Empathy is the source of ethics and is beyond facts and rhetoric. Do you agree?
I don’t agree. I think empathy is to ethics as tastiness is to nutritional content—it’s a reaction that makes us feel good under circumstances conducive to a valuable end and feel aversion to circumstances conducive to deplorable ends, but it’s easily fooled (just as our tastebuds can be fooled by cinnamon buns). We need intuitions and empathy to have a starting point when we talk ethics, but a purely intuitionist morality is inevitably going to be inconsistent and have poor motivations in extreme cases.
It’s obvious that you feel very strongly that adults having sex with children is unethical; you’ve made that abundantly clear. It doesn’t have to follow from that that you are correct, and it definitely doesn’t follow that we can’t consider the question, and I’m sorry to say that you seem to be under the impression that you can’t civilly discuss it with people who don’t share your opinion.
I don’t think anyone is going to read this thread and then find that, because a few people gave some thought to the issue, their qualms about raping children have evaporated. Deep-seated ethical misgivings, legal repercussions, practical concerns, and the simple fact that most people aren’t pedophiles would see to that; anyone who’d be convinced by this thread in favor of actually having sex with children was just looking for an excuse and would have found NAMBLA’s website eventually.
If you cannot stick to solid argumentation in favor of your view (which I suspect is the dominant one—it’s just fashionable in this thread to signal open-mindedness by being cryptic and oblique about the matter) and instead resort to what amounts to shrill, repetitive whining about how unethical we all are, you aren’t “contributing to the discussion” and you certainly are unlikely to make any progress in convincing this particular audience.
All of that having been said, the experiment you describe wouldn’t prove that the children aren’t “freely” agreeing to take the cookie that the adult wants them to take. You can prove that people are likely to incorrectly judge the length of lines when others state incorrect judgments aloud; that doesn’t mean they’re being coerced or that they aren’t free, it just means that humans are social animals. The opinions and wishes of the people around us are important factors in our choices, and it is deeply murky territory when those opinions and wishes turn into coercive power dynamics.
I don’t agree. I think empathy is to ethics as tastiness is to nutritional content—it’s a reaction that makes us feel good under circumstances conducive to a valuable end and feel aversion to circumstances conducive to deplorable ends, but it’s easily fooled (just as our tastebuds can be fooled by cinnamon buns). We need intuitions and empathy to have a starting point when we talk ethics, but a purely intuitionist morality is inevitably going to be inconsistent and have poor motivations in extreme cases.
It’s obvious that you feel very strongly that adults having sex with children is unethical; you’ve made that abundantly clear. It doesn’t have to follow from that that you are correct, and it definitely doesn’t follow that we can’t consider the question, and I’m sorry to say that you seem to be under the impression that you can’t civilly discuss it with people who don’t share your opinion.
I don’t think anyone is going to read this thread and then find that, because a few people gave some thought to the issue, their qualms about raping children have evaporated. Deep-seated ethical misgivings, legal repercussions, practical concerns, and the simple fact that most people aren’t pedophiles would see to that; anyone who’d be convinced by this thread in favor of actually having sex with children was just looking for an excuse and would have found NAMBLA’s website eventually.
If you cannot stick to solid argumentation in favor of your view (which I suspect is the dominant one—it’s just fashionable in this thread to signal open-mindedness by being cryptic and oblique about the matter) and instead resort to what amounts to shrill, repetitive whining about how unethical we all are, you aren’t “contributing to the discussion” and you certainly are unlikely to make any progress in convincing this particular audience.
All of that having been said, the experiment you describe wouldn’t prove that the children aren’t “freely” agreeing to take the cookie that the adult wants them to take. You can prove that people are likely to incorrectly judge the length of lines when others state incorrect judgments aloud; that doesn’t mean they’re being coerced or that they aren’t free, it just means that humans are social animals. The opinions and wishes of the people around us are important factors in our choices, and it is deeply murky territory when those opinions and wishes turn into coercive power dynamics.