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Ah, well, then I'm sure you have some other, non-consent reason why children can't have sex. That's fair enough, but it's a bit surprising considering your comment that I responded to. There, it seemed like the pertinent question (which is the only question to the consent-only folks) was about consent, which still leaves open the question, "Why not?"
EDIT: To add one little remark, consent-only is the current dogmatic position, and you may already be an X-ophobe if you don't ascribe to a consent-only sexual ethic.
Your confusion seems to be because you are missing the distinction between "inability to consent is a sufficient reason for children not to have sex" with "lack of consent is a necessary condition for sex to be wrong." It may help you to do some work on pen-and-paper using Venn diagrams: for example, you see how "All non-consensual sex is wrong sex" is logically distinct from "All wrong sex is non-consensual sex."
Similarly, that consent is one pertinent question in sexual ethics doesn't imply that it's the only question.
I also suspect that even many people who sometimes say, "As long as it's consensual, it's fine," actually make exceptions for things like "power dynamics" and "developing bad habits," but I'm not interested in rationally reconstructing their views.
IME, in these cases, the definition of "consent" is gerrymandered to exclude them. It's not much of an additional step to add more requirements of what counts as "consent" on top of the existing age cutoffs. I kinda see it as CICO weight loss. You can talk about all the tiny little details and factors, but ultimately, it comes down to how those factors influence CICO for determining weight loss. Likewise, you can talk about all the other factors relating to sex that's bad, but ultimately, these factors only count inasmuch as they affect the consent calculation.
Yes, I think this is one of the problems with people thinking they believe, "As long as it's consensual, it's fine," without actually believing that: "consent" gets gerrymandered in this real ways. Liberals (as a movement) did a similar inflation with "justice": if you think that the state should not direct society, but merely address injustices, yet you're really more of a social democrat, then you start talking about "social justice" meaning redistribution of income etc.
Utilitarianism can also get pretty silly doing the same sort of thing.
It's almost like a sort of expansion principle: try to push too much ethical gas into one container (ethical principle) and that container gets expanded by the pressure. It's somewhat of a blessing, insofar as it limits the extent to which many people follow through on the implications of these narrow views. Then you get a really rigorous thinker like Peter Singer, who takes such a view seriously and thinks it through, and the pearl clutching from the gerrymanderers begins...
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Not at all. I understand this distinction perfectly well. Nevertheless, you said:
I'm asking you why this is. Your confusion seems to be that you can't bring yourself to answer the question at hand.
You mean, why can't children and animals consent to acts they lack the mental capacity to understand?
Before you ask, no, I don't think that retarded adults with childlike levels of understanding of sex can consent to sex. Nor do I think that children can consent to e.g. "have parts of their body hacked off, and keep it all secret from their parents!" So neither of the reductios you have mentioned so far are worrying for me, but as I've indicated, I'm probably not the type of person you were addressing above, which was why I was curious as to whether you were addressing me when you used "you" or you were using it in some hypothetical/indirect sense/whatever.
Ok, what is the nature of the mental capacity that they are lacking? Is there something about sex that requires a different type of mental capacity than what is required for children to consent to the variety of other things that they can consent to? If so, what is that nature of that difference, and what are the underlying reasons for why they are lacking one but not the other? Can you help explain the theoretical mechanism to me and to the professional philosophers who have written entire books on this topic, but seem to have just missed the super simple and super obvious way of doing this?
(Before you ask, no, at least Wertheimer didn't think that retarded adults with childlike levels of understanding could consent to sex, either. I'm not immediately recalling off hand Westen's position on this. In any event, Wertheimer again grounded this not in any theoretical explanation of the nature of the mental capacity that was missing. He again simply grounded it in an empirical argument, that he thinks that such people tend to be, on net, harmed by such sex. Moreover, he said that this case was more concerning to him than the case of youth, because while youth tend to grow up, we're essentially foreclosing the possibility of sex for retarded people, ever, regardless of what other importance it might have. Note that this concern is again based on considerations other than a theoretical explanation of consent and capacity, because fundamentally, this area is a big gaping hole in the project of a consent-only sexual ethic. It simply has not been explained.)
Not sure what you mean by "nature" here. Do you deny that children, in general, have weaker abilities to understand the implications of their decisions than adults, in general?
Yes, probably quite a lot of things, but one major respect (which I alluded to with the example of becoming a heroin addict, and which I later suggested with the example of transgender interventions on kids) is the gravity and breadth of the moral implications. A child consenting to buying sweets without parental supervision is a less serious decision than a child choosing to have sex. This is one reason why parents, as a general rule, should have a lot of social and legal authority over children. Why doesn't that authority extend to choosing to let (or require) children have sex, without the child's consent? That's a good example of where a consent-only ethics (or legal doctrine) falls short and something like a harm or corruption principle does work.
