The point is, by the time children are rational there’s no point using violence against them anyway. The best person to judge this of course, if the parent.
If the child did not initiate the sexual action, then they cannot be said to have consented. Many (even most) children willingly have sexual play with other children. But they do not often do so with adults. If an adult sees a child in some act of sexual exploration and decides to join in, without having been invited, the adult has violated the rights of the child. That the child might have consented if they were, say, ten years older, does nothing to change the fact.
The fact is that children can give consent. They do consent to sexual activity with other children. They exhibit no such consent, normally, to sexual activity with adults. So the assumption that an adult who initiates sexual activity with a child is molesting the child, is a perfectly reasonable one.
Why ? Accepting an invitation, for instance, is clearly consent.
But sometimes they do. Not to mention the fact that western culture is highly hypocritical when it comes to sexual matters. ‘Adults’ would seldom if ever openly talk about this kind of thing.
Assuming that the majority of children are not interesed in sexual activities with adults (another not well defined term) it follows that some chidlren would not object to it.
That sounds like guilty-until-proven-innocent…
You’re not responding to my actual argument, which is that a cultural norm against something like watching child pornography in your own home (a vice) does not justify a breach of non-aggression. All you can do is try to disassociate, express yourself against it and prohibit it on your own rightful property. But a communitarian norm of such matters that is legally enforceable by violence is not consistant with libertarianism. Yes, watching child pornography may be widely shunned as a vice, but this doesn’t justify a law against it or any of kind of violence against someone.
Even if it is assumed that it is something that merits punishment (which it isn’t), the punishment of violence against someone’s person is not proportional to the act of watching something on a television or computer screen, which doesn’t qualify as a crime by any common sense definition of crime. Breaches of cultural norms that do not pertain to violence and property in and of themselves do not justify violence. Libertarianism cannot be reconciled with such communitarianism. People can be as intolerant of it as they please, but violence is not justified.
On the idea of an “age of consent”: there is no single “age of consent”, for consent is qualatative rather than quantative in nature. Consent is something to be determined by the particular qualities of a social phenomenon. Any determiniation of consent is always on a case by case basis that takes into account the will and behavior of all the people in the given scenario. A uniform “age of consent” inherently constitutes a one-size-fits-all regulation that decides the case in advance irrespective of its particulars. Different people mentally and physically mature at different rates, and what’s most relevant to the question of consent are the particulars of their behavior as individuals, not some kind arbitrary predetermined quota meant to increase law enforcement’s catches on alleged sex offenders so that more funding is thrown at the bureaucracy of the prison-industrial complex.
A teen-ager is not a child.
Certainly. I was just trying to illustrate the lynching-mob anti-sex mindset. The assumption seems to be that there’s something wrong with sex and that ‘children’ should be protected from it.
Children learn to exploit their rational faculty through nurture and habituation. Until they learn to reason independently, how on earth are they to determine where their interests lie and how to achieve them? States involve adults substituting their judgement for those of other adults, who require no such habituation. So it is disanalogous. Of course the parent cannot force the child not to leave should it decide to do so.
Hi, newby here waves
I would call myself a libertarian apart from the intellectual property thing, which is the reason I have not previously joined here and no longer financially support this org or LRW. Every time I reach for my credit card there’s an article by Kinsella or someone that makes me put it away again.
This topic is a great example of the confusion or outright hypocrisy of the anti-IP stance.
There’s 2 issues here, the right to control such images and the right to create them in the first place.
It is simply logically incoherent to claim any kind of control over photographs, text, or whatever, of any kind, while claiming individuals do not have the right to make contracts on such things. If it’s OK for you to steal music or software because it’s your recording equipment and the owner “doesn’t lose anything” then by your own argument child porn is perfectly peachy. End of discussion.
Face it, either you DO agree with that or you DON’T but please don’t insult people by claiming you believe both at the same time. Save that for Orwell novels.
I get the same “WTF?” feeling when I hear how it’s a terrible crime that the goverment “steals” the value of your savings by printing more dollars (it’s their press right?). They’re ‘only’ devaluing your previous productivity by diluting the value of your store of value, same as ‘sharing’ music or software devalues the producers store of value, which according to Kinsella et al if perfectly fine, heck it’s admirable that they’d spread the wealth, right? Freedom! We can all be rich by stealing!
Spare me the hypocrisy, please. Yeah sure, they ‘force’ you to earn dollars - but who forces you to steal a certain band’s music? If what they do to ‘money’ is wrong and theft then it’s wrong and theiving to do it to people’s IP. End of discussion.
Regarding the children element, first let me say I totally despise the use of children to make a point, though it’s a very valid question in this example. Far too often destruction from govermnet comes with the false claim of “for the baybees!”
