I found this interesting, because I am of the opinion that there (should be) no such thing as a victimless crime. However, all three of your scenarios do involve a victim and/or a violation of rights. The first, would almost certainly involve a trespassing charge or a violation of privacy. The other two involve outright fraud. So I'm good, and can agree that a crime need not have a bad effect to be a crime as long as there is a victim.

Consequentialism refers to a family of moral theories, some of which are relativistic and some of which are not. To claim, as you do here, that consequentialism is unequivocally relativistic is incorrect. You might think that the versions of consequentialism which are not relativistic are all false, but that doesn't mean that they don't exist as theories (Classical utilitarianism is an example of a non-relativistic consequentialist moral theory).

The basic idea behind consequentialism is that the rightness or wrongness of an action comes from whether the consequences that result from that action are good or bad. Obviously this will only work if you have some criteria on the basis of which you can determine what are good consequences and what are bad consequences. Jeremy Bentham and J.S. Mill were both hedonists, which meant that they thought the criteria we should use is whether or not the action led to an increase in pleasure and a decrease in pain. This is not relativistic as it is (presumably) a fact of the matter whether someone is feeling pain or pleasure.

I think you need to show your work when you make claims like this. Sure, it's not an uncommon POV***, but don't gloss over what you unwittingly (hopefully) just did: you just stigmatised an entire group of ppl that already have to deal with potentially severe emotional distress, based on "well, it happened to them".
If insubstantiated, it's no different to the way certain bigots describe gay men as being child molesters.

*** It only crossed my mind a few months ago when an abuse victim made a comment about this exact issue, and the doubled emotional trauma of being the victim of such a crime in the first place, and then to be seen as a likely abuser themselves purely as a consequence of the former happening.

I think your standard allows many instances of reckless behavior where the presence or lack of a victim has a luck component and is therefore potentially too results oriented.

For example, I don't think you could ever convince me that firing a gun into a crowd should only be a crime if the bullet hits someone. (for this example, assume the shot is sufficiently disguised and things like 'panic' can be ignored). It seems like the potential of a victim should matter, not just whether there was one or not.

I cannot pretend that it was unwittingly done. I did recognize as I typed the post that it was possible that it could be taken the way you took it. I will defend it as follows:

We are not well served by ignoring facts. If victims of abuse are more likely to commit abuse then we should face that fact and deal with it. Avoiding saying it is possibly politically correct, but it is not an intelligent path if that causes us to ignore the fact.

I said "I believe" because it is a statement based on my recollection of things read in the past. Thirty years ago I was a parent of young children and was conscious of child abuse as a risk. I spent some time educating myself on the issue to better prepare myself to defend against it. The statement is based on that admittedly outdated information.


I included the "I believe" because I invited and still invite correction. If my dated information has been corrected I would welcome an update. A quick glance at the internet did not offer such a correction.

I never said "a likely abuser". I used the information I had to point out the possibility that there could be substantial trauma in an abuse victim that may not be accepted by the victim and could perturb their worldview. If that is incorrect than make your point. If it is correct and your only point is that it should not be acknowledged, well...I do not agree.

Much as I despise Dawkins as a bigot, he has a point. He didn't say pedos don't traumatize kids, he said he was none the worse for the wear in this particular case. There is a moral panic going on and a tendency to start telling kids how damaged they are. Often, it's nothing but a distasteful memory for them. The greater attention on pedophilia is on balance good because the behavior is getting exposed and combated. My son's Cub Scout book has a good, frank discussion about loudly objecting to and reporting getting touched on the privates. But doesn't everyone itt have a story that didn't lead to nightmares, bed wetting, and a lifelong distrust of intimacy? Too much histrionics.

This (weird) thread is taking some weird turns. FWIW I share the same concern as RLK*. If you experienced a traumatizing event, are you the best judge of whether said event traumatized you? Doesn't the brain go into protection mode when something like this happens?

In any event, I don't think we can even begin to say what molestation victims "often" experience afterwards.