(1) There's no reason to expect it to be super simple and super obvious.
(2) In many (all?) of those professional philosophers, they have various background moral beliefs that (a) lead to implications they don't want regarding pedophilia/pederasty/etc., but (b) they'd rather hold onto at least most of them. You correctly alluded to some examples, e.g. their desire to avoid being X-ophobic or (perhaps worse for some people) being regarded as X-ophobic. As you might have guessed from my presence on here or my comments on how I find male homosexuality physically disgusting, I'm less worried about that than a lot of people.
(3) Professional ethicists are seeking a level of rigour that is neither required for law, nor that I expect from my own moral beliefs. It's akin to how I don't need to know professional physics or engineering to do DIY. If you're aspiring to that level of rigour, then great; I only hope you don't have better things to do with your time than working out really carefully why it's wrong to have sex with children.
Of course not. But what aspect of that is relevant to make the distinction below? They still can surely consent to all sorts of things, even having generally weaker understanding.
Expand on this. I'm considering Activity X, and I want to know about the gravity and breadth of the moral implications. How do I check where it falls? How do I connect this to the particular aspect of the weaker ability that you identified in the above question?
Are you aware that, as I mentioned in the linked comment far above, many people think that sex is like tennis? It's just a fun activity that two people choose to do, expecting to have a little bit of a good time, and then nothing interesting follows from it. They don't think there's any gravity to it, and certainly not any breadth of any moral implications... at least not to anyone who isn't a sex-negative prude (probably due to religious superstition). How would you perform the gravity and breadth of moral implications analysis in your explanation to them?
Of course, I am pleased that you do not hold a consent-only sexual ethic. Of course, that does also open up the question of whether there are other areas that do not abide by a consent-only sexual ethic. It is truly a shame that you will be a cancelled bigot as soon as this is found out.
I only hope that the two of us can figure out a really careful, theoretically-solid reason for this, preferably within a consent-only framework, because without it, when we tell the new social revolution that children can't consent to sex, they're going to ask why not, and then they're going to shun us for not having an answer and for being a bunch of outdated bigots (probably clinging to some religion or something).
Agreed, but obviously not everything is beyond a child's understanding.
That's hard to answer in the abstract, because different activities have different moral aspects. I think that value pluralism is a plausible explanation of why moral issues can be so complicated, and (almost?) any moral principle seems to be riddled with contextual defeaters. However, there are some recurring aspects. One of them, which might suggest somewhat of a convergence with a "harm to children is the (main?) reason to think that pedophilia is wrong" is that the harms involved in making a bad decision.
Analogously, think about someone who is blind drunk, staggering back from a nightclub on their own. Should they be able to buy a greasy, fatty, sugary kebab? Well, there's some potential harm to their health, but they can plausibly comprehend that, if they're able to e.g. exchange the cash. Should they be able to hand over all their assets to support the charitable works of the Church of Latter Day Suckers in a legally binding and irrevocable contract? Presumably not, that's a level of commitment and potential harm that's beyond their capacity in that context.
That's a tough one, I think that's what a lot of people say, but not what they actually believe. So I'd start by talking with them about their own personal sexual choices and emotional history. Then I'd probably get slapped in the face...
There is a funny irony here: some (mentally able) adults, especially among the young, the unwise, or the unconservative, don't have a much better understanding of sex than children, yet they can still consent to sex. However, (a) edge cases make bad laws and (b) I don't claim that a sophisticated understanding of sex is required for consent, only a stronger one than children can attain.
Depends on the circles. I was teaching about labour exploitation and sex in a class not long ago; it was the left-wing students (albeit not Americans and not liberals) who almost all found it quite easy to reject a consent-only view in both areas. I also know a lot of left-wing academics and I'm not sure that any of them think that consent is all there is to sexual ethics, though I admit I haven't talked with them a lot about it for years (if ever).
Not sure about that. Eugenics wasn't killed off by carefully reasoned arguments, nor did the careful reasoning of e.g. James Fitzjames Stephens do anything significant against the influence of John Stuart Mill's muddled views and the rise of social liberalism. Outside of the sciences (Newton's Principia and Darwin's Origins are masterpieces of thoroughness; they were rightly once included in some Great Books courses) I struggle to think of many books that were both theoretically solid and very influential in the course of history.
Rigorous arguments are great and I'm glad that people are developing them, but I think that their historical influence is limited, for both good and ill.
Agreed. But how do we know that something is or is not?
