The argument that pedophilia is inherently wrong is . . . well, wrong

In my encounters with Twitter trolls I’ve been seeing the argument more and more that pedophilia is somehow inherently wrong, so I decided to make a post to address this argument in-depth because it has become quite clear to me that most of the people making it do not really understand morality. To be sure, it’s not always an easy thing to grasp, and anyone who believes it is clearly hasn’t thought about it very much.

Unfortunately, there are tons of people who haven’t, and it’s not difficult to understand why: many people want their moral decisions to be simple, which is why they gravitate to preconceived moral codes like the Ten Commandments. Having a few short, straightforward, easily remembered rules to live by makes life soooo much simpler, doesn’t it? No need to deliberate, or cause ourselves cognitive dissonance over a moral quandary when we can just refer to the existing rule book handed down by some ultimate authority, right?

Yet ethical problems invariably butt up against each other, which creates more complex ethical problems. Sure, thou shalt not kill, but what if the person we are faced with killing is trying to kill an innocent child right in front of us? Thou shalt not bear false witness, okay, but what if your government is murdering innocent people and you know you can protect them by lying?

Psychologist Abraham Maslow, perhaps best known for conceptualizing the hierarchy of needs, famously defined a cognitive bias called the law of the instrument, or the law of the hammer. Maslow said that if the only tool one has is a hammer, then one tends to treat every problem he encounters as if it were a nail. Which is to say, our capacity to solve problems—including the problem of making sense of reality—is necessarily restricted by our own limitations.

Children certainly have many limitations compared to adults. For example, it’s well known that newborn babies see in black and white, or at least they only see black and white distinctly while the few other colors they might be able to see (there’s some debate about this) will be fuzzy and ill-defined. By design, they must see the world either fully or predominantly in black and white. Their eyes have not yet developed the nuance to discern sharp colors, and certainly not to pick up various shades of the same color. In their next stage of growth, babies can begin to see red and yellow, or red and green, very well, until they finally are able to pick the full color spectrum around three months of age.

But what’s really eye-opening to me (no pun intended) is that this phenomenon is not limited to individual humans. The most primitive human societies only had words for black and white. Not surprisingly, the next most advanced societies had words for black, white, red and yellow or black, white, red and green. And so forth. The recognition of colors in various societies was studied extensively by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay and discussed in their 1969 book Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. What they found was that there was a definite evolution in color conceptualizations in the languages of the most primitive extant societies to the most advanced.

Now, this may at first seem completely irrelevant to an understanding of morality, but I beg to differ. I propose that it’s no accident that the most basic (and therefore most limited) form of morality is often framed in terms of colors, namely black and white. Indeed, popular entertainment regularly traffics in it, which is why so many people find such entertainment appealing. In a world of uncertainties, it’s comforting to know exactly who to root for and exactly who to boo and hiss in our favorite movies and television programs.

But that’s the thing: no matter how much we’d like it to be, reality is never as simple as those TV shows with clearly defined heroes and villains. Even as the political landscape becomes increasingly polarized (I suspect in part because this simplistic hero & villain mentality has now taken over the news, and the line between entertainment media and informative media have blurred to the point where in some cases they are one and the same), it’s more important than ever that we come to scrutinize these issues with a critical eye.

Which brings us back round to the matter of pedophilia as a psychological phenomenon and its relationship to morality. Of course, it is first important that we establish in the minds of the public exactly what pedophilia is and what it is not. Pedophilia is, of course, a clinical term, not a legal one, and defines a primary or exclusive attraction to prepubescent children. At the basic level, that’s it. One need not molest children or consume child pornography to be a pedophile; I knew I was a pedophile long before I ever fantasized sexually about children, and even when I did, I knew it would be wrong to act on it. To this day I do not look at child porn, and I do not sexually abuse children, nor do I want to.

