I think his fantasies are perverse and contrary to values I have about human autonomy, but I don’t think the situation is significantly worse. His actions are not going to put a kid in therapy.
If children masturbating makes them feel good, and pedophiles feeling good about having sex with them isn’t inherently bad, then pedophiles helping kids masturbate is just efficient use of labor. Goes the logic.
Goes the logic that works so long as you do not care about meaningful consent. This is a lot like the “if she’s sleeping, it’s not rape” argument we heard in the aftermath of the Steubenville case.
Goes the logic that works so long as you do not care about meaningful consent.
What is this meaningful consent thinghy you mention? Do I need it to play tag with other children (given that I’m a child)? Does an adult need it when playing tag with children? Do you need it when washing eachothers’ backs in the bath? Do you need it when washing your child in the bath? Do you need it when your child asks for a massage? Do you need it when your child asks for a “massage”?
Where, and how, and why, does one draw the line?
My value system is incompatible with your statement and has no entry for this reference of “meaningful consent”.
FTR: If I had any sort of relationship like this when I was a minor (sadly, I didn’t) and someone sued my S.O. / partner over this “meaningful consent” thing, I would have resented them and would still resent them to this day, and would most likely have pressed charges and sued them back into oblivion as soon as I turned legally capable of suing people, over all kinds of privacy breach, life alteration, or whatever other morality-based claims that I could find, in the same way I would sue anyone who pressed charges against me for having sex with my current girlfriend.
Not really. I’ve always found the moral intuitions most people have here rather lacking.
Put a 3-year-old in her mother’s body. The kid wants to have sex ’caus she has her mother’s biosystem, drives and body. Is it okay?
Put a 40-year-old in a 6-year-old’s body. Or better yet, take one of the existing people who just have the same body they did when they were 12. Is sex okay?
Take a 2-year-old WBE that ran at a subjective time factor of 50 since their start. They get transferred to a modified cloned 9-year-old body that has already gone through puberty. Is it okay to have sex?
So yeah. Doesn’t really matter, as long as both parties are aware of the typical downfalls and issues and are capable of enjoying it. (and that they actually do enjoy it, or stop if they don’t)
Put a 3-year-old in her mother’s body. The kid wants to have sex ’caus she has her mother’s biosystem, drives and body. Is it okay?
How, exactly, do you do that? Doesn’t puberty alter the mind as well as the body? You’d have to create a whole new mind, extrapolating what the 3-year-old would be like with “her mother’s biosystem, drives” without making any of the other alterations aging brings.
Put a 40-year-old in a 6-year-old’s body.
Assuming they’re mentally unchanged, I would guess most people would be OK with it, albeit somewhat squicked at the thought. Although some people object to cartoon child porn, so maybe you’d get people claiming it encourages pedophiles or something?
Or better yet, take one of the existing people who just have the same body they did when they were 12.
Holy cow, that’s a thing? What?
Take a 2-year-old WBE that ran at a subjective time factor of 50 since their start.
Are they simulating baseline human biochemistry?
So yeah. Doesn’t really matter, as long as both parties are aware of the typical downfalls and issues and are capable of enjoying it. (and that they actually do enjoy it, or stop if they don’t)
I’m sympathetic to this position—I’m pretty sure these so-called intuitions are just social mores, other societies marry and such much younger—but I think you’re failing to account for power imbalance. We don’t let officers in the military sleep with their subordinates, and with the kind of power adults have over children in our society, the same logic applies.
I’m sympathetic to this position—I’m pretty sure these so-called intuitions are just social mores, other societies marry much younger—but I think you’re failing to account for power imbalance. We don’t let officers in the military sleep with their subordinates, and with the kind of power adults have over children in our society, the same logic applies.
Yeah, power (im)balances is the most important form of many variants of coercion, both implicit and explicit, that come rain down on my ideals of optimal sexual interactions and freedoms. And they can be so insidious or deeply implicit or just so dang entangled that sometimes, even if we do know the full situation, we can’t make sense or trace any sort of natural line. In some cases there’s even no schelling point.
But there’s so much to say here about this topic it might grow into an entire article’s worth of stuff if I keep going, and I’m sure there could be more optimal ways to communicate or use both of our times, especially considering that I suspect many of the issues I’ve thought of have also crossed the mind of most people on LW. Or, at the very least, there should be some significant overlap between any two given people. I don’t quite know enough yet to pinpoint which of my insights overlap and (more importantly) which don’t.
Anyway, power and perceived power can majorly fuck up most heuristics and investigations we’re currently capable of using/doing.
Come to think of it, I don’t remember seeing any post on LW about social power balances and the many ways they influence peoples’ decisions or patterns that come up where sub-optimal situations arise because of them (or the perception of them). I’ve seen some things alluding to it or passing mentions as if everyone knew all the aspects of the topic, though. And I’ve found one old post on the current subject too.
However, I suspect the science on this to be rather… incomplete. Thoughts?
Or better yet, take one of the existing people who just have the same body they did when they were 12.
Take a 2-year-old WBE that ran at a subjective time factor of 50 since their start.
Are they simulating baseline human biochemistry?
Why does that part matter? Maybe consider if they are, and then if they aren’t, and see where the difference is? To me there’s no relevant difference as far as I can tell.
Yeah, power (im)balances is the most important form of many variants of coercion, both implicit and explicit, that come rain down on my ideals of optimal sexual interactions and freedoms. And they can be so insidious or deeply implicit or just so dang entangled that sometimes, even if we do know the full situation, we can’t make sense or trace any sort of natural line. In some cases there’s even no schelling point.
In this specific case, I think the socially-constructed adult/child divide might actually work—sure, it’s arbitrary, but it should largely reflect whether the kid in questions views someone as An Adult or just another kid.
Of course, this sorta falls apart when you have to deal with two kids of different ages.
Or, for that matter, “young adults” who view older people as somehow authoritative, although that’s not as pervasive.
Hmm, maybe we should use the infamous half-your-age-plus-seven “creepiness law”?
Regarding that, here’s probably the most extreme case we’ve ever seen.
Oh, I vaguely heard about that. I though that was unique though?
Why does that part matter?
Well, most of these intuitions are dependent on a human biochemistry. You want to fuck a robot, knock yourself out. Unless it’s, like, a sex-hating robot.
