What’s Wrong With Voyeurism?

David Boonin
What's Wrong?
Originally posted August 31, 2017

The publication last year of The Voyeur’s Motel, Gay Talese’s controversial account of a Denver area motel owner who purportedly spent several decades secretly observing the intimate lives of his customers, raised a number of difficult ethical questions.  Here I want to focus on just one: does the peeping Tom who is never discovered harm his victims?

The peeping Tom profiled in Talese’s book certainly doesn’t think so.  In an excerpt that appeared in the New Yorker in advance of the book’s publication, Talese reports that Gerald Foos, the proprietor in question, repeatedly insisted that his behavior was “harmless” on the grounds that his “guests were unaware of it.”  Talese himself does not contradict the subject of his account on this point, and Foos’s assertion seems to be grounded in a widely accepted piece of conventional wisdom, one that often takes the form of the adage that “what you don’t know can’t hurt you”.  But there’s a problem with this view of harm, and thus a problem with the view that voyeurism, when done successfully, is a harmless vice.

The blog post is here.

School Psychologist Pleads No Contest To Taking Photo Of Woman's Pubic Area

By David Owens
The Hartford Courant
Originally published November 1, 2012


In November 2011, as many people suffered through the power outages that followed the October snowstorm, David Pino of Keen Court opened his home to a friend who had no electricity.

The 36-year-old woman, a longtime friend of Pino and his wife, was going to stay the night. Before going to bed, the group had several drinks.


The guest was going to sleep on a day bed in a home office, but Pino suggested that she sleep in the master bedroom with Pino's wife. He said he would sleep on the day bed.

Early the next morning, the woman later told police, something went wrong.

The entire story is here.