If the hypothetical man has not been successful in eliminating those causes and he’s aware of them, he should still be governed by the reality of the situation as he finds it. Change the prevailing attitude before making love to your Lolita.
Well, see, this is where that vagueness causes trouble again. What science? Established how definitively? What age child? Which sexual activity? What is “inherent” compared to ? What sort of harm was tested for, and over what period?
This is why I tried to pin you down on the child’s age and the nature of the sexual experimentation. Having a dirty old man put your hand on his huge, hard penis is a bit scary but not traumatic (She was five; he was an uncle. When she recalls the incident 15 years on, she grimaces in distaste, but that’s all.) Being cornered in the bathroom of an otherwise empty house is terrifying, even if no attack took place. (She was 12; he was a neighbour. She had been sunbathing topless in her own backyard, reveling in her new breasts, unaware of an audience. The man apparently took the display as an invitation and followed her upstairs. When she grew hysterical, he came to his senses and broke off the pursuit, but made her promise never to tell. She didn’t - until almost a decade later, in confidence - and is, on the whole, glad she didn’t, because he’s not an evil man; he did one impulsive, stupid, wrong thing. But, for some years after, she was afraid to take her clothes off, even on the beach.) Harm is not so easy to quantify of predict.
It is precisely the coercion and manipulation that we try to prevent. Do you assert that the majority of sexual congress between adults and children is done with equal freedom of choice, equally informed consent on both parts? Is most of the child-molesting under age ten really caresses of the cheek?
Do you have a practical suggestion for how this may be done?
We can’t make law for the exception - but we do give judges discretionary power to deal with the exception.
We always are. Law is never going to be perfect. Reality is never going to conform to a hypothetical. Reality is particular, specific, concrete and grubby.
You made her up. Anything you say about her can be true. Nothing you say about her can be true.
I don’t necessarily disagree. I’m interested in whether he could be said to have a duty to work towards changing the prevailing attitude. There are other arenas in which one might feel that the system is wrong and is causing unnecessary suffering (in the case of euthanasia, for example). I instinctively feel that he has some kind of obligation towards the girls’ wishes beyond merely trampling all over them, serving as a conduit for society’s oppression.
It’s not a particularly vague statement to say that in this hypothetical situation science has established conclusively that sexual activity engaged in as a child is not inherently harmful. To clarify further, I am considering primarily older prepubescent and young pubescent children, certainly old enough to vocalize their wishes. Sexual activity would have to be gentle, restricted to mutual masturbation and oral sex. ‘Inherent’ here means that there is nothing about the activity and the physical sensations themselves that cause any psychological harm of any kind; the science has shown conclusively that the harm arises from the social attitudes regarding the activities engaged in, the messages to which the child is subsequently exposed.
If it’s scary then the child isn’t fully willing, and there is manipulation or coercion involved. The same response applies to the other examples you give. In the hypothetical example the hypothetical girl is keen and unphased, the activity proposed is gentle, pleasurable and (until society steps in) salubrious.
In the hypothetical example there is no manipulation or coercion on the part of the man. The girl is fully free to choose, though her choice is not informed (she is unaware of the science and unaware of what society will do to her). As I mentioned above, innocence is often a euphemism for enforced ignorance. This enforced ignorance (society will not allow her sex education until much later) is one way in which society is already oppressing her. Here at least we’re starting to look at the kind of duties the man might have towards her. Rather than an unqualified ‘no’, does he have some kind of duty to educate her, make up for the information deficit, explain his reasons?
Yes, but does that matter? Surely even if I didn’t that wouldn’t make the enterprise any less worthwhile or noble? A good cause is a good cause even without some crystallized method in place. But to get into practical discussions is to enter the real-world arena. My question relates to the moral dimensions of the dilemma.
We do, but not in cases of underage sex. Even the most benign cases are still labelled as rape, a word that in itself sends a clear negative message to the willing child.
This is akin to the kind of fatalism I encountered above. Perfection might be unrealistic, but that doesn’t prevent us from seeking improvement, especially if science points us in another direction. In the hypothetical example, the science has done so, and legislation and society have not yet caught up.