That said, a hundred-year-old human in an adolescent body sounds like they would be allowed to have whatever sex as they wanted, within the usual limits. Indeed, I believe it’s a common excuse in Japanese stuff to have that girl actually be a 700-year-old demon in human form.
Hmm, maybe we should use the infamous half-your-age-plus-seven “creepiness law”?
What’s that? O.o
In this specific case, I think the socially-constructed adult/child divide might actually work—sure, it’s arbitrary, but it should largely reflect whether the kid in questions views someone as An Adult or just another kid.
I think in most circumstances that would be relevant, social roles largely outweigh and override this. In most cases, minors are forced into roles by circumstance and because people who already have greater power force them to be in such roles.
For a better intuition pump towards what I mean, think of The Internets, particularly hacker culture. There, age is probably the most irrelevant out of any culture I’ve seen—only maturity, skill, and some online social likeability matter. Some mature 12-year-olds wield immense power (relatively speaking, in terms of social and cultural power within the limited scope of hacker culture) over some of their peers, and this almost certainly leads many major adults to take suboptimal decisions or actions within the context.
Sometimes, gamers can also form similar small groups where young people with the proper, more powerful “role” can wield relatively disproportionate power over the leisure time and entertainment quality of their peers. I’ve sometimes experienced this firsthand, though the worst cases I saw didn’t happen to me personally.
For a toy example of what I’m talking about, consider gaming “clans”, groups of people who for some reason or another end up gaming with eachother and forming a common In-Group mentality and generally acting like a tribe for the purposes of playing videogames (or some small set of games). Often, some gamers will get really invested in this tribe, emotionally and psychologically, and will make friends there, and spend lots of time making emotional attachments, and so on. More often than not, these groups have a “Leader”, who holds rather disproportionate authority, much like a tribe. In fact, these usually work pretty much exactly like a tribe.
Anyway, this emotional involvement can mean that that kid who would be considered a minor and unable to consent due to power imbalances actually has more power over you now, because failure to comply can, in typical tribal fashion, get you kicked out—which, while not as bad as getting kicked out in the ancestral tribe, in many cases will still sound pretty shitty, and may deprive people of otherwise-reliable good entertainment, and generally just lowers the quality of their leisure time quite a bit depending on how much they enjoy the game and the community they play with.
And then all the meta and game-theoretic concerns apply: if I’m wary that failure to comply might get me kicked from the tribe, I may try to implement the same kind of social status strategies we see in other tribelike contexts. This includes anticipating possible things that the tribe leader might care about and conforming pre-emptively, which would mean I’m taking an action that is sub-optimal or that I don’t want to do, based on my anticipation of possible failure-to-comply situations, without any form of intentional coercion from the group leader.
All of this leads up to: Situations like what I just said, where no actual coercion happens but where someone is accepting some action or situation or thinking in some way that they would prefer not to, generally build up gradually. I would not be surprised if this could easily lead a person into thinking in this manner about sexual interaction (given a social culture that has less taboos against sexuality), and make them build this up into eventually accepting or even offering to have sex with someone solely because they anticipate that them not making this offer could lead to eventual bad consequences for them due to the power imbalance, or something.
This all reminds me of situations where, for example, A wants to blackmail B, but C watches closely for any explicit form of blackmail, so instead A will create a favorable situation by removing all of B’s options and power, and then present themselves as willing to help, in a manner where B contextually knows that A is in a position to mess up their life if they don’t offer, say, sex.
From the outside, it will either look as if B just fell prey to A’s superior prowess, which is normal in many domains such as competitive businesses, or A and B suddenly formed a partnership due to friendly human interactions that were apparently fully voluntary on the part of B (since B initiated it, after all).
So merely the perception that offering sex to A is the only way for B to stay afloat¹ creates a subtle blackmail-like situation that in many cases no one could form a legitimate legal case around in most instances. Many variants of this exist or could happen in various situations.
One of my fears about making sexuality less socially taboo is all about how the above dynamics might factor in more strongly, and reduce the apparent rape rates while making such horrible non-choice not-quite-blackmail scenarios pervasively omnipresent.
I word this quite innocently, but it’s generally made implicitly obvious in such situations that “not staying afloat” implies some Very Very Bad Things—such as being forced to live on the streets while pictures of you mysteriously appear on shady websites and so on. Sometimes, the whole situation already happens with the premise that some other group will kill/maim/otherwise-permanently-make-your-life-much-less-interesting as soon as protection from them is removed by A or cut off because you no longer have the ability to afford this protection.
As the name I referred to it by suggests, you divide your age by two and add seven; anyone below that would be “creepy” to sleep with or otherwise engage romantically. Not sure where it comes from, but it’s been featured in XKCD at least once.
[snip social-pressure rape description]
Yup. And in our society, all kids are in these situations, and many (especially younger) kids may assume such a context in pretty much all interactions with adults. Not to mention the fact that, currently, most people who actually do have sex with children are in such a position of “soft power” over the child.
I’ve always found “informed consent” (probably the same thing) to be a damn good heuristic, myself, although I certainly don’t terminally value it. Are those meant to be rhetorical questions?
… actually, I’m of the opinion that conflating that sort of thing with, y’know, the sort of thing people picture when you say “rape” leads to both overestimation of the harm it causes and devaluing of the suffering caused by violently raping someone. It is, of course, bad, and it should be discouraged with punishments and so on, but I don’t think it shares a Schelling point with “real” rape.
However.
What about this “meaningful consent” that renders it valuable? At what point does consent become “meaningful”? We usually allow parents to consent on behalf of their children, presumably because they will further the child’s own interests; should this apply to sex? What do you think you know, and how do you think you know it? Let’s pry open this black box!
[Side note: I personally am against legalizing such relationships, but I worry that I’m smart enough to argue convincingly for this position regardless of its truth, so I’m not going to elaborate on my reasoning here.]
the sort of thing people picture when you say “rape”
Which in my experience people picture extremely inaccurately. They picture girls getting grabbed off a park sidewalk by a ravenous stranger. That’s a very atypical case. Outside of prison, rape is typically perpetuated by friends and lovers and dates. This is unsurprising given pure opportunity, just as it’s unsurprising that children are typically victimized by families and trusted friends of their families, not by strangers with candy.
