One of the most intellectually advanced cultures in world history, The Ancient Greeks in the time of Plato, Aristotle, etc., approved of pedophilia.

"Wow" is not an argument either.

The Christians are now trying to trap the atheists by using moral relativist arguments in this thread. Ok then.

I guarantee I am the strongest atheist in this thread.

If anyone thinks any sexual orientation is less moral than any other, he is giving cover to those who want to discriminate against gays. I know that orientation is unchosen and therefore amoral.

I believe pedophile practice is harmful, while consensual homosexual and heterosexual activity is not, but that does not make pedophile orientation punishable.

Pedophilia could also be considered to be a mental illness. I do not suffer from this but I do from other mental illnesses, for which I have been discriminated against, despite never having caused harm to anyone because of them.

Hi, Craig1120. I wasn't trying to "trap" anybody. I was just giving a real-life historical example of an advanced culture which did not have a problem with pedophilia, at least in some manifestations of it. It is not necessarily the "no brainer" that some people in this thread are implying that it is, in my opinion.

It is definitely a no brainer with what we now know about the potential traumatizing aspect of sex, the differences in psychological development between children and adults, power dynamics, etc. How is it not a no brainer?

So what. 200 posts ago, in a post where doordonot said that discrimination against gays wasn't real because it wasn't genetic, he also compared gays to pedophiles.

You guys have been running with the gay vs pedophile comparison ever since.

I'm not going to do your work for you. If you have a coherent argument to make that doesn't depend on being compared to pedophiles I'm happy to entertain it. If it contains a comparison to pedophiles I'm not.

Just lol. Homosexuals, pedophiles, and bestiality. Those are literally the only groups of people you can think of to make your "arguments". Amazing.

There's like a hundred identifiable groups you could talk about identified by sexual desires alone. **** man, you gotta do better at this.

Ok, how about those guys who like to have sex while dressed as furry puppets. Do you think they should be discriminated against? If not, why shouldn't they be covered by the protective laws?

Oh wonderful! You CAN think of a different group!

No, I don't think they should be discriminated against, but then that has never been in contention ITT. No, I don't think it necessary to enumerate them among special classes of protected people for employment discrimination and provision of public goods and services.

Now I've already explained this kind of argument, at length, earlier ITT but let me recap. Many of you believe (and I've forgotten whether this is you or not) that the correct view is that there should be ZERO protections for any class at all. Another group seems to believe that if there are ANY protections then it needs to be for EVERY class, otherwise we run into some sort of philosophical inconsistency of which we should be very worried.

I, however, treat this more pragmatically. I want to reduce discrimination, and believe that enumerated protected classes is a mechanism by which wide scale historical discrimination against major groups can be addressed. The civil rights act was a good thing because of how it fixed a major wrong in America, even though it didn't solve every problem of discrimination (far from it) or include every potential group (far from it). So while I would advocate for extending the current list to include sexual orientation and gender identity - major categories with significant history of oppression - I don't find it feasible to enumerate a thousand other minor categories like furries, much as I would wish they wouldn't be discriminated.

You didn't really say why you think furries shouldn't be included, only that it's not necessary. Why isn't it necessary?

What a sad display! People asking genuine questions and both detractors either name-calling or giving the silent treatment unless the person subtly admits insinuations of his guilt by altering his question. How low does someone's emotional maturity and tolerance level have to be to play this sick game? Mind-boggling.

The Civil Rights Act defines in section III and section VIII that no private businesses shall be able to discriminate based on immutable characteristics. This is what I was getting at when I said 'real' discrimination. I said 'uncontrolled sexual desire' or 'genetic basis' but immutable is a far better word. If the characteristic you have is not immutable, it's not discrimination. If pedophilia is immutable, as growing evidence is suggesting it is, then pedophiles cannot be discriminated against, according to the law.

1) Progressives ITT agree with the sentiment of anti-discrimination against immutable characteristics as outlined in the CRA.
2) Progressives have not established scientifically or otherwise the immutability of homosexuality.
3) Progressives ITT have failed to establish the mutability of alternate sexual desires, and I must emphasize again here not behaviors.
4) Either homosexuality is separate from other sexual desires and protected from discrimination because it's immutable and others are not
OR
5) Other sexual desires are immutable too, and cannot be discriminated against.

Well I typed out quite a bit of narrative that you have entirely ignored, but I suppose I can elaborate further.

There is a spectrum. We can protect nothing. We saw how bad pre CRA era was, I think that is a pretty bad idea. We can protect thousands or I dunno millions of different subcategories, every crazy thing people have suggested ITT. It just doesn't seem feasible or benefitial. Or - and this is the approach I support and every western democracy supports - identify a narrow set of major categories that create important divisions between people and have been the basis of considerable discrimination. Race. Religion. Gender. Nationality. I would add sexual orientation and gender identity to the list.

