VirPed Panel: 16 September 2024

Scaling Enthusiast asks:

Are there any coherent deontological arguments supporting masturbatory aids for pedophiles like erotica, roleplay, etc.? I’ve only ever seen utilitarian arguments such as: it’s fictional so no harm is done, pedophiles would be mentally worse off without it, this reduces the chance to offend, etc. (I agree with the utilitarian arguments so I’m trying to expand my knowledge.)

As an armchair philosopher, expect me to say things you have heard a hundred times before.

From my cursory look into the differences between deontological and utilitarian ethics, it seems that deontological ethics is about taking actions in a vacuum and deciding that they are either good or bad based on commonly understood rules.

Well, the rules of the modern day seem to be rather skewed against us MAPs. The rulebook here in the UK stipulates that kodocon is strictly off the table. I can be a good citizen and abide by this law, or I can be a bad citizen and break it. If I’m good, I’m sadder, I maybe feel safer (due to the reduced risk of being arrested), and little else changes. If I’m bad, I’m happier, I maybe feel less safe, and little else changes. In my opinion, this is a bad ruleset that should be changed for the good of humanity. I’ll be sure to vote for whichever political candidate wants to legalise kodocon in the next election.

To be honest, I don’t entirely get deontology. It seems tautological to just say the good ethics are good because they are correct. If God is real, he is fickle and I’ll ignore him. Any set of ethical principals we come up with will be guided by intended outcomes. So, we add addendums to existing rules until they best approximate a society that maximises pleasure and minimises suffering. At that point, we’re making our ruleset approximately force everyone to act in a utilitarian way. Therein, the deontology has disappeared.

Alternatively, I entirely get deontology. I think Kant was onto something when he said the only good act is one motivated by a good will. However, Kant then defines some basic rules for what is good. Kant is wrong. I will defy him, and say that a good act is when someone does what they think is right to do, which would be every action ever carried out by every human ever. In that case, you can do anything you set your mind to, including looking at kodocon, and it will be a good thing. Laws are just conditions to make you go to prison. They are only upheld by taxes. Money isn’t real. I forgot what the point was, but, to be honest, I do like lolis. Lolis are good.

My deontological justification for supporting looking at fictional sexual material is that lolis are good.

Well, I certainly didn’t expect to be answering a philosophical question today, but here goes:

I suppose one could consider this to be deontological in the absence of utilitarianism: “One should be true to oneself”. One could say, in the absence of utilitarianism, that it is one’s duty to at least acknowledge one’s nature and accept it as a part of a holistic self-identity, and that knowing and being true to yourself in some very real way is virtuous.

What is it to accept ones sexuality without expressing it in some specific way?

Now, I’ll admit, this is me really stretching here. One could certainly use my arguments above to murder people as though that’s their ‘way of being true to oneself’. With an absence of any way that one’s actions affects others, it’s not particularly meaningful. I dislike pure deontology, because I feel as though all moral actions require context. Personally speaking, I’m a utilitarian largely, though I think the ‘happiness pump’ is taking things a bit far, as your experience matters too. Even the deontological saying ‘Let justice be done, though the heavens fall’ is utilitarian, as I see it, because the strength of the concept will, over the long haul, benefit more lives than the practice of it hurts in the short term.

But, I don’t intend to get too in to the weeds here, that’s my attempt at answering this question with brevity. I admittedly haven’t picked up a philosophy book in 20+ years.

It’s very difficult for me to get philosophical about an attraction and how it’s manifest. The attraction cannot be viewed in ethical terms. It just is. Attractions cannot be unethical. One can behave in an unethical manner. But having a fantasy cannot be unethical. It’s common to the human species. Producing images through unethical acts is not ethical and rightly not legal. Distributing the images is similarly unethical. Viewing images for personal use does not constitute pixel abuse and should not be considered unethical.

I would propose a more accessible way of phrasing the underlying question. “If pedophile fantasy and masturbation reduces offending or lessens their psychological pain, I am maybe for it. But setting that aside, isn’t active sexual fantasy about children gross and disgusting and inherently immoral? Is this at best the equivalent of fecal transplants in modern medicine?"

My conclusion is that adult fantasies of sex with willing and enthusiastic child partners should be approved of on deontological grounds.

I make heavy use of evaluating similar situations. A key question is whether masturbatory aids for ordinary folks (teleiophiles) like erotica and roleplay are fundamentally OK, aside from any practical benefits or harms.

There are significant sectors of society, especially among conservative religions, who would argue strongly that deontology argues against erotica or roleplay supporting sexual fantasy for ordinary men and women. Carried to the extreme, sexual intercourse is only an acceptable thing when done between a married man and woman with the intention of producing children. I have nothing to say to such people, whose world view diverges so far from mine.

