Whether children can consent or not to sex is a psychological fact. Just as whether a pig can consent or not to being eaten is a biological fact.
Facts may have ethical implications (and thus ethical relevance which is why your question above is confused). The ability to give consent is not obviously and immediately connected with an specific ethical conclusion, because you can argue that it is ethical to eat a pig even though they cannot give consent. To argue that sex with children is wrong, because they cannot give consent, you need to add the ethical argument that sex without consent is unethical.
Whether children can consent or not to sex is a psychological fact.
I’m really surprised you’d claim that. Even if you could propose an experiment that you think would settle this question of fact, it’s far from clear that everyone would agree that your experiment settled it. To me it’s obvious that whether or not we consider that a given act from a given person counts as consent to something is in large part a question of values, not of fact.
Yes, we do seem to disagree. I think that “ability to do X” is factual. However, I suspect there is ambiguity in what “consent” means, and there is room for inserting values there. But I hold my position, because I think that if you define consent in a meaningful way, kids cannot do that. (For example, if you say consent means to just articulate a set of words, I will gladly abandon the word “consent” for what I do mean.)
I would define consent as (a) understanding what you are agreeing to and (b) freely agreeing.
Psychology is a soft science, surely. Which is why I felt more comfortable quoting an authority in psychology than asserting my own beliefs: I hardly know what counts as evidence or good epistemology in psychology. However, I could think of some experiments to demonstrate that children don’t understand and are not freely agreeing. For example, for the latter experiment, first ascertain what the children’s real preferences are, say, for a specific type of cookie. Then demonstrate that if an adult indicates which cookie choice will make them happy, the kid will choose the adult’s choice at a rate proportional to the perceived power imbalance and inversely proportional to their perceived environmental safety.
To be clear, I think that adult-child sex is extremely unethical.
I am motivated to contribute to this discussion, because I hope I may be able to encourage rational people to adopt a similar view on adult-child sex. However, I am not sure it is emotionally safe or that it would be effective to participate. Certain attitudes and comments on this thread make me wonder if any argument for a position that is not counter conventional wisdom will be summarily dismissed. In other words, there seems to be evidence that “you guys” are not unbiased about this.
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.
It may be even more surprising to you that I don’t think inability to give consent is a strong argument for why adult-child sex is unethical. However, to be clear, I think that adult-child sex is extremely unethical.
My personal pet peeve in this discussion is that nobody is defining precisely what “adult” and “child” mean.
Teenagers these days are getting thrown in jail (and given lifetime “sex offender” labels) for having consensual sex on the wrong side of arbitrary age lines that vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
So, my empathy on this subject is much more solidly with them, and that’s the ethics I’m personally concerned with in this discussion. We may not be able to prevent all the harm that takes place from manipulation and abuse, but I’d like to see some improvement for the innocents who get caught in the crossfire.
agreed. A consequentialist, however, would not necessarily buy this—weighing the harm to innocents on the border versus harm to children nowhere near the border might well favor keeping things as they are. Not that I buy that justification.
Whether children can consent or not to sex is a psychological fact. Just as whether a pig can consent or not to being eaten is a biological fact.
Facts may have ethical implications (and thus ethical relevance which is why your question above is confused). The ability to give consent is not obviously and immediately connected with an specific ethical conclusion, because you can argue that it is ethical to eat a pig even though they cannot give consent. To argue that sex with children is wrong, because they cannot give consent, you need to add the ethical argument that sex without consent is unethical.
I’m really surprised you’d claim that. Even if you could propose an experiment that you think would settle this question of fact, it’s far from clear that everyone would agree that your experiment settled it. To me it’s obvious that whether or not we consider that a given act from a given person counts as consent to something is in large part a question of values, not of fact.
Yes, we do seem to disagree. I think that “ability to do X” is factual. However, I suspect there is ambiguity in what “consent” means, and there is room for inserting values there. But I hold my position, because I think that if you define consent in a meaningful way, kids cannot do that. (For example, if you say consent means to just articulate a set of words, I will gladly abandon the word “consent” for what I do mean.)
I would define consent as (a) understanding what you are agreeing to and (b) freely agreeing.
Psychology is a soft science, surely. Which is why I felt more comfortable quoting an authority in psychology than asserting my own beliefs: I hardly know what counts as evidence or good epistemology in psychology. However, I could think of some experiments to demonstrate that children don’t understand and are not freely agreeing. For example, for the latter experiment, first ascertain what the children’s real preferences are, say, for a specific type of cookie. Then demonstrate that if an adult indicates which cookie choice will make them happy, the kid will choose the adult’s choice at a rate proportional to the perceived power imbalance and inversely proportional to their perceived environmental safety.
To be clear, I think that adult-child sex is extremely unethical.
I am motivated to contribute to this discussion, because I hope I may be able to encourage rational people to adopt a similar view on adult-child sex. However, I am not sure it is emotionally safe or that it would be effective to participate. Certain attitudes and comments on this thread make me wonder if any argument for a position that is not counter conventional wisdom will be summarily dismissed. In other words, there seems to be evidence that “you guys” are not unbiased about this.
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.
My personal pet peeve in this discussion is that nobody is defining precisely what “adult” and “child” mean.
Teenagers these days are getting thrown in jail (and given lifetime “sex offender” labels) for having consensual sex on the wrong side of arbitrary age lines that vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
So, my empathy on this subject is much more solidly with them, and that’s the ethics I’m personally concerned with in this discussion. We may not be able to prevent all the harm that takes place from manipulation and abuse, but I’d like to see some improvement for the innocents who get caught in the crossfire.
agreed. A consequentialist, however, would not necessarily buy this—weighing the harm to innocents on the border versus harm to children nowhere near the border might well favor keeping things as they are. Not that I buy that justification.