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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   4498 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 5, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I vote no because Epstein getting to indulge his sick desire is inherently bad. Whether or not the girl is better off or not from the exchange is immaterial.

Why is it inherently bad?

Because it is sick and perverted.

Why does that mean it's bad for it to be indulged?

It simply is. There is no point continuing to ask "but why?" This is what I mean by "inherent".

You may as well ask why is it bad to kill a person. "Because they don't want to be killed." Why does that matter? "Because that deprives them of more utility than you gain by doing the murder." Why is that bad? "It just is".

Sexual perversion is bad. Full stop. Every person knows it deep in their gut, even if they construct elaborate philosophical frameworks to obscure that truth from themselves.

Sexual perversion is bad. Full stop.

Absolutely; miscegenation was always self-evidently awful, disgusting, and against nature, despite the elaborate philosophical frameworks we have constructed to obscure that truth from ourselves.

Sex is not actually a big deal. Full stop. Every person knows it deep in their gut, even if they construct elaborate moral/religious frameworks to obscure that truth from themselves.

Which is mainly why those who subscribe the most to those frameworks are always primarily worried about the spectre of '70s sexuality coming back, even though the dominant model of sexuality encroaching on their moral frameworks and worldviews is quite a bit different these days.

It is certainly self-evident to me that there are certain groups that have strong incentives to equate sex they don't like to murder; whether that equation has any factual basis, on the other hand, is a different story entirely.

Sexual perversion is bad. Full stop. Every person knows it deep in their gut, even if they construct elaborate philosophical frameworks to obscure that truth from themselves.

Which bit are you declaring to be against human nature? I can see three specific possibilities here.

  1. 14-year-olds fucking.
  2. Specifically older people fucking 14-year-olds.
  3. Prostitution.

#1 is very, very obviously not a self-evident wrong. AoC of 15+ is a recent innovation, and still isn't a worldwide thing. #2 also seems a fairly common practice in history with few objections. You can make the argument in the case of #3, I'll admit; revulsion for it does seem extremely widespread, even if I'd question whether that should inform law.

Sexual perversion is bad. Full stop. Every person knows it deep in their gut, even if they construct elaborate philosophical frameworks to obscure that truth from themselves.

This is about as clean a violation of the "consensus building" rule as it gets. Please don't do that.

Would "I hold this truth to be self-evident" be an acceptable formulation?

I certainly don’t find that truth to be self-evident.

Would "I hold this truth to be self-evident" be an acceptable formulation?

I mean, more or less; so long as you hedge it about with sufficient epistemically humble caveats about it being your own view, ideally with some bits of evidence (even anecdotal!) for why it is your view, pretty well any substantive position is permissibly expressed here. "I honestly believe that every person knows this deep in their gut, and here are some reasons why" is a much better post than "Every person knows it, that's just how it is." One reason why it is a better post is that you are in an ideal position to report your own views; you are much less ideally situated to make sweeping reports concerning what "every person knows." That's an invitation to bad (low effort) responses like "Well, I don't know that, so you're wrong," which is a much less productive discussion than "our experiences of the world do not seem to align, so perhaps we can learn something from one another."

Getting a paper cut is also bad, but I'd still get one for $10 million.

Your morality is evil in that is denies someone of 10M USD because you feel icky about the entire thing.

Your morality is evil because it allows billionaires to rape child prostitutes without consequence.

She consented therefore it isn't rape by defnition.

She's 14 and therefore below the age of consent and therefore sex with her by an adult is rape by definition.

That depends on which country you are in.

If she was 4 then it would be much more obviously evil. 14 is too close to 15 (most common global aoc) for 10M usd not to muddy the picture. I'm sure there are 15 year olds with the mental age of 12. Or 18 year olds with the mental age of 16.

No, money doesn't muddy the picture. It makes it worse.

Prostitution is worse than normal sex. Child prostitution is worse than normal statutory rape.

The use of money and power to achieve immoral ends is itself immoral.

Apart from societal judgment, why is prostitution any worse than normal sex?

If your world model doesn't take into account the positive utility of millions of dollars and you are incomprehensible of even conceiving the notion that money would matter at all, then just thank your God you never had to REALLY think about money and no one in your immediate vicinity had to make such choices. It's a wonderful level of naivete that only a first-worlder can AFFORD to live with.

If we think there is a large moral benefit to poor people getting millions of dollars from rich people, that is an argument for greater levels of taxation and redistribution, not child prostitution.

Keeping your facts the same, your arguments are an apology for child sexual abuse.

Children cannot give consent.

In the myriad of child sexual abuse cases that have been reported in the news, statuary rape is certainly among them.

Are you of the opinion that the morality of statutory rape is contingent on monetary compensation to the victims?

child sexual abuse

I'm going to come out and say this: when debating with opponents of Anglospheric AoC, this term currently obscures considerably more than it illuminates.

The reason is that it is defined in two ways:

  1. legally, as sex with children under the age of 16-18 depending on jurisdiction and context
  2. etymologically, as sex with children that is bad ("abuse")

But the people you are arguing with are claiming that these two things do not coincide! We believe that things satisfying #1 do not necessarily satisfy #2. So the use of this term essentially assumes the falsehood of our claims.

Are you of the opinion that the morality of statutory rape is contingent on monetary compensation to the victims?