Requiring rape to be “violent” is to require that most extra-penal rape be reclassified as not-rape. There is usually the implicit threat of violence, and the (typically) women in such circumstances are made to understand they have no choice or power. Anyone who looks at this issue will quickly meet people who insist that it isn’t “rape” if the woman did not violently resist and never succumbed, or if there were no beatings involved.
“Rape” is only as meaningful as “meaningful consent.”
At what point does consent become “meaningful”?
Babies cannot give meaningful consent. Children can sometimes give meaningful consent, but it is difficult to determine. We allow parents to make decisions for their children in weighty matters—within strict limits. We do not allow them to give their kids liquor and cigarettes nor restrict them to “alternative medicine” for deadly disease. All of this makes sense: by and large, we do not allow families to stunt and cripple development.
(I give one exception: it is still considered acceptable to give a child a poor diet to the point of severe obesity. I think this should be at least as criminal, if not more, than allowing cigarette-smoking.)
“Meaningful consent” comes in degrees: adults are better at it than young teenagers. Most states have age of consent laws which, while allowing sex with minors, only allows it within a certain age bracket. Differential intellectual capacity matters.
You’ll notice that I haven’t tried to give a definition. With complicated concepts, it is often better to talk about them as if they were meaningful, and notice that they are, that we can recognize their presence or absence from different circumstances. If you are wholly unable to recognize such circumstances, let me know and I’ll try being more precise.
There is a difference between “I said no, but he was more able to overpower me because I was drunk”, “I didn’t say no, but only because I was too drunk to realize I was making a bad decision”, and “I got drunk so I had an excuse for not saying no”.
Which of these count as “meaningful consent” by your definition?
Which in my experience people picture extremely inaccurately. They picture girls getting grabbed off a park sidewalk by a ravenous stranger. That’s a very atypical case. Outside of prison, rape is typically perpetuated by friends and lovers and dates. This is unsurprising given pure opportunity, just as it’s unsurprising that children are typically victimized by families and trusted friends of their families, not by strangers with candy.
Point.
Still, you know what I mean. Forcible rape, not things-that-are-bad-and-sexual-so-we-call-them-rape.
Requiring rape to be “violent” is to require that most extra-penal rape be reclassified as not-rape.
Well … yeah? That’s not the same thing as it being perfectly acceptable, mind.
There is usually the implicit threat of violence, and the (typically) women in such circumstances are made to understand they have no choice or power. Anyone who looks at this issue will quickly meet people who insist that it isn’t “rape” if the woman did not violently resist and never succumbed, or if there were no beatings involved.
Oh, yeah, threats should totally be included AFAICT. But the example under discussion was a sleeping/unconscious victim, wasn’t it?
“Rape” is only as meaningful as “meaningful consent.”
That is to say not meaningful at all, because you’re treating meaningful consent as a fundamental property of things.
Babies cannot give meaningful consent.
Why not, if they can express desire for sweeties or whatever? At what point do they stop being “babies” and become “children”, under this schema? Are we including toddlers here?
Children can sometimes give meaningful consent, but it is difficult to determine.
Aha! He admits it! Pedophilic relationships can be OK!
We allow parents to make decisions for their children in weighty matters—within strict limits. We do not allow them to give their kids liquor and cigarettes nor restrict them to “alternative medicine” for deadly disease. All of this makes sense: by and large, we do not allow families to stunt and cripple development.
There are some issues where we can safely say we know better, just like, say, an adult consenting to an addictive drug. But how could sex be one of those cases, when it’s only harmful if the person doesn’t consent in the first place? (Ignoring for a minute STDs and such, which parents (and many kids) should be able to take into account.)
“Meaningful consent” comes in degrees: adults are better at it than young teenagers. Most states have age of consent laws which, while allowing sex with minors, only allows it within a certain age bracket. Differential intellectual capacity matters.
Why?
You’ll notice that I haven’t tried to give a definition. With complicated concepts, it is often better to talk about them as if they were meaningful, and notice that they are, that we can recognize their presence or absence from different circumstances.
From hence did this meaningful concept come to you? What do you think you know, and how do you think you know it?
What do you think you know, and how do you think you know it?
I wish we could get past slogans.
Ok, we’re trying to determine whether or not “meaningful consent is meaningful”. A question: could you guess with high reliability what situations I think constitute meaningful consent or not?
A scenario: suppose I slip a girl a roofie, slip her into my car, take her home, and fuck her. Then I sneak her back into the party.
Was my crime “slipping a girl a drug”, or was my crime “that and rape”?
This particular slogan was selected for usefulness. It retains it’s meaning when considered as a question solely in the current context.
Ok, we’re trying to determine whether or not “meaningful consent is meaningful”. A question: could you guess with high reliability what situations I think constitute meaningful consent or not?
Sure. All I have to do is check what the culture you live in condemns.
A scenario: suppose I slip a girl a roofie, slip her into my car, take her home, and fuck her. Then I sneak her back into the party.
Was my crime “slipping a girl a drug”, or was my crime “that and rape”?
As I have indicated before, I consider the term “rape” to include multiple Schelling points in act-space, most of which I condemn and advocate pushing, but to different degrees. As such, I would appreciate if you tabooed “rape” when asking this sort of question.
Taking my own advice, his crimes were slipping the girl a drug and violating her right to bodily integrity, the same as if he had preformed surgery on her, given her a piercing or tattoo etc.
Note that a crime is not the same a harm; technically the girl has not been harmed, we just prefer to enforce this right for game-theoretic reasons. Also, I note you failed to specify if it was “safe” sex.
This particular slogan was selected for usefulness. It retains it’s meaning when considered as a question solely in the current context.
When I try to believe that, I become confused. I’ve found in this and other threads that my being reminded of rationalist truisms correlates with something other than a failure of rationality.
Sure. All I have to do is check what the culture you live in condemns.
Right, which is why you’d be able to guess that I support lowering the age of consent under certain circumstances and relaxing penalties in others. You have a bad discriminant. You are weak at something you shouldn’t be.
As I have indicated before, I consider the term “rape” to include multiple Schelling points in act-space, most of which I condemn and advocate pushing, but to different degrees. As such, I would appreciate if you tabooed “rape” when asking this sort of question.
That’s another thing. My being asked to taboo something here usually—there are exceptions—correlates not with understandable confusion or ambiguity, but with something else.
