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Again, you may not have boiled it down to such a simplistic analogy, but the people I'm responding to did.
But:
You are acknowledging that, while Wertheimer isn't putting forward a coherent narrative on why children can't consent to sex, they are still strictly against pedophilia based on harm-reduction principles.
Other people ran with your statement to say 'since progressives don't have a coherent account of why pedophilia violates consent, they must be in favor of pedophilia and should just admit it'.
This latter stance is akin to my analogy, where they are looking at the lack of a consent-based (Contract-Theory based) reason to reject pedophilia and failing to find it, but not bothering to look at all the other reasons against it (harm).
Unfortunately, I will likely only defend my own statements. Sorry if that's not the most satisfactory to you.
So, the context of many of my comments here, and which I did mention a couple times, is that there are an extremely large number of people who believe in a consent-only sexual ethic. They want that to be enshrined in law, and they argue for such a thing. I would even say that Wertheimer is in that camp. Therefore, perhaps more circumspectly stated, I would argue that Wertheimer's position on child sex (among a few other similar positions) is a gigantic fault line within his own project of mapping out a consent-only sexual ethic. It is instead perhaps a "consent-dominant except for some other cases where it's something like harm reduction or some other consideration" sexual ethic, which may end up being fine on its own terms, but it is not a consent-only sexual ethic.
I would argue that the position of someone who claims to follow a strict consent-only sexual ethic across the wide variety of problem domains but then wants to switch from that only for this domain is untenable. It's part of the reason why I would not currently say that I ascribe to a consent-only sexual ethic. As such, I do actually think that your characterization is quite close to a legitimate complaint. When you say:
I think the modification which makes it a biting criticism would be 'since progressives don't have a coherent account of why pedophilia violates consent and they claim to hold a consent-only sexual ethic,' well, I don't know that I'd quite say that they must be in favor of pedophilia and should just admit it... but I would say that they got some 'splainin' to do.
Ok, if we're ready to move on from whether my replies to other commenters were charitable and into the actual issue, that's great for me.
So I think that you are (not maliciously) misrepresenting the author's stance, using the following rhetorical shift:
Here, you are making it sound like the author is using the metaphor of competitive swimming to say that choosing a gender identity is trivial and non-sacred, in the way that some progressives say that sex is trivial and non-sacred, and therefore can be governed by consent-only ethics.
But I don't think this is correct, on two accounts.
First of all, the 'sex is just about consent' mindset certainly co-occurs with people thinking sex is trivial and not a big deal, but that's not the justification for consent-only sexual ethics. Consent-only sexual ethics is inherently a libertarian stance: People should be able to make horrible decisions that hurt themselves, so long as they are uncoerced and don't hurt anyone else.
This position is held by plenty of people who think sex is consequential and dangerous and hurts people all the time; progressive prudery is a real faction, but it still tends to fall back on consent-only despite believing it to be an extremely fraught and dangerous topic.
Second, reading the rest of the article past your pull quote, where the author next talks for a long time about their own experiences with learning the confines of their racial identity and other identity formations, it seems to me that they are using 'competitive swimmer' as an example of a voluntarily-chosen identity and lifestyle. Rather than saying it's trivial and non-sacred like tennis.
They spend a lot of page space undermining the idea that an obvious and 'natural' gender binary exists and it exactly matches Western gender norms and every individual person in the world fits comfortably into that schema.
But Wertheimer here doesn't at all seem to me to be saying 'Children have the same right as adults to hurt themselves if they want to and the ability to consent to things, thus there's no reason not to let them make horrible decisions that will destroy their life and we should apply consent-only ethics to transition as well.'
If that were his point, it would be a much shorter article. There would be no reason to spend so long disambiguating the claim 'decisions about gender identity are hugely impactful and important' from the claim 'children will always do best if they let society determine their gender identity and expression for them'
This distinction is needed to undermine the claim 'this choice is too important to let children make for themselves, because they'll get it wrong.' The point of the competitive swimmer metaphor, the point of showing how gender is an ambiguous and amorphous concept, the point of talking about how socially-defined notions of racial identity are often harmful and arbitrary, is all to reinforce the sliding doors metaphor:
No one knows which of these paths is actually going to be best for the child in the long term. We can speculate endlessly about the road less traveled, but we can't actually know what that life would be like and whether it would be better than the one we have now.
Children thinking about transition can't possibly know that, and neither can their parents.
(nor can random internet commentators who have never met them, for that matter)
So, given that we're in sliding-doors world where we cannot know which identity will make for the best life long-term, there's not a strong reason not to let the child decide for themself. Meanwhile, there's huge benefit to letting the child decide for themself: it's innately valuable to have self-determination and liberty to determine your own course in life, you know more about your own situation than society and can make more nuanced and individualized adjustments than you could just accepting a huge default category, every chance you are given by others to set your own path is an inherent acknowledgement of your agency and dignity as a human, etc.