I’m not seeking truth. I’m seeking an exploration of the moral dimensions of the dilemma.
Could you express this in more philosophically rigorous terms? What ethical framework are you operating from? Deontological? Because as formulated ^this just looks like a baseless imperative to ‘toe the line, sonny’. Perhaps simply toeing the line is the immoral thing to do, within the grand scheme of things. At the very least it smacks of servility. I’m not goading you here; I’m just looking for a bit more than the visceral, knee-jerk ‘he should keep his hands off kids and that’s obvious and doesn’t need a philosophically rigorous justification’, because I can get that anywhere.
Your hypothetical man is either challenging his society by breaking their rules or he isn’t. If he is challenging their rules, he is going about it in the wrong way. And if after it being explained to him, he persists, it can only be due to a blind lust causing the ignoring of societal rules and thus he should expect to receive condemnation and cause the harm that society might inflict upon her as well.
Good or bad has nothing to do with it. The man is expressing a very poor philosophy for handling his life (and hers) - self-defeating.
Not duty. Self-interest. If he wants underage girls, he has limited choices: Break the law; obey the law and work toward changing it; obey the law and go unfulfilled. (We’re not asking him to cut it off, fcs, just to keep it zipped up another couple of years.) Or he can hire an 18-year-old prostitute in pigtails and pinafore.
That should keep him busy while he’s waiting.
Nobody has an obligation to fulfil anybody else’s sexual fantasies. No need to trample: a polite refusal will suffice. (“Thanks, anyway. Do you have a brother?”).
Oh, sorry, I thought you meant actual science. Had that been true, I could comment on case studies. If the research is in your mind, I can’t evaluate it, while you can adapt it at will.
A three-year-old is capable of clearly saying “I wanna go on the skull-crusher ride!” That doesn’t mean we should let him.
Anyway, the word “child” is both vague enough to include a gamut of abilities and vulnerabilities, and is not even clearly defined in law. So, right from the start, no fruitful consideration is possible without confining the example to a much narrower margin than your original thesis. Now you’re beginning to approach comprehensibility.
Obviously. I was talking about actual incidents, in which the aggressor meant no harm, but deluded himself that the victim was a [potentially] willing participant. You can’t guarantee the purity of your protagonist’s motives, the acuity of his perception or the honesty of his interpretation.
So you keep saying. But I’m not buying it. And the law certainly can’t afford to.
However, I do not agree with classifying all sex with a minor as rape: we do need to make allowance for circumstances, shades and degrees of guilt, the emotional/intellectual maturity of both parties, as well as the possibility that the accused was deceived, manipulated, drugged or coerced.
Unqualified NO. Sex education is not the responsibility of random acquaintances. Direct her to the library.
Without a strategy, or at least a suggestion, there is no enterprise. And this one is trivial to begin with.
Moral dimensions: 1. I shouldn’t. 2. But I want to. 3. She wants to. 4. It can’t do any harm (I have Leitmotif’s solemn hypothetical word.) unless people find out, or she regrets it afterward. 5. But that’s not my fault. 6. Do I owe her a tumble, for educational purposes?
It doesn’t really come up to pushing the fat man off the bridge, in my estimation.
I’d contend that option one here has a couple of sub-options. One centres on pure self-interest, namely have sex with her and to hell with the consequences. The other involves having sex with her on the premise that the harm would be inflicted by society, not him, and then working on making the girl resilient to society’s negative messages. However palatable we might find these, they are both sub-options within the compass of option one.
For the sake of the hypothetical example, I’m assuming that he’s genuinely romantically attracted to the girl as an individual, and would rather go without sex than try to emulate the experience with someone else, above or below the age of consent.
No, but if they desperately want to and you desperately want to, then it’s the pair of you against a hostile society. If the girl’s curiosity is merely idle curiosity, that’s one thing, but if she’s madly in love with the man and feels tortured by the idea of having to wait several years to express herself sexually, then he’s in a position of being expected to subject her to that feeling in the name of protection. Society is operating from a quasi-deontological position here: to have sex with her is inherently wrong. Might we ask ourselves what the greatest good would be?
