NO PLAYTHING:Ethical Issues concerning Child Pornography

Dr Peter J. KingPembroke CollegeOxfordOX1 1DWU.K.

tel.: +1608 659174e-mail: peter.king@philosophy.oxford.ac.uk

ABSTRACT

Academic discussion of pornography is generally restricted to issues arising from the depiction

of adults. I argue that child-pornography is a more complex matter, and that generally accepted

moral judgements concerning pornography in general have to be revised when children are

involved. I look at the question of harm to the children involved, the consumers, and society in

general, at the question of blame, and at the possibility of a morally acceptable form of child-

pornography. My approach involves an objectivist meta-ethics and a utilitarian view of practical

ethics, and I bring out the advantages of these theories to the consideration of moral issues such

as this one.

KEY WORDS

children, ethics, Mill, objectivism, pornography, utilitarianism.

1Mackinnon [1995], p.62

2Longino [1995], p.34

3Snitow [1985], p.157; quoted in Parmar [1988], p.129

NO PLAYTHING:Ethical Issues concerning Child-Pornography

i. Introduction

Compared to its impact on the public, the media, politics, and the law, the issue of child-

pornography has been neglected by philosophers (and by other academics). Part of the reason

for this might be that in much of the literature the notion of pornography is oversimplified,

treated as a simple (and, perhaps, a natural) kind. Thus Catherine Mackinnon writes: “We define

pornography as the graphic, sexually explicit subordination of women in pictures or words”;1 she

goes on eventually to add that men, children, or transsexuals (though not non-human animals) can

take the place of women in the definition. This is part of an attempt to distinguish pornography

from erotica, but it’s surely not an adequate definition of ‘pornography’; it’s a definition of the

specific kind of pornography with which Mackinnon is concerned. Again, Helen Longino writes:

I define pornography as verbal or pictorial explicit representations of sexual behaviour

that, in the words of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, have as a

distinguishing characteristic ‘the degrading and demeaning portrayal of the role and

status of the human female … as a mere sexual object to be exploited and manipulated

sexually (Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, p.239)2

Here we’re even denied the afterthought of men, children, and transsexuals. Moreover, questions

such as whether pornography degrades or demeans women are unabashedly begged.

This approach is explicitly argued for by Ann Snitow:

A definition of pornography that takes the problem of analysis seriously has to

include not only violence, hatred and fear of women, but also a long list of other

elements3.

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4Wiggins [1991], p.142n.

5Dyzenhaus [1992]

6reported in Kelly [1992], p.113

Here the notions of definition and analysis are not merely juxtaposed; the latter is deliberately

assimilated to the former. It’s doubtless true that discussion of pornography would include the

items on Snitow’s list, but a definition shouldn’t. Analysis and definition can be assimilated where

we take the notion of analysis to mean reduction. An alternative to a reductive understanding of

the notion of analysis is the notion of elucidation. As David Wiggins explains:

an elucidation illuminates a concept by employing it in a set of true judgements

that involve it revealingly and interestingly with distinct, coeval, collateral

concepts.4

At best, then, Snitow’s claim can be seen as a partial elucidation.

All this, of course, betrays the starting points and the central concerns of writers like

Mackinnon, Longino, and Snitow; they’re feminists, not members of the Festival of Light, and

they’re concerned with legal and political responses to pornography, not with philosophical issues

(the moral status of pornography isn’t a conclusion that they reach, but one of their premises).

Perhaps that’s acceptable in it’s own context, but such approaches to the notion of pornography

tend to influence more philosophical debates (for example, David Dyzenhaus argues that Mill

would have condemned pornography on the basis of its effects on the subjection of women, and

clearly uses ‘pornography’ in much the same sense as Longino, et al.5). There’s at least a danger

that such purported definitions play too great a rôle in determining the conclusions reached —

and that they lead to the neglect of types of material that lie outside central feminist concerns,

such as pornography involving the abuse of men, animals, or children.

On the other hand, it has been suggested that the reason for the neglect of child-

pornography is that there’s nothing much to be said; as Susan Cole puts it: “focussing on child

pornography [is] too easy, since there [is] a general consensus about the harm involved”.6 This

may be part – perhaps even a large part – of the reason, but the consensus to which Cole refers

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7in Davies [1978]

is, I believe, underarticulated and underexamined. In particular, the question of harm is more

complex than is generally thought, as well as being only part of the moral story.

