It’s not bad, just gross: a review of “Monsters: A fan’s dilemma”

Claire Dederer’s “Monsters: A fan’s dilemma” is a book that tells you what it feels like to struggle with the question: is it morally bad to enjoy Annie Hall?

I did not need this book, although it is beautifully written and I liked spending time with the author. I did not need this book because I know exactly what morally ambiguous consumption feels like; I live on the corner of progressive and millennial and this sort of struggle is endemic to the neighbourhood.

It would be nice to escape this moral ambiguity, to pin things down neatly. I’ll try to dissect the sources of this ambiguity by leaning on moral foundations theory, the concept of moral contagion, and consequentialism.

Old reliable: consequentialism

One (very Western, very Enlightenment) way to think about the morality of an action is to consider its impact on the world. One way to go about that is to:

List out the positive impacts of watching the movie¹;
List out the negative impacts of watching the movie;
Calculate a rough estimate of the size of those impacts; and then
Compare the two columns and figure out which is likely to be bigger.

So, is reading Annie Hall a bad action? I’ll list the impacts:

Positive Impacts	Negative Impacts
I might enjoy myself for the duration of the film. I might also later enjoy remembering the parts I enjoyed. A few hours of enjoyment throughout my life. That’s not bad!	Let’s say I rented the movie on Youtube for $8. Woody Allen, a person who very likely did horrible things ², gets $0.50³. Woody Allen has a lot of money, so that’s probably not going to be meaningful to him.
I might learn something about the human experience, and maybe that brings benefits throughout my life. It’s hard to get a sense of the relative value of this, however, so my default is that this is pretty small.	I personally dislike giving money to people who do horrible things; that’s a negative impact on my own wellbeing through feelings of guilt or discomfort, maybe a few minutes over time (I forget this sort of thing very easily).
I’ll learn about a relevant cultural reference and am better able to understand conversations that reference the work. This is even smaller than the above benefit⁴.	By renting the movie, I’m perpetuating Woody Allen’s cultural power – I’m sending a small vote that says it’s OK for him to continue making movies or enjoying acclaim despite his actions. Somewhere between 33 and 45 million people may have seen the film since it was released in 1977. My watching the film would make it 33,000,001. There are many, many other people on the planet who have not watched the film. I could also just pirate the film and zero this out.
	If I tell other people I’ve watched and enjoyed the movie, I might be raising the status of Woody Allen and reducing accountability for other bad actors. I could also just keep quiet about having watched it.
	What if consciously doing something which harms others (even minimally) is corrosive to my soul⁵?

I’m not going to assign numbers because I’m lazy, but you get the point. You’ll notice that everything in the negative column is very close to 0 because my action is very small and I am one of many, many people involved. This is similar to the paradox of voting; it is unlikely that Woody Allen’s future behaviour, or the behaviour of potential bad actors observing, will change because of my actions⁶.

If you care about the world, you care about what actually happens in it and watching Annie Hall will have practically no effect on others and little negative effect on yourself, and there is a reasonable chance that you will enjoy and learn from the experience.

So go ahead, watch and enjoy the movie.

But it’s gross

If I watched Annie Hall tonight I would probably still feel guilty, even after all of the above. I wouldn’t post a positive review on social media. I would be very, very embarrassed to admit that I liked the film to a victim of child sexual abuse. Some of that would be about how others perceive me⁷, but a lot of it would be internal.

I think that’s because my moral intuitions in this area aren’t entirely, or even primarily, about the consequences of my actions. Moral Foundations Theory is a useful framework to think about this; the proponents of that theory argue that human morality around the world can be categorised according to six dimensions⁸, analogous to how flavours can be categorised as combinations of the five basic tastes (salty, sweet, etc.).

When I’m analysing the morality of watching Annie Hall by assessing the harm this action might cause, I’m only considering the Care/Harm dimension. I think this leaves out another dimension that is central to the experience: Sanctity/Degradation. This foundation is mediated in experience by feelings of disgust and contamination when confronted with certain acts. These feelings, similar to those we experience when we ingest something that is bad for us, plausibly evolved from the need to protect the body from toxins and diseases⁹.

