Sometimes when you create leeway or ambiguity, the worse kinds of people will use it to stress the limits and do unimaginable harm. For example, legalizing a child pornography production and collection would legalize the company that profits off of child pornography and emboldens those with pedophilic urges.
Better to make it illegal and let the judge and jury decide the severity of punishment.
But sometimes when you leave people alone with their struggles they end up losing against those urges.
And nobody said that the production of child pornography should be legalized, though even talking about this reveals that we apparently don’t make a linguistic distinction between material that essentially requires sexual abuse of children to produce and material that requires nothing more than some art supplies and artistic skill. That is the part that I consider disgusting, that we apparently dislike it so much that we forget all about the actual harm the production of some of it does to actual children in our efforts to use euphemistic language to avoid thinking about it too much. It feels like the emotional comfort of those taking part in the public discourse about it is more important than actually solving the problem for the victims.
Sometimes when you create leeway or ambiguity, the worse kinds of people will use it to stress the limits and do unimaginable harm. For example, legalizing a child pornography production and collection would legalize the company that profits off of child pornography and emboldens those with pedophilic urges.
Better to make it illegal and let the judge and jury decide the severity of punishment.
But sometimes when you leave people alone with their struggles they end up losing against those urges.
And nobody said that the production of child pornography should be legalized, though even talking about this reveals that we apparently don’t make a linguistic distinction between material that essentially requires sexual abuse of children to produce and material that requires nothing more than some art supplies and artistic skill. That is the part that I consider disgusting, that we apparently dislike it so much that we forget all about the actual harm the production of some of it does to actual children in our efforts to use euphemistic language to avoid thinking about it too much. It feels like the emotional comfort of those taking part in the public discourse about it is more important than actually solving the problem for the victims.