agrote wrote: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.
That's a rather difficult position for a consequentialist to take, since consequentialism must consider
all of the potential consequences of an act. You want to segregate law and morality into neat compartments, but I don't think a consequentialist can do that. After all, the question that consequentialism asks of any action is: "does this action bring greater or lesser utility (or happiness or whatever) to the world?" It does not ask if an action brings greater or lesser
morality to the world, since morality is simply a function of utility (indeed, to declare an action "moral" is just another way of saying it is "more utile than not"). And the law is likewise a function of utility. Consequently, if an action is, on the whole, inutile, it really doesn't matter if it is inutile ethically or legally -- utility is the sole measure of all actions, while law and morality are merely expressions of the utilitarian calculus.
agrote wrote: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.
And that's the problem that I previously identified with any consequentialist analysis. Ultimately, such an analysis becomes a fact question, and we can no longer say someone's argument is right or wrong, but only that it is persuasive or unpersuasive.
agrote wrote: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.
If the receipt of stolen goods as gifts is legal but the
purchase of stolen goods is illegal, then everyone who obtains stolen goods will claim that they received them as gifts. Conceivably, fences of stolen goods would then set up shops where the transactions are structured as gifts rather than as sales: e.g. a fence, rather than selling a stolen tv for $100, sells an item of little value for $100 and throws in the tv for free as a "gift." The market for stolen goods would expand because of this loophole, which would then encourage thieves to steal more goods in order to satisfy the demand created by the loophole.
I would also add that the mere example of people obtaining stolen goods encourages more people to obtain stolen goods. And if the practice becomes widespread enough to reach a "tipping point," then obtaining stolen goods becomes socially acceptable, at least to a certain class of people if not the entire society. If it is, however, inutile to encourage stealing, it is also inutile to encourage the social acceptability of stealing.
agrote wrote:But couldn't the police simply assess whether a case of somebody viewing child porn has had harmful consequences?
You want the police to exercise the functions of both judge and legislator? I don't think you've considered all of the consequences here.
agrote wrote: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.
Is it more utile or less utile to have lots of "innocent" child porn flying around the internets if you have already determined that "guilty" porn should be banned?
You want to have a world where a lot of child porn is wrong but a little is all right. I can't help thinking that you're proposing a situation that is the equivalent of being a little bit pregnant.
agrote wrote: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.
And I'm saying that, on consequentialist grounds, you haven't thought your position all the way through.
