Man Jailed For Cartoons Of Children, page 6

I have a couple of related opinions.

For one thing, I think the age of majority being 18 is completely arbitrary. There is a difference between kids, and young adults who have undergone puberty, but once those changes start anywhere you draw the line is arbitrary. It's not sick to be attracted to a 17 year old any more than it is an 18 year old. In fact it's often unavoidable, but obviously you can't act on it because it's against the law. So my point is that 18 years is an arbitrary place to draw the line, and certainly does not have any strong moral justification.

What does have strong moral justification is protecting pre-pubescent kids. Ultimately though, what's fake is fake. You can't arrest people who kill "people" in video games, because it's a fake instance of a real crime. The real crime is real child porn, not fake child porn. Anything should be allowed in artificial mediums, because it's not real.

I guess there are two parts of that discussion. One is that in the producing of real child porn, a real child is harmed. So in that sense, the fake child porn avoids harm. The other part of this discussion is the idea that whenever children(real or fake) are portrayed as sexual objects, that is bad. This aspect seems to apply to both real and fake child porn. This same argument can be applied to anything that creates a "bad" mental state, from sexual attraction to child, to violence against people. I would argue that society has made a distinction between real and fake things that provoke undesirable mental states. Violence against anyone is bad, but it is okay to put it in media("okay" in the sense that society deems is morally permissible, as evidenced by so many movies, video games, books, and tv shows). Since society has distiguished between fake and real things that evoke negative mindsets(violence, for example), we should continue to do so when it comes to child porn. Therefore fake child porn should be permissible.

It is very imporant in this discussion to remember that sexually objectifying a child in cartoons is bad because of the harm that it leads to and promotes, and that in and of itself(it's creation, existance, and viewing) no harm is done to a child directly. As long as we aggessively protect against the actual harm that may come from people viewing children as sexual objects(i.e. protecting against pedophiles) then there is some room to allow artificial child porn with no actual harm being done.

If we decide that artificial child porn(cartoons) is not morally permissible, we are forced to due so with the awareness of the glaring contradiction that would come to exist due to the fact that artificial violence(and everything else) is not only permissible, but is very aggressively consumed in the form of movies, books, tv, and video games.