My aim in this paper is to help to correct that situation, by examining the moral status of

child-pornography (I ‘ll have little to say concerning practical issues such as censorship and the

law, though I hope that what I have to say will be relevant to such areas). In order to do this I

shall first have to say something about the ethical position which informs my analysis and

discussion.

ii. The ethical basis

In this section I present an account, not only of the fundamental approach to moral issues – the

meta-ethical position – that I shall assume in what follows, but also of my mid-level ethical

position, which is what provides the link between deep questions of the nature of morality and

practical concerns — the application of moral thinking to specific, real-world problems.

There are, claims Christie Davies, two main positions available to those who argue against

pornography.7 They can claim that pornography causes behaviour or encourages ideas that are

in some way or other undesirable, or they can claim that it’s simply wrong in itself, regardless of

its effects. He calls the former position ‘causalist’ and the latter ‘moralist’. These are misleading

labels (the causalist is likely to be as concerned with morality as is the moralist), and the

suggested analysis of the pornography debate is narrow and inaccurate; for example, relevant

effects of pornography include, as I shall discuss in some detail, harm to those who are exploited.

Nevertheless, the distinction might at first seem broadly useful as a starting point. When,

however, we try to use it in that way, we face difficulties: hardly anyone in the debate adopts a

non-causalist approach.

This shouldn’t be surprising; moral thinking outside philosophy is largely dominated by

two theories, generally held vaguely and unreflectively, and often found together (however

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8Graham [1999], p.105

uncomfortable their conjunction can sometimes be): relativism (often collapsing into subjectivism)

and consequentialism. The former is the meta-ethical component, and (in its popular form at

least) involves the claim that there are no genuine, universal moral truths, but that morality is

relative to a particular culture or other group. On this view, for a member of one culture to make

moral judgements about another culture is no more sensible than for an English schoolchild to

refer to Australians as living upside down. The latter theory, consequentialism, is the mid-level

ethical component, and holds that actions are moral or immoral wholly in so far as they produce

certain consequences. Consequentialism in one form or another dominates our moral thinking

to such an extent that, according to Gordon Graham:

the claim that [pornography] is harmful is usually a refuge for those who, really,

think that it is objectionable in itself, but believe that couching their objections

in terms of harm is more likely to command agreement.8

This suggests that Graham believes that, while the majority of people are consequentialists, most

of those who disapprove of pornography are not. I’m not clear why he thinks this, though at the

same time I accept that it’s more than possible that some anti-pornographers tailor their

arguments to the beliefs of the people they want to persuade.

I shall come back to the meta-ethical question later. First I want to associate myself with

the consequentialist approach to morality; more specifically, I take a utilitarian position deriving

from the works of J.S. Mill and others. For me, then, the morally relevant consequences of actions

are those involving the increase or decrease of happiness. For the purposes of this paper, I shall

treat ‘happiness’ as standing simply for pleasure and the absence of pain. Like Mill, I reject the

popular formulation of the utilitarian principle, which calls for actions to produce ‘the greatest

happiness for the greatest number’; this seems to me to be more appropriate to economics than

to ethics, and leads both to unreasonable demands upon the moral agent and to problems of

distributive justice. Also like Mill, I hold that the grounds upon which we should judge agents are

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9Wiggins [1991], p.321

10Indeed, I take it to be central to the issue of moral disagreement; that is, despite the objectivity of moral

values, different cultures at different times have adopted what seem to be very different moral judgements.This paper isn’t the place to go into this issue in detail, but I hold that such disagreements can frequentlybe explained in terms of differences, not concerning moral values, but concerning metaphysics —especially what counts as a person, but also what counts as harm.

very different from those upon which we should judge actions, and this will be one of the issues

on which I shall focus in this paper.

Unlike Mill, I hold that pain has more moral significance than does pleasure; that is, it’s

more important to avoid causing (or to relieve) pain than it is to produce pleasure. Thus, doctors

are more important than comedians, and a cure for malaria is more important than even a new

series of the Simpsons. I intend to argue for this position in detail elsewhere. I stress it here

because, in what follows, I shall ignore the complicating and ultimately nugatory question of the

ratio between the pleasure produced in the consumers of pornography and the pain produced

in those whom it exploits, etc. It should in any case be clear from the start that there is no

possibility of any balance here, much less imbalance in favour of the pleasure produced, but the

recognition that pain outweighs pleasure serves to emphasis the point.