I haven’t adapted it, so that’s not a valid criticism. No goalposts have been shifted. The original formulation stands: in the hypothetical example science has established unequivocally that sexual activity engaged in as a child is not inherently harmful.
No, because it’s not safe for a child of his age. However, in the hypothetical example science has established unequivocally that sexual activity engaged in as a child is not inherently harmful.
OK, to narrow it down for the purposes of this discussion, let’s say she has just turned 10 and is about 2 years off menarche.
That applies to all sex, irrespective of age. Which is why we have rape laws for those over the age of consent. However, to go back to my initial formulation, the girl is a fully willing participant in the hypothetical example.
Then why are you bothering to discuss it? It’s a hypothetical question. The terms of it have been clearly stated.
Suppose I set up a hypothetical question as follows: ‘Imagine a world in which elephants can fly. What strategic air traffic considerations would we need to have in place in different geographical territories?’ It would be ridiculous to step in and say ‘but elephants can’t fly in the real world’, because it’s a hypothetical question in which they can. It would be ridiculous to step in and say ‘but elephants don’t have wings, and their ears wouldn’t make serviceable wings’, because it’s a hypothetical question in which they can fly, and it doesn’t matter how.
I alluded to this in my original post. If you can’t buy into the basic premises of a hypothetical scenario because your imagination won’t allow you to step out of the real world temporarily, then don’t discuss it.
I think this is a very interesting issue, and probably one that goes beyond the hypothetical scenario I wanted to discuss. I’d be interested to know how you would make allowances for circumstances, shades and degrees of guilt, etc. etc. And I’d also be interested to know whether you would envisage this being dealt with by way of amendments to age of consent legislation or other sexual offence (rape) legislation. I think one downside of age of consent legislation is that it is overly black-and-white, precluding such subtleties of distinction.
Is it not? What if she makes advances on him, is turned down with an unqualified no, and then approaches some sexual predator a week later, who preys on her lack of knowledge. ‘But that would hardly be his fault’, you might argue, even though he enforced her ignorance no less than society as a whole did. And if we take the view that he didn’t inflict the harm, it was the sexual predator who did, then why don’t we do the same in the hypothetical scenario and assume that if he does have sex with her it won’t be him inflicting the harm but society?
There are always some kind of suggestions of a suitable strategy inherent in an overall goal. Here the goal is to prevent harm from society’s messages which do not cohere with the current status of science. That in itself suggests that an information deficit needs to be addressed by means of education (in its broadest sense).
Can’t at least one of you formulate these dimensions in more philosophically rigorous terms?
Pygmalion? Okay, that’s a sub-option, assuming the guy has control of the situation. For example, the parents haven’t whisked her off to a private school.
You did specify obligation, last round. Never mind. Now they’re Romeo and Juliette and desperate. Chances are, they’ll do it clandestinely, as illicit lovers always do. I have no moral objection to that, provided she’s not actually a child (not under 13, handicapped, escaped from a crazy sect, incapacitated or under his care in an institution).
You have been asking. I already said there might be exceptions. Too bad society and its rules are not as nuanced and responsive as the possible gamut of behaviours.
I didn’t say you had; I said you can, while I have no access. This renders the ‘science’ moot.
Face and arm stroking; limited hugging, maybe the odd kiss - no tongue. (Show me a man who is desperately in love with a 10-year-old, and i’ll recommend him a good treatment facility. She hasn’t got the hormones for a desperately torturing libido.)
I’m okay with that hypothetical. Next, I want to know how many elephants, of what weight class, to expect in which sector, at what time of day. What facilities are currently capable of handling elephantine needs? Have we any controllers trained in directing elephant landings and takeoffs? What other traffic can we expect? Etc.
In a world where the sexual maturity and emotional readiness of girls were obvious and unequivocal, and all men respected the rights and feelings of their sexual partners, we wouldn’t need to make laws regarding who can have sex with whom. If that’s your argument, I agree.
