Pedophilia - The Next Taboo To Fall?

[Cow Poke]

I'm all for disagreement, I'm just against hate speech. I would be happy arguing about whether taxes should be high or low, whether god exists, how objective morality works etc until the cows come home. That's disagreement. I love disagreement. I did a degree in philosophy solely because I love discussing and disagreeing with people over obscure topics.

But hate speech is when you select out a historically-disliked minority group and start spreading nasty rumors about them and making nasty claims about them. It's the use of negative claims to demonize a whole group based on an alleged behavior being common among them. Hate speech is always personal in a way that disagreement isn't, because it's always specifically about a group of people (here gay people/activists) who are being demonized by whatever method (here a claim that they support pedophilia) - it is not a dispassionate discussion of ideas (eg like "what are the pros and cons of lowering the age of consent from 18 to 15?" would be) but about insinuations, insults and slanders of a particular group of people. In many Western countries hate speech is illegal, and I support it being illegal.

So, yes, if I were to ever run a forum, hate speech would certainly be banned

Wait, aren't you the guy who was bitterly complaining about the rules?

(and it would presumably legally have to be due to the laws of my country, I would have no choice in the matter and could be potentially prosecuted if I didn't ban it), and thus I would almost certainly mod a post like Rogue's which has crossed the line into hate speech. So if your suggestion is "let's CLEANSE THE INTERNET" of hate-speech... well, yes, that's one of the things hate speech laws try to do.

Wow... so, like "the victor gets to write the history", um.... whichever party is dominant can simply decide that the other side's "freedom of speech" is all hate speech, and have all the dissidents locked up.

Hate speech?

[Starlight]

I've gone back and forth on where I stand on hate speech laws but at this point I tend to be against them.

For a long while I didn't really understand why hate speech laws were necessary or what the motivation behind them was. But I've come to realize that certain groups have been pretty viciously victimized over the years, and can see a legitimate need to stop people saying nasty stuff about them and inciting others against them. Given we protect women from sexual harassment, it seems to me to make sense to equally protect black and gay people from the forms of harassment they experience as well.

I've already seen them used as a blunt tool against religion and I expect that to continue.

This comment makes me smile wryly, because defenses on the grounds of religion are often built into hate-speech laws. I always find that very ironic. It's like saying "it's illegal to be too nasty, but we recognize that religious people can't live up to the same moral standard as everyone else, so we'll set a lower bar for them and allow them to be really nasty."

So, for example, if a publisher were to publish a book that said some of the sorts of things the bible says, they would get pinged for hate speech violations. But if they publish the bible, that's fine, because it's "religious". That always makes me go when I think about it. Gay actor Sir Ian McKellen, for example, is known for regularly ripping a couple of pages out of leviticus in every hotel bible he encounters, because he finds it too offensive.

Obviously religious people are the most motivated when it comes to willful nastiness towards certain groups in the present because they feel their religion tells them to, so they naturally tend to get pinged for it the most, even despite the built-in protections that the laws often offer them.

Having said that, If I ran a forum, I would have rules against it.

[Starlight]

Wait, aren't you the guy who was bitterly complaining about the rules?

Nope. I was the guy saying you guys were obsessed with rules. If I ran a forum, hate-speech and harassment would probably be the only two things I would ever mod people for, and I would be legally required to do so in both instances.

Wow... so, like "the victor gets to write the history", um.... whichever party is dominant can simply decide that the other side's "freedom of speech" is all hate speech, and have all the dissidents locked up.

That doesn't really make sense. Given the definition of hate-speech, the courts decide what individual instances count and what don't. "Whichever party is dominant" doesn't get to decide. I guess the dominant party could pass a random law to put all their opposition in jail... that's certainly been done before in various less-than-democratic countries, but that's got nothing much to do with hate-speech.

Hate speech?

the ability to criticize the current government. That's the key element of political speech, which absolutely must be in place for any democracy to function properly. If the government ever penalizes a citizen for criticizing the government, then there's no longer free speech. However, if a citizen ever starts being too nasty to another citizen - e.g. hitting, stealing, punching, harassing, slandering, raping etc - the government has a duty to intervene to protect the victim. That's where hate-speech comes in - it's the government protecting minority groups from people being nasty to them.

A comedian once described it as "punching down versus punching up": Critiquing those who are more powerful than you ('punching up' with your comedy) is always legitimate - they can take it, they're valid targets for comedy, and it serves a useful democratic political purpose to question those in power; whereas any nastiness or comedy at the expense of those who are less powerful than you or oppressed ('punching down' with your comedy) is never legitimate - you're just a bad person if you're trying to make their already-difficult lives even more difficult by mocking them.

[Jedidiah]

Large eyes, especially, are pretty attractive and since they don't really grow smaller younger people are going to express neonate features men find attractive. Slender frames, softer skin, no wrinkles. Our country's perception of feminine beauty is ridiculously focused on looking youthful

I would modify that to say that our public perception of feminine beauty is pathetically, and pathologically, focused on looking youthful.

[Cow Poke]

Nope. I was the guy saying you guys were obsessed with rules.

Not any more than I am 'obsessed' with stop signs or speed limits.

