Marat

Padren: While I agree that many ancient societies had many barbaric forms, such as slavery, oppression of women, militarism, etc., my argument is essentially that if a society like Ancient Greece, where pedophilia was an approved social usage, was really psychologically damaging because of its objective, transcultural nature, then it is inconceivable that that society would have proved so resilient and brilliant in its achievements. Sculpture, architecture, philosophy, mathematics, science, and drama all experienced their greatest development ever at the hands of men who, as young boys, had all suffered what our society would regard as the most crippling psychological injury imaginable. If they had really been that damaged by their early sexual experience, they would hardly have been able to accomplish all the great feats of invention and creativity which they did, since such productivity is the surest measure we have of psychological health. Depressed people are inert; psychotic people are disordered; paranoic people are reclusive or combative -- and we see none of that in Ancient Athens when pedophilia flourished there. When you complain that sex is outside the experience of children, it seems that that is the result of the design of a culture which constructs children artificially as asexual, rather than some transcultural necessity. Children are certainly not asexual if they can get away with their sex games. As it is, children are now made to do many things they are not ready for, and to accept many things that are outside their experience. Going from playing all day in the sandbox to having nuns scream at you about the eternal flames in Hell that were going to burn you up if you picked your nose was certainly something outside my experience at the time. Almost every activity carries risks and has good and bad aspects. You can break your neck jumping off a diving board at the YMCA and spend the rest of your life paralyzed, just as you can get hep C or produce an unwanted pregnancy by having sex with your teacher when you're 12. But the fact that our culture chooses only to see the good in swimming lessons at the Y and only the bad in 12-year-olds having sex with their teacher says more about society's dislike of sex than it does about its special riskiness. I know that Wilhelm Reich is not especially popular today, but most psychiatrists would agree that people can become neurotic from sexual repression. Just look at nuns! So to imagine that parents do not truly harm their children by forcing on them the extremely unnatural sexual perversion of denying them access to their own sexuality in any form of open expression of it with a partner would be naive, although this is what the unrealistic social construction of children as sexless requires. I don't doubt that there is a lot of emotional pain, and perhaps even neurosis, that comes from children exposed to sex with adults in today's world, but that is just an artifact created by society's profound disapproval of it. When children feel this disapproval, and when they are clinically dissected by 'experts' as a result of their experience, this is no doubt extremely traumatizing. But that is a conventional social problem, not a problem essentially rooted in the human psyche. Just imagine what happened before there were any sophisticated social mores in the time of early humans or 'cave men.' People must have always had sex with each other as soon as they could, say at about 12, and no doubt even before then they played sexual games with each other, much as young pups do now or as children spontaneously do in their sex games. But for your theory to be correct, all these people would have had to be traumatized by their sexual experience, which for everyone came in childhood. Yet then the question arises: Why would they have been traumatized? Why would the experience have seemed any different to a cave man at age 30 having sex with a 12-year-old than it would have seemed to him when he was 12 and a 30-year-old had sex with him? Since no mechanism is imaginable by which the experience could have been traumatizing, then we have to accept that the trauma of pedophilia is just an unnecessary side-effect of an arbitrary cultural construct. You seem especially concerned about sex between older males and young males because of the tensions in any shared intimacy between someone with knowledge and experience and someone without it. But for the Ancient Greeks, the mentorship that went along with the social ritual of pedophilia was one of its major benefits. Even if you don't accept that, just consider other examples, where boys and men cooperatively set off on a common bonding experience, such as a 12-year-old and a 30-year-old going off together on a hunting trip. The same disparities of age and experience exist there, but no one would ever think it simply had to be traumatizing for that reason. I think the whole pedophilia case highlights the difficulty of thinking of anything branded by strong cultural disapproval in a neutrally objective way. Our condemnatory values keep creeping in to our attempt to think of everything rationally.

I thought that Constantine suffered some hallucination of the Cross in the sky before a battle he won and that's why he made Christianity the state religion. But whatever Christianity's positive effects, these seem to have worn off pretty quickly, since the Roman Army looked pretty pathetic when it ultimately succumbed to the masses of barbarian tribes streaming over the Empire's borders.

