So this happened, it kind of highlights a point i’ve made before how moral relativism and overindulgent Rationalism can allow any act that can be fit into the “Ethical Hedonism” sphere of “not being that bad so whats the big deal”.
Oh and then people defend him, and other (quite a high amount disturbingly) even go further sayings things like,
So this is where our culture of Tolerance and moral Relativism is leading to.
People said this would happen and the “Liberals” told them off saying oh “slippery slope fallacy this has nothing to do with pedophiles pedophiles are scum”.
Welp here are the civil rights/social justice activists of tommorow.
How many from the left will join our cause then, when societal degeneracy forces all those with principles to take a stand or be “tolerant”.
Remember it was only until relatively two hundred years ago that it was common place for sixteen year old women to be married off to men. Society was very functional with that. I don’t view such a thing to be negative at all.
It worked and nature wasn’t offended at all with the precedent.
Clearly a profound darkness looms on the horizon, because the degeneracy has extended even to the celebrated “stinklebrink”, prolific intellectual that he is. Grace! Fear not! I actually read the article quoted in the OP. And I read Dawkins’ quote.
Dawkins thinks that you cannot condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours. Grant him that, if you want. (Personally, I do not). So, while Dawkins may think that both racism and the abuse he received in his childhood are utterly reprehensible, he isn’t going to condemn people of the past by our standards today. —We know better. They didn’t. That’s his point.
So, is Dawkins saying that “mild pedophilia isn’t so bad”? —Quite obviously not. Where did he say anything like that? I can see quite obviously it’s not in the article, or anything he said that is quoted in the article. Nobody is calling Dawkins a racist for what he said. But what he said about race, and condemning the racism of the past, is the exact same thing he said about his personal example. Dawkins is simply not being anachronistic in his condemnations. (Stoic Guardian, you’ll have to look that word up: “anachronistic”).
Dawkins cannot condemn the abuse he received in the past by the standards THAT HE WOULD CONDEMN IT today. That’s fucking clear from what he said.
What a shame that stinklebrink has attained such a level of stupidity that he has misunderstood Dawkins so blatantly. Stoic Guardian, do not be like stinklebrink.
Yeah Tyrannus, when I was 18 I dated a girl who was 16. she was a gymnast. it actually did feel kind of illegal due to our size difference, but she seemed to know what she was doing, so…
nature’s elegant argumentum ad ovulation and sperm production starting at around 13 would seemingly have the potential to threaten most ethical reasoning.
but nonetheless I know, strenuously, that the modern laws get it right, i know this in my gut.
what it’s really about is abuse of power or taking advantage of someone not in their right mind (a kid by definition is not in their right mind), that’s the presumption, and in most cases that’s precisely what you’re getting when pedophilia is acted upon. Although I don’t think this applies in every case, and the older you go, say approaching 18, the lines get fuzzy…fuzziness being a big part of the story I suppose. In theory there could be a science of morality whereby we prove that neurochemistry is compatible with sexual choice at a certain age, or even in a certain person, but we’re a long way from that kind of awareness.
so until then…i have kids and i’m not willing to gamble on the idea that they are able to truly “consent” in a healthy way with some older goofball who lives down the street. i would probably have to go postal on him regardless of the circumstances.
Although when I was a horny 12 year old, i was just about bursting out of my skin praying that some hot female grownup teacher or dental hygienist or friend’s mom would just go ahead and molest me already, but I’m probably better off that they didn’t, and I will keep repeating that to myself as needed, during moments where I look back sadly on all the wasted salad days and months and years where my neurons were cued to symphonic proportions and with no one to fuck.
SG, the conclusion you draw from this article is interesting. As Von Rivers points out, he isn’t saying that pedophilia should not be condemned today, but that past pedophilia can’t be condemned by the application of present values. What’s especially off in your interpretation of this is that, to the extent Dawkins’ comments relate to relativism, they address a change towards greater condemnation of pedophilia. Liberal morality has relaxed some standards, but it’s tightened others. The rights that children possess have been expanded as part of liberal moral trends, and pedophilia as a cause for concern grows out of that increased recognition of rights. If we’d been locked into earlier conceptions of morality, we’d never have adopted the very values that Dawkins’ relativism dictates he not apply to a different time.
I) liberals have often been LESS tolerant about abuses of power, including sexual ones, including pedophilia. In fact with incest related pedophilia, conservatives have often resisted intervention based on conceptions of children as property. Similar to how conservatives also considered it impossible for a wife to be raped. Liberals were less tolerant of certain kinds of abuse of power by (often) men in familes.
2) this is even truer of more radical parts of the the left and feminists, who are less tolerant than the right on a number of sexual issues, expecially where power imbalances are present.