Horberg et al. (2009) found that purity violations—many of which involved sexual behaviours perceived as deviant or immoral—elicited higher levels of disgust compared to violations of other domains. For instance, participants who read about sexual behaviors that violated cultural or religious purity norms (e.g., incest or other taboo sexual acts) were more likely to report feelings of disgust. Tybur, Lieberman, & Griskevicius (2009) show that sexual disgust is a distinct form of disgust, activated when people encounter sexual behaviours perceived as inappropriate or contaminating. For example, incest, promiscuity, or non-normative sexual practices often trigger sexual disgust because they are seen as violating purity standards related to bodily integrity and reproductive fitness¹⁰.

This provides an explanation for why I still feel gross about consuming Allen’s art even though I know that there are practically no consequences for this action. Remembering Allen and the allegations of sexual abuse against him makes me feel gross and contaminates the experience of watching Annie Hall.

Gross by association

The contamination doesn’t stop there; if I start telling people that I love watching Annie Hall, they’ll start associating me with the feelings of disgust that float around Woody Allen. This is known in the literature as moral contagion – a concept first formalised by Philip Tetlock et al. in a seminal 2000 paper titled “The Psychology of the Unthinkable: Taboo Trade-offs, Forbidden Base Rates, and Heretical Counterfactuals.” In the paper, Tetlock & co. define moral contagion as the perception that people who associate with those who have committed serious violations of moral norms are complicit or morally compromised, even if they themselves have committed no violations.

Helzer & Pizarro (2011) conducted experiments showing that people often judge individuals as being “tainted” by association with a morally impure person. They found that participants were more likely to negatively judge someone who merely interacted with a person known for committing a moral violation¹¹. This finding is particularly strong when the original violation is seen as deeply disgusting or impure, such as violations of sexual morality. In these cases, disgust responses can drive exclusionary judgments not just against the violator but also against those associated with them¹².

So, even though watching Annie Hall is likely neutral on the basis of its consequences, it feels fraught to be in contact with someone who has been fouled by their bad actions by consuming their art. This is partly due to the contagion on the film itself, and partly due to the fear of being seen as contaminated by others.

Neatly pinned down, we are

So there you have it: enjoying the art made by morally compromised people is not often likely to have a significant negative effect¹³. If harm is your only concern, you can go ahead and watch Annie Hall with a clean conscience. But of course, it is not your only concern.

We seem to be wired to feel disgust when reminded of moral violations and of those who commit them. Even if you don’t feel that disgust yourself, others around you will, and they will judge you as morally deficient for not being equally repelled. Faced with this fan’s dilemma, some of us skip Annie Hall out of disgust and some of us watch it but keep quiet if we enjoyed it.

There are other options: some will try to get out of the dilemma by claiming that Allen did nothing wrong, and others will try to exit it in the opposite direction, by trying to show that the work itself is morally corrupting¹⁴. I think these are distractions from the core issue; our internal moral intuitions are in conflict in regards to consuming the work of bad actors, and only one of these intuitions (care/harm) lends itself to the kind of moral reasoning that is consistent with a pluralist democracy¹⁵. The result for secular thinkers is a temptation to justify what our disgust wants us to do with arguments that purport to be about consequences and harm.

Claire Dederer’s Monsters is a beautiful personal account of struggling with this dilemma, and she avoids making any general prescriptions beyond embracing the complexity of the issue and making personal, contextual decisions on whether to engage with the art of bad actors.

My account of my struggle with this issue is less personal and certainly less beautiful, but I can give a prescription:

Work out whether consuming a specific work of art will be harmful or beneficial. If it is a net benefit, consume it. Work through the feelings of disgust, knowing that they are old programs that are not very relevant to your current situation. Know that others also have these old programs, so be mindful of how you will be perceived.

