I hesitate to write this post since it relates to homosexuality and homosexuality is nowhere near the most pressing issue we face. The attention which the American right gives to homosexuality is a diversion from the far more important issues, namely: anti-civilization propaganda in schools, the racial caste system, feminism, immigration, and moral decline.
While I personally am conservative and I would like to see an end to the public display and celebration of homosexuality in society, I think that some homosexuals are good people and I don’t think that every gay person should be prohibited from being gay.
Having said that, I wanted to write this in response to an argument I have seen going around about pedophilia. The argument goes like this:
The Left-Liberal Argument for Toleration of Pedophiles
P1. A person’s sexual preferences are inborn and therefore unchosen.
P2. Ought implies Can. People cannot be worthy of blame for things that they didn’t choose.
C. Therefore nobody can be worthy of blame for their sexual preferences.
We of course demand that people with pedophilic attraction never act on their inclinations, but since pedophilia is a sexual preference, so the argument goes, no one can be blamed for being a pedophile and “non-offending pedophiles” deserve our sympathy and maybe even our praise.
Quite a few intelligent left-liberals are persuaded by this argument. Sympathetic coverage of “non-offending pedophiles” has appeared in The Economist and other major media outlets.
These left-liberals believe - and they say this explicitly - that tolerance of “non-offending pedophiles” follows from the same arguments that persuade them to tolerate homosexuality. In their discussions of the topic, the left-liberals who defend pedophilia take for granted that homosexuality is an inborn characteristic which cannot be influenced by choice.
What does the evidence say?
The Scientific Consensus on the Causes of Homosexuality
When one identical twin is homosexual, the other twin is homosexual 1/3 of the time. If people actually were “born gay” we would expect it to be 100% of the time. 33% indicates some genetic effect (because 33% is much higher than the probability that a person randomly drawn from the population will be gay) but keep in mind that literally every major behavioral trait is influenced by genes to some degree.
Then there’s the enormous rise in homosexuality over the past few decades. Male homosexuality has increased 6 fold. Lesbianism has increased 20 fold. Bisexuailty has increased an incredible 75 fold. It is not possible that genes could have changed fast enough to explain this shift. This cannot be because a more welcoming culture allows people who would have been homosexual anyway to admit to being their true selves. If that were the case, we would expect to see lots of older people who had been suppressed their whole lives finally come out of the closet. The fact that homosexuality is rising so much with each generation shows that society is causing people to be homosexual, not merely allowing genetic homosexuals to express themselves.
If homosexuality isn’t genetically determined, then what’s going on1?
The Concept of Perversion
Against the left-liberal view that sexual desires are innate and unchangeable, there is the alternative view that desires can be weakened or cultivated through conscious choice and experience. That view dates back at least to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and is held today by Christians, especially Catholics.
It is a common experience among people who watch pornography to find that they start to desire more and more extreme forms of pornography. The experience of consuming pornography changes their sexual tastes. People who start to develop a taste for more extreme pornography have a choice: they can choose to indulge that taste, or they can choose not to watch more extreme forms of porn. The former choice will strengthen and solidify their taste for more extreme sex acts, and that may show up in what they do in the bedroom with a real person. The latter will halt and maybe reverse the development of their taste for more extreme sex acts - it will redirect their mind back towards a desire for “vanilla” sex acts.
There is an old concept called “perversion.” Perversion is when a thing is oriented toward one purpose, but it is being used for a different purpose. From Webster’s Dictionary (1828) the definition is
PERVERT'ED, participle passive Turned from right to wrong; distorted; corrupted; misinterpreted; misemployed.
The perverted use of an object is not very efficient, and is also probably injurious, because the object was not designed to be used that way. E.g. If I use my blender as a hammer, it won’t work well as a hammer and I’ll break my blender. Sexual perversion is when a person’s sexual desire and sexual function has been turned away from its natural end of producing children in the union of one man and one woman, towards some other end, such as the achievement of pleasure for its own sake.