I can't speak for others, of course, but I'm of the opinion that the morality of statutory rape is for the most part dependent on whether it's consensual - i.e., whether or not it's "real" rape. The monetary compensation is not super-relevant; I would consider it morally wrong, for instance, to rape a screaming/struggling 14-year-old and then pay him/her $10,000,000, and I would consider it NBD to have consensual sex with a 14-year-old without money changing hands. The only relevance here of the $10,000,000 is that people will consent to many more things for $10,000,000 payment than for $0.

Children cannot give consent.

I am so incredibly disillusioned by the persistent poor use of language on this topic and the fact that the only tool in the toolbox for the current Morality Police is consent. I've read the professional philosophers on the topic, and once you see it, this sort of base simplification is big oof.

The first basic classification is whether you mean, "Children cannot give factual consent," or, "Children cannot give legal consent." If it's the latter, then the response is simply not relevant to these sorts of hypotheticals about morality. If it's the former, then huge questions remain. Why can't they? What does factually consenting consist of? What capacity do they lack that prevents them from doing so? Why is this particular use of "consent" so different from many other areas where we might use the term "consent" to mean things that everyone agrees a child would be capable of doing? What's the difference?

Now, we could have rich discussions on these questions. I don't know that I personally think they can all be answered in a simple way that comes to the result that you might like, not because I think that child sex is good, but more because I think the "consent only" sexual ethic is probably wrong. But we basically never even get to the meaningful questions, because this oversimplification is viewed as an atomic first principle. It's just a thought-terminating slogan that kills any meaningful progress rather than elucidating anything interesting.

This is why I also think that Hanania's efforts are more low-effort trolling unless he follows it up with something that really pokes people to consider how this question really rips raw their deficient conception of a sexual ethic.

My thinking was both legal and factual, if I understand you correctly. I do not think a 14 year-old is mature enough and understands the social consequences to consent to sexual activity with an adult, simply because of their inexperience. Even if the adult they is a billionaire in exchange for payment. This is not to say younger person could not agree to partake in the activity, but the difference in age and social stature on the part of the child renders any of their agreement to be coerced and manipulated.

By "consent" you mean "consent (correctly)", which means you're independently judging there's a non-consent reason the child shouldn't be having sex, which is the reason the child shouldn't have sex. Why not just say '14 year olds shouldn't have sex with 18 year olds for '? Why say they 'can't consent'?

I do not think a 14 year-old is mature enough and understands the social consequences to consent to sexual activity with an adult, simply because of their inexperience.

And I don't think black people are mature enough and understand the social consequences to consent to sexual activity with a white person (or other black people), especially because they commit a lot more sexual crime than the average white person (and crime in general, suggesting a lack of impulse control, understanding of social consequences, and general maturity), and have lower IQs than the average teenager. Allowing them to experience such a powerful stimulus like sex, or have someone else use them to access such, is therefore bad for them.

If we're going to start drawing lines on "social consequences" and "maturity" you ultimately run into the problem where there are objectively better lines to draw on than mere age- so what's different here other than "society now believes it's more proper to discriminate based on age rather than race when it comes to what we think they're capable of [consenting to]"?

(Of course, I'm sure our modern phrenology asserting the subhumanity of the under-25 set is totally correct this time.)

I do not think a 14 year-old is mature enough and understands the social consequences to consent to sexual activity with an adult, simply because of their inexperience.

Ah, something like the "knowledge" prong in Westen's parlance. So, then, suppose that we instituted a top tier sexual education to help children understand the social consequence of consent to sexual activity with an adult. Would that make it fine?

This is not to say younger person could not agree to partake in the activity, but the difference in age and social stature on the part of the child renders any of their agreement to be coerced and manipulated.

...and we've taken a massive left turn, actually. This is a totally different and contradictory basis on which to make the claim. It sort of also comes from nowhere. We basically never say that age/social stature differences inherently make agreements coerced/manipulated, invalidating consent. We don't even have to go to hypotheticals about Taylor Swift wanting to have sex with someone... though we could; how could a "normal" person possibly consent to having sex with Taylor Swift, given her immense social stature advantage? This sort of reasoning kills a normal person's ability to consent to the transaction of buying a ticket to a Taylor Swift concert! How could they possibly consent, given the massive different in social stature?!

Instead of bringing up Taylor Swift you should have brought up R. Kelly he demonstrates your point better.

The great part about realizing that your position is obscenely over-inclusive is that I can pick an example which falls within your over-inclusive claims but is optimally contrary to your intuitions. Therefore, let's go with Taylor Swift. Unless you'd like to introduce some form of distinction that you didn't have before which would be a good theoretical reason why Taylor Swift doesn't count.

I don't see how the 'quality' of person involved is a rebuttal to my argument. I said it was based on age. The difference in age for any adult and a fourteen year-old nullifies any idea of consent on the side of the child. Children who don't have jobs, can't drive and are subject to curfew are open to sexual coercion from any adult.

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Replace 'billionaire' or 'Taylor Swift' with gym coach, music teacher or religious leader, I still think the age and status difference between a child and an adult makes such an agreement coercive.

Whelp, are you going to tell them all that they can't go see T-Swizzle's new tour, or am I going to have to?

Are you of the opinion that the morality of statutory rape is contingent on monetary compensation to the victims?

Very much yes. If its worse to rape someone AND steal from them. It's better to rape someone and pay them. The rest of it is just algebra.

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