*Though, I really have no idea if people who were abused are more likely to be abused themselves, and so have no comment on that part of his post.

This is the crux of the matter. Child abuse, by and large, is done by familiar figures, often family members. The vast majority of the time, no pain is involved (i.e. it's not your garden-variety rape scenario). Frequently, the molester/pedophile (or w/e) has genuine feelings for the child and is a respected member of the childs social circle. Lastly, the child frequently doesn't yet understand what sex is and what's being done to him/with him.

So most often - the event itself isn't traumatizing. What IS traumatizing is realizing in your teens/puberty (i.e. at a time when you DO start to understand what happened back then) that someone you likely liked/admired/respected abused you and your trust in order to gain sexual gratification.

Shortly put, you're likely wrong. While psychological issues due to sexual abuse are diverse and widespread, becoming a molester yourself isn't prominently among them (to any significant degree). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_...ogical_effects

This isn't surprising, given that the vast majority of abuse victims are female, yet the vast majority of abusers are male. If there was a connection between suffering and inflicting abuse, those ratios should look different.

Are we talking about the same thing? Dawkins described unwanted touching of the privates, not violence, mindphuc or threats to kill his dog.

If a kid is merely annoyed by what happened, parents and councilors shouldn't start injecting anxiety, shame and drama.

From a creeper coping a quick feel, then it's over? No, we should not assume so. You listen for harm, but you don't stir it.

As a kid I accepted a ride once, the guy touched my johnson, I objected, he let me out, it pissed me off, end of story. That's happened to everybody or a close friend. We're supposed to dig for undetected trauma and listen to drama queens claim we're more hurt than we realize?

The words "abuse" and "molestation" imply real harm, but they include many acts, and at the mild end of the spectrum are things many people experience as merely obnoxious. But you mustn't say the obvious or you're making excuses for child rapists. Pointing this out does not make groping less criminal, it's just a refusal to join a moral panic. The moral panic being the freaking out about groping, not prosecutions for incest and child rape.

It's never happened to me or anyone I know. (That I know of, of course). I still don't know why you are attempting to speak for everyone this has ever happened to, or why you feel you are qualified to do so.

If when I was young an adult (the implication being someone I can trust) molested me, in whatever connotation you want to give to that word, I would imagine it would bother me severely for a multitude of reasons. I can't go very far beyond that of course, since it hasn't, but I don't think either your voice or Dawkins is sufficient to close this matter and do worry that he is minimizing quite the larger event.

I don't think we disagree on anything here*, and this may be just semantics again. I would still say it is the event itself that is traumatizing since it is that act that is causing the trauma we feel later on, but its not that important of a distinction, IMO.

Except for that "genuine feelings" stuff. I'm not really sure why that's relevant.

I said exactly the opposite. Kids should describe what happened and how they felt about it without anyone leading them towards feeling more/less/any trauma. It's just a fact that people who have been groped do not always feel shattered. If someone is traumatized, then they've been traumatized. But if they weren't, then you accept the fact.

I can immediately think of two friends (of each sex) who as minor teens had consensual sex with adults and fully enjoyed and participated and had no regrets or shame. That doesn't mean the adults shouldn't be prosecuted, they should. I doubt either of my friends would say today that sex with minors should be legal. And adults doing anything with children is a whole nuther level of criminality. But it seems elementary to me that you don't run around telling people how horrible they are supposed to feel and assuming they are all devastated. The fact that Dawkins cannot even relate his own personal experience without you saying he is minimizing the behavior suggests to me the reach of moral panic.

Sexual abuse thrives on secrets and shame so it is understandable that we dig for signs and don't assume someone is fine because they say so. But there's not always trauma there and saying so is just being factual, not giving peds a break.

There's an important issue in how we treat children. You don't want to make them feel awful about something if they aren't. (And no, that doesn't mean you avoid talking about safety.)

The problem is that you're creating a huge double standard. There are actual severely traumatized children. Child soldiers or children of a war zones come to mind. We don't routinely question their ability to accurately remember what happened to them, nor to accurately judge it's effects on them.