Taking my own advice, his crimes were slipping the girl a drug and violating her right to bodily integrity, the same as if he had preformed surgery on her, given her a piercing or tattoo etc.
So her “right to bodily integrity” extends to penis-in-vagina? We’re trying really hard to not see the obvious. Go on, use the word.
Note that a crime is not the same a harm; technically the girl has not been harmed, we just prefer to enforce this right for game-theoretic reasons.
She hasn’t? Under what “technically” are we working? Are “we” just preferring to enforce this right for “game-theoretic reasons?” Are you assuming too much on the part of “we”?
Also, I note you failed to specify if it was “safe” sex.
This particular slogan was selected for usefulness. It retains it’s meaning when considered as a question solely in the current context.
When I try to believe that, I become confused. I’ve found in this and other threads that my being reminded of rationalist truisms correlates with something other than a failure of rationality.
Maybe. I was genuinely asking, not censuring you for failing to follow the tenets of our faith.
Are you intending to respond to my question, or just muse about my motives in asking it?
Sure. All I have to do is check what the culture you live in condemns.
Right, which is why you’d be able to guess that I support lowering the age of consent under certain circumstances and relaxing penalties in others. You have a bad discriminant. You are weak at something you shouldn’t be.
Except that doesn’t necessarily reflect anything real besides the details of the culture in question. See also: witchcraft.
As I have indicated before, I consider the term “rape” to include multiple Schelling points in act-space, most of which I condemn and advocate pushing, but to different degrees. As such, I would appreciate if you tabooed “rape” when asking this sort of question.
That’s another thing. My being asked to taboo something here usually—there are exceptions—correlates not with understandable confusion or ambiguity, but with something else.
In this case, while I am not confused by your meaning, you are rendering this discussion too ambiguous for me to make my point. If I insisted on referring to homosexuality as a “fetish”, (or “perversion” or something else that boiled down to “sex thingy that’s not mainstream”,) and replied to arguments about how homosexuality is qualitatively different with discussions of “fetishes”, asking me to taboo “fetish” and talk about the facts of the matter would be reasonable, don’t you think? (This is not a hypothetical example.)
So her “right to bodily integrity” extends to penis-in-vagina? We’re trying really hard to not see the obvious. Go on, use the word.
I submit that giving someone a tattoo while they’re drunk is not the same as raping them.
Note that a crime is not the same a harm; technically the girl has not been harmed, we just prefer to enforce this right for game-theoretic reasons.
She hasn’t? Under what “technically” are we working? Are “we” just preferring to enforce this right for “game-theoretic reasons?” Are you assuming too much on the part of “we”?
OK: I prefer to punish this in order to discourage it in general, even if, in this specific case, it has negative net utility.
And yes, having something happen to you that does not cause physical damage or mental distress (because you don’t know it happened) can reasonably be categorized as not containing “harm”, although obviously there are different possible definitions of the word “harm”.
Also, I note you failed to specify if it was “safe” sex.
That “failure” was deliberate and appropriate.
Well, I guess it’s a good thing I noted it then, isn’t it?
Seriously, though, that failure is not appropriate, because there is a difference in the resulting harm caused by safe and unsafe sex; to whit, possible pregnancy and the risk of STD transfer. Both of these have measurable effects that the victim remembers, and indeed are likely to reveal that the rape occurred (depending on the individual in question.) You are deliberately trying to conflate different things, here. Stop it. Even if it turns out what we care about is identical in both cases, what you are doing amounts to refusing to discuss the question at all.
Except that doesn’t necessarily reflect anything real besides the details of the culture in question.
Except [supporting lowering the age of consent under some circumstances] doesn’t necessarily reflect anything [real] besides [culture], [like witchcraft!] Word salad. What you could have said is, “I was mistaken, as I could not have predicted that,” or, “I was correct, because lowering the age of consent is a really popular right now.”
And yes, having something happen to you that does not cause physical damage or mental distress (because you don’t know it happened) can reasonably be categorized as not containing “harm”, although obviously there are different possible definitions of the word “harm”.
I think people should have a say in what happens to them, be it politically or otherwise. Would it “harm” a child to keep him locked in a giant playground/amusement park, with everything he could ever want provided, but kept from any education? Would it “harm” the human race as a whole to be kept in a state of perpetual orgasm, kept alive, but forgetting everything else? Is a slave being harmed, even if his master does not beat him and feeds him well?
I’m with the old-school utilitarians on this. Utility is not hedonism. Immediate pleasure and pain are not the sum of all harm. I think that women and men should have some say in what happens to their bodies. That’s why I’m not fond of circumcision, especially fgm. (Another cultural prediction?) That’s why I have no problem with almost any type of relationship between consenting adults. Bondage? Sure. Open relationships? I’ve had them and they’re my favorite. Polyamory? Why not? Homosexual? Obviously. Incest? With some exceptions concerning guardian/minor relationships, but otherwise, why not? I would even support tax breaks/rights for polyamorous relationships similar to those now granted for monogamous couples, the scale of which to be determined after research into outcomes for children and other—to my knowledge—unknowns.
But this is obviously “culture”, which you would have predicted. That’s why it wouldn’t have helped you to use “meaningful consent”, right? If I were to give some other LWer a checklist of predictions about my feelings about sexual relationships, and tell him to use “culture”, he—statistically a `he’ - might use polls. If I tell him to use “meaningful consent”, how much more accurate would he have been?
If your answer is “no more accurate”, I’ll propose an experiment. If your answer is, “yes, significantly more accurate,” then we know that other people understand something that you do not, and that the problem is not the phrase but your own comprehension of it.
Well, I guess it’s a good thing I noted it then, isn’t it?
No, it’s not. I’m trying to establish that something is an offense, and I’m not interested in whether or not something else aggravates it. I might have cut off her foot, too. Who cares. That’s not “conflation.” What’s clear is that you don’t think that violating self-determination is “harm”. That’s the difference between us. Keep it to the internet, though, because if you touch a sleeping girl, you might find “Schelling points in act space” won’t help you.
Are you intending to respond to my question, or just muse about my motives in asking it?
Just muse.
Pretty please?
Except [supporting lowering the age of consent under some circumstances] doesn’t necessarily reflect anything [real] besides [culture], [like witchcraft!] Word salad. What you could have said is, “I was mistaken, as I could not have predicted that,” or, “I was correct, because lowering the age of consent is a really popular right now.”
