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They can't consent to sex. Whatever consent to sex is (not an easy concept to analyse, to put it mildly) it's not the same thing as not wanting to have sex. I definitely wanted to have sex when I was 11 (and pre-pubescent). A cat in heat wants some sexual activity and doesn't particularly care with what. The problem is that children and animals can't engage in consensual sex, whether they want to or not, any more than they can make a mature decision about whether to become addicted to heroin.
Are you opposed to animals having sex with each other?
I'm opposed to bestiality, but I do think the "animals can't consent" argument isn't good.
No, because I don't make the same moral requirements of animals as I do of humans. "It's wrong for humans to have sex with a non-consenting partner" doesn't imply "It's wrong for animals to have sex with a non-consenting partner," any more than "It's wrong for humans to torture mice for their amusement" implies "It's wrong for cats to torture mice for their amusement."
So if you just happen to by lying around looking attractive and an animal shows up and has his way with you?
I wouldn't condemn the animal ethically, any more than I'd condemn the weather ethically for having a storm when I'm sailing and breaking my back. Would you?
What about the person though?
A person who does that to have sex with an animal? Not meaningfully different from the case where the person initiates.
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It's not "morally wrong" for an animal to try that, the same as it isn't "morally wrong" for a bear to try and maul you. Indeed, I've never seen anyone judging a bear for doing that.
When you shoot an animal that does something you don't like, it's not because they're morally in the wrong, it's becausee they're doing something you don't like.
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To be clear, the moral requirements are upon those who are human, specifically, and not those who are able to consent, right?
As I assume you wouldn't be okay with children having sex with animals (since you think both are unable to consent)?
Not specifically humans, no. If Vulcans existed, they would also have moral requirements.
But you're fundamentally right: being unable to consent to sex is not a sufficient condition for being outside the realm of moral responsibility. However, in most plausible examples, a child who engages in sexual acts with an animal (and hasn't been specifically told not to etc.) likely doesn't understand what they are doing, so should be treated as someone who did something wrong without knowing. I think this is common sense: if you saw your 7 year old daughter doing things with your dog, you'd treat her very differently from your 70 year old neighbour doing things with your dog, and one of the pertinent differences is their likely degree of understanding what they are doing.
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This is more than just not an easy concept to analyse. From my comment here a while ago:
Your comparison to "mak[ing] a mature decision about whether to become addicted to heroin" is definitely somewhat relevant here, if you read the full linked comment. People think that there's something "more" and "different" about sex and heroin and things like that compared to "normal" things that children can definitely, totally consent to. But the theory here is just completely whack and not at all up to the challenge of explaining why. You can simply ask yourself, "Why can't children consent to sex?" When you do so, you might go down the same road I went down; you might read the same major works by professional philosophers that I read. But I really don't think you'll get a good theoretical answer. It's just sort of an axiom that is held by some. To others, it's just the dogmatic mantra that they were forced to repeat in order to help justify fighting the X-ophobes. But when the same people who convinced you to subscribe to a consent-only sexual ethic and who swear that the thing we need most is early comprehensive sex education to help children understand the sexual choices that they're allowed to make come calling, they're going to ask, "Why can't children consent?" If you don't have a better answer than the professional philosophers who are making the best case possible for a consent-only sexual ethic, you're going to find out that you're an X-ophobe. You're going to get stared at like you're an alien for making outdated assumptions about people. For Sagan's sake, everyone knows that kids are capable enough to choose their gender, have parts of their body hacked off, and keep it all secret from their parents! Of course they're capable of deciding to have a little fun with some friction on the bits.
Just not with adults.
Kid on kid is fine, obviously.
Why not? They "can't consent", he said. What is it about the second player (or maybe second and third, if they're a kinky kid) that somehow converts their inherent ability to consent from a "can't" to a "can"? How does this work? And if there are cases where there's a "can consent", why didn't you jump in to tell @Harlequin5942 that he's just wrong about his broad claim that they "can't consent"?
I’m highlighting that tension between “able to consent” and “but not if an adult is involved” and the giant gray ball of arbitrary murkiness there.
There aren’t clean cut lines here in nature, but we have to have them in the law if we are going to have them.