Catholics believe that every thing has an inherent purpose, the purpose for which it was designed by God. But there is also a secular version of the idea of purpose. If you believe in evolution, you believe that every part of your body and every faculty of your mind was “designed” to fulfill some purpose in your overall survival strategy as a human organism2. When you orient part of your body or mind away from its “designed” purpose, problems arise. For example, your butt wasn’t designed for sitting, and when you sit on your butt for several hours per day, you get out of shape and can develop back pain from sitting down too much. When you eat highly processed fast food, rather than natural food, you become less healthy. When people say that homosexuality is “unnatural” they don’t mean “natural” in the sense of being something that happens in the absence of artifice, they mean that homosexuality is a use of sexuality which is deviant from sexuality’s divinely intended purpose - i.e. the true nature of sexuality.
The concept of perversion comes with the corresponding concept of normalcy. To say that something is “normal” is to say that it is functioning in accordance with its purpose, with its nature. The correct way of functioning is called “normal” and when one of your faculties is used in an incorrect way, it’s called “perverted.”
Left-Liberals don’t have the concept of perversion, so to Left-Liberals, “normal” just means “usual” and there is no moral content in being normal because it is neither morally good nor morally bad to be unusual.
As a matter of metaphysics, I think I’m with the Left-Liberals, not the Christians or Vitalists. I think that the concept of a thing’s inherent purpose is not the right lens of analysis for either moral or metaphysical questions. Still, the concept of normalcy is useful as a practical heuristic. If a person is walking in a way that looks “weird”, that is a strong clue that the way they are walking is unhealthy. A healthy method of walking produces a “normal” gait and posture.
As a matter of human psychology, I’m with the Catholics on this point. Most desires really can be strengthened or weakened by conscious choice and habit, even if the desire can never be entirely eliminated. The Left-Liberals’ rejection of the concept of normalcy has led them astray on a matter of empirical fact when it comes to homosexuality and I will argue that it leads them badly astray in their analysis of pedophilia. Even though inherent purpose is not the right lens of analysis, the Catholics are empirically correct that homosexual orientation is not usually determined at birth, that environmental factors play a large role and choice may play a role as well3.
The Different Philosophical Premises of Left-Liberalism and Catholicism lead to Wildly Different Prescriptions
Now let’s turn back to the issue of pedophilia. Left-Liberals think that pedophilic attraction is innate and unchangeable. Catholics think that an inborn predisposition to pedophilia can be minimized through conscious choice and habit. A person with pedophilic tendencies can choose never to indulge in a sexual thought about a child; he can deny his pedophilic instincts and instead strengthen whatever instincts he has for sexual attraction to adults.
We previously saw that the Left-Liberal argument for toleration of pedophiles is:
P1. A person’s sexual preferences are inborn and therefore unchosen.
P2. Ought implies Can. People cannot be worthy of blame for things that they didn’t choose.
C. Therefore nobody can be worthy of blame for their sexual preferences.
Christians, Vitalists, and I reject premise 1. Nobody chooses their innate predispositions, but you do choose which predispositions to indulge and which to reject, and so people are sometimes morally responsible for the way they feel, not just the way they choose to act on their feelings. If it’s true that you can shape your mind through habit, then having certain feelings IS a choice. It’s a choice in the same way that obesity is a choice: you can’t choose to stop being obese right away, but you can do things that will make you not obese in the future. I believe that people with pedophilic inclination can refuse to indulge in sexual thoughts about children, and can develop habits of mind that will make them either not have sexual attraction to children in the future or will greatly reduce their sexual attraction to children.
A person with pedophilic inclinations who wanted to prevent themselves from developing pedophilic attraction or who wanted to reduce their pre-existing pedophilic attraction would watch his thoughts and would stop himself from thinking about children in sexual ways. He would be wise to avoid places in which children are present. It goes without saying that he would not consume any form of child pornography.
“Minor-attracted-person support groups” such as the Prostasia Foundation encourage behavior which is the exact opposite of what a moral person would do in order to minimize their pedophilic inclinations. Prostasia advocates for the legalization of animated child pornography and child sex dolls. Using either of those things would obviously tend to strengthen pedophilic attraction, not reduce it.
In fact, the very existence of such a “support group” presumably tends to strengthen pedophilic attraction because it legitimizes the attraction. The purpose of a pedophile “support group” is to spend a lot of time talking about their pedophilic attractions, so they are giving their pedophilic attractions lots of attention, when they should be starving those attractions of attention.