Huh? A minute ago you were complaining I was being contrary because the predictions worked fine. I can predict what you’d disapprove of for reasons of “”informed consent” just fine. I just don’t think it refers to anything in the territory beyond the bit of the map labelled “informed consent”. Or at least, if it does, you seem to be having trouble pointing to it.
I think people should have a say in what happens to them, be it politically or otherwise. Would it “harm” a child to keep him locked in a giant playground/amusement park, with everything he could ever want provided, but kept from any education? Would it “harm” the human race as a whole to be kept in a state of perpetual orgasm, kept alive, but forgetting everything else? Is a slave being harmed, even if his master does not beat him and feeds him well?
I’m with the old-school utilitarians on this. Utility is not hedonism. Immediate pleasure and pain are not the sum of all harm. I think that women and men should have some say in what happens to their bodies. That’s why I’m not fond of circumcision, especially fgm. (Another cultural prediction?)
As I said, I recognize the right to bodily integrity, which is violated in both cases. I also value, y’know, not traumatizing people (which you seem to dismiss as “hedonism”.)
Also, honestly, I think you probably overestimate the value of freedom and choice and so on. They’re nice and all, but they’re massive applause lights in our culture; other cultures don’t seem to have been so impressed by them.
That’s why I have no problem with almost any type of relationship between consenting adults. Bondage? Sure. Open relationships? I’ve had them and they’re my favorite. Polyamory? Why not? Homosexual? Obviously. Incest? With some exceptions concerning guardian/minor relationships, but otherwise, why not? I would even support tax breaks/rights for polyamorous relationships similar to those now granted for monogamous couples, the scale of which to be determined after research into outcomes for children and other—to my knowledge—unknowns.
Thanks for the extra data o pinpoint the precise subculture I should be checking.
But this is obviously “culture”, which you would have predicted. That’s why it wouldn’t have helped you to use “meaningful consent”, right? If I were to give some other LWer a checklist of predictions about my feelings about sexual relationships, and tell him to use “culture”, he—statistically a `he’ - might use polls. If I tell him to use “meaningful consent”, how much more accurate would he have been?
Except you cannot explain “meaningful consent” except by pointing to culture/yourself-as-black-box. Why should I treat them as separate theories to be tested? How should I treat them as separate theories, if I haven’t already grown up in our culture?
Well, I guess it’s a good thing I noted it then, isn’t it?
No, it’s not. I’m trying to establish that something is an offense, and I’m not interested in whether or not something else aggravates it. I might have cut off her foot, too. Who cares. That’s not “conflation.” What’s clear is that you don’t think that violating self-determination is “harm”. That’s the difference between us.
Hey, it could be worse—your point might have simply sailed over my head.
He could have cut off her foot. In fact, lets talk about that scenario. Lets say there’s a well-known crime, stealing someone’s purse. This traditionally involves cutting off their foot, because people chain their purses to their feet. But sometimes, a cunning criminal tricks someone into giving them the key to this chain, or steals it out of their pocket, resulting in a purse-theft without the loss of a foot.
Is it a good idea to talk about how this gut is a foot-thief just because the dictionary says a “foot-thief” is someone who teals the purse someone attached to their foot, and attack anyone suggesting (say) a lighter sentence or something as defending those horrible people who cut off feet? Is it useful to ignore the loss of people’s feet and increase the penalty for all foot-thefts across the board, instead of punishing them separately?
(Of course, the correct punishment may not be fitted to the damage done for game-theoretical reasons, but I hope you appreciate the idea.)
Keep it to the internet, though, because if you touch a sleeping girl, you might find “Schelling points in act space” won’t help you.
Considering my repeated statements that such behavior should, in my opinion, be harshly punished, this particular jab falls a little flat.
(Also, if I were to ignore the fact that I don’t want this happening to me so I want to discourage it, I wouldn’t be sadistic enough to tell the victim, harming them again at significant cost to myself.)
I think his fantasies are perverse and contrary to values I have about human autonomy, but I don’t think the situation is significantly worse. His actions are not going to put a kid in therapy.
I also completely fail to see the relevance.
If children masturbating makes them feel good, and pedophiles feeling good about having sex with them isn’t inherently bad, then pedophiles helping kids masturbate is just efficient use of labor. Goes the logic.
Goes the logic that works so long as you do not care about meaningful consent. This is a lot like the “if she’s sleeping, it’s not rape” argument we heard in the aftermath of the Steubenville case.
What is this meaningful consent thinghy you mention? Do I need it to play tag with other children (given that I’m a child)? Does an adult need it when playing tag with children? Do you need it when washing eachothers’ backs in the bath? Do you need it when washing your child in the bath? Do you need it when your child asks for a massage? Do you need it when your child asks for a “massage”?
Where, and how, and why, does one draw the line?
My value system is incompatible with your statement and has no entry for this reference of “meaningful consent”.
Edit: Split away irrelevant part of the comment.
FTR: If I had any sort of relationship like this when I was a minor (sadly, I didn’t) and someone sued my S.O. / partner over this “meaningful consent” thing, I would have resented them and would still resent them to this day, and would most likely have pressed charges and sued them back into oblivion as soon as I turned legally capable of suing people, over all kinds of privacy breach, life alteration, or whatever other morality-based claims that I could find, in the same way I would sue anyone who pressed charges against me for having sex with my current girlfriend.
When you say “minor”—are we talking teens, preteens, infancy? A month below the local AOC? Does it matter?
(Also, good luck with that lawsuit.)
Not really. I’ve always found the moral intuitions most people have here rather lacking.
Put a 3-year-old in her mother’s body. The kid wants to have sex ’caus she has her mother’s biosystem, drives and body. Is it okay?
Put a 40-year-old in a 6-year-old’s body. Or better yet, take one of the existing people who just have the same body they did when they were 12. Is sex okay?
Take a 2-year-old WBE that ran at a subjective time factor of 50 since their start. They get transferred to a modified cloned 9-year-old body that has already gone through puberty. Is it okay to have sex?
So yeah. Doesn’t really matter, as long as both parties are aware of the typical downfalls and issues and are capable of enjoying it. (and that they actually do enjoy it, or stop if they don’t)
Good to know.
How, exactly, do you do that? Doesn’t puberty alter the mind as well as the body? You’d have to create a whole new mind, extrapolating what the 3-year-old would be like with “her mother’s biosystem, drives” without making any of the other alterations aging brings.