Big Laconian "IF". Hilariously, also a Big Lacanian "IF".
But you've kind of proven my point. You don't really have any way to justify this sort of boundary. So, when they come and ask, "Why can't children consent?" I guess, you're gonna be like, "Well they can, but I have a giant gray ball of arbitrary murkiness, if you'd like to look into it!" And I mean, uh, they're not going to give much of a shit about your giant gray ball of arbitrary murkiness; they're going to hear that you said that children can, in fact, consent, and they're going to view your giant gray ball of arbitrary murkiness as just some superstitious, sex-negative, religious prude bigot weirdness that they can safely ignore, because, "Ew."
Life is full of murky areas where we make arbitrary cutoffs.
We have to make such decisions over what “consent” even means in any given context. “One drink” is a standard some places for lacking the ability to consent, for example.
I’m not trying to defend the specific one here as it is, or attack it, I’m pointing out something like an age cutoff is basically inevitable and that “consent” is both complicated and insufficient as a principle.
Age of responsibility/adulthood issues are their own mess before you even bring in the separate mess of consent.
Congratulations! You appear to not be a subscriber to a consent-only sexual ethic. Unfortunately, this probably means that you're a bigot. Right-thinking people know that consent-only is the proper sexual ethic, because that is how we justify our other political positions. As soon as you start letting concerns other than consent into the picture, it's harder to smugly say that any concerns other than consent are just some backwater religious shit.
You are now no longer even relevant to the conversation when they ask the question, "Why can't children consent?" because as soon as you try to pipe up with, "Uh, actually, I have other concerns for my sexual ethic than just consent," you will immediately be deplatformed as an obvious bigot, and the public conversation will just be between people who can at least try to maintain some message purity on the basics of the movement.
The funny thing here is you’re blatantly wrong about the present dynamic among progressives/youngins.
Go read about age gap discourse and get back to me.
Also, progressives already don’t live by a strict consent-based moral framework. They frequently believe the right of consent should be taken away (organ donation for money, and anything else they perceive as involving a potential power imbalance that could involve “exploitation” of the oppressed).
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Why not with adults? There's nothing wrong with adults playing tennis with kids, is there?
That is my point yes.
We have drawn arbitrary lines around “adult” and “kid” and there’s no way around the fact that children develop their abilities gradually and not at the exact same rate.
The potential side effects of sex and potential for manipulation/abuse/exploitation of younger people explain the rules we have and why we have them; not some absolute concept of “consent.” Obviously, plenty of young people who are adults still have such things happen to them, but so it goes with adulthood and drawing lines somewhere.
Teenage marriage to an adult is of course legal in most places with appropriate permissions.
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The comment you're replying to is filtered.
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How are you using the word "you" here?
I have never subscribed to a consent-only sexual ethic.
Ah, well, then I'm sure you have some other, non-consent reason why children can't have sex. That's fair enough, but it's a bit surprising considering your comment that I responded to. There, it seemed like the pertinent question (which is the only question to the consent-only folks) was about consent, which still leaves open the question, "Why not?"
EDIT: To add one little remark, consent-only is the current dogmatic position, and you may already be an X-ophobe if you don't ascribe to a consent-only sexual ethic.
Your confusion seems to be because you are missing the distinction between "inability to consent is a sufficient reason for children not to have sex" with "lack of consent is a necessary condition for sex to be wrong." It may help you to do some work on pen-and-paper using Venn diagrams: for example, you see how "All non-consensual sex is wrong sex" is logically distinct from "All wrong sex is non-consensual sex."
Similarly, that consent is one pertinent question in sexual ethics doesn't imply that it's the only question.
I also suspect that even many people who sometimes say, "As long as it's consensual, it's fine," actually make exceptions for things like "power dynamics" and "developing bad habits," but I'm not interested in rationally reconstructing their views.
IME, in these cases, the definition of "consent" is gerrymandered to exclude them. It's not much of an additional step to add more requirements of what counts as "consent" on top of the existing age cutoffs. I kinda see it as CICO weight loss. You can talk about all the tiny little details and factors, but ultimately, it comes down to how those factors influence CICO for determining weight loss. Likewise, you can talk about all the other factors relating to sex that's bad, but ultimately, these factors only count inasmuch as they affect the consent calculation.
