Speaker 3 00:00 - 00:08 Still the adult child sex. That's always a big sell. Oh, yeah. Well that I had um, I could friends who said are you crazy? Do not write that book Speaker 1 00:08 - 00:36 man, listen, you're talking to a guy who for 25 years has been making arguments about More or less in defense of adult child sex in classrooms. I don't know if it's the same argument as yours, but I even authored a piece in the Daily Beast in which I called into question the age of consent laws, which is, you know, and I brought to bear the arguments I was making in class. And I'm going to see how they, whether they jive. The right infringement case that we Speaker 3 00:36 - 00:44 don't get, they can't give their valid consent. And therefore, it's wrong in virtue of being a right infringement. And there's a view that it's exploitative. That even Speaker 1 00:44 - 00:44 if Speaker 3 00:44 - 00:49 it's not harmful, even if it's not a right infringement, it's somehow an exploitation. I've Speaker 1 00:49 - 00:50 heard all these. Yes. Okay. Speaker 3 00:50 - 01:03 Right. So those are the three dominant arguments. And none of these convinced me. So the... Me neither. The harm argument, well, there's actual, like, you know, empirical controversy over this. Sure. Yeah. on the rights-based argument, I think, look, we make children do all sorts of things that Speaker 2 01:03 - 01:03 we Speaker 3 01:04 - 01:20 don't want to do. We make them go to church. We make them go to the temple. We tell them to go to school. They've got to go to the dentist. They've got to go to their sister's ballet recital. And we don't care what they say. And they want to do things we say no, right? They say, I want to stay up and watch Creature Feature on WPIX until 2 Speaker 2 01:21 - 01:36 in the morning. We say, well, it's tough. That is all a child's life is, is coercion. That's right. It's coercion by adults to make, and often to make the child do something for the adult's pleasure only. That's exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. You're going to go to your great uncle's funeral, even though you Speaker 3 01:37 - 01:37 want to go and Speaker 1 01:37 - 01:37 he's not Speaker 3 01:37 - 02:19 in your interest. So the rights-based argument is a little bit hard to follow. In addition, at least in some cases, certainly with the group of hemophilia, because this seems to be like a paradigm case, there's actually some meta-studies which seem to suggest that in some cases, at least with regard to adult males and underage males that it's not harmful or if it is harmful, we can't decide whether the harm is due to the sex itself or the fact that society goes berserk over it. And so one of the articles I was reading said, look, this is wrong. Speaker 3 02:19 - 02:32 We don't need to know whether it's harmful. The empirical question of whether or not there's any long-term harm we could track on this is really beside the point. And I was kind of struck with a question. I thought, well, It's not obvious to me why that is, right? Speaker 2 02:32 - 02:32 I mean, Speaker 3 02:32 - 03:06 the standard kind of other argument is that it's a right infringement. And I wasn't sort of convinced by that argument. And also when it comes to hebephilia rather than sort of adult child sex, so sex with like young teens, it's not clear to me. I mean, look, there's at least some reason to believe that that individuals are designed by evolution to begin reproduction at that period. So if they're designed by evolution to begin reproduction, it's not clear why it would be physically either harmful or emotionally harmful. So there was kind of like three different explanations. Speaker 3 03:06 - 03:13 And then last, exploitation. Again, I don't think exploitation is wrongful. I'm not exactly sure even what makes something exploitative. Speaker 1 03:13 - 03:13 Exactly. Speaker 3 03:13 - 03:54 If there were, I'm not sure what makes it wrongful. And even if it were wrongful, it's not clear that it occurs in most cases of adult child sex, or even, let alone all of the cases. Let me address the evolution in adult child sex. And again, I'm speculating here, but it's not obvious to me there aren't evolution advantages. And here's the reasons to think there are evolution advantages. One is, when you test college age males, surprising numbers, like over one fifth, show attraction to prepubescent individuals, I assume that's mostly girls. And that's true not only when you ask them to self-report it, which people have got to be having self-report it, but when you use the penile responses, which are the kind of true test. Speaker 3 03:55 - 04:43 So it's fairly widespread among young men, particularly young men in our society. Second, you see in the hunter-gatherers. You