So the implicit and explicit idea, in your OP, that the left is for tolerance while the right makes value judgments, is fallacious.
And then ditto to what other people have said about you sloppy interpretation of Dawkins.
Except people, namely Liberals/Leftists do this all the time.
As they look at “progress” in a historically linear fashion in which thngs are constantly improving over time.
Implying i don’t understand what an anochronism is?
Sure you can choose your interpretation if you like, but the fact that he’s saying he can’t codemn an act of Child molestation on the same level he would now (whatever that means) is infact implicitly suggesting that this act was not so bad as to codemn it.
As it wasn’t Rape one could term it “mild” in comparion to that.
The fact that so many people defending Dawkins seem to share such a sentiment is what disturbs me more so than what dawkins himself said.
I don’t really see how pedophilia is more greatly codemned today than at earlier times in history where such act got you a death sentence and not a few months in prison.
And it’s completely related to Moral relativism, he’s in fact stating that he is judging a past event by the attitude he had at that time(?) rather than one he may have now(?).
Anything younger than sixteen is way too young for me, but I see nothing incorrect with sixteen year olds have consensual sex with men older than eighteen. The problem is we live in a modern society that has made children out of individuals longer than they use to be compared to past historical generations. In our ancient past as example sixteen year olds were already out living on their own having their very own living space compared to today’s era where sixteen year olds are still considered as children. Sixteen year old males back then were already learning and being prepped for combat to fight in wars.
Are you going to look at couples of ancient times who got married spawning children at the age of sixteen in moral judgement because they didn’t live up to modern values? If not, where you considered their behavior acceptable, what then empowers you to make judgement in our modern period condemning the ability of sixteen year olds to have consensual sex with whomever they please?
Now in this era where there is no longer any economic prosperity we see twenty five year olds still living with their parents. Please explain to me how this modern era is progressive. What we have done in this modern era is essentially lengthen childhood to extend in the early 20’s of people’s lives.
What is magical about the age and number of eighteen that defines societal permission for people to engage in their own sexual behavior?
Besides a great deal of number of sixteen year olds are already having sex with each other despite attempts by conservative cultural christianity forbidding it which finds itself a great deal of many times influencing government politics which introduce these sort of laws or regulations in place.
If sixteen year olds are already having sex with each other I fail to see what harm there is if they should decide to have sex with people much older.
What you said implies that Dawkins thinks mild pedophilia “isn’t so bad”. It’s in your title. And that is straightforwardly false. Dawkins himself says so in what you yourself quoted.
If it is humanly possible to bungle an interpretation more than you have—interpreting Dawkins’ words to mean the opposite of what he straightforwardly said—then, well, we’re all fucked.
Here’s your confusion, in a nutshell. Suppose your hairy ancestor was once upon a time swinging a club at other people indiscriminately. Maybe he was also jerking off in the middle of the cave where other people could see. Publicly.
Do you think that hitting people with a club and jerking off publicly is bad? Of course you do.
Are you going to condemn your hairy ancestor for his behavior? No, of course you’re not. Why would you? On what basis?
Does the fact that you’re not going to condemn your hairy ancestor mean that you think hitting people and jerking off in the middle of public places “isn’t so bad”? ----(Insert your answer here. And then address why that’s what you’re attributing to Dawkins). Pretty clear, right?
I don’t care if he’s got doublethink confusion, trying to reconcile two differant opinions of the same thing based on what he thought at one time about a subject compared to what he “may” think now is completely idiotic.
I can recall opinions i use to have that I now consider false, that doesn’t mean i would consider them to be not false past hense.
My analogy was exactly right. You didn’t even answer the question. You have completely misunderstood what Dawkins said. You are attributing to him the exact opposite of what he very clearly said in what you quoted from him.
You have claimed that Dawkins said “mild pedophilia” isn’t so bad. That is the opposite of what Dawkins said. Moreover, Dawkins has never claimed to think that “mild pedophilia” wasn’t so bad in the past, either.
There is a difference between thinking that an action is morally wrong, and condemning a person for doing that action. Here’s another example: Do you think that hitting little girls is bad? Yes, you do. Are you going to morally condemn a 4 year old boy for hitting his little sister? No, you’re not. You’re going to tell him that he shouldn’t hit little girls, but you’re not going to say that he is a bad person. That’s because he didn’t know what you now know, having grown up. You aren’t condemning him by the standards that you would use for other people.
All that Dawkins said was that he can’t condemn people of the past by the same standards as he does today.
There’s two separate moral trends at play here:
First, I maintain that pedophilia is more seriously morally condemned. The Catholic church was much more willing to move around pedophile priests even a few decades ago than they are today, and parents were more willing to dismiss their children’s complaints about those pedophile priests. The priests might have faced some scorn, but they rarely faced discipline.
