In Italy the age of consent is 14, it can go down to 13 if the partner is at max 15 years old, but it raises to 16 if the partner is a temporary or permanent authoritative figure, like a coach or a teacher.
18 is the limit at which it is allowed to publicly show or sell pictures/movies about that person naked or performing sexual acts.
I frankly feel that this is one of the very few cases where Italian laws get the facts right: thirteens would still (try to) have sex wether or not it was allowed. I remember that I believed too that the age of consent was 18, and felt fine with it, so it was a little shock to discover that the limit was much lower. I later however got various data about how sexual expression/desire/maturity starts around that age (mine too, FWIW), so I reconsidered that this was indeed a case of a law just making common sense: you don’t throw in jail a teenager just because of his/her natural impulses.
you don’t throw in jail a teenager just because of his/her natural impulses
Well, in the general case, of course you do… at least, if you throw them in jail at all. Adults, too. Most crimes are natural impulses, at least for people raised in a given culture; acts that we are neither naturally inclined to do nor explicitly taught to do tend not to be common enough to be worth the effort to pass laws against.
With respect to age of consent laws in particular, I would say there’s more than one relevant age threshold if we’re going to bother regulating this stuff by age at all; a typical thirteen-year-old is not equivalent to a typical 17-year-old, but neither is s/he equivalent to a typical 9-year-old.
I would also say that the kind of relationship matters more to capacity for consent than age, though I understand the “bright line” reasons for using the latter.
I’m pretty sure MrMind would class two teenagers lying to their parents about where they’re going to be and finding somewhere private to have sex as obeying precisely the sort of “natural impulses” referenced in their post. And, yes, agreed, most of the acts involved are entirely instrumental.
I would class that as the same kind of planning demonstrated by a bank robber (although one hopes that successful bank robbers require more sophisticated planning skills).
If you would say neither of those are “natural impulses” because they require instrumental planning, that’s fine, I won’t argue with you… I’m talking about the thing MrMind is talking about, and using their langauge to refer to it, but if y’all can agree on a different word to use I’ll happily use that word instead.
Semantics aside, if there’s an actual disagreement here, can you say more about what it is?
Well, I do agree with you that people are certainly thrown in jail because of their “natural impulses”—not all crimes are like that, but some are.
However the remainder of that paragraph (“Most crimes are natural impulses...”) makes no sense to me at all, I think it’s wrong because you’re completely ignoring instrumentality. Consider a trivial example: running a red light. Are people naturally inclined to do that? No, I don’t think so. Are they explicitly taught to do that? Nope. But is it common? Fairly common, I’d say and there are certainly laws against it.
As I say, I certainly agree that most of the acts people perform, whether criminal or not, are instrumental rather than… um… whatever the alternative is. (Reflexive? Instinctive?)
And yes, I guess you’re right that I’m ignoring that fact… precisely because it seems irrelevant to me.
Similarly, I’m happy to say that eating is a natural impulse. If someone objected that the overwhelming majority of the actions we perform in order to satisfy that impulse are instrumental and deliberate, I would certainly agree that this is true, but would find it strange to conclude that eating was therefore not a natural impulse. Instrumentality of acts just seems entirely beside the point.
Your position makes more sense to me as applied to running red lights, though. My (natural?) inclination is to extend the same reasoning to that case as well but I can definitely appreciate the criticism that at this point I’m just being metaphorical and could just as easily classify anything as “natural,” and I’ll accept that I over-reached with my original claim. People don’t run red lights in the wild.
But murder? Rape? Battery? Nah, in response to certain stimuli these are as natural as eating and having sex. The psychological and social structures we’ve constructed to prevent those stimuli from arising, and to prevent us from responding with those impulses when the stimuli do arise, and to prevent us from implementing those impulses when we do experience them… those structures are wonderful things, and in many contexts they enable us to do much much better than our natural impulses would lead us to do… but to therefore claim that those impulses don’t exist just seems bizarre to me.
I wonder whether what’s underlying the inferential gap here is some unstated assumptions relating to the moral implications of something being a natural impulse. Does it help at all if I say out loud that many of our natural impulses are utterly abhorrent?
I think the word “impulse” is providing more confusion here than light.
I’m happy to say that eating is a natural impulse
Let’s unpack. You have a biologically hardwired desire/instinct to eat. That provides you with a “natural” goal that you may reach through a variety of instrumental ways. Some of them are more acceptable (either from a psychological or from a cultural standpoint), some of them less.
Similarly, there is a desire/instinct to, say, have sex. That, however, doesn’t make rape “natural” as what’s “natural” is desire, not a particular way to satisfy it. There are ways to have sex other than through rape—just as there are ways to eat other than by stealing food and ways to assert dominance other than by punching someone in the face. That’s why distinguishing between the underlying desire and the specific way chosen to satisfy it is important.
many of our natural impulses are utterly abhorrent?