[Jedidiah]

It always freaks me out when I think "how did anyone ever find out anything before the internet?" I'm just a tad too young to have ever really tried to seriously research anything before the internet was around. But, yeah, people back then relied on the TV news and the newspaper to tell them what they needed to know, and if they wanted any better answers they had grab the encyclopedia off the shelf or down to the local library and read books. Knowing things like "so what is this so-called new 'nambla' organisation, and what does it do or stand for?" simply wasn't a question that was answerable for them.

It must have been weird living before the internet, back in the stone age.

We had libraries. Was not so very hard.

[Cow Poke]

We had libraries. Was not so very hard.

We had liberries. Until Mrs Johnson set us straight in the 3rd grade. THEN we had libraries.

[Jaecp]

How would a library have helped someone in 1978 with an organization that started in 1978?

[Tassman]

Large eyes, especially, are pretty attractive and since they don't really grow smaller younger people are going to express neonate features men find attractive. Slender frames, softer skin, no wrinkles. Our country's perception of feminine beauty is ridiculously focused on looking youthful

Yes, all of that but the reason gender is not so important for pedophiles as it is for us is, I think, that they're also attracted to a child's vulnerability, innocence and purity.

[Jaecp]

Yes, all of that but the reason gender is not so important for pedophiles as it is for us is, I think, that they're also attracted to a child's vulnerability, innocence and purity.

Oh, yes, absolutely. I was piggybacking off of someone else mentioning feminine features so I focused purely on the physical! Thanks dude

[HumbleThinker]

But that it not a scientific argument, it is a moral and emotional argument. Why even consider consent? So what if the child can not consent? Science does not tell us if acting against consent is wrong. I mean we find rape in the animal kingdom. Quite natural.

I think we are getting a few details of the argument mashed together here. The research on child psychology and power dynamics is about providing evidence for an acceptable age of consent. This sort of research accepts that consent is the law and isn't trying to support it. I'm sure if we wanted to, we could find research that shows the negative effects of non-consensual sex in both children and adults, so that would be evidence supporting the maintenance of the legal concept of consent. And while individuals' reactions to rape and pedophilia would be emotional and moral arguments, the majority's position on the issues in a democracy constitutes a legal argument. I'm not sure what to categorize this under except perhaps pragmatic, but there is the argument that without consent laws, and government protection of basic rights in general, we would fall into a Hobbsean "state of nature" or otherwise undermine the maximization of the potential of our citizens and thus our society.

Again, there of course can and should be moral arguments brought to bare on any position, but history seems to show that it is not wise to make laws solely on moral arguments. Particularly since we've yet to establish an objective morality that can be demonstrated to all. Given that, moral arguments are simply another class of subjective arguments that can't override other subjective arguments by themselves. It's simply necessary in a democracy to diffuse the power of any one class of argument so that we are not simply making law on what the majority feels about an issue based solely on one class of argument.

We also need to make sure we don't commit the naturalist fallacy of claiming that just because something is found in nature, then it is good. Something being found in nature would only mean that it is in some respect natural. Whether it's natural to our species is of course another question entirely.

[rogue06]

We had liberries. Until Mrs Johnson set us straight in the 3rd grade. THEN we had libraries.

In second grade when our teacher told us to line up to use the lavatory I was so excited expecting to see some place we could expect to conduct experiments and such (a laboratory). Imagine my disappoint. Although, in a way, I guess you could still conduct experiments of a sort there.

[rogue06]

Large eyes, especially, are pretty attractive and since they don't really grow smaller younger people are going to express neonate features men find attractive. Slender frames, softer skin, no wrinkles. Our country's perception of feminine beauty is ridiculously focused on looking youthful

I don't think it is just our country that sees youthful as attractive. Young women are the most likely to be most fertile meaning I think it is basic biology that causes them to be seen as the most attractive.

[seer]

I think we are getting a few details of the argument mashed together here. The research on child psychology and power dynamics is about providing evidence for an acceptable age of consent. This sort of research accepts that consent is the law and isn't trying to support it. I'm sure if we wanted to, we could find research that shows the negative effects of non-consensual sex in both children and adults, so that would be evidence supporting the maintenance of the legal concept of consent. And while individuals' reactions to rape and pedophilia would be emotional and moral arguments, the majority's position on the issues in a democracy constitutes a legal argument. I'm not sure what to categorize this under except perhaps pragmatic, but there is the argument that without consent laws, and government protection of basic rights in general, we would fall into a Hobbsean "state of nature" or otherwise undermine the maximization of the potential of our citizens and thus our society.

I think you missed my point. Whether to have age of consent laws in the first place (regardless of consequences) is not a scientific question, it is strictly a moral one.

[HumbleThinker]

I think you missed my point. Whether to have age of consent laws in the first place (regardless of consequences) is not a scientific question, it is strictly a moral one.

Ok, I wasn't sure which detail you were commenting on. Thanks for clarifying.

I think you may have inadvertently defined your position into being correct. If we aren't appealing to the consequences of an act, then we are inevitably going to be moralizing the issue as you claim. But those are precisely the kinds of decisions that history seems to show are potentially very problematic in my view. But appealing to the consequences of an act as part of determining whether it should be allowed or deemed illegal, as well as moral arguments, is exactly my position of how we should determine laws. If we take stealing for instance, we can look at the consequences of stealing, the consequences of the people allowing stealing to remain legal, and the consequences of making stealing illegal. Let me know if I didn't make my objection clear.