Whereas, there's no sliding-doors uncertainty when it comes to pedophilia. We're pretty damn sure that it's almost always very harmful, we have the data on that. This is a place where parents can be pretty confident in knowing the right answer, and if the child disagrees they're almost certainly wrong. And, furthermore, having sex with someone isn't an identity; the benefits of being allowed self-determination are much much smaller because it's not a part of your core identity, it's just an activity (a potentially very dangerous one!) that you can do or not do arbitrarily.
So none of the metaphors and consideration that author is building up about transition and identity really apply here.
Nope. In fact, I pointed out here that the author seems to think that it is not trivial and is, in fact, important. My other topic areas are to illustrate the idea that people very casually slide along this scale depending upon topic area and the point they're trying to make.
I think you might be a bit confused. Wertheimer did not write the linked NYT article. Wertheimer wrote the linked philosophy of ethics book.
Precisely. The force of this sort of reasoning seems to vary considerably depending on which problem domain we are dealing with. That was the point of my OP.
Note that this is not any sort of theoretical argument about a child's ability to consent. So we're right back to my last comment. Can we insert, immediately before this sentence, that you are disavowing a consent-only sexual ethic, which would then enable this sentence to possibly have some normative force in the remainder of the argument? If not, like I said, you got some 'splainin' to do.
Again, you're ignoring half of what I said here to make it sound like that's the only standard I'm using in both cases.
The argument isn't that the author is saying children can consent to transition, and therefore they should be able to consent to sex.
The argument is that consent isn't a meaningful framework for the question of transition, the author is using a different metric related to the 'sliding doors' metaphor and the intuition that parents and society aren't going to make a better choice than the child would anyways.
The author is not applying consent-only ethics to transition, which doesn't preclude them from applying it to sex and saying children can't consent to sex.
The 'it's extremely harmful to children' part has nothing to do with consent ethics, it's explaining why the 'sliding doors' metaphor doesn't apply to pedophilia the way it applies to transition (in the author's formulation).
I'm not saying that the author is applying a consent-only ethic to transition. I don't know where they stand on that. But how these concepts work in related areas can be relevant. Regardless, you still say:
You're so so close. Since the 'extremely harmful to children' part has nothing to do with consent ethics, as you say, then if a person espouses a consent-only sexual ethic, then the whole bit is just irrelevant for the question of pedophilia! We'd have to delete that part of the sentence. It can't tell us anything about pedophilia or an ethical difference between pedophilia/transition, because it simply tells us nothing about the ethics of pedophilia. I think what you'd have to construct is an argument along the lines of, "I don't espouse a consent-only sexual ethic, so harm is why pedophilia is bad. And then, [argument about transition that coheres with the rest of the project, which could perhaps be what you're calling 'sliding doors']." But we have to lay out explicitly what concepts hold where and why.
... right, this whole 'tennis' thing you've got going is entirely irrelevant to the question of pedophilia, that's my point.
I think maybe this will be clearer:
Sex, including pedophilia, is governed by consent-only ethics. Children can't consent, and adults rightly protect them from sex. The parent (or society) is a better-informed proxy who can correctly make that decision on their behalf.
But with transition, society and the parent are not better-informed and cannot reliably make a better decision than the child.
Thus, consent-based ethics are incoherent for this question, since they don't lead to any change in recommended course of action. That's why we fall back to other ethical values for this question, such as self-determination.
The point here is that, as I understand you, you're saying that the implication from the transition argument is that children can make decisions for themselves, therefore children are capable of consent, therefore they should be able to consent to sex.
What I'm saying is that this line of logic does not follow. Children can make decisions for themselves, but they can't consent, not in the way we mean when we talk about sexual consent.
Someone who is held at gunpoint by a rapist still makes a decision about whether to allow rape to happen or to fight back and probably die. The decision to allow it to happen is not consent, even though a decision was made; 'decision' and 'consent' are not synonyms, in this case.
But despite not being able to give meaningful consent, children still get to make all kinds of decisions for themselves every day. There are only a few cases where we regularly invoke meaningful consent to override them, those cases are the exception rather than the rule. Sex is one of them, most major medical procedures are another, and the author is arguing that transition shouldn't be in that category.
This is stated without argument. I cannot believe you made it this far after having actually read my OP and not realized how this is something that must be explained.
What is your theory? You need to explain why this is, conceptually.
Correct. This is the freedom prong in Westen's parlance. He gives a conceptual explanation of why this is the case. That conceptual reasoning does not explain why "children can't consent". You need to explain a different one.
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