filmguy123
Veteran
This is a poor caricature of the opposing perspective. The opposing perspective would say nudity is special, not dirty, and what is dirty is diluting its sanctity via certain context.
Defining moral gray merely on the terms that there are many different views is a lazy attempt at defining gray - it assumes all perspectives or practices are equally "good". That's not how philosophy has ever attempted to define values of "good". The question is what is "good" (put another way, what is the end goal, precisely), and how well does item/issue XYZ precisely do to serve or hinder that end goal?
In some cultures, they beat children. In other cultures, racist practices are norms. That doesn't make any of those things "gray"; gray is anchored to values. If your primary value is economic production and efficiency, one could say that beating children or slavery has utility. But if you have a competing value of human rights, these come into conflicts, and at a certain point one value has to take precedence over the other. In other instances, competing values need to balanced in careful harmony. That's complicated.
Point being, you could say nudity in media is "gray" because there are competing values and valid (and still in progress) competing arguments on how to best manage them, but not merely because many people/cultures landed in different places. From a scientific perspective, we'd be more interested in analyzing and assessing how well different cultural experiments have gone in different cultures over time to determine what's black, white, and gray. And we have to do that precisely; it's not enough to say there has been painted representations of nudity in religious art in Europe for hundreds of years, therefore, real photographic nudity plastered on billboards and displaying in motion on digital delivery is basically the same. It's not, and our data on that is extremely short term.
Most people don't realize how complex their simple assumptions are. Light bulbs are very simple, you just flip a switch and walla, light. The harnessing of electricity from a central hub to your home, to the complex manufacturing process of a light bulb, all assembled and scaled across the country, is insanely complicated. The easiest way to simplify is reduce extraneous factors. By reducing all considerations regarding manufacturing, power delivery, and electrical physics - yes, lightbulbs are very simple, you could teach a 5 year old. Include the underlying factors, however, and you'll make even most intelligent adult's heads spin.
Issues of morality are no different; the view that things are simple is laden with innate assumptions regarding morality, sexuality, freedom, individuality, etc. - if you exclude the building blocks of your innate assumptions, sure, the issue is "simple".
Until you run into someone who also excludes their innate assumptions and says the opposite "Nudity displaying in media or art is clearly wrong, it's not that complicated, depraved people just make it an issue". Well, things just got more complicated if you are dealing with two intelligent people that want to have a meaningful conversation. Or they get more violent or aggressive if you are dealing with two people entrenched in their assumptions and unable to dialogue.
All this to say, nudity in media/art IS gray, but not merely because lots of people have different views. The issue is not simple, it's a complicated and meaningful debate. Any genuine intellectual approach to the issue holds it with a certain level of respect.
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