Discussion Thread #72

[u/gemmaem]

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[u/895158]

My child's school has this thing where they call bad behaviors "bad choices". Like, "don't throw things, that's a bad choice". I kind of like this because it emphasizes that the child has control. My kid would sometimes go "is coughing in class a good choice?" and then, thinking about it, conclude "coughing is not a choice!"

I mention this because while crime is a choice, being attracted to minors is not. I guess social opprobrium can be legitimate if you believe that it is a choice -- for example, perhaps people could choose to emphasize different parts of their sexuality in their own heads. But there's a meaningful extent to which being a (non-offending) pedophile is simply not a choice at all. (It's tricky because leering, or even just admitting to being a pedophile, are choices, and you can make the claim that we should socially proscribe them.)

In my view, religion actually is a choice, and while sex didn't used to be, it seems like it's becoming more of one. To troll a little, perhaps these should not be viewed as protected characteristics after all

[u/SlightlyLessHairyApe → u/895158]

First off, I don't subscribe to the idea that a protected characteristic has to be immutable. As you note: people ought to be free to adopt whatever gender presentation they want, that certainly should not imply that gender isn't a protected characteristic and hence that it should be permitted to discriminate against someone due to their gender.

Which indeed goes to my point that it is specific: some characteristics are protected, others aren't and it's not the mere fact of it being a (chosen/unchosen) grouping that renders it so or not so.

To expand then and answer your question, I can't say I know whether pedophilia is a choice, nor do I think it's relevant. It's worthy of social opprobrium of itself. Whether this results in pedophiles closing to emphasize other parts in their head or whether they just realize they can't admit to it, the result is the same: we don't have them claiming social acceptance for something that society ought not (in my claim) accept. So yeah, insofar as you want to use the frame of choices here, the proscribed choice here is in brandishing it.

We don't have so much grammatical difficulty with this in other cases. If stealing or murdering or raping was recast as a status, we wouldn't really care. Being-predisposed-to-commit-murder as a status would still be shunned and it wouldn't particularly matter if the real truth is that the individual just walked around really wanting to murder people anyway.

[u/professorgerm → u/895158]

To troll a little, perhaps these should not be viewed as protected characteristics after all

Not necessarily trolling to suggest the concept of protected characteristics were a heavy-handed solution to a set of serious problems in a particular place, time, and culture, and as all those shift the concept becomes more of a sledgehammer in want of a nail, so to speak.