No, I don’t think so. Do you have any particular examples?
So going back to the OP I responded to… when two 14 year olds have sex, is that a specific way, or an underlying desire?
When the OP says it’s common sense not to imprison teenagers “just because of his/her natural impulses”, is it referring to specific ways, or underlying desires?
acts that we are neither naturally inclined to do nor explicitly taught to do tend not to be common enough to be worth the effort to pass laws against.
So would you say that murder is either:
1) a natural inclination of human being;
2) explicitly taught;
3) not regulated by the law.
3 is clearly not the case, so I’m curious to know what would you pick between 1 and 2.
Murder is very much a natural inclination of humans.
It sounds like you disagree with this claim; can you say more about why? (I’m willing to defend it, but right now I feel like someone has incredulously said to me “Wait, you’re saying humans consume organic matter for fuel?”… I don’t know where to start addressing your disagreement.)
There are also contexts in which killing people is explicitly taught, but they are relatively rare and we tend not to label them “murder” and they tend to be legal.
I guess one question is what do you mean by “natural inclination”.
Humans are clearly capable of murder. They also, clearly, engage in it quite rarely (regardless of the degree of law & order around, I might add). Evolutionary speaking, the capability to murder is beneficial, but needs very strong constraints on it—a tendency to murder those (of your species) around you is likely to wash out of the population pretty quickly.
So yes, there is a biologically hardwired ability to murder, but there are also hardwired brakes on it. These brakes are pretty powerful.
Murder is very much a natural inclination of humans.
I don’t think this is true, for most values of “natural inclination”.
Indications are that it’s very hard to reliably convince people to kill. First-world militaries base quite a bit of their training methods and tactics on working around this; training reforms suggested by S.L.A. Marshall and contemporaries took the US Army from about 25% of front-line soldiers firing their weapons in WWII (!) to a ratio of around 55% in the Korean War, and near 90% by Vietnam. But modern tactics still lean quite heavily on indirect fire and other less personal methods of killing enemies.
Even more tellingly, research into PTSD and related conditions seems to point to a stronger link with responsibility for violence than with exposure to personal danger. Granted, shooting strangers in warfare is rather different from, say, knifing someone in a bar fight; but the evidence seems to suggest that people without sociopathic traits need to overcome substantial psychological barriers before killing’s considered as an option.
Yes, I would expect that most people need to overcome substantial psychological barriers before they are willing to kill someone, especially before they are willing to kill complete strangers. If that is inconsistent with something being a natural inclination, well, OK, then I’ll agree that murder isn’t a natural inclination.
As you suggest in your first sentence, this has more to do with the meaning of “natural inclination” than with anything related to my original point.
Trying to get away from the purely semantic issue… do you disagree with any of this? If so, what?
Murder is very much a natural inclination of humans.
Then it is very possible that we intend with “natural inclination” wildly different things. I see “natural inclination” as whatever innate impulse is strongly present almost universally in humans, such that not meeting it creates a sense of urgency and/or frustration: eating, company, sex, etc. That’s why what you say feels to me like “Of course humans eat truck tires for breakfast!” :) Do you (I hope) intend something much less… coercive.
Barring the socializing influences of culture, I expect typical humans to intermittently experience urges to eat, to socialize, to have sex with each other, and to kill each other.
I also expect that every successful human culture has established cultural norms that govern those urges so that they don’t become too dangerous to the group. Consequently we mostly don’t go around eating whatever we want, having sex with whoever we want, or killing whoever we want… instead, we follow social rules that govern what and when and how it’s OK to do those things.
In some cases we internalize such rules and adopt them as values of our own (“I respect the property rights of others and will therefore not eat food that isn’t mine”, “I respect the bodily autonomy of others and will therefore not have sex with them unless the desire is mutual,” “I respect the social rules that govern acceptable sex partners and will therefore not have sex with socially unacceptable partners whether or not the desire is mutual”, “I respect the lives of others and will therefore not kill them even when they deserve it,” etc.). In other cases we don’t internalize them, but we follow them because it’s more practical to do so.
That doesn’t mean the impulse isn’t there.
That having been said… I would agree that the sense of urgency that arises from, for example, not eating for a day is very different from the sense of urgency that arises from, for example, not murdering someone who violates me.
But I would also say that the sense of urgency that arises from not having sex with someone really attractive is not very much like either of those, and more like the latter than the former.
This will inevitability turn into a nature/nurture discussion about what is and is not natural. Let’s dissolve it.
Most humans instinctively understand how to inflict harm, possess emotions that can trigger violence under certain conditions, and also have an innate desire to prevent harm from occurring.
Cultural mechanisms can prevent the conditions of murder. Cultural mechanisms can also override the instinct of harm avoidance so that murder can be more easily committed.