Assuming they’re mentally unchanged, I would guess most people would be OK with it, albeit somewhat squicked at the thought. Although some people object to cartoon child porn, so maybe you’d get people claiming it encourages pedophiles or something?
Holy cow, that’s a thing? What?
Are they simulating baseline human biochemistry?
I’m sympathetic to this position—I’m pretty sure these so-called intuitions are just social mores, other societies marry and such much younger—but I think you’re failing to account for power imbalance. We don’t let officers in the military sleep with their subordinates, and with the kind of power adults have over children in our society, the same logic applies.
Yeah, power (im)balances is the most important form of many variants of coercion, both implicit and explicit, that come rain down on my ideals of optimal sexual interactions and freedoms. And they can be so insidious or deeply implicit or just so dang entangled that sometimes, even if we do know the full situation, we can’t make sense or trace any sort of natural line. In some cases there’s even no schelling point.
But there’s so much to say here about this topic it might grow into an entire article’s worth of stuff if I keep going, and I’m sure there could be more optimal ways to communicate or use both of our times, especially considering that I suspect many of the issues I’ve thought of have also crossed the mind of most people on LW. Or, at the very least, there should be some significant overlap between any two given people. I don’t quite know enough yet to pinpoint which of my insights overlap and (more importantly) which don’t.
Anyway, power and perceived power can majorly fuck up most heuristics and investigations we’re currently capable of using/doing.
Come to think of it, I don’t remember seeing any post on LW about social power balances and the many ways they influence peoples’ decisions or patterns that come up where sub-optimal situations arise because of them (or the perception of them). I’ve seen some things alluding to it or passing mentions as if everyone knew all the aspects of the topic, though. And I’ve found one old post on the current subject too.
However, I suspect the science on this to be rather… incomplete. Thoughts?
Regarding that, here’s probably the most extreme case we’ve ever seen.
Why does that part matter? Maybe consider if they are, and then if they aren’t, and see where the difference is? To me there’s no relevant difference as far as I can tell.
In this specific case, I think the socially-constructed adult/child divide might actually work—sure, it’s arbitrary, but it should largely reflect whether the kid in questions views someone as An Adult or just another kid.
Of course, this sorta falls apart when you have to deal with two kids of different ages.
Or, for that matter, “young adults” who view older people as somehow authoritative, although that’s not as pervasive.
Hmm, maybe we should use the infamous half-your-age-plus-seven “creepiness law”?
Oh, I vaguely heard about that. I though that was unique though?
Well, most of these intuitions are dependent on a human biochemistry. You want to fuck a robot, knock yourself out. Unless it’s, like, a sex-hating robot.
That said, a hundred-year-old human in an adolescent body sounds like they would be allowed to have whatever sex as they wanted, within the usual limits. Indeed, I believe it’s a common excuse in Japanese stuff to have that girl actually be a 700-year-old demon in human form.
What’s that? O.o
I think in most circumstances that would be relevant, social roles largely outweigh and override this. In most cases, minors are forced into roles by circumstance and because people who already have greater power force them to be in such roles.
For a better intuition pump towards what I mean, think of The Internets, particularly hacker culture. There, age is probably the most irrelevant out of any culture I’ve seen—only maturity, skill, and some online social likeability matter. Some mature 12-year-olds wield immense power (relatively speaking, in terms of social and cultural power within the limited scope of hacker culture) over some of their peers, and this almost certainly leads many major adults to take suboptimal decisions or actions within the context.
Sometimes, gamers can also form similar small groups where young people with the proper, more powerful “role” can wield relatively disproportionate power over the leisure time and entertainment quality of their peers. I’ve sometimes experienced this firsthand, though the worst cases I saw didn’t happen to me personally.
For a toy example of what I’m talking about, consider gaming “clans”, groups of people who for some reason or another end up gaming with eachother and forming a common In-Group mentality and generally acting like a tribe for the purposes of playing videogames (or some small set of games). Often, some gamers will get really invested in this tribe, emotionally and psychologically, and will make friends there, and spend lots of time making emotional attachments, and so on. More often than not, these groups have a “Leader”, who holds rather disproportionate authority, much like a tribe. In fact, these usually work pretty much exactly like a tribe.
Anyway, this emotional involvement can mean that that kid who would be considered a minor and unable to consent due to power imbalances actually has more power over you now, because failure to comply can, in typical tribal fashion, get you kicked out—which, while not as bad as getting kicked out in the ancestral tribe, in many cases will still sound pretty shitty, and may deprive people of otherwise-reliable good entertainment, and generally just lowers the quality of their leisure time quite a bit depending on how much they enjoy the game and the community they play with.
And then all the meta and game-theoretic concerns apply: if I’m wary that failure to comply might get me kicked from the tribe, I may try to implement the same kind of social status strategies we see in other tribelike contexts. This includes anticipating possible things that the tribe leader might care about and conforming pre-emptively, which would mean I’m taking an action that is sub-optimal or that I don’t want to do, based on my anticipation of possible failure-to-comply situations, without any form of intentional coercion from the group leader.
All of this leads up to: Situations like what I just said, where no actual coercion happens but where someone is accepting some action or situation or thinking in some way that they would prefer not to, generally build up gradually. I would not be surprised if this could easily lead a person into thinking in this manner about sexual interaction (given a social culture that has less taboos against sexuality), and make them build this up into eventually accepting or even offering to have sex with someone solely because they anticipate that them not making this offer could lead to eventual bad consequences for them due to the power imbalance, or something.
This all reminds me of situations where, for example, A wants to blackmail B, but C watches closely for any explicit form of blackmail, so instead A will create a favorable situation by removing all of B’s options and power, and then present themselves as willing to help, in a manner where B contextually knows that A is in a position to mess up their life if they don’t offer, say, sex.
From the outside, it will either look as if B just fell prey to A’s superior prowess, which is normal in many domains such as competitive businesses, or A and B suddenly formed a partnership due to friendly human interactions that were apparently fully voluntary on the part of B (since B initiated it, after all).
So merely the perception that offering sex to A is the only way for B to stay afloat¹ creates a subtle blackmail-like situation that in many cases no one could form a legitimate legal case around in most instances. Many variants of this exist or could happen in various situations.