I am sure people have been spiking drinks with one substance or another for centuries in order to make them unconscious and gain some advantage over them, whether it was robbery, kidnapping, or illegal sexual contact. But since any number of substances may accomplish that, from alcohol alone to alcohol mixed with a range of ordinary, over-the-counter sleep aids, there was no need for the world-wide outburst of hysteria and the massive response of the criminal law to the introduction of just one more substance which could help in that age-old scheming. I think the over-reaction was more a matter of the public's background fear and hatred of sexuality being played upon by the media and by public authorities, who are always eager to seize on any excuse to gain more control through intrusive laws and enhanced police powers. I agree with much of what Lemur said, which is that society would be a much more sane and relaxed place if sexuality had never been turned into something sacred, which in turn makes it something relatively scarce, which then leads to all sorts of social stress and criminal acts to obtain it. If having sex with someone had been constituted by our cultural history as something no more significant than having a conversation with someone, then a variety of sexual partners would be available as readily as a variety of conversational partners are now, with the result that no one would ever think of using violence to force anyone into sex. After all, has anyone in an alley at night ever forced you at gunpoint to discuss the day's politics with him?

But if pedophilia really does cause harm in a transcultural, objective, necessary, and unavoidable sense, then why have there been so many successful societies, from the greatest of all societies, Ancient Greece in the Age of Pericles, to the Kalahari Bushmen of Southwest Africa, to the Polynesians of Pitcairn Island, who have practised it with apparently no negative consequences, either in the general psychological health of their citizens or in the cohesion of their society? I grant that pedophilia in modern, industrialized societies would be severely psychologically harmful, if only because the society regards it as harmful and that general view would have its influence on everyone affected by it, producing psychological trauma of all sorts. But my question is whether we can demonstrate that there is something about pedophilia beyond that which has to make it harmful in every possible human society? Children are certainly sexual beings, though few societies in history have wanted to admit that. Children around the world spontaneously play naughty games like 'doctor' with each other, and they often resent the interference of adults with what they regard as their natural fun. At least that is what I remember from the group of five or six children I used to play with when I was age 4 to 10. If some attractive female teacher had 'abused' me when I was a child I would have been absolutely delighted, so I question the automatic characterization of such actions, at least when they proceed from adult females to young boys, as abusive. It would certainly be abusive if it involved some element of compulsion, such as the teacher requiring my participation against my will under threat of a bad grade, but sex under compulsion is an entirely different issue from sex per se, which is also illegal and assumed to be 'harmful.' What I did experience as painful and abusive when I was a child was the sexual starvation I was forced to endure by the adult world around me. I don't understand the other argument usually made, which is that children are not ready for sex and so they cannot consent to it. As I said before, children can consent to many activities infinitely more risky than sex, like jumping off diving boards into pools, or swimming as far out into a pond as they can, and yet society hardly seems to take notice of these risks. Also, children are pushed into many activities which they do not want and which benefit only adults. Thus in my own case, I was forced from age 5 on to endure a hideously strict religious upbringing, which only imparted to me material suitable for developing nightmares and neuroses, and involved my being frequently physically harmed by insane nuns who delighted in beating the tender young flesh of children's fingers with their steel-edged rulers. Even though all of this was harmful and was done not only without my consent but even against it, society was perfectly prepared to permit it as part of my parents' inalienable right to determine my religious upbringing. This was objectively much more damaging than any sexual experience could have been, but the damage was invisible to society, since it was a morally approved damage, while sex is morally disapproved of. But while I was certainly unprepared for religious instruction and discipline when I was forced into it, I was more than eager for sexual experimentation of all sorts, as were all my friends of the same age. So why is pedophilia automatically assumed to be harmful while religious education is praised? I think this is just another case of society assuming that what it profoundly disapproves of must also just for that reason be objectively harmful, just as when Kinsey surveyed American medical students in 1959 and found that half of them were convinced that masturbation was physically harmful.