The second moral trend is that punishments have become lighter. Theft in old England used to punishable by death, and now we see that as barbarous. But that doesn’t mean we see theft as less morally wrong, but rather that we see such a punishment as more morally wrong. Again, the increasing recognition of innate human rights has led to an idea that a criminal maintains some rights after they commit a crime, and thus they cannot be killed for just anything.
Together, that produces a situation where we have greater moral outrage over pedophilia, but simultaneously more lenient sentencing. A better metric for moral outrage in criminal justice is the frequency of prosecution, rather than the sentence. Pedophiles are more frequently prosecuted today than they were when Dawkins was young, and that indicates a social morality more tolerate of child abuse.
Children are recognized as having a greater set of innate rights today than they used to be. Corporal punishment of children used to be widely accepted. At home by parents, and even at school by teachers and administrators, children were subject to routine physical abuse as a form of punishment. That is no longer acceptable, and I would argue that that is because of our increased recognition of children as people rather than property. This same lack of respect for children’s rights is what made the sexual abuse of children less objectionable in the past: if children had fewer rights to bodily integrity, less harm would done by abusing the body for sexual purposes.
Society has moved away from this, and that social evolution is due to moral evolution: society now broadly accepts that children have rights, and that it is wrong to violate those rights. This evolution depends on the ability for morals to change. If morality were fixed, kids would still be beaten routinely.
The relativism here is just in recognizing that in the past, society accepted a different set of values. Take an extreme example, just so that we can find some common ground:
Early in human social development, when we were still hunter-gatherers living in tribes, the murder of someone from another tribe was not seen as murder. Other tribes were almost completely othered. We were animals, competing for scarce resources, and warring and killing were neither uncommon nor morally wrong. Do we condemn those warring tribes for killing each other? For completely discounting the value of the lives of non-tribesman? I don’t think we do. The circumstances were different.
Assuming you’re with me so far: I futher posit that the switch from that murder being acceptable to it being wrong did not happen instantly. Instead, it happened gradually over time, and in many parts of the world the change is still happening. The racism that allowed slavery is much the same sentiment, and though the practice has been stamped out, the racism often persists, but it is generally morally condemned. However, if we recognize that the earlier sentiment was ever acceptable in context, we must also acknowledge that between then and now it was at some point less acceptable in context, and then less, and then less, and it was unacceptable, and then more unacceptable, and then more. The change was gradual, and throughout we should be able to accpet that at points, actions that are decidedly wrong today were somewhat less wrong at that time.
That contextual morality, the recognition that it wasn’t wrong for competing tribes to kill each other, is what I’m referring to when I talk about moral relativism, and I think it’s what Dawkins is doing to. The fact that the difference between then and now is much slighter doesn’t change that the difference in the social morality of child molestation between then and now was real. Dawkins accepts this line of argument, and refuses to condemn actions in the past using morality from the present. That doesn’t imply that he doesn’t condemn the same acts if they were committed in the present, and in fact I think it suggests the opposite.
I will try addressing it, although my approach may raise some eyebrows personally helped raise my nephew who had a rather turbulent youth. He married at a very young age, divorced remarried,and had children from both marriages. His last marriage with a divorcee who had a daughter from a previous marriage ended disastrously.
His stepdaughter incited him toward an act of paedophilia, when she was around 12 years old. After the police found probable cause that the girl was partly a party to the act, the mother, his wife, insisted to press charges, in spite of professional opinion bearing toward a better course: that of intervention. The conclusion was that the mother, by exhibiting a less then admirable model herself, was mostly responsible for the daughter’s behaviour.
The husband's involvement was concluded to be a sufficient lack of restraint, which he claimed became impossible under the circumstances.
The man has already served 5 years of a 7 years sentence, and his life has been totally ruined.
The OP's implication of mild paedophilia not being bad, misleads the fact that in it self it may be true, however the consequences can be devastating.
Define ‘functional’. We were caught in an industrial revolution with what seems to me to have been a pretty disfunctional society in many senses. Economically successful, yes, but also inhumane in its treatment of people. That women could be ‘married off to men’ (by other men) whether they wanted it or not seems to me to be an example of dysfunction. The fact that the gender bias has changed (/is changing), and has done so largely because of people campaigning for that change, is a good indication that the previous state was somehow less functional than the current one.
Did the society immediately collapse? No. Nor do the societies which mutate the genitals of females or burn witches. But are they really ‘functional’ societies? Aren’t we, in some ways, now more ‘functional’ because women are no longer treated so poorly?
Well, anyway, until you say why it is you think that the societies you are talking about were ‘functional’, I’m not sure you really have a point, which might be why no one is replying.