One of my fears about making sexuality less socially taboo is all about how the above dynamics might factor in more strongly, and reduce the apparent rape rates while making such horrible non-choice not-quite-blackmail scenarios pervasively omnipresent.
I word this quite innocently, but it’s generally made implicitly obvious in such situations that “not staying afloat” implies some Very Very Bad Things—such as being forced to live on the streets while pictures of you mysteriously appear on shady websites and so on. Sometimes, the whole situation already happens with the premise that some other group will kill/maim/otherwise-permanently-make-your-life-much-less-interesting as soon as protection from them is removed by A or cut off because you no longer have the ability to afford this protection.
As the name I referred to it by suggests, you divide your age by two and add seven; anyone below that would be “creepy” to sleep with or otherwise engage romantically. Not sure where it comes from, but it’s been featured in XKCD at least once.
Yup. And in our society, all kids are in these situations, and many (especially younger) kids may assume such a context in pretty much all interactions with adults. Not to mention the fact that, currently, most people who actually do have sex with children are in such a position of “soft power” over the child.
I assumed that Randall Munroe had just made it up on the spot.
I’m pretty sure I heard of it before the comic.
I’ve always found “informed consent” (probably the same thing) to be a damn good heuristic, myself, although I certainly don’t terminally value it. Are those meant to be rhetorical questions?
… actually, I’m of the opinion that conflating that sort of thing with, y’know, the sort of thing people picture when you say “rape” leads to both overestimation of the harm it causes and devaluing of the suffering caused by violently raping someone. It is, of course, bad, and it should be discouraged with punishments and so on, but I don’t think it shares a Schelling point with “real” rape.
However.
What about this “meaningful consent” that renders it valuable? At what point does consent become “meaningful”? We usually allow parents to consent on behalf of their children, presumably because they will further the child’s own interests; should this apply to sex? What do you think you know, and how do you think you know it? Let’s pry open this black box!
[Side note: I personally am against legalizing such relationships, but I worry that I’m smart enough to argue convincingly for this position regardless of its truth, so I’m not going to elaborate on my reasoning here.]
Which in my experience people picture extremely inaccurately. They picture girls getting grabbed off a park sidewalk by a ravenous stranger. That’s a very atypical case. Outside of prison, rape is typically perpetuated by friends and lovers and dates. This is unsurprising given pure opportunity, just as it’s unsurprising that children are typically victimized by families and trusted friends of their families, not by strangers with candy.
Requiring rape to be “violent” is to require that most extra-penal rape be reclassified as not-rape. There is usually the implicit threat of violence, and the (typically) women in such circumstances are made to understand they have no choice or power. Anyone who looks at this issue will quickly meet people who insist that it isn’t “rape” if the woman did not violently resist and never succumbed, or if there were no beatings involved.
“Rape” is only as meaningful as “meaningful consent.”
Babies cannot give meaningful consent. Children can sometimes give meaningful consent, but it is difficult to determine. We allow parents to make decisions for their children in weighty matters—within strict limits. We do not allow them to give their kids liquor and cigarettes nor restrict them to “alternative medicine” for deadly disease. All of this makes sense: by and large, we do not allow families to stunt and cripple development.
(I give one exception: it is still considered acceptable to give a child a poor diet to the point of severe obesity. I think this should be at least as criminal, if not more, than allowing cigarette-smoking.)
“Meaningful consent” comes in degrees: adults are better at it than young teenagers. Most states have age of consent laws which, while allowing sex with minors, only allows it within a certain age bracket. Differential intellectual capacity matters.
You’ll notice that I haven’t tried to give a definition. With complicated concepts, it is often better to talk about them as if they were meaningful, and notice that they are, that we can recognize their presence or absence from different circumstances. If you are wholly unable to recognize such circumstances, let me know and I’ll try being more precise.
Among my friends this sentiment is encapsulated as “You always hurt the ones you love, cuz they’re the ones in range.”
Consider the examples in this comment:
Which of these count as “meaningful consent” by your definition?
Point.
Still, you know what I mean. Forcible rape, not things-that-are-bad-and-sexual-so-we-call-them-rape.
Well … yeah? That’s not the same thing as it being perfectly acceptable, mind.
Oh, yeah, threats should totally be included AFAICT. But the example under discussion was a sleeping/unconscious victim, wasn’t it?
That is to say not meaningful at all, because you’re treating meaningful consent as a fundamental property of things.
Why not, if they can express desire for sweeties or whatever? At what point do they stop being “babies” and become “children”, under this schema? Are we including toddlers here?
Aha! He admits it! Pedophilic relationships can be OK!
There are some issues where we can safely say we know better, just like, say, an adult consenting to an addictive drug. But how could sex be one of those cases, when it’s only harmful if the person doesn’t consent in the first place? (Ignoring for a minute STDs and such, which parents (and many kids) should be able to take into account.)
Why?
From hence did this meaningful concept come to you? What do you think you know, and how do you think you know it?
I wish we could get past slogans.
Ok, we’re trying to determine whether or not “meaningful consent is meaningful”. A question: could you guess with high reliability what situations I think constitute meaningful consent or not?
A scenario: suppose I slip a girl a roofie, slip her into my car, take her home, and fuck her. Then I sneak her back into the party.
Was my crime “slipping a girl a drug”, or was my crime “that and rape”?
This particular slogan was selected for usefulness. It retains it’s meaning when considered as a question solely in the current context.
Sure. All I have to do is check what the culture you live in condemns.
As I have indicated before, I consider the term “rape” to include multiple Schelling points in act-space, most of which I condemn and advocate pushing, but to different degrees. As such, I would appreciate if you tabooed “rape” when asking this sort of question.
Taking my own advice, his crimes were slipping the girl a drug and violating her right to bodily integrity, the same as if he had preformed surgery on her, given her a piercing or tattoo etc.
Note that a crime is not the same a harm; technically the girl has not been harmed, we just prefer to enforce this right for game-theoretic reasons. Also, I note you failed to specify if it was “safe” sex.
When I try to believe that, I become confused. I’ve found in this and other threads that my being reminded of rationalist truisms correlates with something other than a failure of rationality.
Right, which is why you’d be able to guess that I support lowering the age of consent under certain circumstances and relaxing penalties in others. You have a bad discriminant. You are weak at something you shouldn’t be.