To take another approach to this question: Do you think that if any random human were selected and made God, with all the imperfections of character and morals that humans have, that person would have designed the universe to be so cruel as it now is? On a really bad day I might have designed the world so that very bad people would get a mild electric shock every time they chose evil over good, but I would never have sent cancer into the world as some subterranean causal consequence of apparently entirely unrelated evil choices by humans! Most religious people would say that if God ceased to exist, the universe would cease along with him, so he must actively sustain the universe by some continuing creative or generative force. But if you were God and could experience, through your omniscience, every intimate detail of a single family's desperation as they watched helplessly as their child was dying of cancer, perhaps in horrendous pain because of the attending physician's reluctance to court the dangers of giving adequate morphine doses to young children, would you have the sadistic capacity to continue to will that horror to persist, second by second, for perhaps weeks on end until the child's eventual death? Now multiply this times the hundreds of millions of horrible deaths in the world! Is it conceivable that any even moderately good, to say nothing of an infinitely good, God, would allow this to persist, or would create a universe where this could happen rather than just prefer to sit by himself in an empty universe which at least had no such hideousness?

"So its future value has nothing to do with its current value?" That statement expresses the whole problem with this line of thought. Why should things which now seem to have a value somehow not matter unless they have a value in some make-believe world after I am dead? If I am put in a torture chamber and have various pieces and parts of my body pulled off over the next four years until I am dead, would I say to myself, "Luckily none of this matters because it will not be recorded eternally either in my memory during some coming everlasting life, in the history of God's mind, or in the eternity of the universe." Of course not! The problem comes from the initial perspective created by religion, which is that the absolute force of moral values as we experience them in society must depend for its validity on their anchoring in the will of some infinite being, eternal plan, divine order or the universe, or some other force which is as absolute physically as the values are absolute morally. But as Kant famously said, "You can't derive an 'ought' from an 'is,'" and so here, the absolute value of various moral imperatives cannot be meaningfully supported by their being supported by some absolutely powerful thing. Moral values have all the support they need from their anchoring in a source superior to any individual, and that is in society itself. Just because human society, which creates our values, is not itself absolute, does not mean that its values cannot be absolute within the society into which we have been socialized and which forms our ultimate context of meaning. If someone tells me a native of the Amazon River basin feels worthless until he has proved his maturity by killing a man, that does not make me feel inadequate because I have not yet done so.

I said, "anything which CAN be related to sexual liberty," since I don't think that GBH has anything more to do with sexuality than Sominex does. It is just that in a society which is disproportionately terrified of the dangers of sex, everything new can easily be interpreted as a sexual danger, and then the attendant hysteria emerges. In Saudi Arabia, for example, women are forbidden to drive cars because cars are regarded as 'brothels on wheels' since they provide a convenient venue for illicit sexual liasons. That they can also be used to carry food home from the grocery store and that this benefit may outweigh any moral dangers somehow doesn't occur to anyone there.

In-person schooling really wastes a huge amount of time, if you count all the time lost and energy expended in moving into and out of dorms, dealing with odd roommates, resisting party invitations, walking back and forth to classes, looking for the right offices, etc. In theory, on-line education could dispense with that and save at least a few hours a day of logistics time. But the downside is that you have to have the self-discipline and motivation to make your education seem real to you, and you lack the inspiration of fellow students and professors physically present around you to encourage you to think. Just reflect on how well you have learned material studied in a university class compared to how well you have learned it by reading out of a textbook, and you see the problem with on-line education. However, for many people with other commitments it will open up the possibility of education where it would otherwise have been impossible. Unfortunately, most on-line schools up to now have not been very good, just diploma mills trying to make money rather than serious institutions of higher learning. The only exception is the University of London, which has been offering correspondence degrees since the 19th century. They give their correspondence students the same exams in the same format as the internal students take, and they hold them to the same standards. However, as far as I know, they have never become a truly on-line program.

