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MugaSofer comments on What truths are actually taboo? - Less Wrong
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That seems like an astoundingly arbitrary position. Good thing + good thing somehow equals bad thing?
Mind you, I'd say any argument that even tangentially endorses pedophilia - including all those arguments that are trivially wrong but filled with applause lights - is massively taboo.
I agree with the second part of your comment, as I've said.
Good thing + good thing? I don't think that using children for sexual pleasure is a "good thing" at all. It would be if we lived in a universe where the formula is pleasure + pleasure, but it obviously isn't. Do terms such as "meaningful consent" or "exploitation" have any relevance here?
Perhaps this example will help:
A pedophile lives in a holodeck and molests holographic children. Is this worse than a analogous situation involving holographic adults? Why?
Are the holographic people actually people (as defined by the Turing test/the generalized anti-zombie principle)?
No, sorry, that was what I meant to imply by "holodeck".
As for the actual mechanics of it, maybe it pulls data from parallel universes, maybe they're the puppets of a (sentient) AI (zombie-master hypothesis) or maybe consciousness is easier to fake than you might expect, so they run sophisticated chatbots certified by a nonperson predicate. Damned if I know.
It's basically an experience machine / catgirl volcano lair, is the idea. Only, y'know, icky.
In that case, it doesn't squick me much more if they're children than if they're adults. But then again, few of the examples in section “Emotion and Deontological Judgments” in this post squick me much, so I may be the wrong person to ask.
I think his fantasies are perverse and contrary to values I have about human autonomy, but I don't think the situation is significantly worse. His actions are not going to put a kid in therapy.
I also completely fail to see the relevance.
If children masturbating makes them feel good, and pedophiles feeling good about having sex with them isn't inherently bad, then pedophiles helping kids masturbate is just efficient use of labor. Goes the logic.
Goes the logic that works so long as you do not care about meaningful consent. This is a lot like the "if she's sleeping, it's not rape" argument we heard in the aftermath of the Steubenville case.
What is this meaningful consent thinghy you mention? Do I need it to play tag with other children (given that I'm a child)? Does an adult need it when playing tag with children? Do you need it when washing eachothers' backs in the bath? Do you need it when washing your child in the bath? Do you need it when your child asks for a massage? Do you need it when your child asks for a "massage"?
Where, and how, and why, does one draw the line?
My value system is incompatible with your statement and has no entry for this reference of "meaningful consent".
Edit: Split away irrelevant part of the comment.
FTR: If I had any sort of relationship like this when I was a minor (sadly, I didn't) and someone sued my S.O. / partner over this "meaningful consent" thing, I would have resented them and would still resent them to this day, and would most likely have pressed charges and sued them back into oblivion as soon as I turned legally capable of suing people, over all kinds of privacy breach, life alteration, or whatever other morality-based claims that I could find, in the same way I would sue anyone who pressed charges against me for having sex with my current girlfriend.
When you say "minor" - are we talking teens, preteens, infancy? A month below the local AOC? Does it matter?
(Also, good luck with that lawsuit.)
Not really. I've always found the moral intuitions most people have here rather lacking.
Put a 3-year-old in her mother's body. The kid wants to have sex 'caus she has her mother's biosystem, drives and body. Is it okay?
Put a 40-year-old in a 6-year-old's body. Or better yet, take one of the existing people who just have the same body they did when they were 12. Is sex okay?
Take a 2-year-old WBE that ran at a subjective time factor of 50 since their start. They get transferred to a modified cloned 9-year-old body that has already gone through puberty. Is it okay to have sex?
So yeah. Doesn't really matter, as long as both parties are aware of the typical downfalls and issues and are capable of enjoying it. (and that they actually do enjoy it, or stop if they don't)
I've always found "informed consent" (probably the same thing) to be a damn good heuristic, myself, although I certainly don't terminally value it. Are those meant to be rhetorical questions?