I’ve already said so. This is where the discretion of judges (which vary considerably by nation and state) and their competence (ditto) comes into play. If the father of a 15-year-old accuses the 17-year-old boyfriend of rape, while the kids plead mutual consent, a worthy judge will probably dismiss the charge. There are all kinds of tests for witness competence and veracity. It’s an area in which forensic science has contributed, and will no doubt continue to adapt.
In the US, it’s piss-poor and all over the map (literally). Needs work. Doesn’t need philosophical reconceptualization, though.
Just as you argued that society’s disapproval hurting her wasn’t his fault. You are responsible for what’s in your control, to the best of your ability to foresee the consequences.
No, he didn’t enforce anything: he directed her to a different venue. Society as a whole doesn’t enforce ignorance, either. Maybe the odd religious sect does, but regular kids have internet access. Also access to other kids their own age, who are not liable to prosecution.
At the moment I don’t quite know what you mean by ‘protectionism’ (I haven’t been following this thread).
I would say the above double-standard demonstrates my moral relativism more than anything else; I willingly admit of what you call a double standard, but deny that I should have the same standards as others in the first place.
I don’t consider normative or deontological ethics to be possible, because I don’t believe moral propositions are possible.
I am observing Moore’s naturalistic fallacy and Hume’s is/ought fallacy here.
In that sense it wouldn’t be considered a violation of my moral standards when I ‘did unto another what I wouldn’t want done to me’.
Other than that you got me on all corners. I knew in advance this hypothetical could be easily defended (which has nicely unfolded in the exchanges) and so didn’t attempt to give any rational explanation for my would-be actions.
On a formal note, I can envisage how a society with legal pedophilia could exist… but very many things would have to be different- major changes in the social structures, and a redefining of religious, ethical and cultural concepts. As I said, we are too far beyond the period in time when pedophilia was not a controversial issue. I don’t see humanity going back to a social system in which pedophilia would be a feasible thing, really.
I think another association at the core of what we might could call that natural gut-feeling telling us pedophilia is wrong: we tend to socialize most with our peers, those in our age range, because we have the most in common with the people who are at the same stage in life. Sex, being the most intimate physical contact that can be had with a person, augments the feeling of connection between the people having sex, and for that reason, feels like it should be reserved for people of the same peer group.
I have absolutely no problem with a five year old experimenting with another five year old. In fact, in some third world country (forget which), children openly engage in sexual activity in public all the time. Adults don’t think anything of it.
This is not an argument (technically) because it wouldn’t hold, but I do think there is something to this intuition, you could call it; the feeling of awkwardness, of something inappropriate, at the thought of a thirty year old having sex with a nine year old.
I don’t need to justify this feeling philosophically because I’m not a philosopher (well I am but I don’t want to be). And evolutionary arguments for and against pedophilia are circumstantial to natural selection… which is in turn circumstantial to the environment. Sexual attraction to younger mates can be considered endemic to our survival… but this is not to say that the human race would not still exist as it does in approximately the same way, had the mechanism of this attraction never developed.
I’m also thinking that legal pedophilia would demystify and desensitize sexuality such that it would remove a critical form of social discourse which ‘fuels’ much of the consumerism keeping the gears turning.
Is it not the great curious mystery of sex that so stimulates our interaction with peers during our youth? Just trying to get laid by the right person was enough to make you buy a whole new wardrobe and car, and go out to spend money wherever the girls were.
How much of that would still exist if we were all already giving/getting blow-jobs at ten years old? There would be no magic left in that mystery.
Just a few thoughts here. I apologize for not indulging in this thread but I’m burnt out lately for non-philosophical reasons.
In summa: this matter is an ethical matter. Zoot Allures stopped handling ethical matters seven years ago, and would sooner decide to rearrange his sock drawer than engage in another moral argument. Excellent effort by all the posters, though.
How old is the child?
How old is the man?
How does she show signs of wishing to experiment?
Is he friend, relative or acquaintance?
Is she the first child he will have had a sexual liaison with?
Are you simply saying that the hypothetical science is moot because it’s hypothetical? Within the hypothetical scenario, it certainly isn’t moot; as I said, it’s unequivocal.
