The problems with liberal contract theory and consent

[Artaxerxes II]

My take is that it is possible, but very difficult to justify adult-minor sexual relationships by using liberal logic. This is because consent as we know it is based primarily upon liberal contract theory. But two problems arise:

• Most minors can’t refuse to go to school, can’t vote, aren’t allowed into the workforce as waged workers, can’t vote, can’t own property unless it’s some inheritance, nor pay taxes whilst working. So intuitively, if they aren’t deemed capable of holding those duties (many of which contractual) then liberal logic follows that they can’t enter into sexual contracts either.
  
  As Foucault pointed out, the problem with liberal contact theory is that it’s based on an unfalsifiable assumption that contracts exist in a vacuum which relies on a liberal metanarrative that isn’t proven by reality as contracts are often shaped by society’s values and relationships of power, so contracts aren’t an ideal standard.

Now, some may bring up the inconsistent logic and arbitrary standards of age of consent laws (e.g., having minors “consent to sex” when they do it in close age gaps but suddenly it’s le bad when it comes to larger age gaps even in situations where the adult is from a more disadvantaged background (e.g., being disabled, mentally stunted, being poorer, etc…) than the minor), as well as how disability rights and gay rights means that it doesn’t have to be this way.

Fair enough. All points well taken. But…

Considering how private property is foundational to liberalism since the days of Locke (which in itself is a product of British politics rather than something sacred), as well as liberalism’s own contradictions as pointed out by Losurdo and other scholars, one wonders if said proponents actually understand how things like minority rights, women’s rights, disability rights and gay rights came to be. The answer isn’t some idealistic Whig history-type platitude about progress or whatever.

All of them were part of larger movements, and came as a result of radical pressure resulting in the liberal establishment taking the path of least resistance by giving in to some concessions in exchange for maintain their position of power.

A key example would be the gay rights movement which, although having its beginnings in the Anglo and German bourgeois of the 19th century, began to shape into what we know today via its attachment to the heterosexual free sex movement, itself attacked to the cultural revolutions of the 1960s and the 1970s radical American counterculture that included various groups like the black panthers. The APA, that managed the globally-used DSM, used to classify homosexuality as a mental pathology before removing it from the DSM. Was it because of free civil debates? No! It was because gay rights activists actually went into APA conventions to disrupt them, at which point the APA had to relent and subsequently give in to political concessions. The same gay rights activists were also the ones fighting the police at Stonewall alongside other gutter elements of society like underage boy prostitutes, meth addicts, etc…
Thing is, they didn’t just have financial support such as from certain trans millionaires as well as meeting less elite and societal opposition back then compared to MAPs such as pedos today, they also took on the kind of radical actions respectability politics discourage.

Same goes for the civil rights movement, itself being possible thanks to both being funded by black American union workers, as well as because radical action from the black panthers (like the free lunch programs for impoverished black neighbourhoods) means that the US presidency had to act lest the (at the time anyway) largest visible minority caused insurgencies, especially as the civil rights movement had many white backers + black populations were concentrated in the old south on the top of growing in urban areas, and could pose a threat to the liberal establishment as shown by the riots following MLK Jr’s assassination.

As for the women’s rights movement? Attaches itself to the enlightenment movement, particularly the abolitionist cause, before going full throttle with the liberal establishment by the time the republican reconstruction of the post-civil war south in the US fails. In the UK, women are given rights following Pankhurst’s mail bombing campaign leads her to jail where she makes a compromise where suffrage in Britain is extended to women at the age of 21 at least if she and her allies agitate for the “white feather” campaign to drive up recruitment rates for WW1’s British war efforts. Similar trajectory of being attached to power structures and larger movements before any gains are followed by feminist movements elsewhere.

So, how can one argue for adult-minor sex legalisation under the framework of a modernist ideology that in itself is often incoherent and whose “achievements” rests less on ideological moves and more on political concessions made under political pressure and forced compromises, and whose even ideological founding fathers created various liberal principles less out of sincerely believing in it as much as justifying their own material actions?

