HalcyonGlaze wrote:

Indeed. Let's simply say I'm of a more deontalogical pursuassion and I completely shun concequentialism.

OK, assuming it's not wrong, what makes it morally acceptible or right for an adult to have sex with a child? Love? So, is it right because we love it or do we love it because it's right. I'm trying to ask an ethical question about the basis of morality. You are trying to promote a specific ethical judgement about pedopheia. Most teenage boys would like nothing better than to have sex with a woman... or anyone for that matter. The ethical issues of teens having sex with each other is problematic enough. But add in an adult who really should know better and it becomes very hard to defend as a good thing. I can certainly imagine situations when you might say it didn't hurt anyone and maybe offered great comfort. But these are exceptions. Teens are biologically ready for sex, beginning with puberty. In ancient and pre-historic cultures, with much shorter lifespans and vastly different cultural traditions impregnating a teenage girls was normal and acceptable behavior. These days it almost always morally unacceptable, certainly in the US. Knowing that something IS morally good.. or evil... entails knowing not only whether the society accepts it or not, it's knowing WHY it's right or wrong. Traditionally we have always had religious intitutions to provide moral education. The institution itself provided the moral justification for its ethical code. But these days, there is no supreme moral authority to appeal to. So I come back to my question (Socrates' question) as to why something is moral or not.

Sorry, But I'm not too worked up over the difference between pedophelia and child rape or other forms of child sexual abuse.

That doesn't seem to be a philosophical question as much as an opportunity to express a moral preference.

Developmentally people don't mature to the point of being able to assess their actions on terms of long-term consequences until 16 or so. Then they have to live with the consequences (good and bad) of their actions for long enough to learn from their mistakes. Only then can a person act with moral responsibility and authority as an adult.

If you want me to believe something like that in the first place, you would have to prove to me that you did, just as I would have to present you with evidence of my meeting god and him saying that, because I don't feel like beileving your random statements.

OK, so an adult has sex with a 16 y/o "child" and both consent. It all feels good and they have a wonderful time. The kid brags to the friends, word gets out and the adult ends up in jail. Is that just? By your definition it would be.

Any term can be defined as not being what it is not. I don't see how such a tautology sheds any light on the cognitive content of its meaning.

So if I sit alone in my room my whole life, I'm on the same moral ground as someone who spends their life doing good for others and themselves?

Or maybe you would say sitting alone in my room is a bad thing because I'm NOT out there doing good... or not out there not doing what is not good? St. Augustine held that evil is the privation (absence) of good. Good for him, of course, was God, which he conceived in a nearly Neo-Platonic sense. Thus, evil for him was just a turning away from God and therefore from reality itself. So are you suggesting that to be good is to turn away from evil? Or that good is the privation of evil? If so, then by extension evil is real and goodness is not. I see the same problem with your position that I see with Augustine's. If you define one as the absence of the other you assume that we know what the present one is in itself, so we can define the other one as the opposite of it. But we don't know the nature of evil in itself any more than we know what is good. Are you suggesting we know what is Bad more easily than we know what is Good? Either way, the question of what makes something good or bad and how we can know that in a way such that "to know the Bad is not to do the Bad" or vice versa.

HalcyonGlaze wrote:

Excellent. You therefore conceede that my argument is indeed correct, and I have no reason to believe you so far. I thus await your proof.

HalcyonGlaze wrote:


I don't understand. Why is Evil a man-made entity? What does killing for a reason have to do with anything? What do consequences of an action have to do with that action's moral nature?

HalcyonGlaze wrote:
If by "Good for others" you mean Just altruistic things, then yes.

I don't know about you, or this "we" you speak of, but *I* certainly have a fair idea of what is evil. I could be wrong of course, but I could also be right, and it seems more likely to me that I am correct.