[Oops. I meant to post this months ago. Sorry about the lag. —fl]

In an anonymous comment on an Edward Feser post I mentioned back in December someone raised the same objection I have to sex with children and, very nicely, traced back to Socrates.

Anonymous was responding to Feser’s self-interested assertions that the Ancients singled out only homosexuality for prohibition rather than all expressly non-reproductive sex regardless of age or orientation**.

There is also some decent stuff on sexuality in Gregory Vlastos’ book on Socrates. Interestingly, he understands Socrates’ refusal to indulge his inclinations as rooted in the idea that to do so would harm the boys (ancient Greek homosexuality, if you aren’t aware, tends to be presented specifically as pederasty and not as a sexual relationship between grown males, though that does seem to show up in the Symposium). Since it would harm the boys, it couldn’t be virtuous, and so it would harm Socrates too.

Anonymous said it here.

It might not have occurred to Socrates, or Plato, nor evidently to Feser and his correspondents, but the same can be said of sexual relations between men or boys but adults and children of any gender: it only momentarily gratifies the adult but almost always royally, um, compromises what would otherwise be the child’s healthy sexuality. For life. Including his or her entire adult life. In other words the problem isn’t that it’s perverted (whatever that means anyway) but because it’s destructive use.

Since, however, the same can not be said of affirmative sexual relations between an autonomous, competent adult and other autonomous, competent adults. Which is why it’s hard to generate much legitimate objection to adults of any gender or orientation in sexual relationships with each other.

[** But not, incidentally, of gender — unlike today the Ancients almost universally agreed that the urges to bear children created by women’s uteruses them amorally incapable of sexual restraint. Therefore only men were considered capable of… and therefore expected to exercise… chastity, morality, or restraint.

And naturally, thanks to this ur-“no-sex” class theory, women weren’t believed to enjoy sex because they might actually, you know, enjoyed sex. See, again, the job nobody wanted. Nope, for women it was supposed to be all about Teh Children. Worth considering when assessing anything Feser might have to say on the matter of abortion. —fl]