Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
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Notes -
The master of trolling is at it again. Hanania:
As of this writing, the results are:
Look at the engagement metrics on this tweet: 94,000 votes, 3.4 million views, 4,700 comments, 273 likes. This might be the most "popular" Hanania tweet of all time.
Now, I am one of the apparent sickos who voted "yes", but I can see some decent arguments for "no". I'm still surprised the results are this lopsided, and I'm also surprised that there appears to be no gender gap.
The whole thing just boils down to deontologists, consequentialists, and virtue ethicists failing to recognize that this is how other people think about morality, coupled with a layer of modern weirdness about just how destructive teenagers having sex is. The basic perspectives for those three branches are going to be:
Deontology - Prostituting teenagers is awful, we have a duty to reject it and try to prevent it. The price doesn't matter, teenage prostitution is unacceptable.
Consequentialist - Prostituting teenagers may harm them but receiving $10 million in the future helps someone a lot. This could be a significant improvement in total wellbeing and that's what to consider.
Virtue ethicist - Do you really want to be the kind of guy that enables Jeffrey Epstein prostituting teenagers? The price doesn't matter, I'm not that guy.
The deontologist and virtue ethicist positions don't make sense to me. It just seems like they don't accept the existence of trade-offs. Do their virtues and ethical rules not say that the things $10 million can buy matter? You can do a lot of good and be extremely virtuous with $10 million. This just makes me suspect those ethical frameworks are fundamentally illogical.
You can consider deontology and virtue ethics shortcuts to considering second and third-order effects. Making child prostitution legal for the right price is likely to make it much more socially acceptable and less illegal in general. Keeping child prostitution illegal amd socially unacceptable is worth more than $10m.
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How much money would you torture a child to death for? Tradeoffs exist, right?
We torture children to death every day as a consequence of how we've decided to order our society; suicide is among the top killers of the under-12 (and under-18) population in all Western nations (and Eastern ones, too). Sure, there's a baseline rate of suicide, but given it gets worse around certain times of the year corresponding to things like exams I'm far from convinced it's all natural.
It turns out it's very economically productive to treat them the way we do, and should we create conditions sufficiently bad that they kill themselves to escape we have, effectively, tortured them to death for financial gain. Thus the amount of money for which we would torture children to death might be relatively high, but is clearly not infinite.
No wiggling, please. You, personally, directly, with your own two hands and provided tools, physically until death. How much do you ask for it?
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Depends on the methods and everything, I'd probably do it for $500 million of new goods and services value created. I'd fully expect to end up in jail afterwards for life etc, but $400 million can secure my lineage for a dozen generations (the other $100 million I would use to fight child torture and end up saving hundred of children form being tortured to death), it's a tradeoff I'm willing to make. Of course I would also try to end the child's suffering as soon as possible.
I wouldn't even have moral pangs to be honest, from my point of view I just saved N-1 children from being tortured to death for some large N, and ending up in jail for the rest of my life is worth it for that.
Remove the jail condition and I'd knock $100 million off the price.
And if your next question is to ask about whether I or someone I love would like to be on the torture recieving end of the trade my answer would be an empathetic no, but that's why I'd take precautions to not end up in a situation like that, and if the person is basically being chosen at random the risk to me and my family personally will be on the order of 1 in many millions, and that's a level of risk we take on a daily basis when we travel to work each day, I'll gladly accept it. Doesn't mean I wouldn't fight to try and get out of it, but I'd expect the child to fight as well and that's fine in my book.
And equally the situation we were discussing up thread was one where both the girl and her parents consented to the act, which is not the case if the person about to be tortured to death was forced into it. If you could provide a cast iron guarantee that this person and their close family members all voluntarily and freely agreed to it (I don't know why they would, but maybe they've been offered a large sum of money too) then I'll knock another $50 million off the price.
Of course there are things I would not do for any amount of money, like e.g. shoot my own mother, but that's because of personal selfishness, because I like my own mother and she is worth a lot to me. I would still do a tradeoff analysis and find that the cost is so high that the tradeoff is not worth it anymore for whatever amount of money. It's not that doing the tradeoff analysis is wrong, it's just that the result of the tradeoff analysis is different in this case.
However once again I note that this situation is nothing like the Epstein sex case, in that situation everyone on all sides consented to it and there were third party moral busybodies who wanted to stop the transaction even though it had nothing to do with them. And in much the same way, if someone who fully consented was going to be tortured to death for a large amount of money being handed to all participants I would not be against it as an unrelated third party living in the same society.