But the problem is that the laws of civilized societies forbid lots of activities which are not objectively harmful, but which are merely morally disapproved of. Thus marijuana use is much less dangerous and harmful than alcohol use, but while alcohol use is legal, marijuana use is illegal. Incest is illegal, but who is actually harmed by it? Perhaps it could be allowed and restricted, so that the couple would have to use birth control to prevent genetically defective offspring, but even this would probably be a small problem, since the rulers of Egypt were required to marry their brothers or sisters to maintain the purity of the royal bloodline and that didn't produce obvious genetic defects. What about bestiality? If performed with sufficiently large animals in heat, would that really be harmful to anyone? If it could spread disease, then just require condom use. In all these cases we just have pure moral disapproval making harmless things illegal, so what would be wrong if we took Scalia's reminder seriously and made homosexuality illegal? I think that a liberal society should follow John Stewart Mill's 'harm principle,' and try to restrict itself to criminalizing only those activities which demonstrably harm other people, but no societies I know ever manage to do this, so where do we draw the line?

But, returning to the original point behind this subsidiary discussion: If, as you say, animals are less valuable to God than humans are, then His allowing an animal just to gain a bit of nourishment by eating a newborn human at the cost of terrible human suffering and the death of a human was evil. God would even regard a human killing another human for just one meal, in a situation where it did not save the life of the cannibalizing human, to be evil, never mind an animal doing so. And since this evil by the construction of the hypothetical example had no possible causal link to any ultimately beneficial or redemptive outcome, God has allowed evil having no beneficial or redemptive purpose to come into the world.

Andrea Dworkin said that in 1999 she was raped by the date rape drug, though somehow the great feminist rape-hunter forgot that it was important not to take a shower to wash away all evidence of the deed, and that it was also important to report the incident to the police, or to name either of the alleged perpetrators. If we do perform an experiment in which both GBH and alcohol are consumed together, then how do we know which drug had the soporific effect, or how much can be attributed to either? Alcohol always used to have the reputation of being the seducer's trick of last resort, so combining it with GBH would seem to mask the latter's effects.

I was living in England when the world-wide hysteria over the 'date rape' drug GBH first seized hold of public consciousness. Officials in the British government were alarmed that their laws did not permit them at the time to prohibit the manufacturing, sale, distribution, and use of the drug, so being naughty, I thought I would buy some and try it. I found it really salty -- so salty in fact that I couldn't understand how anyone could possibly slip it into someone's drink without the person noticing it, unless it were tomato juice already spiced with Worcestershire Sauce. I also found that while it made me slightly sleepy, it took about an hour, even at the highest dose, for the drug to make me even seriously want to go to sleep. It was certainly much less powerful as a soporific than Sominex or anything else freely available over-the-counter in the sleep medication section of any pharmacy around the world. So if GBH had to be prohibited, then why not Sominex? The whole incident just illustrates once again the hysterical response of bourgeois society to anything which can be related to sexual liberty, even a mild sedative like GBH.

Is pedophilia harmful to children? Cultural historians usually hail Ancient Greece in the Age of Pericles as the greatest culture the world has ever witnessed, yet there pedophilia was regularly practised, and love between older men and younger boys was praised as a social institution to promote the maturation of teenage boys. Since that didn't have disruptive effects on the rich artistic, philosophical, literary, and military achievements of that culture, I don't see how we can assume that pedophilia is a transcultural evil. It should be noted that the form of sex practised between men and young boys in Ancient Greece was not the sort that would cause any physical harm. It seems reasonable to suppose that the 'harm' which can now be detected in young boys 'victimized' by sex with older men is probably the result of society's disapproval of this activity, which can then make those participating in it feel traumatized. The same thing used to happen with those who gave into homosexual inclinations in the days when society reacted with horror to homosexuality, assuming that it too must be harmful because it was morally disapproved of. Perhaps if we ceased to react with shock and horror at pedophilia, we would also find that its effects were just as neutral as they were when it was a commonly accepted cultural practise in Ancient Greece. The fact that children 'cannot consent to sex' is not a biological or psychological fact, since children are legally allowed to consent to all sorts of things, like diving off a springboard into a swimming pool, which are far more likely to prove dangerous to their health than sex is. The inability of children to consent to sex is only a legal construct, much as the inability of anyone legally to consent to homosexual acts used to be. I'm not gay or a pedophile, but just a liberal, so I wonder why I bother sticking my neck out on such a controversial topic! But I think if we take seriously the Socratic injunction to question everything until it either turns out to make sense or it logically fails to do so, then we can't shrink back even from testing such a delicate matter as this.