In Italy the age of consent is 14, it can go down to 13 if the partner is at max 15 years old, but it raises to 16 if the partner is a temporary or permanent authoritative figure, like a coach or a teacher.
18 is the limit at which it is allowed to publicly show or sell pictures/movies about that person naked or performing sexual acts.
I frankly feel that this is one of the very few cases where Italian laws get the facts right: thirteens would still (try to) have sex wether or not it was allowed.
I remember that I believed too that the age of consent was 18, and felt fine with it, so it was a little shock to discover that the limit was much lower. I later however got various data about how sexual expression/desire/maturity starts around that age (mine too, FWIW), so I reconsidered that this was indeed a case of a law just making common sense: you don’t throw in jail a teenager just because of his/her natural impulses.
Well, in the general case, of course you do… at least, if you throw them in jail at all. Adults, too. Most crimes are natural impulses, at least for people raised in a given culture; acts that we are neither naturally inclined to do nor explicitly taught to do tend not to be common enough to be worth the effort to pass laws against.
With respect to age of consent laws in particular, I would say there’s more than one relevant age threshold if we’re going to bother regulating this stuff by age at all; a typical thirteen-year-old is not equivalent to a typical 17-year-old, but neither is s/he equivalent to a typical 9-year-old.
I would also say that the kind of relationship matters more to capacity for consent than age, though I understand the “bright line” reasons for using the latter.
No, most crimes have “natural” motivations. If you, say, plan and execute a bank robbery that’s not an impulse.
Most acts are instrumental—you do them to reach a goal, not because you’re “naturally inclined” to do them just so.
I’m pretty sure MrMind would class two teenagers lying to their parents about where they’re going to be and finding somewhere private to have sex as obeying precisely the sort of “natural impulses” referenced in their post. And, yes, agreed, most of the acts involved are entirely instrumental.
I would class that as the same kind of planning demonstrated by a bank robber (although one hopes that successful bank robbers require more sophisticated planning skills).
If you would say neither of those are “natural impulses” because they require instrumental planning, that’s fine, I won’t argue with you… I’m talking about the thing MrMind is talking about, and using their langauge to refer to it, but if y’all can agree on a different word to use I’ll happily use that word instead.
Semantics aside, if there’s an actual disagreement here, can you say more about what it is?
Well, I do agree with you that people are certainly thrown in jail because of their “natural impulses”—not all crimes are like that, but some are.
However the remainder of that paragraph (“Most crimes are natural impulses...”) makes no sense to me at all, I think it’s wrong because you’re completely ignoring instrumentality. Consider a trivial example: running a red light. Are people naturally inclined to do that? No, I don’t think so. Are they explicitly taught to do that? Nope. But is it common? Fairly common, I’d say and there are certainly laws against it.
(nods) Thanks for answering my question.
As I say, I certainly agree that most of the acts people perform, whether criminal or not, are instrumental rather than… um… whatever the alternative is. (Reflexive? Instinctive?)
And yes, I guess you’re right that I’m ignoring that fact… precisely because it seems irrelevant to me.
Similarly, I’m happy to say that eating is a natural impulse. If someone objected that the overwhelming majority of the actions we perform in order to satisfy that impulse are instrumental and deliberate, I would certainly agree that this is true, but would find it strange to conclude that eating was therefore not a natural impulse. Instrumentality of acts just seems entirely beside the point.
Your position makes more sense to me as applied to running red lights, though. My (natural?) inclination is to extend the same reasoning to that case as well but I can definitely appreciate the criticism that at this point I’m just being metaphorical and could just as easily classify anything as “natural,” and I’ll accept that I over-reached with my original claim. People don’t run red lights in the wild.
But murder? Rape? Battery? Nah, in response to certain stimuli these are as natural as eating and having sex. The psychological and social structures we’ve constructed to prevent those stimuli from arising, and to prevent us from responding with those impulses when the stimuli do arise, and to prevent us from implementing those impulses when we do experience them… those structures are wonderful things, and in many contexts they enable us to do much much better than our natural impulses would lead us to do… but to therefore claim that those impulses don’t exist just seems bizarre to me.
I wonder whether what’s underlying the inferential gap here is some unstated assumptions relating to the moral implications of something being a natural impulse. Does it help at all if I say out loud that many of our natural impulses are utterly abhorrent?
I think the word “impulse” is providing more confusion here than light.
Let’s unpack. You have a biologically hardwired desire/instinct to eat. That provides you with a “natural” goal that you may reach through a variety of instrumental ways. Some of them are more acceptable (either from a psychological or from a cultural standpoint), some of them less.