If child sacrifice actually worked, and the benefits it got were good enough (e.g. rain to save the tribe's crops and prevent famine) I would also not be against it. I would not want to sacrifice my own children but you could well see people agreeing to it and gestating a child just to sacrifice it to Moloch if the rest of society compensated them enough for it, and that would be just and fine in my book.
(Note: In reality I would not take any money to murder a child with my own two hands either, but that is because of my religious convictions since I know what then penalty on the day of Judgement is for killing an innocent in Islam, the answer above would apply for a hypothetical atheist version of me and I believe that is the right frame to answer the question in since large portions of the people cooking up a stink over the results are atheists too. I can accept God-fearing humans to be extremely unhappy with Epstien offering money for sex and agree with their arguments for it being bad in a society living under a religous framework, but the west is not religious any more, it is atheist and can not hide under the mantle of religion when confronted with things that logically should be perfectly fine under its stated beliefs but in reality awaken a deep and ancient "ick" within us all).
Who determines whether "it's got anything to do with them"? If you say shooting your own mother has a tradeoff of infinity because of your personal selfishness, why can't others put a tradeoff of infinity on "allowing openly purchasing sex from children"?
For the same reason we don't allow people to put a tradeoff on infinity of "letting two gay people do what they want behind closed doors". Sure we let people believe that if they want, but we don't humour their beliefs for a single second and even make fun of people who believe such shit. We can do the exact same thing here.
Society as a whole decides whether something has got anything to do with them. As I mentioned society as a whole generally doesn't allow people to put a tradeoff of infinity on letting two gay people do whatever they want with each other in their bedroom or at least cries foul about other societies that do do this like Saudi Arabia.
The question then becomes what is it about "allowing openly purchasing sex from children" that does not apply to "gay sex between two consenting adults behind closed doors", and pretty much anything you can come up with there has an easy exception where society behaves the other way, thus displaying their hypocrisy and providing an argument for changing how society puts a tradeoff on things (which in the end is all we can do here merely by arguing online).
If you make a maturity argument then you need to realise that there are people who are more mature at 14 than others are at 40, I certainly could have consented to sex at 14, probably even at 10, and I know many other similar people. Now you could make a Schilling point argument about why we have an age of consent and the difficulty in determining who/who doesn't have the ability to consent but that just then implies (as another poster mentions in this thread) we should also forbid black adults from having sex, as most black adults are less intelligent and capable of making good decisions than many white teenagers for whom we forbid sex.
Other arguments for why we shouldn't allow 14 year olds to have sex have similar glaring loopholes where that same argument applies to different groups where we are absolutely fine with them having sex.
So you're going to use society's opinion as a reference for what is or isn't moral busybodying? I am confused then. In the West society certainly does consider it their business to prohibit children under 16 (18 in practice, higher than that depending on how old the other guy is and who you ask) having sex with adults.
In practice the attempts to equivocate such situations are sorely lacking. They fail to account for all aspects of child/adult disparity and/or make quite dubious reaches, such as "most black people are less capable than an unspecified percentage of white teenagers". I remain unconvinced.
What you might want to consider is what kind of relationships are currently deterred, in practice, by the age of consent laws as they are now. I do not believe these are the same kind of relationships as would be prevented by "consistent" consent laws that are supposed to match the rest of society to how we treat children.
(I'm also aware you probably think blacks /poors having unprotected sex is worse than children having sex, so no need to restate that unless you're going to deny it.)
No, I am just saying that in the real world society's opinion is exactly what counts for what is/isn't moral busibodying, and this is true regardless of whether the society is the USA or Saudi Arabia. I want to change society's opinion to be more in line with my opinion, no different to what pro-LGBT activists in Saudi Arabia want.
The onus is on the people who support the restriction to provide reasons for it, what reasons do they have for forbidding sexual intercourse between Jeffery Epstein and a 14 year old where the parents are in full agreement that do not also apply to other situations where those who call for this restriction would be fine with the intercourse? Note the age of consent in China is 14 so a well off Shangai family could easily decide to do this without legal issues, but I expect that westerners would still see a moral problem with this, no different to how Saudi Arabians see a moral problem with gay sex behind closed doors in the west.
Depends on the people having the intercourse as always. Most children are stupid so I absolutely would not support it for >99.5% of all children, in fact I consider it worse than blacks/poors having unprotected sex because many of these children are going to grow into perfectly good and decent adults and the early intercourse could hurt them and thereby all of society, while certified low productivity yield adults aren't going to be making big contributions anyways...
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ConsequentialismChads can't stop taking Ws.
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