Re: Is it wrong to view child pornography?
agrote wrote:Viewing free child porn doesn't seem to be any more harmful than drinking a cup of tea or flushing tha lavatory.
On what basis do you make that conclusion?
agrote wrote:Because if you pay for child pornography, you give child abusers a financial incentive to abuse children. Your action raises the probability of children being harmed.
Whether a perpetrator receives any financial gain from his misdeeds is, from an ethical perspective, largely irrelevant. The fact that money changed hands just means that the activity might be more widespread or harder to eradicate, but it doesn't have much relevance to the act's inherent morality. It's true that, from a purely consequentialist perspective, an inutile action may be more inutile if it is more widespread, but that's different from saying that the action is more
wrong if it is more widespread. The solitary child pornographer who takes photos of children for his own pleasure and who doesn't share those photos with anyone else is still engaging in a wrongful action. If he sells those photos or gives them away, that would only bear on his culpability for distributing those photos -- it wouldn't bear on his culpability for taking the photos in the first place. Furthermore, if the act of
viewing child porn is wrong, the fact that porn was purchased or obtained for free is completely irrelevant to the wrongness of that action.
Now,
agrote, it would seem that you are arguing that merely viewing child porn isn't wrong. That's a strange position for a consequentialist to take, since a consequentialist (like, e.g., Mill) would argue that we must take into account
all of an action's consequences. Viewing porn is the functional equivalent of consuming a product (indeed, as an image, that is the only way one can "consume" porn). The consumption of a product that is produced by unethical means, however, is unquestionably inutile, since it rewards the producer (even the producer who gives away the product for free) and encourages further production. Surely, from that perspective, consumption of the product is just as inutile/unethical as its production.
agrote wrote:If you download it for free, no such thing happens. Your action seems to have very little (if any) effect on the probability of child abuse occuring.
I'm a consequentialist, so the ethical distinction I am putting forward is based on the net contribution that each action has towards the maximisation of human well-being. Paedophiles do not give financial contributions to child abusers when they download chidl porn for free. They do, on the other hand, satisfy their sexual appetite (in one of the few harmless ways that they can), and therefore promote their own well-being. It is ethically better to download child porn for free than to buy it from those who produced it.
That's rather like saying that it is ethically better to receive stolen goods as a gift than to pay for them. If the state has an interest in deterring a behavior, then it also has an interest in deterring others from rewarding and encouraging that behavior. A consequentialist would easily agree with that. Thus the state not only prohibits stealing, it also prohibits the selling and buying (as well as the gratuitous passing and receiving) of stolen goods, on the rationale that the selling and buying of stolen goods rewards and encourages stealing. In the same way, if the downloading of child porn (including the gratuitous downloading of child porn) rewards and encourages the production of child porn, then the downloading can be prohibited as well as the production.
agrote wrote:In fact, I go as far as claiming that it is perfectly fine to download child porn for free, and should not be a crime. At the very least, it should not be punished with lengthy prison sentences.
Now you're talking about the law. I thought you wanted to keep this strictly on an ethical level.
