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That's an uncharitable summary that OP made of one section of one article taken out of context, not a universally agreed-upon progressive maxim.
To defend my level of charitability, I didn't actually present it as a summary of any section of the article. I said that I had commonly heard other people use an argument that treated sex like tennis in other arguments and that this setup reminded me of those arguments. The author of this article seems to think that transitioning is a very significant decision, often irreversible, and generally much more grave of a choice than deciding to quit competitive swimming. However, she does liken the two in one feature - both choices forever close off vast swaths of alternate possible worlds. And on that ground, she argues that we should let people make the choice.
I'm remarking separately that how seriously we consider things like sex are is often highly variable and unfortunately seems to vary within particular individuals depending on what type of argument they're wanting to make. We have no indication from this article concerning how serious the author thinks sex is in any of the settings I discussed. Nevertheless, all those areas still have in common the feature of making choices which shut out a variety of alternate possible worlds. I think the point I was kind of trying to grasp at is that we do need to think long and hard about the seriousness of the choice in question and a variety of other theoretical characteristics to come up with any sort of consistent rules for how far we can get just by observing that making choices shuts off alternate possible worlds.
Well, perhaps I should have added a meta-layer where people are recharacterizing you characterization.
People are using you characterization of the belief to make arguments of the form 'if you would play tennis with your sister, why wouldn't you have sex with your sister?!?!' which does not logically follow from the limited formulation you offer here about them being 'alike in one way, but seems to be where most of the conversation has gone now.
Again, I would just point out that 'closing off possible worlds' isn't the only factor used in moral reasoning, there are lots of other reasons to oppose something.
And it's not charitable to say (which I'm not quite accusing you of, but it's where the overall conversation is trending) that if someone wrote an article about a single moral consideration and didn't talk about any other ones, and that singular moral consideration on its own has nothing to say about pedophilia, that the author must be in favor of pedophilia/is being hypocritical if they denounce pedophilia.
That's just a weird place to go to, and the movement seems more related to culture war rhetoric than anything it would be normal to conclude form the article itself.
If someone said that tax evasion was bad because it violates Social Contract theory, responding with 'Well, Social Construct Theory on it's own doesn't tell us why pedophilia is bad, so why don't you just admit that you approve of pedophilia?' I think we would all recognize that as an improper argument.
Yeah, I didn't do that sort of thing, and I don't think anyone here is doing that, either. (I haven't thoroughly followed all of the discussion that has followed.) In your example, there seems to hardly be any conceptual link whatsoever between the two items. I attempted to construct a core conceptual link between several topics of discussion, which is ruminating on how seriously we take various activities/identities in different contexts and how that affects our willingness to simply let others make choices on those issues. I think it is that link that is sorely missing from your attempted analogy to Social Contract Theory/pedophilia. (Though if someone could come up with an interesting conceptual link between the two, I would be interested to hear it, not knowing yet whether I would ultimately view the link as compelling.)
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).
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