minimized on HN, which for many users is a source of authoritative information about the world.

There are many studies that show how emotions negatively impact decision making[1] [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotions_in_decision-making

On the unrelated note, this bit was interesting: "I’d rather my children red than dead,” he told her."(Kennedy, Mimi)

Perhaps one of the reasons emotional language keeps appearing in this thread is that moral judgments can be viewed as nothing more than the expression of emotional attitudes, as opposed to propositions with any particular truth value. That kind of language may be essential to any productive conversation about ethics.

> ".. moral judgments can be viewed as nothing more than the expression of emotional attitudes.."

I sense that you hold an underlying assumption that morality cannot be attained through logic and reasoning.

Eh, I don't know but the 'open question' argument has always made sense to me: 'For any non-moral description of an action or object it seemed that competent speakers could without confusion doubt that the action or object was appropriately characterized using a moral term such as ‘good’ or ‘right’. The question of whether the action or object so described was good or right was always open, even to competent speakers.'

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/

You should read Timothy Noah's take, instead of just responding to the title. I found it compelling; maybe you will too.

Can you please link to what you're referring to?

http://www.newrepublic.com/blog/timothy-noah/100566/jfk-mons...

Huge power imbalance and employer-employee issues here. He deserves to be fully criticised for a lot of the behaviour outlined.

"I stood in the shallow end of the pool and performed my duties."

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