Prudence

"...goodness of heart and openness of temper, though these may give (you) great comfort within, and administer to an honest pride in their own minds, will by no means, alas! do their business in the world. Prudence and circumspection are necessary even to the best of men. They are indeed, as it were, a guard to Virtue, without which she can never be safe. It is not enough that your designs, nay, that your actions, are intrinsically good; you must take care they shall appear so. If your inside be never so beautiful, you must preserve a fair outside also. This must be constantly looked to, or malice and enjy will take care to blacken it....Let this, my young readers, be your constant maxim, that no man can be good enough to enable him to neglect the rules of prudence; nor will virtue herself look beautiful unless she be bedecked with the outward ornaments of decency and decorum." (Henry Fielding, "Tom Jones")

I heard an argument the other day in favor of not rejecting the idea of watching explicit material just because it is explicit. You have to judge it for how it is presented and what the overall point is. Otherwise you are limiting yourself to important concepts and intimating that you do not have complete free agency in that you cannot control your actions after seeing explicit material, so the argument went. As much as I am partial to this way of thinking, and recognize its logic, I don't know how far I am willing to throw all caution to the wind and be so sure of myself that that which I view doesn't affect me. Sounds quite anti-humanistic, but I think this quote helps to illustrate an important consideration.