Since many people depend on their reputation for their career and income, such as lawyers, judges, doctors, engineers, etc., then libel really has to be forbidden by law, as it is everywhere in the world I know of. You can do undeserved and real harm to people by saying false things affecting their public reputation, so that type of speech really does cause objective harm and not just hurt feelings, which anyone believing in free speech should be prepared to endure. Publishing false news has been forbidden in various jurisdictions and has been used as an excuse to punish Holocaust denial. But since historians have serious debates all the time about what really happened in the past, it seems dangerous to allow society to punish Holocaust denial. How many people might be offended by any one of a number of denials of past events? Would the British Royal Family be offended if someone denied that the Duke of Clarence was innocent of the Jack the Ripper murders? If so, should that assertion be illegal? If the Armenians are offended by the Turks denying that the Armenian Genocide occurred, should that be illegal? If the descendants of the tribes killed by Moses en route to the promised land are offended if the truth of the Old Testament is denied, should we all be forced to subscribe to belief in the tales of Moses?

The 14th Amendment protection against discrimination allows a wide range of differential treatments for different groups. The only limit is that these differences in treatment are subjected to varying levels of scrutiny to assess whether they are rationally justified or not. Discriminatory regulations against children normally pass this test quite easily. While it is certainly true that children vary greatly in their abilities and maturity, the state, for its administrative efficiency, is entitled to impose certain simplifying categories on people to manage the society without too much cost. But while those are the general principles governing the way children are treated, I would generally prefer that children be granted greater personal autonomy, especially when it comes to state restrictions which are imposed on children 'for their own moral good' rather than for their objectively measured health and safety interests.

Are you asking about primary school, high school, or university education? Universities began around 1100 A.D. because prior to the inevention of movable type, books were prohibitively expensive, so it made economic sense to have people desirous of learning gather together where they could all listen as books were read aloud and then discussed. Ever since Gutenberg's time, however, this reason for universities has been missing, and now with the new technology of the internet, perhaps universities should evolve once again to keep up with this technological advance, getting rid of the expensive buildings and just becoming 'virtual' institutions with a budget focused on professors rather than dorms and lecture halls.

Since the military forces of other countries, such as Germany, allow gays to serve openly and there don't seem to be any problems, I can't see what is so different about the U.S. Army that problems with gays would be inevitable. Also, since there are now women in the American military, it shouldn't be assumed that gays or lesbians being attracted to other men or women, respectively, would place inordinate strains on life in military service, since the same tensions must already be present among the much larger populations of straight males and females. What is most interesting about the whole issue is how quickly homosexuality, which until about 30 years ago was criminal if acted upon, and was often very severely punished by state laws, now designates a legal category of persons who are protected not only against criminalization but also against discrimination. Can you imagine a future era in which a Pedophile Rights movement gets going and suddenly it becomes illegal to discriminate against pedophiles in the military, in teacher hiring practises, among church staff members, etc.? This was the ultimate sense of the questions raised by Justice Scalia in the homosexual rights Supreme Court cases: Is society allowed to declare certain types of person or the actions certain types of persons perform to be criminal simply because it doesn't approve of them, or does it have to prove first that those actions are objectively harmful? If the state can't prove that the actions which characterize the preferred behavior of a certain class of people are objectively harmful, must it then grant that group not only freedom from being punished by the criminal law, but also legal protection from discrimination?