see it in all sorts of cultures that are quite different than our own, in places like New Guinea and things like that, Melanesia. And third, you see it historically. It was true in adult child sex, true in ancient Japan, ancient China, ancient India, Egypt, even Great Britain. And you see in our closest cousins, the bonobos. Bonobos are the closest to us genetically. So if you see the same preference for adult child sex in young males today, in hunter-gatherer societies today, in history, and our closest genetic cousins, there's excellent reason to believe, not excellent, but there is good reason to believe that there's actually a strong benefit to adult child sex. Speaker 3 04:44 - 05:17 Now, what is that benefit? I'm not entirely sure. It might be that people are getting acclimated to sexuality, or they're getting prepared for a long-term bond, or it might be something else. It might be that you're bonding families together. I don't know exactly what the explanation is, but I would claim that in evolutionary terms, as best we can determine, it's more likely than not there's a strong evolutionary case for adult child sex. Imagine that an adult male wants to have sex with a 12-year-old girl. Imagine that she's a willing participant. a very standard, very widely held view that there's something deeply wrong about this. Speaker 3 05:18 - 05:46 And it's wrong independent of it being criminalized. It's not obvious to me that is in fact wrong. I think this is a mistake. And I think that exploring why it's a mistake will tell us not only things about adult child sex and statutory rape, but also about fundamental principles of morality. There's a couple of things to say here. One is, even if you are looking for a threshold, let's say there's a threshold, I'm making this number up, but let's say it's at age eight. Still, and that tells you that some adult child sex is permissible. Speaker 3 05:47 - 06:24 Second, the notion that it's wrong even with a one-year-old is not quite obvious to me. There are reports in some cultures of grandmothers fellating the baby boys to calm them down when a colicky. Now, I don't know if this is true, but this is sort of widely reported as occurring in at least one culture. And it working, that the grandmothers believe this actually works. If this were to be true, And again, I don't know it to be true. If it were to be true, it's hard to see what would be wrong with it. So yeah, I guess I think, no, I don't think there's a blanket period beyond which this is permissible. Speaker 3 06:24 - 06:54 If we're interested in willing participation, which is the way I structured it, then yeah, there's a point below which people aren't willing participants in anything, because they don't have intentions or they don't have the sort of mental states that allow for willing participation. But no, I don't think it's a blanket wrong at any age. They might think that children can't be willing things in general. It's an odd view in that they seem to will things all the time. They will participation in kickball. They will showing up, participating in the bar mitzvah lessons, bat mitzvah lessons. Speaker 3 06:55 - 07:23 So there's all sorts of things that they will. You might think, well, maybe there's something distinct about sex that they can't really understand it. It's not clear to me that what they're not getting at is consent. I suspect what they want to say is, Okay, they're willing participants, the voluntary participants, they have some understanding of what's going on, not understanding we do, but some understanding, but they haven't consented. Perhaps that's so, but that's a different claim from their being unwilling. There's just lots of activities that children engage in that they don't understand all that well. Speaker 3 07:23 - 07:31 For example, when you, when you first show up to participate in a judo tournament or you prepare for your bat mitzvah, I mean, you have Speaker 1 07:31 - 07:31 a Speaker 3 07:31 - 08:11 rough idea, but it's not clear how much you fully understand it. If we're in the area of legislation, rather than morality. Here's a rule of thumb. If you don't know whether something has expected good or expected bad consequences, the thumb on the scale should go to liberty. So if we don't know whether willing sex with 15-year-olds is going to have net good or bad consequences, it's likely to say, oh, well, go ahead and ban it. The idea is that people trying to criminalize something bear the burden. And even having harsh opinions on this before we condemn people for engaging these on the basis of probabilistic utilitarianism, we should know that it does pose a risk for those and only those willing participants. Speaker 3 08:12 - 08:13 I don't think we know that.