Except, of course, everybody does NOT do it. And so it causes an obvious harm, namely that when kids grow up they would wish they did not have this. So no, your tattoo on the thigh idea is a terrible idea, which is precisely why nobody does it.

As for "children give a choice beforehand" the basic reality of child/parent relationship is that children do NOT get the choice on any number of things such as the food and medicine and education and upbringing and environment that they are brought up in. All of that can, and often does, pose significant dangers and they don't get a say in any of it. It is just a biological reality. Every once in a while (and it is very rare) society steps in when there is enormous harm being done to the child to say that it cannot happen. So you have to argue - if you want a ban - that this is one of those cases and the harm is very large.

You have yet to demonstrate ANY harm.

It's fine that you think that we can modify our children's bodies anyway we like so long as it's not 'harmful' and the majority of society thinks it's okay. It's fine, but wrong.

I agree it's effective but that still misses the point, it could be just as effective with a strong emphasis on the child autonomy. I assume for various reasons of practicality WHO isn't doing this in Africa but the point still stands. Forced circumcision is not necessary to get the results wanted in Germany.

Im speaking of autonomy, the idea that the child is a distinct human being from his/her parents and should be afforded certain rights as such, not anatomy. The unnecessary violation of which is the harm.

If you date rape some kid, and keep them on a morphine drip or something else to sedate the pain so they don't feel it once they wake up, did you not do something terrible? Just because something doesn't harm someone, doesn't mean you should be allowed to do it to them.

Probably should specify it such that the person being raped didn't know it happened, so there's no emotional harm later on.

(You may have already meant that, dunno).

He needs to specify that everyone needs to do in society too. If one person does it it's bad, but everyone's doing it you better hop on that date rape bandwagon.

Whether the majority of society thinks it is okay is entirely irrelevant, except in the sense that the harm someone is likely to experience (such as the nudist example) depends on the society they are in. You keep confusing this.

The thing is, while you refuse to acknowledge it, I highly suspect that in any other situation you would agree with the metric that to ban X, X must be shown to cause harm. As in "ban stoning, because stoning causes harm". Perhaps I am wrong and you just have a really weird world view, but I doubt you really are disagreeing in a fundamental way with my metric.

And you can say it is wrong, but you still have to argue WHY it is wrong. All you have done so far is assert it.

That was the intent of date rape as opposed to rape, but I guess the clarification may help so thanks.

In the same vein, if you rape a coma victim and they never know or suffer any adverse affects from it, did you do something wrong, or is what you did something that should be legal?

I think I have a name for my new band.

Ya think? Obviously it would be vastly less practical.

As for "forced circumcision"...uh...what? Who is talking about forcing it? The question is whether people should be forced NOT to do this to their children.


Sorry, but they are not. Children's autonomy is violated all the time by their parents, out of biological necessity. You are going to have to better than that to show why in THIS case you oppose it while in all OTHER cases you do not.

There are more kinds of harm than physical harm. Although I am sure they would experience physical harm in this case here too.

Ok, so as said above, your kid is in a coma, you rape it, it wakes up 3 months later. It never feels pain or knows it happened. Did you do something wrong or should it be legal?

You don't think losing 3 months of your life is a form of harm? Or that there is any form of physical consequences from a 3 month long coma?

Even though you can't seem to construct a good thought experiment, I know where you are going. If we had constructed the "perfect" thought experiment where by some magic absolutely no form of measurable harm or consequence comes from an otherwise "bad" act, is it still bad? This is a philosophical question, not one of making pragmatic bans on society. Personally, I am not a deontologist, I am a consequentialist. So if you perfectly remove every bad consequence then, yes, in this crazy thought experiment knowing no relation to the real world, then it would cease to be bad.


edit: missed a post in there about the coma patient, so the first two sentences don't make any sense in my post. I will leave them in case they were already read.

I really hope you don't have a dentist who thinks the same way when you're under anesthesia.

Anyways, to answer the coma patient query, I should first note that we have already seen circumcision compared to stoning, now we are seeing it compared to raping coma patients. My goodness.

Rightly or wrongly, there is a fundamental difference between children and adults and so the level by which we are willing to accept violations of their autonomy is different. In adults, we only allow violation of their autonomy in extreme cases (say they murdered someone, then we lock them up). For children, however, all the time we allow parents to violate their autonomy for all kinds of reasons. This is because of the dependency of babies on children. So a comparison to raping coma patients just doesn't seem relevant to this.