... actually, I'm of the opinion that conflating that sort of thing with, y'know, the sort of thing people picture when you say "rape" leads to both overestimation of the harm it causes and devaluing of the suffering caused by violently raping someone. It is, of course, bad, and it should be discouraged with punishments and so on, but I don't think it shares a Schelling point with "real" rape.
However.
What about this "meaningful consent" that renders it valuable? At what point does consent become "meaningful"? We usually allow parents to consent on behalf of their children, presumably because they will further the child's own interests; should this apply to sex? What do you think you know, and how do you think you know it? Let's pry open this black box!
[Side note: I personally am against legalizing such relationships, but I worry that I'm smart enough to argue convincingly for this position regardless of its truth, so I'm not going to elaborate on my reasoning here.]
Which in my experience people picture extremely inaccurately. They picture girls getting grabbed off a park sidewalk by a ravenous stranger. That's a very atypical case. Outside of prison, rape is typically perpetuated by friends and lovers and dates. This is unsurprising given pure opportunity, just as it's unsurprising that children are typically victimized by families and trusted friends of their families, not by strangers with candy.
Requiring rape to be "violent" is to require that most extra-penal rape be reclassified as not-rape. There is usually the implicit threat of violence, and the (typically) women in such circumstances are made to understand they have no choice or power. Anyone who looks at this issue will quickly meet people who insist that it isn't "rape" if the woman did not violently resist and never succumbed, or if there were no beatings involved.
"Rape" is only as meaningful as "meaningful consent."
Babies cannot give meaningful consent. Children can sometimes give meaningful consent, but it is difficult to determine. We allow parents to make decisions for their children in weighty matters - within strict limits. We do not allow them to give their kids liquor and cigarettes nor restrict them to "alternative medicine" for deadly disease. All of this makes sense: by and large, we do not allow families to stunt and cripple development.
(I give one exception: it is still considered acceptable to give a child a poor diet to the point of severe obesity. I think this should be at least as criminal, if not more, than allowing cigarette-smoking.)
"Meaningful consent" comes in degrees: adults are better at it than young teenagers. Most states have age of consent laws which, while allowing sex with minors, only allows it within a certain age bracket. Differential intellectual capacity matters.
You'll notice that I haven't tried to give a definition. With complicated concepts, it is often better to talk about them as if they were meaningful, and notice that they are, that we can recognize their presence or absence from different circumstances. If you are wholly unable to recognize such circumstances, let me know and I'll try being more precise.
Point.
Still, you know what I mean. Forcible rape, not things-that-are-bad-and-sexual-so-we-call-them-rape.
Well ... yeah? That's not the same thing as it being perfectly acceptable, mind.
Oh, yeah, threats should totally be included AFAICT. But the example under discussion was a sleeping/unconscious victim, wasn't it?
That is to say not meaningful at all, because you're treating meaningful consent as a fundamental property of things.
Why not, if they can express desire for sweeties or whatever? At what point do they stop being "babies" and become "children", under this schema? Are we including toddlers here?
Aha! He admits it! Pedophilic relationships can be OK!
There are some issues where we can safely say we know better, just like, say, an adult consenting to an addictive drug. But how could sex be one of those cases, when it's only harmful if the person doesn't consent in the first place? (Ignoring for a minute STDs and such, which parents (and many kids) should be able to take into account.)
Why?
From hence did this meaningful concept come to you? What do you think you know, and how do you think you know it?
I wish we could get past slogans.
Ok, we're trying to determine whether or not "meaningful consent is meaningful". A question: could you guess with high reliability what situations I think constitute meaningful consent or not?
A scenario: suppose I slip a girl a roofie, slip her into my car, take her home, and fuck her. Then I sneak her back into the party.
Was my crime "slipping a girl a drug", or was my crime "that and rape"?
Among my friends this sentiment is encapsulated as "You always hurt the ones you love, cuz they're the ones in range."
Consider the examples in this comment:
Which of these count as "meaningful consent" by your definition?