Assume instead that we recognize that sexuality is a natural part of the human experience, and one to be celebrated. Role play of unusual situations among consenting adults can be part of that. Much more commonkly, solo masturbation serves as an expression of a joyful sexuality, and scenarios that invite it or support it should be celebrated. This should include the romance novels that are popular among women and the “calendar girls” and modern equivalent that are popular among men. (Set aside for another day pornography involving either adult or child participants, and restrict our attention to cases where they are not involved.)

ChatGPT assures me that romance novels have traditionally often involved scenes of rape or forced seduction, with the understanding that the readers may find these erotic. More recently, this aspect of such stories has been condemned in some quarters and rape is depicted less often. I speculate that even in the original formulations, it was more acceptable to expect the reader to identify with the person being forced than the person doing the forcing.

I’ll speculate that for a lot of people, fantasies of raping someone else are prohibited on deontological grounds – i.e. not just because of any danger of such fantasies leading to bad behavior (consequences). If I try hard to get a deontology hat to stay on my head, I guess I can agree. But those with that view should surely consider the deontological status of the vast array of fantasy in a variety of media that celebrates killing of opponents, where they are not explicitly connected with “just war” or enforcing just laws in a way that cannot be done by any less violent means.

The original question concerned pedophilia, and can I believe be fruitfully considered on how the various situations above look when substituting children for adults.

A key question is whether a pedophile who imagines a willing and enthusiastic child partner (and let’s add in parental permission while we’re at it) is engaging in a wholesome, good expression of human sexuality. I say that he is.

One objection is that since there are no such partners in reality, he is necessarily imagining rape, but I think this is irrelevant. Consider a man who masturbates while thinking of sexual intercourse with a willing and enthusiastic Taylor Swift. The chances are so minuscule that Taylor would consent to such an encounter with any given man that we should conclude that it is just as impossible as the willing child. (Or suppose that this man actually knows Taylor, who has said in the clearest terms that she would never consent to sex with him as an individual.) I still see no deontological problem. The man has transformed the real Taylor Swift in his fantasy into a willing one. With a sex-positive mentality, we are surely free to transform the adults in our fantasies into consenting participants, and there is no obstacle to our doing the same with children.

If you care to fantasize about an unwilling child, it should have the same deontological status as fantasizing about an unwilling adult. For an imagined masochistic child, compare to an imagined masochistic adult.

I am not a big fan of deontology. Maybe I’m on board when it pertains to cannibalism or necrophilia, but shortly after that I part ways, thinking that what is “good” is largely chosen by individuals without much justification that should carry over to those with different tastes. But I have tried to consider the question above while retaining the deontology perspective.

If having a nonmainstream sexuality achieved anything for me, philosophically, it was to make me take utilitarianism more seriously and deontology less seriously.

Most of the published/legislative objections to those masturbatory aids are actually framed in a utilitarian way, based on the idea that they result in harms to children. This argument rests on evidence of correlations - but not demonstrated causal links - between some people using these outlets and then harming kids (while ignoring those who use them and don’t harm a child).

A deontological argument against them is simply that it’s self-evidently wrong to fantasise about children, but without supplementary utilitarian arguments, this rests on nothing, as far as I can see.

There’s an argument that such fantasy is not normative (and therefore bad?) but this argument cuts a lot of ways into all kinds of other behaviour, sexual and otherwise. In other words, you can’t consistently take this line and consider homosexual desire permissible (which it absolutely is).

People often extend the non-normative argument to argue against legal outlets (and against open discussion of pedophilia) on the grounds that it “normalises pedophilia”, to which I respond that pedophile attraction is already part of the normal, everyday experience of millions of people; its prevalance is much higher than most people acknowledge and moreover it’s not known to be infectious.

One deontological argument in favour of these aids is that everyone is fundamentally entitled to the pursuit of happiness (with a utilitarian exception for where this harms others). Masturbatory aids of this kind are the only ethical method of sexual satisfaction for pedophiles, and so they are a good in themself. I guess this is a better “why should anyone use them”? answer versus the utilitarian harmlessness argument, which is a “why shouldn’t anyone use them?” position instead.

However, this argument is vulnerable to the question of whether the pursuit of this particular kind of happiness is “valid”. Some people argue that there is some higher happiness available for pedophiles in desisting.

To answer this without just gainsaying it, you need both evidence and to return to utilitarian arguments that show net benefits accruing to the individual pedophiles concerned which do not impact negatively on other members of society.