joefromchicago wrote:agrote wrote:No, but I can't think of any other incentives that could be caused by the action of viewing child pornography, which would motivate the producers of child pornography to abuse more children than they would have done otherwise.
Your lack of imagination is not a particularly good defense of your position.
You're begging the question if you assume that the reason I can't think of harmful consequences of viewing free child porn is that I lack imagination. Maybe I have an excellent imagination, and in fact there just aren't any such consequences to be imagined. Maybe the reason I can't think of any is that there aren't any.
Quote:But then this is always the problem when dealing with a consequentialist moral system. Inevitably, moral questions for consequentialists always become fact questions, and fact questions cannot be resolved logically.
Some can. Empirical questions can't by answered by reason alone, but empirical questions are not the only questions of fact. A logician or a mathmetitian can use a pen and a blank piece of paper to prove that 2+2=4.
Anyway, a lot of the empirical questions raised will be ones that we already know the answers to. We already know that rewards motivate people, and we don't need a team of researchers to determine that if somebody is financially rewarded for violently raping children and distributing images of it, then the abusive behaviour will usually be reinforced and he will be more inclined to keep doing it. We can intuitively guess that the utility of paying for this sort of child porn (the customer's pleasure etc.) will be outweighed by the disutility (the increased likelihood that children will suffer horifically). That's how we know that paying for child porn is a consequentially bad thing to do.
Yes, there's a bit of empirical speculation in all that, but I don't think it's something we can't rely on for present purposes. After all, the claim that children don't enjoy being violently raped is actually an empirical claim. You can't verify it by reason alone. But it's pretty obvious that if we looked for evidence for that particular empirical claim, we'd find it. Nobody in their right mind would deny that children do not enjoy being violently raped. For some empirical questions, intuition is enough.
Quote:A pedophile can always rationalize his position that pedophilia is, on the whole, more utile than inutile, just as any criminal can explain that, in his set of circumstances, his misdeeds are justifiable.
They can
try to rationalise and
try to explain. Not all of them will succeed. Charles Manson will never
successfully argue that his killings were justifiable (assuming that they weren't). You can't successfully argue for something that isn't true. If a conclusion is false, then an argument which establishes that conclusion is going to have holes in it, whether we see them or not.
A paedophile can speculate about empirical claims and produce a valid argument that certain actions associated with paedophilia are not wrong. You're right about that. But I don't see what the problem is. If you think that soem of my empirical speculations are probably mistaken, you can either find some real evidence that cotnradicts them, or just explain your own intuitions to the contrary. Why do you think I'm mistaken to assume that downloading free child porn gives no extra incentive for the producer of the child porn to make more of it? What incentives can you think of? What empirical speculations do you have to offer?
The discussion doesn't need to fizzle out just because we're speculating about "fact questions".
Quote: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 don't know how you would argue for that. The police could still use the images as evidence of child abuse and child porn production. They'd have no more difficulty than usual in tracking down people who pay for child porn. If anything their job would be made easier. At the moment people arrested for viewing child porn often claim they were doing research. That claim won't make a difference if the law is only against paying for the stuff. Research or not, if you pay for it you reward those that make it. And it will be easier to verify whether an exchange of money has taken place, than it is to verify whether somebody has deliberately viewed images of child abuse for his own pleasure.
If you want to try to make that argument, I'm all ears.
Quote:But those are all fact questions, which makes debating consequentialist ethics ultimately rather uninteresting. And I'm not going to bother debating those fact questions with you, since you've already made up your mind which facts are important and which ones aren't. As I've said before, your questions really don't interest me. If anyone is interested in addressing the questions that I think are interesting, I'll be happy to discuss them.
Could you remind me what those questions are? I don't think you've said much about them. Why don't you begin the new discussion?