Let’s say positive = causes enjoyment, health, wellbeing, flourishing and negative = causes harm and suffering. ↩︎
For the purposes of this essay, I will assume that Woody Allen is guilty of most of the allegations against him. The arguments that follow only apply if the people in question believe the artist is guilty of bad acts. ↩︎
Is it intrinsically bad to benefit someone who has done horrible things and refuses to acknowledge and atone? Let’s go with yes for this exercise. ↩︎
We could also discuss the societal benefits of trying to introduce nuance and subtlety into our moral reasoning or of the postmodern, “death of the author” view, but we won’t.
↩︎
Lots of spiritual traditions take this seriously. Buddhism, for one, considers every indulgence of a harmful act to be a defilement that keeps you tied to perpetual suffering; it’s in your interest to avoid and redress these acts. Judaism has a similar concept of good and evil inclinations and the importance of strengthening your good inclination by avoiding harmful acts, among others. Since it is impossible to avoid harm to others entirely, this is more a matter of personal judgement. If we are only discussing a single film, it is hard to imagine it will have a large effect, especially given the other ways most people get their entertainment.
↩︎
Note that the paradox of voting doesn’t say anything about the ethics of your voting choices, just the relatively low impact of your individual vote. For the record, voting in an important election definitely has a way bigger impact than choosing whether or not to engage with a film. Which says something.
↩︎
Which is also an important part of living a moral life! ↩︎
Care/harm; Fairness/cheating; Loyalty/betrayal; Authority/subversion; Sanctity/degradation; Liberty/oppression
↩︎
Rozin, P., Haidt, J., & McCauley, C. R. (2008). Disgust. In M. Lewis, J. M. Haviland-Jones, & L. Feldman Barrett (Eds.), Handbook of Emotions (pp. 757–776). New York: Guilford Press; Horberg, E. J., Oveis, C., Keltner, D., & Cohen, A. B. (2009). Disgust and the moralization of purity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 97(6), 963–976. https://doi.org/10.1037/a001742
↩︎
Tybur, J. M., Lieberman, D., & Griskevicius, V. (2009). Microbes, mating, and morality: Individual differences in three functional domains of disgust. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 97(1), 103–122. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015474
↩︎
I should note that, as with a lot of psychology research, there have been issues in replicating some of the empirical findings in these papers. The association between feelings of disgust and moral judgment seems relatively robust, but when you get into the specific tests (“does washing your hands affect your moral judgments?”) often the results don’t replicate and/or the effect sizes are small. My take-away is that the phenomena of moral disgust and moral contagion are real but context-dependent and nuanced.
↩︎
Helzer, E. G., & Pizarro, D. A. (2011). Dirty liberals! Reminders of physical cleanliness influence moral and political attitudes. Psychological Science, 22(4), 517–522. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797611402514
↩︎
I’m sure there are many examples where the effect is significant and negative, but these are the easy cases – just don’t do that clearly harmful thing.
↩︎
I’m not convinced that Annie Hall is itself particularly morally corrupting, though Dederer makes this case. She points out that one of the underlying values in Annie Hall is the idealisation of youthful female innocence and the way Allen’s male character exerts intellectual superiority over his romantic partners. Dederer critiques this dynamic, suggesting that it reflects a power imbalance typical in many of Allen’s works. I don’t disagree with this, but there are so many other widely beloved works with these (or much worse) underlying values that it’s hard to believe that Annie Hall is being singled out for being particularly corrupting.
↩︎
As its proponents have noted, all the moral foundations other than Care/Harm are grounded in deontology (the morality of an action should be based on whether that action itself is right or wrong under a series of rules and principles, rather than based on the consequences of the action) or virtue ethics (which centres virtues and vices instead of actions as the subject matter of ethics). It is very difficult to make compelling deontological or virtue ethics arguments to people who don’t share our values or worldview. Philosophers like Peter Singer and Derek Parfit have argued that consequentialism can provide a neutral framework in which disagreements about morality can be managed by focusing on the effects of policies or actions, rather than on conflicting ethical principles or beliefs.
↩︎

Daniel Silveyra dot com