joefromchicago wrote:agrote wrote:I have claimed that the existence of realistic computer-generated depictions of child abuse might make it harder for the police to use child pornography to track down child abusers.
You are suggesting that the legalisation of the viewing of free child porn might make it harder for the police to track down child abusers.
Nope, never said that. Never even suggested that. I said:
The argument can be made, however, that the loophole you want to create for "innocent" consumption of child porn would make enforcement against "guilty" consumption of child porn far more difficult.
I wasn't talking about "tracking down child abusers," I was talking about the enforcement of laws against the "guilty" consumption of child porn -- and even you agree that there is "guilty" consumption of child porn.
Okay, yes you're right, I made a mistake. I suppose you were talking about the police tracking down people who actually pay for child porn?
One thing to bear in mind is that I'm sort of making two claims about the mere viewing of free child porn. One is the obvious ethical claim: I don't think it's wrong to perform this action. The other is a more tentative claim about what the law should be; that it should be legal to view free child porn.
It may be the case, as you are arguing, that it wouldn't be practical to legalise certain ways of viewing child porn. But that wouldn't change the fact that some of those ways are ethically acceptable because they do not harm children, or do not raise the probabilty of children being harmed. You could be right that the change in legislation would make things difficult for the police. But that would be the legislation having bad consequences, not the act of viewing child porn havign bad consequences.
So even if there is no case to be made for the legalisation of the viewing of free child porn, I have still made a case for the action itself; the acton of viewing free child porn. It benefits the user without harming anybody else. It might be unhelpful to make it legal, but that doesn't make it a wrong action.
To give an analogy, I and many others think that there is nothing ethically wrong with growing cannabis for moderate personal use. But to make that action legal might have practical problems; maybe it would increase the irresponsible use of cannabis and lead to more young people suffering mental illness as a result of heavy use. I don't know whether that's true, but it could be. There might therefore be no justification for the legalisation of cannabis use. There is however, I think, justification for the personal use of home-grown cannabis. Some illegal actions are morally good.
Anyway, having got that out of the way, I should look at your argument and see whether I can make a case for making the law correspond to the ethical status of the action of viewing child porn.
Quote:agrote wrote:These are two different claims. My claim is about the ethical status of producing realistic depictions of child abuse. Your claim is about the ethical status of allowing paedophiles to view free photgraphs of real child abuse.
But we used the same sort of consequentialist analysis of those claims. Yet for some unknown reason you don't know how
I can make that argument even though it's the same kind of argument you just made. So why is my consequentialist analysis of "innocent" child porn consumption flawed while your consequentialist analysis of computer-generated child porn is sound?
We discussed seperate actions with seperate consequences. I don't disagree with your use of consequential reasoning; I disagree (I think) with your claim that legalising the viewing of free child porn would have the consequences that you claim it would have.
Quote:...in the same way that creating a loophole for receiving stolen goods as gifts would encourage stealing, creating a loophole for "innocently" viewing child porn would encourage the "guilty" viewing of child porn.
Could you explain exactly how the legalisation of the receipt of stolen goods as gifts would encourage stealing? I'm not saying that it wouldn't encourage stealing, but I'd just like to know exactly what you have in mind before I try to work out whether the analogy works.
Quote:Just as everyone who is attacked by the Pirates of Penzance claims to be an orphan, if the law makes an exception for child porn consumers who receive the porn gratuitously or through some sort of accident (e.g. finding it on the street), then everyone apprehended by the police will claim that they were such "innocent" consumers. And without a thorough investigation of the manner by which these people obtained their child porn (and, no doubt, they will now have every encouragement to hide the provenance of their porn), there could be no conviction. In other words, it will waste police time -- probably more police time than the search for the "phantom" child abuse behind the computer-generated porn images. "Innocent" consumers will be investigated while "guilty" porn consumers will go unpunished as they pretend to be "innocent." And that, of course, will simply encourage more "guilty" consumption, just as the lax or uneven enforcement of any prohibition leads to greater evasion of that prohibition.
But couldn't the police simply assess whether a case of somebody viewing child porn has had harmful consequences? For example, presumably the police have ways of finding out whether money has been illegally exchanged, so why would they have any extra difficulty with finding out whether a paedophile has paid for the porn he has used? Instead of investigatign whether a paedophile has looked at child porn, they would be investigating whether apedophile has given money to the producers of child porn.
The other cases of viewing child porn which I have admitted are not entirely harmless, were cases where the porn's lifespan on the internet is somehow increased in the process of consumption, for example by the file being duplicated or stored in a shared folder from which others may access it. Would the police have any extra problems prosecuting these cases if the harmless cases were legalsied? I'm not sure they would. Surely they could clamp down on the whole practice of sharing files, which so often invovles the illegal sharing of music and video anyway. They could stamp that out. But even if not, I'm still unsure exactly how much worse it is to share an image of child porn than it is to merely view it.
I think it might be the case that the only paedophiles that the police need to prosecute are the ones who abuse children and the ones who pay others to abuse children. But I'm out of my depth here really. I'm not an expert on law, and I'm not sure whether the current laws should be changed. I do maintain that the ethical status of viewing free child porn is such that it is an acceptable thing to do. And I maintain that the new laws regarding fake child porn should not be introduced.