This case is different from the normal rules by which the government can freely design its tax exemption status rules, since it concerns a Constitutional right of freedom of religion, which these rules arguably violate. The issue is whether churches can endorse political candidates from the pulpit. The argument against allowing this is that it would permit churches to use their tax-exempt status to support their political views, in effect forcing taxpayers indirectly to bear the financial burdens of the political campaigns of candidates they don't support. This would make the government indirectly the financial backer of certain political candidates, which would violate the necessary political neutrality of the government tax structure. The argument for allowing this is that religious doctrines may clearly have implications about which political candidates should be endorsed, so if the government denies tax-exemption status to churches endorsing candidates from the pulpit, this could be government interference with freedom of religion. I am not sure why the churches want to make such an issue of this, however, since the government tax rules are easily circumvented as they stand. Thus a priest could say from the pulpit, "Any Catholic who gives aid and comfort to anyone endorsing abortion is excommunicated!" and this would be regarded by the law as a politically neutral religious statement, but if said just before Election Day, all the members of the congregation would recognize it as a political endosement.

All forms of gambling seem silly, since you pay $1.00 for a lottery ticket worth about $0.10, since otherwise the lottery operator could not make a lot of money. But people have argued that lottery tickets should be viewed as a kind of inverse insurance policy. When I buy insurance, I protect myself against the unlikely occurrence of an enormous catastrophe, and I pay more than that protection is worth, since the insurance company makes a profit. When I buy a lottery ticket, I buy the chance of the unlikely occurrence of something very good happening to me, i.e., winning the lottery prize, for which I pay more than it is worth, since the lottery operator makes a profit. Viewed this way, buying a lottery ticket can seem as rational as buying insurance, with the only difference being that I can't avoid the risk that something terrible will happen to me, but I can neglect buying the unlikely opportunity that something very good may happen to me.

What was Abraham doing with that goat then after he let Isaac go? How dare Christ send the mental illness of the insane person into a herd of animals such that they were driven by it to drown themselves? I seem also to remember the Bible saying somewhere that the world was provided by God for man to use to his purposes. Theologians usually interpret Christianity, with its central image of man becoming immortal by rising into heaven after death, and God becoming man by incarnating as Christ, as a religion which sets humans at the apex of value. This was in great contrast to other religions of the era, such as Hinduism with its thousands of animal gods, Ancient Egypt with its animal-headed gods, Grecian Egypt with its city, Krokodilopolis, dedicated to the sacred crocodile, and Mithraism with its sacred bull, which gave animals a more prominent role as divinities. In fact modern Pagans now try to dress up their religion by pointing out how they always gave nature a higher role compared to humans than did Christianity, which gives the Pagans greater credence by their closer link to the modern environmentalist movement.

Yeah, except Christianity takes the view, in opposition to Paganism, that animals were put here for human use and have no value in themselves apart from that.

One of the definitions of a 'nation' under international law is a 'legal jurisdiction able to control the entry and exit of persons at its borders.' So for the United States to preserve its status under international law, it has to be able to control migration at its southern border, and if a wall is required to achieve that control, who can complain? It seems truly odd that foreign nationals can complain that a sovereign jurisdiction is erecting a wall to prevent them from violating its laws and its international legal right to control the entrance of foreigners at its borders. Can there really be a 'right' to commit the crime of wandering into a foreign jurisdiction without complying with its entry regulations? The ultimate issues of the tension between racism and the preservation of national cultural character are too sensitive to be addressed rationally in the whole immigration debate. But if there were enough jobs and enough space for 1.2 billion ethnic Chinese to immigrate to the United States, would it be racist to object to this mass immigration simply on the ground that this would transform the cultural character of the United States? English would no longer be the national language, Christmas would no longer be a legal holiday, and most citizens would know more about the life of Lao Tze (Confucious) than about George Washington. Should a liberal state which defines itself by its legal values rather than by its cultural identity be free to control its immigrant population to preserve its cultural identity, or is it legally and morally committed to require nothing but adherence to the values of the Bill of Rights and to allow a type of 'international airport lounge' population to arise in America?

