Paul Bloom: evaluation

Transcript context

…That, I enjoy. Darth Vader comes on the screen. I wouldn’t say I’m scared, but I feel the negative evil presence, and I respond to that in an aesthetically positive way. I think that that’s right, where we take some sort of pleasure from negative emotions: sadness and fear and disgust and even guilt, shame. But there’s a lot of variation in which emotions people like — some people like a good cry; some people like to scream — and the intensity of it. I do like scary movies, but for me it’s like The Babadook or It Follows. The gory ones, I can’t bear to watch. I think there are different sources for our appetite for them, but one is, it might reflect what’s sometimes been called safe practice, where our minds are drawn to worst-case scenarios as a way to practice encountering them. An analogy I like is that of a flight simulator. You’ve got a flight simulator; you would often program it for difficult situations to get you practiced into coping with them if you get them in real life. Sometimes I think our enjoyment of fiction and fantasy is like we’re running off a flight simulator. You’ve posed this question in your work as a hypothetical: Is consenting sex between adult siblings morally wrong? What’s your view?…

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