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Is It Immoral To Get A Tattoo

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Abstract

Tattoos are widely regarded as morally neutral, and the decision to take them every bit carrying no ethical implications. The aim of this paper is to question this assumption. I argue that (at to the lowest degree some) decisions to have tattoos involve risks that are non merely prudential—they are normative. The argument starts with a thesis that the power we presently have over our lives is constrained by the demand to respect our future selves. If nosotros make a discretionary pick that disregards our future interests and preferences, so, under certain circumstances, nosotros can be morally to arraign. I argue that certain decisions to get tattoos fit this description. Therefore, getting some tattoos makes us blameworthy.

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Notes

  3. Apart from famously unfavorable 1908 essay Ornamentation and Crime past Adolf Loos, who claims that "if someone who is tattooed dies at liberty, it means that he has died a few years earlier committing a murder" (Loos 1975: 19), the only drove of texts that partly discusses normative implications of tattooing is a popularizing collection of essays from the Philosophy for Everyone serial (Arp 2012).

  4. Of form, the perceived permanence of tattoos is conditioned on the existing technology. At the moment, tattoo removal is often prohibitively expensive, causes great pain, and results are non guaranteed. Yet, in the time to come, better technology might make tattoo removal accessible, painless and easy. In that case, much of this paper volition lose its relevance. However, this is non a problem unique to this paper every bit such technology-dependence is widespread in applied philosophy. For example, much of contemporary environmental ethics would as lose its relevance if new, revolutionary energy sources were discovered (cold fusion, for example), chop-chop cutting CO2 emissions and stopping global warming.Moreover, the (intended) permanence is an inherent office of the tattoo culture. If tattoos were easily removable, the whole experience would radically transform.

  5. The sketched account of the wrongness of suicide is non mutually sectional with other accounts from the literature. It might exist truthful that suicide necessarily disrespects our rational nature and is therefore always wrong (Kant 2012: iv:422) or is an affront to dignity (Dworkin 1994). If that is the case, I would only argue that breaking the obligations to our time to come selves but provides an additional reason why suicide is incorrect.

  6. I am using the vocabulary famously developed by Strawson (1962).

  7. There is also an important strand in psychological research connecting attention to our hereafter selves to that of other people, in dissimilarity to the present selves. "The decisions people make for future selves and others are similar to each other and unlike from their decisions for present selves." The source of this behavior involves "differences in attention to subjective experience" (Pronin et al. 2008: 226). Applying the same normative categories (east.m. 'recklessness') to both types of situations is thus plausible besides from psychological perspective.

  8. In that location is, however, no statistical data available that shows the extract percentages for each blazon of tattoo.

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Funding

This publication was supported inside the project of Operational Programme Research, Evolution and Pedagogy (OP VVV/OP RDE), "Heart for Ethics every bit Written report in Human Value", registration No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/15_003/0000425, co-financed past the European Regional Development Fund and the state budget of the Czech Republic.

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  1. Eye for Ideals, University of Pardubice, Pardubice, Czech Commonwealth

    Matej Cíbik

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Correspondence to Matej Cíbik.

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Cíbik, Thousand. On the Immorality of Tattoos. J Ethics 24, 193–206 (2020). https://doi.org/x.1007/s10892-019-09319-w

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Keywords

  • Moral luck
  • Obligations
  • Personal identity
  • Prudence
  • Tattoos

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