If some kid from a war zone is claiming that it's youth had, by and large, not been hugely affected by the war (and it can back that up), we conclude it was lucky, not that it's in severe denial.

So why the scepticism towards Dawkins ability to accurately judge the consequences of his experience?

And the reason why positing the trauma back to the actual act of abuse is silly is that there's simply no evidence for it. Psychological trauma refers to something like:

"A traumatic event involves a single experience, or an enduring or repeating event or events, that completely overwhelm the individual's ability to cope or integrate the ideas and emotions involved with that experience. The sense of being overwhelmed can be delayed by weeks, years or even decades, as the person struggles to cope with the immediate circumstances." (wiki)

The average case of child sex abuse doesn't fit this description at all.

There's a lot of focus on the possible effects of the abuse and not many people are talking about the fact that it's a gross failure and neglect of the responsibility the adult has for a child's welfare. Are 'mild touching ups' ok then since they're highly unlikely to result in lifelong trauma or damage? That's behaviour that we're just going to shrug about and say 'ah well, it probably won't bother them when they're older?'

I think that regardless of the effects, child abuse is not ever something that can we can 'struggle to condemn'.

No, and as I pointed out to you, this is a gross misrepresentation of what Dawkins said. He has also offered a clarification here:

I understand his reluctance to claim any kind of status as a 'victim' but if you say 'by the standards of the day and by the standards to which abuse can be taken, what I experienced was neither worthy of being called harmful nor is it something I could now bring myself to punish' what does that say about today's standards, are they overly strict? What changed in terms of how we judge 'minor' examples of abuse that cross the line but barely?

What that teacher did was inexcusable and I think that Dawkin's desire to play it down so as not to appear self absorbed or unaware of more serious harm caused by child abuse undermines that. The mistake he makes IMO is where he says he couldn't find it in his heart to condemn what that teacher did.

No one said that.

I know, that was a question that I asked because of other things that were said. Since then, it's been pointed out to me that it was 'a gross misrepresentation of what Dawkins said'.

I'm not sure whether I need to do a better job of defining what I mean, or whether you're taking liberties with the context of "victimless crime".

I'm thinking more in terms of drug use, prostitution, gambling, homosexuality (or two consenting adults having sex with whomever the heck they want), etc. Shooting into a crowd and missing, does create victims in my opinion. At best, people are victimized (traumatized?) by fearing for their lives. At worst, their victims of having their lives put in danger. In short, I do not consider firing into a crowd and missing to be a victimless crime. The same as I wouldn't consider shouting fire in a crowded theater a victimless crime.

I suppose you can play with semantics and say I'm wrong. If so, maybe I need to find better wording of what I mean by victimless crime.

btw: The german green party had the legalization for non-violent, 'consenting' sex between adults and children as part of their politic agenda in the early 80s. Similar associations seem to have existed in some factions of the liberal party.

There was a period of time over here, when supporting the legalization of some forms of pedophilia was considered 'progressive'.

The mil[l]ieu of Mill and Bentham would assign pleasure and pain points how, exactly? Let's just say an orgasm is the standard unit of pleasure. Is it then equivalent for...I don't have to finish my sentence, do I?

Absolutist consequentialism is groundless.

In ancient Greece/Rome it was nothing; pedophilia was in fact expected. Relativism FTW

Of course, my pointing this out undermines my own point from my previous post, wherein I implied that not all orgasms are [ethically] equivalent. Eh, both points can still stand via cultural relativism so I'll play that card. Obviously absolutism never existed and never will exist, so I need not appeal to deontology that was dead before it was ever conceived

This is a silly argument. We don't have a standardized unit of "health", but we can still talk objectively about actions that improve or degrade health. Moreover, let's say that an objective unit of pleasure/pain is created (perhaps measuring ratios of dopamine, oxytocin, stimulation of c-fibres etc). Would this then change your view? I am going to go out on a limb and say no, in which case this argument is purely rhetorical on your part.