Similarly, there is a desire/instinct to, say, have sex. That, however, doesn’t make rape “natural” as what’s “natural” is desire, not a particular way to satisfy it. There are ways to have sex other than through rape—just as there are ways to eat other than by stealing food and ways to assert dominance other than by punching someone in the face. That’s why distinguishing between the underlying desire and the specific way chosen to satisfy it is important.
No, I don’t think so. Do you have any particular examples?
OK.
So going back to the OP I responded to… when two 14 year olds have sex, is that a specific way, or an underlying desire?
When the OP says it’s common sense not to imprison teenagers “just because of his/her natural impulses”, is it referring to specific ways, or underlying desires?
So would you say that murder is either: 1) a natural inclination of human being; 2) explicitly taught; 3) not regulated by the law.
3 is clearly not the case, so I’m curious to know what would you pick between 1 and 2.
Murder is very much a natural inclination of humans.
It sounds like you disagree with this claim; can you say more about why? (I’m willing to defend it, but right now I feel like someone has incredulously said to me “Wait, you’re saying humans consume organic matter for fuel?”… I don’t know where to start addressing your disagreement.)
There are also contexts in which killing people is explicitly taught, but they are relatively rare and we tend not to label them “murder” and they tend to be legal.
I guess one question is what do you mean by “natural inclination”.
Humans are clearly capable of murder. They also, clearly, engage in it quite rarely (regardless of the degree of law & order around, I might add). Evolutionary speaking, the capability to murder is beneficial, but needs very strong constraints on it—a tendency to murder those (of your species) around you is likely to wash out of the population pretty quickly.
So yes, there is a biologically hardwired ability to murder, but there are also hardwired brakes on it. These brakes are pretty powerful.
Yes, I would agree with all of this.
I don’t think this is true, for most values of “natural inclination”.
Indications are that it’s very hard to reliably convince people to kill. First-world militaries base quite a bit of their training methods and tactics on working around this; training reforms suggested by S.L.A. Marshall and contemporaries took the US Army from about 25% of front-line soldiers firing their weapons in WWII (!) to a ratio of around 55% in the Korean War, and near 90% by Vietnam. But modern tactics still lean quite heavily on indirect fire and other less personal methods of killing enemies.
Even more tellingly, research into PTSD and related conditions seems to point to a stronger link with responsibility for violence than with exposure to personal danger. Granted, shooting strangers in warfare is rather different from, say, knifing someone in a bar fight; but the evidence seems to suggest that people without sociopathic traits need to overcome substantial psychological barriers before killing’s considered as an option.
Yes, I would expect that most people need to overcome substantial psychological barriers before they are willing to kill someone, especially before they are willing to kill complete strangers. If that is inconsistent with something being a natural inclination, well, OK, then I’ll agree that murder isn’t a natural inclination.
As you suggest in your first sentence, this has more to do with the meaning of “natural inclination” than with anything related to my original point.
Trying to get away from the purely semantic issue… do you disagree with any of this? If so, what?
Then it is very possible that we intend with “natural inclination” wildly different things.
I see “natural inclination” as whatever innate impulse is strongly present almost universally in humans, such that not meeting it creates a sense of urgency and/or frustration: eating, company, sex, etc.
That’s why what you say feels to me like “Of course humans eat truck tires for breakfast!” :)
Do you (I hope) intend something much less… coercive.
Barring the socializing influences of culture, I expect typical humans to intermittently experience urges to eat, to socialize, to have sex with each other, and to kill each other.
I also expect that every successful human culture has established cultural norms that govern those urges so that they don’t become too dangerous to the group. Consequently we mostly don’t go around eating whatever we want, having sex with whoever we want, or killing whoever we want… instead, we follow social rules that govern what and when and how it’s OK to do those things.
In some cases we internalize such rules and adopt them as values of our own (“I respect the property rights of others and will therefore not eat food that isn’t mine”, “I respect the bodily autonomy of others and will therefore not have sex with them unless the desire is mutual,” “I respect the social rules that govern acceptable sex partners and will therefore not have sex with socially unacceptable partners whether or not the desire is mutual”, “I respect the lives of others and will therefore not kill them even when they deserve it,” etc.). In other cases we don’t internalize them, but we follow them because it’s more practical to do so.
That doesn’t mean the impulse isn’t there.
That having been said… I would agree that the sense of urgency that arises from, for example, not eating for a day is very different from the sense of urgency that arises from, for example, not murdering someone who violates me.
But I would also say that the sense of urgency that arises from not having sex with someone really attractive is not very much like either of those, and more like the latter than the former.
This will inevitability turn into a nature/nurture discussion about what is and is not natural. Let’s dissolve it.
Most humans instinctively understand how to inflict harm, possess emotions that can trigger violence under certain conditions, and also have an innate desire to prevent harm from occurring.
Cultural mechanisms can prevent the conditions of murder. Cultural mechanisms can also override the instinct of harm avoidance so that murder can be more easily committed.