Needimprovement: The problem in your reasoning turns on your notion of 'possible.' If we were walking together at night down a street in a slum section of a major city in July, and a man wearing a mask and carrying a gun came towards us, I would say that from the tangible, empirical evidence and from logical inferences based on that evidence, the man is a robber about to attack us, so we had better run. But if you then said, "No, it is possible that he is a devotee of Hallowe'en who is still wearing his holiday costume even in July," I would say that that was crazy, since your assertion was based on a bare, theoretical notion of 'possibility' which did not arise from any tangible empirical evidence (such as it's being October 31st) or from any logical inference from such tangible empirical evidence. If we ever actually used such purely ungrounded notions of 'possibility' in our reasoning, all our thinking and action would be paralyzed, since we would always have to entertain all the vast array of theoretical possibilities that everything was actually different from what the empirical evidence or logical inference from the empirical evidence suggested it was. Since we don't ever grant such purely notional views of possibility any weight in our reasoning, then we shouldn't do so in our philosophical reasoning either. Thus, returning to the case at hand, based on the empirical data in the situation of the newborn being eaten by wolves, we can discern and logically infer no real possibility of this event having a benevolent or redemptive value. To say that it might possibly have such a value even though the data provide us with no grounds for inferring such a value, and we cannot develop any logical train of thought that would tie such a value to the available data, is to use an empty and unreal notion of possibility which does not have any weight in a rational argument. You can't throw an empty notion of theoretical possibility into the scales against a clear empirical case where the evidence suggests that there is no possibility of suffering being redeemed and pretend that the evidence-backed and the empty possibilities balance each other out. First you have to show why it is just as reasonable to think that the newborn being eaten by wolves is as consistent with a benevolent purpose as it is to think it is inconsistent with a benevolent purpose. If we admitted that type of empty, theoretical, empirically and rationally unsupported possibility as a valid move in our reasoning and arguments, then we could justify not getting up for work in the morning because it is possible that what seems to be reality is just a dream or an elaborate optical illusion. But while that is just as theoretically 'possible' as that the evil in the world has an ultimately benevolent purpose, neither is a sufficiently empirically or logically supported possibility for us ever to take either one seriously.

Things can be extremely important in a relative sense -- that is, relative to me and the other people around me at this time and in this place -- without having to be important in an absolute sense for all eternity and for the entire universe. The $100 bill in my wallet is still important and useful to me even though on some other galaxy or in Ancient Rome it would not be recognized as legal tender with the capacity to purchase anything. There is a general tendency to assume that things need an absolute foundation to be validated at all, when in fact all we ever have in our finite existence are relative foundations, which are always adequate for the relative purposes, meanings, and existences we have.

But if we assume that children aged 14 freely consent to sex with someone their own age or older, then why is it so important that their consent to sex was immature, stupid, silly, with the wrong person, or a too soon for their intelletual and emotional development? Children that age can consent to swimming lessons which may drown them if they mis-estimate their strength and ability to swim back to shore, or which may break their neck if they dive off the diving board of the pool in a reckless way, but society doesn't seem especially concerned about this potentially lethal mistake, and inducing children to start swimming too early for their ability to assess its risks competently in all circumstances is not illegal. Early swimming lessons, just like early sex, can have good as well as bad effects, so why do we let children consent to the former but not to the latter? I think that there is no way out of this trap for a supposedly liberal, rational, positivistic society which is dedicated to legal freedom except where the likely injury of exercising that freedom clearly outweighs any potential benefits. We simply have to admit that the reason why two 14-year-olds having consensual sex with each other is illegal while two fourteen-year-olds going swimming in challenging waters is not is just that we hate and fear sex while we are relaxed about swimming. When making the cost-benefit analysis in each case, society exaggerates the risks, conceiving sex as nothing but a series of near-certain exposures to Aids, unwanted pregnancy, kidnapping into the harems of Fu Man Chu in the Orient, or death at the hands of Jack the Ripper, and negates the benefits, which are the sexual pleasures involved, which in the mind of bourgeois respectability count as non-existent.