Yes, I think this is one of the problems with people thinking they believe, "As long as it's consensual, it's fine," without actually believing that: "consent" gets gerrymandered in this real ways. Liberals (as a movement) did a similar inflation with "justice": if you think that the state should not direct society, but merely address injustices, yet you're really more of a social democrat, then you start talking about "social justice" meaning redistribution of income etc.
Utilitarianism can also get pretty silly doing the same sort of thing.
It's almost like a sort of expansion principle: try to push too much ethical gas into one container (ethical principle) and that container gets expanded by the pressure. It's somewhat of a blessing, insofar as it limits the extent to which many people follow through on the implications of these narrow views. Then you get a really rigorous thinker like Peter Singer, who takes such a view seriously and thinks it through, and the pearl clutching from the gerrymanderers begins...
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Not at all. I understand this distinction perfectly well. Nevertheless, you said:
I'm asking you why this is. Your confusion seems to be that you can't bring yourself to answer the question at hand.
You mean, why can't children and animals consent to acts they lack the mental capacity to understand?
Before you ask, no, I don't think that retarded adults with childlike levels of understanding of sex can consent to sex. Nor do I think that children can consent to e.g. "have parts of their body hacked off, and keep it all secret from their parents!" So neither of the reductios you have mentioned so far are worrying for me, but as I've indicated, I'm probably not the type of person you were addressing above, which was why I was curious as to whether you were addressing me when you used "you" or you were using it in some hypothetical/indirect sense/whatever.
Ok, what is the nature of the mental capacity that they are lacking? Is there something about sex that requires a different type of mental capacity than what is required for children to consent to the variety of other things that they can consent to? If so, what is that nature of that difference, and what are the underlying reasons for why they are lacking one but not the other? Can you help explain the theoretical mechanism to me and to the professional philosophers who have written entire books on this topic, but seem to have just missed the super simple and super obvious way of doing this?
(Before you ask, no, at least Wertheimer didn't think that retarded adults with childlike levels of understanding could consent to sex, either. I'm not immediately recalling off hand Westen's position on this. In any event, Wertheimer again grounded this not in any theoretical explanation of the nature of the mental capacity that was missing. He again simply grounded it in an empirical argument, that he thinks that such people tend to be, on net, harmed by such sex. Moreover, he said that this case was more concerning to him than the case of youth, because while youth tend to grow up, we're essentially foreclosing the possibility of sex for retarded people, ever, regardless of what other importance it might have. Note that this concern is again based on considerations other than a theoretical explanation of consent and capacity, because fundamentally, this area is a big gaping hole in the project of a consent-only sexual ethic. It simply has not been explained.)
Not sure what you mean by "nature" here. Do you deny that children, in general, have weaker abilities to understand the implications of their decisions than adults, in general?
Yes, probably quite a lot of things, but one major respect (which I alluded to with the example of becoming a heroin addict, and which I later suggested with the example of transgender interventions on kids) is the gravity and breadth of the moral implications. A child consenting to buying sweets without parental supervision is a less serious decision than a child choosing to have sex. This is one reason why parents, as a general rule, should have a lot of social and legal authority over children. Why doesn't that authority extend to choosing to let (or require) children have sex, without the child's consent? That's a good example of where a consent-only ethics (or legal doctrine) falls short and something like a harm or corruption principle does work.
(1) There's no reason to expect it to be super simple and super obvious.
(2) In many (all?) of those professional philosophers, they have various background moral beliefs that (a) lead to implications they don't want regarding pedophilia/pederasty/etc., but (b) they'd rather hold onto at least most of them. You correctly alluded to some examples, e.g. their desire to avoid being X-ophobic or (perhaps worse for some people) being regarded as X-ophobic. As you might have guessed from my presence on here or my comments on how I find male homosexuality physically disgusting, I'm less worried about that than a lot of people.
(3) Professional ethicists are seeking a level of rigour that is neither required for law, nor that I expect from my own moral beliefs. It's akin to how I don't need to know professional physics or engineering to do DIY. If you're aspiring to that level of rigour, then great; I only hope you don't have better things to do with your time than working out really carefully why it's wrong to have sex with children.
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