I’d say to you that you’d be surprised how many people don’t know that pedophilia and child sexual abuse are not interchangeable terms, but if you’ve followed me so far then you probably wouldn’t be surprised by that at all. Even when the people I’m debating are aware that these are not the same thing, I often see them make an argument which tends to go something along these lines: “Yeah, but you’re attracted to children. That’s just wrong and always will be. So you should be _________ [fill in the blank here: ashamed/arrested/hanged/castrated/stuck in a rocket and shot into the sun/etc.]”

Now here’s the part where we critically dissect this nonsense, and it isn’t all that hard to do, honestly. Pedophilia, whether you consider it a mental aberration or a sexuality, cannot be designated as inherently immoral without rendering the entire concept of morality meaningless. To understand why, we need to understand what moral agency is. Wikipedia describes it thusly:

Moral agency is an individual’s ability to make moral judgments based on some notion of right and wrong and to be held accountable for these actions. A moral agent is “a being who is capable of acting with reference to right and wrong.”

What that all boils down to is knowing what right and wrong are and being able to perform some action accordingly. In other words, for morality to have any real meaning, there must be some ability to act on one’s knowledge of right and wrong. Conversely, assigning a ‘morally inferior’ status to an unchosen condition cannot be right, since there was no moral agency involved.

And yet, that is exactly how a hefty percentage of people approach this issue. Such thinking is dangerous in a number of ways. For one thing, in the past this sort of viewpoint has fueled some of the worst atrocities humans have ever committed against each other. This is the sort of belief that led to most historical genocides, most notably the Holocaust, in which Nazis justified their mass murder of the Jews by first preaching that Jews were inherently corrupt and immoral just by being genetically Jewish, a condition they were born into. American slavery was likewise justified on these grounds: that blacks were amoral savage animals by nature and thus enslaving them was no different than domesticating dogs or cows.

Another problem with this line of reasoning is that it reduces or eliminates the incentive among pedophiles to behave, since they are essentially damned if they do and damned if they don’t. If the moral status of pedophiles in society is largely considered the same whether or not they offend against children and a pedophile takes that message to heart, then the only incentive he really has not to engage is to avoid arrest and/or public shaming. Considering how often people commit sex crimes against kids despite both the powerful social taboos against it and the severe legal consequences, that is not going to be effective enough to significantly curb sexual abuse. Now, some have said that this is victim blaming. It isn’t. Nowhere in that entire point did I mention the condition of victims in relation to rates of sex offending. No, the condition which I’m claiming affects the rates of sex offending by pedophiles is societal perceptions of them as a population.

The biggest problem with the notion that pedophilia is intrinsically wrong, however, has already been mentioned: it essentially renders the entire concept of morality irrelevant, for if one innate, unchosen and unchangeable condition can be deemed immoral, then it’s a short leap from there to deeming another one so, and another one, and another one. The Nazis didn’t just murder Jews after all. They also killed gypsies, lesbians and gays, and yes, pedophiles. And unsurprisingly, the most vicious critics of NOMAPs on Twitter and elsewhere have been members of the far right, many of whom also support treating all minorities as subhumans who are worthy of everything from verbal degradation to execution. You see, this sort of thinking never stops with one unpopular minority.  Look at history.

That’s not all. Over the last two years we have seen Trump and his far right base attack and begin to break down the very bedrock principles of all free and democratic cultures: those of fairness, universal freedom, morality and most importantly, truth. Those of us who care about these things cannot allow that to happen. And so, we cannot let intellectual infants define morality by unchosen traits, for that way lies Orwellian madness. The less evolved among us, who can only perceive morality in the simplest black and white terms, might assure you that no, they only think of pedophiles as bad to the core, but you should know from experience that this simply isn’t true. Given leave to proclaim that this group is naturally evil, they will inevitably gravitate to affirming that that one is as well, and then that one, and that one, until no one is left but those who look, talk and behave exactly as they do.

And what is right and wrong must be defined not by unchosen conditions but only by chosen actions, or morality ceases to have any real value, and we step over the threshold from punishing wrongdoers to punishing wrongbe-ers, and those can and will be determined by whatever faction happens to hold power in the moment.