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This is conflating sexual preference with criminality. It's not a crime to have a sexual preference for children. It's a crime to molest children.
Pedophile is to child molester as heterosexual male is to rapist of women. While it might not be possible to change the sexual preference, that doesn't mean we cannot rehabilitate criminals. If rapists of adult victims can be rehabilitated, then why not rapists of children?
(This conflation is very common in discussions surrounding pedophilia, by the way. My theory for why that happens is that people have such an irrational, visceral hatred of pedophiles that they just do not want to consider the possibility of a non-offending pedophile. But the distinction is important nonetheless, if you want to maintain a justice system where people are convicted based on their actions, and not just their thoughts or inclinations.
Something similar happens with other hated groups like “incels”, where being involuntarily celibate is almost a crime in and of itself, regardless of whether you've actually harassed any women.)
This is an irrelevant hypothetical. You can argue that because of his past crime and the possibility of recidivism, Van de Velde should not be alone with twelve-year-olds in the future, but what does that have to do with him playing volleyball in a team full of adults?
The people who oppose Van de Velde participating in the Olympics seem to do so on the basis of some poorly-articulated principle that someone who has committed a horrible crime should never be allowed a place in the spotlight, regardless of whether they are likely to reoffend or not.
I agree with your distinction between pedophile and child molester, but not with this equivalence. A pedophile is someone who wants to have sex with children. A heterosexual male is someone who wants to have sex with women. Having sex with children is by definition child molestation. Having sex with women is not by definition rape, unless you are Andrea Dworkin. So your theoretical ethical pedophile who never acts on his desires (I assume such exist, though I admit I'd be skeptical of any individual's claims that they never ever have or will) is still someone who fundamentally wants to molest a child.
Whether you can "rehabilitate" them depends on whether you believe that sexual attraction to children is something inherent in their sexuality (which would make it equivalent to a sexual orientation) or a dysfunction that will respond to psychological treatment. From what little I know of the literature, most psychologists are not optimistic about the potential to "cure" pedophiles. They seem more similar to sociopaths and narcissists, in that you really can't counsel them or medicate them into being something else.
It's not a perfect analogy, but it's useful because it separates the innate sexual attraction from acting on that attraction.
I think the word “want” is being used in a very vague way here. A pedophile is sexually attracted to children, but might not consciously want to fuck them.
Compare with a heterosexual man who has a crush on his neighbor, but he knows she is married, and since he considers having sex with married women beyond the pale, he won't pursue her. Does he want to fuck her? On some theoretical level yes, but on a more practical level no. What if instead of being married she is underage, and he ignores her for that reason? Same thing, as far as I'm concerned.
In the real world, there is a lot of difference between cravings and conscious desires. A recovering alcoholic might crave a drink, but simultaneously want to avoid drinking. It's not helpful to simplify that to “alcoholics want to drink” — it's much more complicated than that.
I don't think pedophilia can be cured, but it can be managed, just like alcoholism can be managed.
But even if it were true that alcoholics, pedophiles, philanderers, sociopaths and narcissists are utterly untreatable. What bearing does that have on whether they should be allowed to participate in the Olympics?
Seems like a distinction without a difference. What does it mean to be "sexually attracted" to someone if you don't wan't to have sex with them?
It's not that confusing a concept. Say you meet a hot woman, but want to be faithful to your wife. You're still attracted to the sexy lady, even though you are consciously deciding not to act on that attraction.
The fact that you're choosing not to have sex with the hot woman (or choosing not to try to get her into bed with you) doesn't mean you don't want to. Just because a reformed alcoholic is choosing not to drink doesn't mean he doesn't want to: if he didn't, he wouldn't be an alcoholic.
This topic gets quite contentious and goes back at least to the Scholastics, with different 'levels' of will involved. Even the mere question of time-dependent tastes/desires gets a lot of hackles up. It doesn't help that different people often have different experiences, and we don't have much of a rigorous framework for objectively probing cognitive states. Some alcoholics do actually report that their habits and discipline have resulted in a 'reactionary' will that does not actually desire to consume alcohol, while others instead continue to struggle with desire and must rely on a second-order will to choose not to consume. Some people who have discovered that they have food intolerances say that they used to love such-and-such a food, and they really struggled with desiring it when they first decided to stop eating it, but later have an experience where they will see such a food and not even have a will to consume it. "Oh, that is a beautiful looking piece of food, masterfully crafted, and I'm sure someone will enjoy it, but I don't want it." A time-dependent example is pretty common; many kids don't like vegetables like broccoli, they have no first-order will whatsoever to consume it and must rely on a second-order will to choose to consume it anyway for other purposes. This may start out being a will to please and not anger parents, or to satisfy a rule that then allows them to consume other foods. This may later develop so that they actually have a first-order will to consume broccoli.
It gets complicated, and most people don't have a consistent sense for how it works. No fault of their own; we have very few tools for proper analysis. So, they tend to default to a handful of heuristics to explain how they think it might work.
Sure, I don't dispute that agents' first-order desires can change over time, or that they can have multiple competing and mutually exclusive first-order desires. But I think "John has a first-order desire to fuck kids, but his competing first-order desire not to harm children/not to go to prison/not to bring shame upon his family etc. overrides his desire to fuck kids and he chooses not to act upon it" is a coherent statement; likewise "John has a first-order desire to fuck kids, but after years of exercising control over this first-order desire and choosing not to act upon it, he finds that the desire itself has grown weaker over time, as a direct result of his self-control and discipline". By contrast, "John is sexually attracted to kids, but doesn't want to fuck them" is just a completely incoherent statement.
I think what's missing in this analysis is any role for higher-level will.
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