However I feel an important principle is being missed here. Responsibility can ONLY come with associated rights, ie power. No right, ie no power, then no responsibility. I cannot control the weather thus I bear no responsibility for it. If a parent is “responsible” for a child then they must have power over that child, whether you wish to call it ownership or not, the responsibility comes with rights and power or there IS no responsibility. As such, to keep things simple, I’d say parents DO own their children. You can fidget over the details if you like but in blunt terms if the parents do not have ownership and power over their children then they have no responsibility to them either.
The idea that YOU, through your opinion or mob vote, have power over other people’s children or parenting goes totally against the NAP. As such pure libertarian principle should be to turn a blind eye to anything a parent does with THEIR child. So following libertarian principles the answer to the question must be thus:
If the filmer is the child’s parent then it’s perfectly acceptable, even if 99.9% of us loathe the very idea of it, likewise the copying, sharing, selling or renting of such material is also fine. End of discussion.
Alternatively we wish to believe multiple things at the same time, which sadly seems all too common, even among libertarians. As for all the waffle about where rights come from I’d have thought it obvious - human rights stem from the basic principle of “Do onto others..” No further nitpicking about self-awareness or anything else required. We respect human rights because we’re human. Those who break that pact are enemies of us all.
“I wanna steal music cos I can get away with it” does not fit within that pact any more than stealing bread, gold or other people’s children.
My own take? That we should move with the times and technology and acknowledge intellectual property as real, valuable, property. That includes unauthorised photos or video of our children. We should have a say in how our likeness or images are used, just as copyright laws protect logos and trademarks, model releas forms are required for mass broadcast etc.
As for the point a child owns themselves and is no longer the propery of the parents, keep it simple, puberty, ie the point they become reproducing adults themselves. Why make it complicated?
Yes, that does mean parents could film their own children and sell the results to peacefully purchasing fellow perverts. Either that or you accept mob rule determining what’s done with your property, in which case why not just call yourself a statist instead of a libertarian?
I guess I missed it somewhere but I was under the impression that libertarianism supports free markets, the right to contract and private property? Unless you want to steal it or it involves baybees?
sigh
Oh man, you made me laugh.
But it isn’t real property. There is no element of scarcity to it. I don’t want to take this thread offtopic, but the definition of property is not flexible. That is how we get into these problems with the state and shifting legal foundations.
Strawmen are wonderful things, aren’t they?
All I’ve maintained is that such people wouldn’t be accepted into many communities, confined to their own community they’d quickly die out. I don’t know why you’re implying otherwise.
Hello sceptic! Welcome to the Mises forum!
I forgot, sorry.
That’s not exactly the point – I’m not disputing that. Let’s say a parent wants his child to read the bible but the child doesn’t want to ? Who’s going to determine what the ‘best interests’ of the child are in this case ? The courts ?
Yet ‘normal’ parenting takes for granted that children know nothing and that parents know what’s good for their children. That strikes me as analogous to the idea that paternalistic governments know what’s good for their subjects. Make it a loose analogy if you want to…
So we basically agree I suppose ? If the child decides to leave, it’s (correctly) assumed that it’s acting in its best interests. And the same should be true for other decisions made by the child.
The idea that the involved children just might have a say in the matter doesn’t cross your mind ? And this has nothing to do with IP of course.
I don’t see how it follows even from a fairly common cultural norm against it that such people will necessary be completely exiled from communities. Economic incentives are to sell homes to people, and it’s not likely that such people are particularly “out of the closet” about such things to begin with (I.E. it’s not likely that people will know who the hell is watching the stuff anyways). I don’t know why you always tend to insist that the inevitable result of freedom is that people who practise vices are exiled from communities. I think you just have a strong preferance for disassociation and superimpose this onto your vision of libertarianism. But I don’t think it logically follows from libertarianism that every single identity group atomistically isolates into their own enclaves, which simply is not realistic or practical for the functioning of a society.
Do you think that a free society would be just a bunch of small towns with their own morality/thought police ? Because if that’s not the case, I don’t see how your socially conservative utopia is going to ‘work’…
That is irrelevant with respect to whether or not a child consented or witheld consent to an action.
Agreed. I am not claiming there is some line, like age 18, where a child all of a sudden has the ability for rational thought. I would guess it is usually far younger, around 5 or 6 years old. Again, it is up to the child when they want to claim their rights.
Exactly, just like animals. Again, only someone that has the ability to consent can actually be raped. Because rape is sex without consent, by definition. But we have no way to know if a child consented to it or not.
This is simply a slippery slope argument. Is spanking a child assault? Is not letting a child crawl off the property imprisonment? Is taking a child to the store kidnapping? I am sorry. I understand you find child sex apprehensible, as I do. But it does not make it illegal.
Not really. Courts are no better than parents at determining whether they are doing good by their children. This is a completely statist appeal, that government knows best.
I do not think anyone is suggesting that there is some uniform “age of consent”. It most definitely is a case by case basis, and up to the child.