So you’d accept the premises of the hypothetical scenario and start discussing the questions entailed? So why not here? Is it because you believe it is more credible that elephants could fly than that sexual activity engaged in as a child might not be inherently harmful and that science could ultimately establish this? I doubt you believe that. So why are you able to suspend your disbelief only for the more outlandish scenario?
Age of consent laws were not formulated to protect young people’s rights and feelings; they were formulated to preserve the valuable commodity of female virginity and to prohibit acts that were considered unholy (which is a whole separate history in itself). In the 19th century ages of consent were raised as a result of hysteria led by the social purity movement. As late as the 1970s rapists were being let off because the female victim had not put up enough of a physical fight. The notion of informed consent and protectionism as we currently formulate it is a very recent phenomenon. See Matthew Waites, The Age of Consent for a much more detailed and incisive analysis. Protectionism is a veneer; the underlying motives are the same.
This sounds unpalatably kritarchic. We do have case law, which creates an aggregate of precedent. We do have sentencing guidelines. I’d rather leave as little as possible to the discretion of an individual. Unfortunately we sometimes end up with this kind of nonsense, where discretion (here: on the part of the Crown Prosecution Service) rules the roost.
We have close-in-age exemptions, which I find discriminatory (against both the older party and a girl who may find herself attracted only to properly adult men/women).
In general, I don’t disagree with you. I think age of consent laws provide welcome added protection, but if rape laws were sufficiently formulated and such tests as you describe were infallible, then perhaps age of consent laws wouldn’t be necessary and we could respect the quiddity of each case and take it on its merits.
I’m not familiar with the US, but from what I hear it’s a ridiculous situation over there. Due to the fetishization of consecutive rather than concurrent sentencing, there are guys who have viewed illegal images serving sentences far longer than guys who have committed a contact sexual offence on a child. If you live in a state in which the sentence for viewing illegal images is 1 year, and you viewed 100 in a drunken evening, you could find yourself serving (effectively) a whole-life term, whereas the guy who stuck his ‘old chap’ in a 7-year-old boy’s mouth in the toilets only gets a 15 stretch. On this subject, see James Kincaid’s Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting.
I disagree with this. Not a week goes by (here in the UK) without some debate on TV about how kids are being sexualized and how we need to put better controls on the Internet and shield them from the whole sordid business of sex. The standard line is the less they know the better. It’s not that kids can’t get access to the information, it’s that we don’t want them to and will do our utmost to preserve their ‘innocence’ (which, as I’ve said, is often a euphemism).
Within age of consent debates you have tension between protectionist efforts (those serving to protect children from harm) and youth rights (namely the right of young people to express themselves sexually).
I don’t think you’re alone in this, but few would admit it so openly. That’s perhaps the point. A lot of people blindly assume that age of consent laws (or, more broadly, any other kind of protectionist measure) are all about protecting people from harm. I’ve mentioned above how Waites shows how this is simply not the case.
I would err on the side of emotivism myself.
Now we’re starting to get philosophical!
It raises questions about society’s motives and society’s role in the harm equation. Whether it would be easy to defend the man if he chose to engage in sexual activity with the girl is something I doubt, but I find it interesting that people (in general) instinctively shoot down the man for even considering it and don’t call into question the integrity of society until much later on in the debate.
To be pedantic, paedophilia is legal. It refers to preferential or exclusive attraction to prepubescent children, not to sexual activity with a child, which is referred to as child molestation or child sexual abuse.
I think that’s projecting certain assumptions onto a relationship we have no details about other than sex and chronological age. We react similarly to the idea of a 20-year-old man with a 70-year-old woman. What if what they have in common is a shared sense of humour, tremendous comfort in one another’s company, and a great deal of mutual physical affection that becomes gradually more sexual as the child ages? I’m not arguing that it’s OK (or not OK, for that matter); just that we shouldn’t make assumptions on the quiddity of a relationship based solely on age difference. Same-age relationships can be abusive.
There is at least one society in which boys suck off men for many months as part of a coming-of-age ritual. There’s no suggestion of them being harmed by it. There are societies in which young children are masturbated to soothe them. There’s no suggestion of them being harmed by it.