That’s another thing. My being asked to taboo something here usually—there are exceptions—correlates not with understandable confusion or ambiguity, but with something else.
So her “right to bodily integrity” extends to penis-in-vagina? We’re trying really hard to not see the obvious. Go on, use the word.
She hasn’t? Under what “technically” are we working? Are “we” just preferring to enforce this right for “game-theoretic reasons?” Are you assuming too much on the part of “we”?
That “failure” was deliberate and appropriate.
Maybe. I was genuinely asking, not censuring you for failing to follow the tenets of our faith.
Are you intending to respond to my question, or just muse about my motives in asking it?
Except that doesn’t necessarily reflect anything real besides the details of the culture in question. See also: witchcraft.
In this case, while I am not confused by your meaning, you are rendering this discussion too ambiguous for me to make my point. If I insisted on referring to homosexuality as a “fetish”, (or “perversion” or something else that boiled down to “sex thingy that’s not mainstream”,) and replied to arguments about how homosexuality is qualitatively different with discussions of “fetishes”, asking me to taboo “fetish” and talk about the facts of the matter would be reasonable, don’t you think? (This is not a hypothetical example.)
I submit that giving someone a tattoo while they’re drunk is not the same as raping them.
OK: I prefer to punish this in order to discourage it in general, even if, in this specific case, it has negative net utility.
And yes, having something happen to you that does not cause physical damage or mental distress (because you don’t know it happened) can reasonably be categorized as not containing “harm”, although obviously there are different possible definitions of the word “harm”.
Well, I guess it’s a good thing I noted it then, isn’t it?
Seriously, though, that failure is not appropriate, because there is a difference in the resulting harm caused by safe and unsafe sex; to whit, possible pregnancy and the risk of STD transfer. Both of these have measurable effects that the victim remembers, and indeed are likely to reveal that the rape occurred (depending on the individual in question.) You are deliberately trying to conflate different things, here. Stop it. Even if it turns out what we care about is identical in both cases, what you are doing amounts to refusing to discuss the question at all.
Just muse.
Except [supporting lowering the age of consent under some circumstances] doesn’t necessarily reflect anything [real] besides [culture], [like witchcraft!] Word salad. What you could have said is, “I was mistaken, as I could not have predicted that,” or, “I was correct, because lowering the age of consent is a really popular right now.”
I think people should have a say in what happens to them, be it politically or otherwise. Would it “harm” a child to keep him locked in a giant playground/amusement park, with everything he could ever want provided, but kept from any education? Would it “harm” the human race as a whole to be kept in a state of perpetual orgasm, kept alive, but forgetting everything else? Is a slave being harmed, even if his master does not beat him and feeds him well?
I’m with the old-school utilitarians on this. Utility is not hedonism. Immediate pleasure and pain are not the sum of all harm. I think that women and men should have some say in what happens to their bodies. That’s why I’m not fond of circumcision, especially fgm. (Another cultural prediction?) That’s why I have no problem with almost any type of relationship between consenting adults. Bondage? Sure. Open relationships? I’ve had them and they’re my favorite. Polyamory? Why not? Homosexual? Obviously. Incest? With some exceptions concerning guardian/minor relationships, but otherwise, why not? I would even support tax breaks/rights for polyamorous relationships similar to those now granted for monogamous couples, the scale of which to be determined after research into outcomes for children and other—to my knowledge—unknowns.
But this is obviously “culture”, which you would have predicted. That’s why it wouldn’t have helped you to use “meaningful consent”, right? If I were to give some other LWer a checklist of predictions about my feelings about sexual relationships, and tell him to use “culture”, he—statistically a `he’ - might use polls. If I tell him to use “meaningful consent”, how much more accurate would he have been?
If your answer is “no more accurate”, I’ll propose an experiment. If your answer is, “yes, significantly more accurate,” then we know that other people understand something that you do not, and that the problem is not the phrase but your own comprehension of it.
No, it’s not. I’m trying to establish that something is an offense, and I’m not interested in whether or not something else aggravates it. I might have cut off her foot, too. Who cares. That’s not “conflation.” What’s clear is that you don’t think that violating self-determination is “harm”. That’s the difference between us. Keep it to the internet, though, because if you touch a sleeping girl, you might find “Schelling points in act space” won’t help you.
Pretty please?
Huh? A minute ago you were complaining I was being contrary because the predictions worked fine. I can predict what you’d disapprove of for reasons of “”informed consent” just fine. I just don’t think it refers to anything in the territory beyond the bit of the map labelled “informed consent”. Or at least, if it does, you seem to be having trouble pointing to it.
As I said, I recognize the right to bodily integrity, which is violated in both cases. I also value, y’know, not traumatizing people (which you seem to dismiss as “hedonism”.)
Also, honestly, I think you probably overestimate the value of freedom and choice and so on. They’re nice and all, but they’re massive applause lights in our culture; other cultures don’t seem to have been so impressed by them.
Thanks for the extra data o pinpoint the precise subculture I should be checking.
Except you cannot explain “meaningful consent” except by pointing to culture/yourself-as-black-box. Why should I treat them as separate theories to be tested? How should I treat them as separate theories, if I haven’t already grown up in our culture?
Hey, it could be worse—your point might have simply sailed over my head.
He could have cut off her foot. In fact, lets talk about that scenario. Lets say there’s a well-known crime, stealing someone’s purse. This traditionally involves cutting off their foot, because people chain their purses to their feet. But sometimes, a cunning criminal tricks someone into giving them the key to this chain, or steals it out of their pocket, resulting in a purse-theft without the loss of a foot.
Is it a good idea to talk about how this gut is a foot-thief just because the dictionary says a “foot-thief” is someone who teals the purse someone attached to their foot, and attack anyone suggesting (say) a lighter sentence or something as defending those horrible people who cut off feet? Is it useful to ignore the loss of people’s feet and increase the penalty for all foot-thefts across the board, instead of punishing them separately?
(Of course, the correct punishment may not be fitted to the damage done for game-theoretical reasons, but I hope you appreciate the idea.)
Considering my repeated statements that such behavior should, in my opinion, be harshly punished, this particular jab falls a little flat.
(Also, if I were to ignore the fact that I don’t want this happening to me so I want to discourage it, I wouldn’t be sadistic enough to tell the victim, harming them again at significant cost to myself.)