Substance use is a very tricky part of both Westen and Wertheimer. Like, suuuper tricky. Most people agree on something akin to "blind drunk" or unconscious. But I hardly think children can be analogized to that. When it comes to lower levels of intoxication, it's really difficult. (I don't have my copy of Westen handy, but Wertheimer was honestly a bit better at trying on a few of these, to my recollection, whereas Westen somewhat more often just fell back on a descriptive, "Here is what different legal regimes do in practice, and here is some vocabulary about how we can describe some of the conceptual differences.")
One commercial analog given is gambling and drinking in a casino. No one argues that drinking and gambling (possibly more than you intended to, on both counts) may result in significant potential harm, but basically no one thinks that it should be flatly prohibited or that gambling losses should be recoverable if intoxicated, at least not until one reaches a pretty extreme state1. He thinks this is partially justified because the gamblers, themselves, would prefer this rule to how the world would be in the counterfactual world. Like, just that there might be some harms, or that they might be significant, isn't really connected in any solid way. I don't think people actually take a measure of the harm that might befall a child who is, say, playing hockey or rock climbing (which could include, ya know, death), and determine that that level of potential harm is just flatly above some threshold, categorically banning them from consenting to the activity.
Wertheimer again ends up grounding his reasoning here in something that isn't really "about" ability to consent. He contrasts two frat houses, one in which the members accept consent from a woman only when it is given before she starts drinking and one that will accept consent after she starts drinking (the former is analogized to a "tattoo parlor rule", while the latter is analogized to the gambling rule). Literally says:
So, like, uh, h-what? What has he even done here? It's kind of wild. It's not anything to do with their actual intoxication or mental abilities or anything. And of course, it's not anything to do with their specific regret/lack of regret for a particular action. For surely, every person would prefer the rule to be that they can legally take back every particular donation to the LDS that they regret, every particular gambling loss they incur, but keep every particular gambling gain, and of course have all the particular intoxicated sex that they don't regret. So, he ends with this awful mash of awfulness. It's certainly not anywhere nearly clear cut to tell us anything useful regarding anything about the mental capacities necessary to consent, on some hypothetical sliding scale of intoxication level, or how to understand how children would fall into this approach. That's probably why his attempt for children just completely went down the empirical route rather than even trying for any sort of real analogous reasoning here. Like, I just don't think you actually can reason analogously here at all, because they're just not the same sort of thing, and we have no theoretical mechanism linking them to each other or to anything about the gravity of sex or whatever.
Hot damn, as an aside, I checked to make sure I was remembering completely right that he did, indeed, immediately head for the empirical route for children, and he sure did. What I had forgotten was this doozy immediately thereafter:
This is what the claim will be. Again, you're just a regressive, sex-negative (probably religious) prude if you disagree.
LOL! Nah, tho. They're Aella-based and enlightened-pilled. They'll be as happy as all get out to describe how sex-positive they are about all the sex they chose to have. "Even the sex I kind of regret was good in its own way, and I'm glad to have had the choice," or whatever. See the NYT article that I linked in one of my comments that I linked way back up in our earlier conversation.
I mean, this is going to go very poorly for you. You've sort of given up the game that you can have the same level of understanding of sex (and presumably the gravity and breadth of any moral implications), but somehow, those children still can't attain some mystical additional "sophistication"?! Like, what? How does this even work? What religious magic is this?
Yeah, you have to work a bit to make them actually see the contradictions in their claims. Most of the time, people just shake their head with mood affiliation. But when it comes to serious politics and Supreme Court briefs, they will absolutely refuse to see the contradictions, akin to how they'll suddenly think that opinion polls settle biological science.
Fair enough. We might be doomed, you and I, regardless of whether we can actually complete this project. They're probably going to do what they're going to do, regardless of whether we actually have a rigorous argument that children can't consent. Mayyybe, it miiiight help, but probably they'll just find some way to ignore it or minimize it anyway. Of course, it doesn't help that their counter to, "Children can't consent," is something short and pithy like, "Why not? They consent to all sorts of stuff!" whereas our counter to their counter is, "Well see, if you understand this complicated rigorous argument that fixes all the prior issues with not being able to analogize this situation to intoxication and avoids falling into the trap of, and... and..." I guess we really just are doomed to the fate of being right (ya know, if we can fix all of the problems in the project, which I'm still not seeing yet) but ground under an unstoppable cultural force.
1 - Worth noting here briefly that I think prohibitions on children gambling are, and should be, based on reasoning other than that they "can't consent". But I admit that it would be easy for this issue to get complicated, and that it seems a bit disanalogous.
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