This is why philosophers and commenters who support the terminology “Minor-attracted-person” or support the existence of pedophile “support groups” receive such strong condemnation. Merely bringing this into the open, and discussing it in a dispassionate way gives pedophilic attractions too much legitimacy. If a person is born with a predisposition to pedophilic thoughts, he should not find a “support group”. Rather, he should vigorously suppress that part of himself and it should never be spoken of.
Key Takeaway #1: A lot of smart left-liberals think that pedophilia should be tolerated - and they are right that toleration of pedophilia follows from the premises of their ideology.
Key Takeaway #2: Contrary to popular belief, the scientific consensus is that sexuality is not set in stone at birth in most cases. Environmental factors play a large role and choice may play a role as well.
Key Takeaway #3: The concepts of perversion and normalcy are about whether things are functioning in line with their inherent purpose.
Key Takeaway #4: If people can exercise some control over their sexual inclinations, then bad sexual inclinations should not be dealt with by support groups - quite the opposite: they should never be spoken of.
Part of the reason that many people think that homosexuals are “born that way” is because there was a highly successful campaign to make people think that. Here are some quotes from After the Ball by Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen.
“The public should be persuaded that gays are victims of circumstance. That they no more chose their sexual orientations than they did say, their height, skin color, talents, or limitations. We argue that, for all practical purposes, gays should be considered to have been born gay–even though sexual orientation, for most humans, seems to be the product of a complex interaction between innate predispositions and environmental factors during childhood and early adolescence.” [italics in original]
“To suggest in public that homosexuality might be chosen is to open the can of worms labeled ‘moral choices and sin’ and give the religious intransigents a stick to beat us with. Straights must be taught that it is as natural for some persons to be homosexual as it is for others to be heterosexual: wickedness and seduction have nothing to do with it.”
Atheists who believe in the concept of perversion from an evolutionary perspective would probably be called “Vitalists.”
There really are people who claim to stop being homosexual and go on to live a heterosexual lifestyle. I’m not sure if I believe them, but I don’t dismiss them out of hand.
« For example, your butt wasn’t designed for sitting, and when you sit on your butt for several hours per day, you get out of shape and can develop back pain from sitting down too much. »
Yup. Sitting is for degens :)
Thanks for reminding me to stand up.
«Key Takeaway #4: If people can exercise some control over their sexual inclinations, then bad sexual inclinations should not be dealt with by support groups - quite the opposite: they should never be spoken of.»
Can't you make the same reasoning work for alcoholics and AA support groups? Some people do make that claim and may advocate non-acknowledgement of "the problem" as a strategy. But I also think that AA groups would kick you out, if you start discussing the wonderful emotional experience of the alcohol drinking experience in vivid detail. That'd make people thirsty. AA people also strongly discourage their members from drinking "alcohol free"-beer, because it never fully is and even if it were, it would stir up the memories/associations you want to suppress. If a particular pedo support group make these mistakes, then they may be counterproductive and should be repressed.
It ends up being an empirical question, of how good/bad these groups are, though. And it would depend on the specific group, the people that participate in them and their particular dynamic.
As to whether pedophilia being openly discussed legitimizes the preference and shapes more people into pedophiles. I kinda doubt it would have a non-negligible effect, whereas I don't doubt the same memetic effect being obviously a factor for shaping people into gays, furries and anorexics. I may be wrong, but don't know if there's good evidence either way and then there's an argument for what the base assumption ought to be, that I probably would have to make to justify my position.
In general, I believe that trying to logically reason from ideological premises (and it doesn't even matter which) is a fools' errand. Ideologies are cookie-cutter simplifications, useful for trying to build lowest-common denominator consensus for running a mass movement or cult (and which rarely are a force for good) and occasionally they have some explanatory value. But if taken too seriously end up distorting your view of reality in a highly detrimental way.
Wish I could convince everybody of that.
I think the Roman Catholic view of buttsex isn’t that it’s perverted because of its reliance on an unnatural orifice for pleasure it’s because it cannot result in conception. The same principle regards masturbation and oral sex as perversions. The difficulty is that oral sex has good evolutionary pedigree. Buttsex is very enjoyable and masturbation has its upside.
The religious view of sex (pace Bill Clinton) that isn’t directly procreative held by Roman Catholics isn’t determinative of the morality of sex acts carried out by consenting adults, it’s just one view. A better view is that sex acts which help in the formation of stable pair bonds are desirable and those that aren’t are undesirable.