But we’re talking about the real world here and I’d like to return to the hypothetical scenario in which science has now proved unequivocally that sexual activity engaged in as a child is not inherently harmful.
What is that feeling of awkwardness? What does it contain that we might not be comfortable with admitting? Some element of control perhaps? Or an ‘if I can’t have it, neither can the rest’? I doubt it’s straightforwardly protectionist. There are always more base, animalistic motives lurking in the machine. Why are we so much more condemning of a 30-year-old man masturbating a 9-year-old girl than a 30-year-old woman masturbating a 9-year-old boy? The discrepancy even manifests itself in the sentences meted out. I’ve heard men complain that they weren’t taken seriously about child sexual abuse they’ve endured because the perpetrator was a woman.
I have strayed away from philosophical justification.
I think there’s a ‘second order’ benefit. Presumably the greatest evolutionary benefit stems from the human species that is sufficiently flexible that paraphilias are possible. To eliminate paraphilias, human sexuality would probably have to be a lot less flexible, which might be an evolutionary disadvantage.
Quite. That’s an interesting discussion in itself. Kincaid notes in Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting, and to an extent also in his earlier work Child-loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture, that our obsession with the sexualization of children foregrounds their erotic potential. I also believe that it signals a failure to develop a more sophisticated method of shifting products and services than ‘sex sells’. This would make an interesting topic of discussion in itself.
I think it would still exist. I remember distinctly at age nine the competition to have a watch that was water-resistant to the greatest depth so as to secure the kisses of girls.
She’s 10. He’s cagey about his age, but it’s probably in the 30’s. He’s known her for years, as a fr4iend, not a relative. (They’re in love and burning up, possibly.) She explicitly asked him for a physical relationship. He feels it’s his duty to educate her, because society wants to keep her pure for its own nefarious ends. (Hypothetical science has definitively proven that sex with a middle-aged man won’t harm her.)
It took two gruelling pages to get that far. The baton is yours.
The short of it - noone really cares. Unless you put it on prime time TV, add dramatic colors and dramatic background music, then all of a sudden everybody cares.
Or, if you put it on comedy TV with more pleasant colors, and canned laughter, all of a sudden it’s alright.
You’re dealing with a culture of chimpanzees, the faster you recognize that, the better.
Therein lies your first problem, making this some sort of “case”, evidence that you have already closed your empathetic, rational mind. your next step presumably, is to label me as some of pedophile or with pedophile interests. “satan” in hebrew means “the accuser” but in his case I think he was wholly justified, where as humans make accusations a part of entertainment media (just look at the tabloids, no empathy, no truth, simply accusatory sensationalism, chimp-culture.) Notice shield-madien’s complete ignorance (non-acknowledgement) towards the post above hers, similar to how news stations ignore anything if it doesn’t have drama impact. her actual case is vague, is she for it? against it? what we do know is that whatever it is, it is negative, and her “case” revolves around logical half-truths, logical ad-hominems, focusing on the words themselves and not the meaning behind the words, similar to a lawyer who takes things out of context and twists words quotes and ideas to guilt the accused.
Go back, past your own nonsensical observations and read the first post. He is making a case to support underage children having sex with an adult.
Later in the discussion his case has gone full circle where he acknowledges that it is a crime against children and something a child endures not enjoys.
His words not mine.
I have read all the posts in this thread, including yours, so what. It warranted no reply from me. It is of no relevance, only an excuse for you to have a tantie.
It now resorts to use the “royal chimps” to back it up. Pathetic.
Ok, so you’ve at least offered some clarity, what side you are on, presumably against 30 year olds having sex with 10 year olds. Do you offer anythng of substance to back up your claims? Not from what I can tell. This is because you are stuck in the commoner mentality, of looking for tools, weapons to use in your fight, your “case” as it were. Common rational sense would say that human life is more flexible than that, and that there of course would be a 10 year old who would genuinely loves a 30 year old, and other 10 year olds who wouldn’t. In essence, human flexibility is very easy to understand, but humans like to fight and argue and create conflict, tension and drama, and put their little spin on the truth, which is of course to cover it up the truth, put a stigma on it and cause migraines for everyone involved.