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You can’t explain why they can’t consent to sex without reference to natural law, but even a tiny bit of natural law renders it trivial.
Go find a pair of eight year olds of the appropriate genders and explain sex to them in graphic detail(please do not actually do this), then ask if they want to have some. The reaction will be shock and disgust. And it should be disgust, an eight year old who wants to have sex is mostly because there’s something wrong with him to begin with. It’s simply contrary to the nature of a little kid. The logic of the German cannibalism case would seem to apply if you take even a tiny bit of natural law into account.
I think the intersection between the set of people who adopt natural law and the set of people who adopt a consent-only sexual ethic is possibly the empty set.
As I've said before, consent-only sexual ethics are so wholly inadequate that in practice nearly everyone who tries to adopt one winds up inventing a convoluted justification for why some aspect or other of natural law is actually about consent.
++ Wherever consent based sexual questions get hard, the consent paradigm breaks down.
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I had my first boner at the ripe old age of 5 after watching a Bollywood dance number on TV. It certainly confused the fuck out of me, but soon enough I was humping my pillow because it felt good. I found out what sex was and fervently desired it well before I was at the legal age to have it.
At any rate, appeals to "natural law" would also rule out homosexuality, since the only thing worse than kissing girls to most young boys at that age would be kissing boys. Some might consider this a feature, not a bug, but I'm not one of them.
This is increasingly looking like a feature, not a bug. Homosexuality's very low heritability has disturbing implications.
Why the hell would anyone expect homosexuality to be particularly inheritable???
I'm hard-pressed to think of anything that could be less inheritable, maybe a spontaneous point mutation or chromosomal abnormality that kills embryos when they're a week old, or at least something that makes you sterile.
I expect, historically, that most gay men (and almost all lesbian women) sucked it up and coupled with the opposite gender and spat out a few kids, assuming their imagination could override their penises. Even then, it's almost certainly going to have a negative impact on fertility, especially for the men.
The "gay uncle" hypothesis is rather dubious, and not particularly supported last time I checked.
Bisexuality could potentially be adaptive, in terms of reducing intra-sexual tensions and bonding. But overwhelming preferences for the same sex? Very unlikely.
You can call this post-hoc if it pleases you, but I wasn't even around in the early 90s when people were fervently looking for (and failing to find) a "gay gene".
I'm too tired to do a proper crawl, and this is a topic where Wiki can be less reliable than you'd like but:
The last portion makes me dismiss what I assume are the terrible implications you're hinting at.
Not that I particularly care why people are gay, I find "Natural Law" to be a worthless concoction of mistaking commonality for objectivity (or at least "objectively good"), "applicable only when convenient to me" and the naturalistic fallacy.
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I recall finding erections very annoying and wondering how to prevent them when changing out of my pullup into cartoon print undies at a young enough age to not really be aware of what 'age' was. I'm well aware that that system works at very young ages and that eliciting a sexual response is possible well before puberty. And I'm also well aware that boys start having sexual urges well before adulthood, but desiring sex before puberty is generally a sign of sexual abuse/grooming.
Yes, natural law rules out little boys having sex with males as well as with females. I'm not sure how that's a strike against it. You can make a natural law argument against adult homosexuality, and that is the one that's generally made, but I haven't made it in this case.
Since my head is crammed full of minutiae for upcoming exams, I happen to know that the average age of puberty for boys in the UK is 12, but the threshold for which puberty is "normal" is 9 years there.
I doubt you had that latter value in mind, but it's still true.
For what it's worth, I think giving much credence to "natural law" for its own sake is incredibly stupid, and even those who appeal to it when convenient shy away from endorsing all that it implies, generalizing to the principle that the conditions and norms which were nigh universal throughout human history are thus inherently desirable. You don't see them advocating for 50% infant mortality rates.
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Show off!
Did you, though? In America, we have this weird legal duality wherein sex isn't illegal so long as you and the partner are both below the age of majority or both above. Normal caveats about state by state variation and allowances for 17/18 or 365 days age difference limits.
I'm not sure I can think of another activity like this. What is something else that's legal to do with other minors, but not when crossing the minor-age of majority threshold?
To be CRYSTAL clear: I am totally in favor of maintaining these age of majority laws and am zero percent consent-only in sexual ethics. The Trans movement, beyond its anti-scientific stance, has insane flirtations with the "minor attracted persons" predators.
I did show it off to my parents, as I was gravely concerned by the new turpidity of an organ I'd only ever used for pissing. Sadly I can't recall their reaction, heh.
In India? Absolutely:
This isn't really enforced all that often, usually, it's a threat applied by the parents of two horny teens to stop them from engaging in such non-sanskari* activities when they should be studying for the all important NEET exams 🙏. If the cops do get involved, unless one of the parties has some serious political pull, the degree of enforcement involves raking the boy over the coals for a bit, maybe a bit of slapping. I've never heard of a girl be prosecuted for this, regardless of what the law says. In more rural areas, getting married before the age of 18 is common enough, and nobody gives a shit.
But, according to the letter of the law, my pining for the hot MILFs I saw outside my school when I was what, 12? constitutes an urge to commit rape. Wouldn't have been me dragging them to court, if they'd been so kind as to oblige.
*roughly translatable to something that offends social sensibilities or cultural orthodoxy.
Oh God, that reminds me of the first time I got an inconvenient erection. I was 8 or 9 and my brother was 11 or 12 and I was getting dressed because our family was hosting a barbecue. I'd just finished putting my shoes on when my brother came into my room sporting a pants teepee and a look of confusion. It was something he'd just learned about in school - "a totally natural thing called an erection, and your penis does it so you can have sex with a lady." Since I read encyclopaedias for fun, he figured I would know what to do about it. He was mistaken.
"Is there a lady you are going to have sex with?" I asked, although I already knew the answer. I started thinking more intently about it, when suddenly our problems multiplied - now my pants were tenting too! Like all good farce it didn't stop there though - my mum's voice sang out down the hallway, our guests had arrived! We both froze for a second before I realised what to do - the teacher said it was totally natural right? So it's only a big deal to us because we've never seen it before!
We did absolutely nothing, and walked out into the crowd of guests both sporting massive erections, and didn't even notice how everyone gawped at us with eyes like dinner plates and desperately leaned away from us when we tried to hug them. Our dad, for reasons known only to him, waited until we'd made everyone present uncomfortable before taking us aside and explaining a few things.
That's some grade A Wagyu levels of cringe! If it's any consolation, I'm sure it hurt the onlookers far more than it did you haha.
I'd attribute this to the still insufficiently explored neurological process seen after paternity that makes dads suddenly far more fond of groan-inducing jokes, bad puns*, and gives them a keen sense of schadenfreude where they can reasonably expect the momentary discomfort won't actually harm their offspring.
*I can only pray that I haven't ever knocked up an ex who then hid it from me, because the former two are already well established.
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I did not know that about Indian law.
Continue fighting for freedom boners, brother.
Don't take Indian law too seriously, we Indians certainly don't!
I'll fly the flag at full mast, in every sense of the term ;)
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