That’s why I’m not as much of a liberal/libertarian as I used to be on this issue. It’s not that I’m against MAP rights, it’s just that I don’t think the liberals of the MAP movement have actually thought any of this through when they decided to make MAP rights centre around liberalism. I get the appeal, just don’t think it’s feasible without MAPs attaching themselves to larger movements (like how our predecessors did with the 1960s counterculture) or becoming more revolutionary. I think it’s no coincidence that the side of MAP politics that got the most mainstream today has been anti-Cs like the VirPeds who can brag about endorsements from the medical establishment, as opposed to pro-Cs whose sole contribution (i.e., lowering the AoC in the Netherlands for some years) got tore down by liberal antis.

Inb4 "Sex isn't that hard". Points taken, but I get your points, but my point isn’t about getting on board with adult-minor sex per se, as much as that one would be hard-pressed to justify it via liberal logic, considering that for liberals sex revolves around “consent” which is just liberal contract theory applied to sex.

If a minor isn’t deemed capable enough to own property or sign a contract (traits that classical liberals deem are necessary to be considered “autonomous individuals”) then you’d be hard pressed to convince them to legalise adult-minor sex.

Essentially, to accept adult-minor sex as being morally neutral you’d have to accept a degree of inequality liberals today find anathema.

And if liberalism itself is incoherent, then is there any purpose to appeal to the liberal establishment using its own logic, that they barely adhere to?

Because I’ve been thinking about it, and came to the conclusion that short of revolution, the fuel for the civil rights route has been spent too much at least for pro-Cs. I don’t discourage other pro-C MAPs from taking that route as I understand the appeal + neither commies nor Nazis are accommodating of MAPs, but I do see it as futile, especially since the most successful MAP org of the 21st century has also done the most to pathologies minor attraction. Ofc I’m talking of VirPeds and anti-Cs on twitter who became the face of MAPs among online antis.
That's why the applicability of the consent concept needs to be interrogated. It's better to speak of willingness and autonomy. Contract theory presupposes private property, but bodily autonomy is better seen as simply a natural freedom, unlike property which applies to inanimate resources not organically attached to any particular person. This should be especially obvious when we note that people don't even treat the whole body this way in practice, only the "private parts."

So, what do y'all think of this matter?

[John_Doe]

Artaxerxes II,

I don't want to address all of this but,

That's why the applicability of the consent concept needs to be interrogated. It's better to speak of willingness and autonomy. Contract theory presupposes private property, but bodily autonomy is better seen as simply a natural freedom, unlike property which applies to inanimate resources not organically attached to any particular person. This should be especially obvious when we note that people don't even treat the whole body this way in practice, only the "private parts."

I don't understand your distinction here. The consent argument incoherently lumps sex without supposed true consent in with sex against one's will. Willingness is ignored because it's not considered informed and the 'autonomy' angle that you seem to be suggesting as an alternative seems, to me, to be just insisting that they can meaningfully consent to sex. The idea of private property (as in owning things outside of one's body) is supposed to stem from a right to autonomy but whether you think that's coherent or not, I don't think anyone on either side of the issue is concerned with that kind of 'property.' The antis seem to see child-adult sex as a kind of fraud, a not-truly-authorized sexual access to a child's body. Contracts can involve one's body and not natural resources that one owns because of discovery or modification or ultimate inheritance from someone who made a thing there's through discovery.

I don't want to properly analyze this, I think I understand your point about letting children consent to sex when we don't let them enter into other legally binding contracts or hold them accountable for criminal behavior but I don't think any of this practically matters without the meaning of sex that we project on to it, since we normally accept that children can make various choices in their day-to-day life or don't have a problem with subjecting them to experiences that they're not even willing to have, never mind that they don't 'truly understood.' I think you can make a 'liberal' case against the stigma by challenging the meaning of sex that the Judeo-Christian tradition takes for granted. From a secular standpoint, there's no evidence for this objective meaning that the stigma requires (we consider rape a special-class offense; not necessarily because it tends to be quantitatively more stressful than non-sexual physical assault but fundamentally because it involves sex. Pressuring someone into sex, even if we're talking about a husband and his wife, is diabolical in a way that pressuring them into a game of scrabble is not because it involves sex. There are many jobs that are highly stressful, even disgusting, but only sex work is considered deeply exploitative. Only with sex work are you "buying" the person you're paying, we don't "buy" plumbers or accountants or lawyers).

