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.

Why not? The majority of utilitarians accept the need for deonotological rule systems in society. It is entirely consistent to think that despite morality not having a reasonable deontological basis, that a society should accept a rule like "do not sexually touch somebody else without their consent"

So let me ask this question directly since whenever I say it, it just seems to get dropped:

Is there anybody here who is seriously disagreeing with the contention that if you want to ban X, X ought to be shown to cause harm? If so, why?

As happy as I am that everyone seems to have abandoned the nonsensical line of thought that circumcision is harmful, this still needs an answer.

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the child is being forced to have his foreskin removed, when its not necessary.


that's the operative word, necessary. Children's autonomy is violated all the time because it is socially, biologically, medically, necessary. Circumcision is not medically necessary nor do the benefits occur until after the child generally becomes accountable.

Sure, so let us test that rule to see if makes sense. At first glance it seems to, certainly cutting off an arm would be bad and cause lots of harm. Unfortunately, we have this great counterexample called circumcision where it doesn't seem to cause any form of harm, and in fact is a pretty arbitrary cultural thing with no meaningful consequences. Guess that is a bad rule.

We dropped the notion that circumcision is harmful because you tried redefined harmful. You wanted to define it as such as to imply there had to be some form of larger damage done (larger than the actual tissue damage). Under this definition I could give my baby repeated paper cuts so long as there was no long-term (larger) damage done.

Except that something being medically necessary is clearly NOT the standard we use in society when trying to decide what to ban. As I have repeatedly said, parents do all kinds of stupid **** - especially religious parents - to their children many of which have vastly worse consequences than circumcision. For example, the harm done to a child because their parents let them be obese until the "age of accountability" is vastly further than the more or less nonexistent harm from circumcision. But we don't ban that. We don't ban parents from teaching their children their religion. We don't ban the rather dangerous outdoor swimming pools. Nor should we.

But we should stop pretending that something being "necessary" is a relevant metric on whether to ban it. It never has been and never will. The only reason I used the word necessary is about the general framework that a child, incapable of adult reasoning and independence, by necessity relies on the parent. So we give the parents a very wide birth of freedom except in the most egregious cases. You have not demonstrated that this is an egregious case, or even a case to worry about at all.

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It wasn't a redefinition, it was asking why damaging the foreskin was itself a problem. Why IS it a problem. Yes I know it is damaged, but you can't just wave your hands and magically insist that this is causing some form of major harm to the person.

No paper cuts sounds egregious because effectively nobody would actually do this. But many parents do things that are far far more egregious and risky to the childs life than giving them paper cuts. We allow all that. Paper cuts just has a sort of vindictiveness to it so it sounds somewhat worse, but it is actually quite a bit less worse in my view than the things we do allow that increase the chances of fatalities.

Indeed. And as I have explained numerous times, there is a fundamental difference between the violations of autonomy allowed to children by their parent (not anybody else) and to adults. There are good reasons for this. The two situations are fundamental incomparable.

Not to double post, but I forgot that you didn't actually answer my direct question:

"Is there anybody here who is seriously disagreeing with the contention that if you want to ban X, X ought to be shown to cause harm? If so, why?"

I'm almost certain this is due to practical reasons. For example, some children are taken away from their parents for being obese, so it is 'banned' in a lesser sense.

Define harm.

So you're all for child molestation?

In perhaps the most egregious cases, but in general it is totally acceptable. But one second, are you actually trying to push back on the idea that stupid parents do all kinds of stupid stuff to their kids that has, on average, long term and significant harm - both physical and psychological - to their children?

I don't think it is all practical reasons - people genuinely agree with the notion that parents have right to raise their children as they see fit - but even if it was...so? I don't want the state coming in and micromanaging every single parenting decision based on whether they think there is some harm or not. I personally am of the opinion that teaching children religion is incrediably harmful, but I don't want it to be stopped and not just for practical reasons. But you have zeroed in on this one thing where there is almost no measurable harm and want the state to ban that. Are you normally such a crusader for state infringement on parenting decisions?