As for furries specifically, there just isn't the kind of societal-level organized pattern of historical discrimination against them as a major class of people in society. To include furries is to include thousands of others sub and subsub and subsubsub categories in the enumerated lists. I'm sure you can use the same creativity that struggled to find a comparison beyond zoophilia to think of dozens of ways in which the situations are qualitatively different.

By the way, the way it works in Canada is that there are enumerated classes and what are called I believe it is interpreted classes. It might well be that in a Canadian court, should someone be fired purely for it being revealed they are a furry that this would fit in as an interpreted class, and I would be quite fine with that kind of thing (but this legal structure doesn't exist). However, as I say, I'm motivated mainly by pragmatism here. This just isn't showing up high on any realistic list of major social problems that we can organize our political clout around.

Besides, since your view IIRC is that absolutely nobody should be protected, trying to find the exact boundary between classes that I think should and should not be is a pretty pointless challenge. The extreme are both silly, and I don't really care to quibble about where the dividing lines should be drawn with somebody quite happy to live on an extreme.

I didn't ignore anything just because I didn't quote it back. You said you didn't believe they needed protection but not why. I am skeptical about it not being needed. I imagine that in the current culture coming out as a furry might be more stigmatized than coming out as homosexual. The only reason there hasn't been as much persecution of them is because they are fewer in number.


If there were to be a law regarding sexual preference, I think it would be generic and interpreted to include any preference possible.

But in general, I don't think that no one should be protected from discrimination, I think that everyone should be. I guess there could just be a law protecting everyone from discrimination, but it is hard to say how it could be worded or if it could work.

Try to suss this out. Because I think such laws are pretty ridiculous. You've said this sentiment a few times in a few ways, how wonderful it would be if everyone was protected from discrimination in an exactly equal way. But if you spend any time going down that rabbit hole, it quickly becomes impossible. Heck, how would you even start to actually do it? If there actually was a way to do what you said, then maybe I would be on board. But for now, I take the view of western democracies: make substantive, pragmatic steps to fight against major, societal-level historic oppression.

Or perhaps let me put it like this: if you genuinely want to protect everyone from discrimination, but that laudable goal isn't politically on the table today, would you not be happy making a step in that direction by enumerating LGBT protections? If not, why not?

I don't really know what else to say about furries. You didn't respond to the argument I twice typed out, and the things you did say don't speak against it.

Has anyone thought that maybe discrimination laws limit freedom inherently and they should be done away with altogether? No matter how many laws you write, you're not going to change peoples biases and hatreds. It seems like progressives take on that ol' Marxist canard that human beings are malleable in the extreme and that a government can somehow change human nature. Sorry to say, your utopia is not happening anytime soon.

We have a criminal justice system, it's not like people can just get beaten up or abused or that the justice system we already have to deal with injurious behaviors works any better if you have an extra law saying you can't injure this group. You're not allowed to injure it as it is. Not only that, no one has really given any evidence that these laws do what they intend.

Why not just live and let live? Why do you have to impose obviously contentious points of view on everyone?

Furries should be theoretically covered by blanket sexual orientation anti-discrimination legislation.

I'm not concerned by a law inherently limiting freedom. There are plenty of laws that do that.

My answer for why not "live and let live" is because we know what the world looks like before things like health and safety regulations, worker's rights, anti-discrimination laws, and it was bad.

In spite of my unwillingness to engage in certain aspects of this discussion, I am interested in the philosophy of law. The thing is that I don't let abstract philosophy freeze me into inaction in law any more than I let the problem of hard solipsism get in the way of my interaction with other people.

I'm struggling to see how the world has become worse since the civil rights movement, and I struggle to see how it could be worse after improving LGBT rights. The philosophical masturbation side of things doesn't concern me there.

Good point. Thank you for that.

Just one quick follow-up question if you please: Before modern psychology discovered the potential traumatic aspect of sex, was it a "no brainer" that pedophilia was bad?

Thanks.

i got temp banned once for not debating people in this forum. did you get banned yet? i bet i can guess.

If all prejudices were exactly the same they would all contain an identical prejudgment.

Moral truth that we now take as self evident was not always self evident. I agree with that. But we live in the current time, where we do know that pedophilia and homosexuality are not morally equivalent.

Well said!

I still do not think that any sexual orientation has a moral component.

Then I'd say your thinking is too narrow. Do you think it's better to decrease suffering, and raise the quality of life, for yourself and others? If so, then every action we take is either working toward that goal or not, even if we just want to check out and go on autopilot. That moral aim is either better than indifference or not at all times even if we do not we want to be aware of it.

What I think you're feeling is that you don't like the idea of judging people's ethics based on something they have no control over, and that's fair enough, but morality is so much more than ethics.