One thing about the idea of informed consent and autonomy I've noticed is that because liberals are hesitant to openly admit to some authoritarian leanings they'll often rely on contrived logic to defend paternalistic policies under the guise of 'true freedom' (which they define away to mean something other than autonomy, like the distinction between positive freedom and negative freedom which is meaningful but we're not talking about autonomy anymore which is what classical liberalism is concerned with). The idea is that people who use heroin aren't making an informed choice to do so, they're necessarily acting out of desperation, so their choice/consent doesn't 'count.' I think this is nonsense. I appreciate the harm that paternalism can cause, I appreciate that I don't necessarily understand what's best for other people, my ideal is to respect people's autonomy by default (at least or especially when they would experience the frustration of a desire for autonomy) but I think I'm more honest in opposing the legalization of fentanyl because of the suffering that it causes, not because I can make a rational choice about someone else using fentanyl that they can't because only someone who's too incapacitated by desperation could decide to use fentanyl (the same circular reasoning is used when it comes to suicide. We know that suicide can't be a 'rational' choice because only an irrational person would want to commit suicide). None of our choices exist in an emotional vacuum, they are always influenced by some emotional state or primal desire and often involve some undesirable ultimatum.

That said (this doesn't really apply to the last paragraph), I do suspect that the idea of statutory rape or sexual exploitation is 'leftist' at its core. Leftists seem to be the ones who think that power imbalances are inherently wrong out of antagonism toward the privileged classes. This might stem from a concept of fairness as equality of welfare/advantage that they arguably promote even at the expense of less privileged people (so even if younger people enjoy a relationship with someone older, priority goes to eliminating the unfairness of advantage inequality within a relationship. I can already see some possible holes in this so feel free to critique it. It's kind of the same idea behind prohibiting prisoners from having relationships with guards not just out of risk aversion but because it's exploitative, whether or not intimacy with guards could make life so much easier for any given prisoner just isn't considered, protecting them from the power imbalance is more important than protecting them from emotional harm; in other words, it's not really about their welfare as it is about equality of welfare/advantage/power which is very different than equal consideration of everyone's welfare). I think an honest truly conservative argument against child-adult sexual relationships would be rooted more so in the fact that they are 'disordered' or 'unnatural' (because they have no reproductive capacity) than the selective preoccupation with whether or not children are 'truly' consenting.

In the UK, women are given rights following Pankhurst’s mail bombing campaign leads her to jail where she makes a compromise where suffrage in Britain is extended to women at the age of 21 at least if she and her allies agitate for the “white feather” campaign to drive up recruitment rates for WW1’s British war efforts. Similar trajectory of being attached to power structures and larger movements before any gains are followed by feminist movements elsewhere.

I have a hard time believing this.

Same goes for the civil rights movement, itself being possible thanks to both being funded by black American union workers, as well as because radical action from the black panthers (like the free lunch programs for impoverished black neighbourhoods) means that the US presidency had to act lest the (at the time anyway) largest visible minority caused insurgencies, especially as the civil rights movement had many white backers + black populations were concentrated in the old south on the top of growing in urban areas, and could pose a threat to the liberal establishment as shown by the riots following MLK Jr’s assassination.

Huey and Bobby started the BPP in October of 1966, the Civil Rights Act was passed in '64 and the Voting Rights Act (which, to my understanding, didn't address explicitly racial discrimination) in '65. So as far as 'institutional racism' goes, I think that had already been addressed by the time the panthers came into existence (and King was assassinated in '68). Politicians and Lyndon B Johnson were ultimately responsible for the civil rights bill but I think MLK and the non-violent movement associated with people like him, Bayard Rustin, Medgar Evers, Rose Parks, etc. were more influential in terms of public support for civil rights than the panthers or people like Malcolm (especially or at least pre-Mecca Malcolm) were. I doubt most white northeners supported segregation, I don't know. This might not apply to something like the Holocaust which required force to bring an end to but when it comes to the U.S, I think 'respectability politics,' non-violence, the emphasis on brotherliness and not resentment or vengeance etc. has generally been more effective when it comes to ending at least legal discrimination against certain groups. I don't want to get into this and I'm no history buff, if I sound like a fool. Even with the Holocaust, fighting Nazis meant fighting their ideas and that included race-based superiority (and I think vengeance on the basis of race or membership to a group falls under that. Had Jews 'retaliated' against random innocent non-Jewish white Germans they would have been ascribing to some of the same collectivist, anti-humanitarian reasoning that Hitler's ideology depended on).