For a great deal of this paper, then, I shall be centrally concerned with the harmful con-

sequences of child-pornography. What, though, counts as harm? As David Wiggins points out:

the idea of harm is correlative with ideas of human life and flourishing that each

culture has to make the best it can of. These are public property and the fit

subject of constructive argument; but, like so many ordinary ideas, they are also

metaphysical and essentially contestable. And to some theorists of politics that

will seem both dangerous and unnerving. They will search about for reasons to

displace these notions by more technical, supposedly more operational, counter-

parts whose application will occasion less heart-searching and less argument9

I’m in broad agreement with this,10 and it’s certainly true that Wiggins’ prediction concerning

political theorists rings true in contexts like the present one. Nevertheless, I intend to say very

little about the way in which I use ‘harm’ in what follows, because for the most part I shall be

concerned with usages that are common to most cultures and times, and I don’t think that

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anything I have to say will pose any difficulties of this sort, will even come near the margins of

agreement concerning what counts as harm. I should also be concerned if serious issues of

practical morality were made to rest on obscure technical definitions; in choosing how to act and

how not to act, as well as in judging the actions of others, we should stay on a human scale, and

not be dragged into the intricacies of the academic world.

All of this, though, is at a level above meta-ethics, and I should now examine that deeper

level. I need to say something about what it is about a certain action or state of affairs that makes

it morally right or wrong — what is it about harm that makes it central here? From where does

the normative element of morality come? For, without the normative, morality is no more than

a version of taste or social custom. The position from which I shall be arguing here is a kind of

moral realism (in the sense that moral judgements are, or can be, candidates for truth and falsity)

sometimes called objectivism. That is, I hold that moral values are objective, and applicable to any

sentient, sapient, empathic being that shares our sensitivity and sensibility. Such beings share the

same basic moral responses, which grow out of our knowledge of what it is to feel (for example,

pain or fear), our grasp of what it is for others to feel (not simply an intellectual but an emotional

grasp), and our ability to reason (for example, to extend our empathy beyond what is immediate

or obvious, and to act appropriately).

Our emotional responses are, therefore, not mere reactions; they’re not parasitic on

morality, but central to it. Those who dismiss the appeal to emotions as mere sentimentality are

in grave danger of missing the heart of morality. In what follows I shall try to bring out the direct

relevance of this to the subject of child-pornography, sometimes in ways that will force me to say

more about both the issues and my utilitarian approach to them; this will also involve me in a

further discussion of the key notion of our morally relevant emotional responses.

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iii. Preliminary analyses and distinctions

Before I start, some distinctions will be useful, and some analysis essential. In each case, the

fineness and the degree of detail are matters of decision. I’ve tried to achieve a level that will

make matters clear without either covering up issues that are difficult for my arguments or

burdening the reader with unnecessary complication.

First, I need to distinguish between different types of pornography (that is, of pornography

in general; I shall go on to ask how well this typology fits the specific case of child-pornography).

The following, then, is meant to represent a rough moral hierarchy, starting with what would be

generally agreed upon as the most morally objectionable:

1. Rape-type material A record of actual rape or other non-consen-

sual sexual activity

2. Consensual-type material A record of actual consensual sexual activity

3. Fake-type material The representation of sexual activity by ac-

tors, whether professional or amateur

4. Nudity-type material Images, etc., of naked people

5. Pin-up-type material Images of scantily-clad or suggestively-clad

people

(I include in the first category material in which the subject is clearly coerced, even when no actual

sexual activity occurs.) A number of points ought to be made here. First, I must emphasise that

my concern is with moral, not with legal considerations; even if certain sorts of consensual sexual

activity (such as adultery) were illegal, and certain sorts of non-consensual sexual activity (such as

marital rape) were legal, their positions in the typology would be unaffected. Secondly, I’ve

ignored the differences between types of media; where such differences are relevant I shall

discuss them, but I prefer not to over-complicate matters at the beginning. Thirdly, the order in

the hierarchy represents what I take to be the likely moral consensus concerning pornography in

general, primarily adult-pornography. Even there I think that it would repay further examination,

No Plaything É 8

but in what follows I shall have cause to question (and hence to complicate) it with regard to

child-pornography.

It’s somewhat easier to divide pornography into types than it is to define it (as was

suggested above in section i). That’s partly because there are two factors involved: the way in

which the material is produced, and the way in which it’s consumed. Material might be produced

for innocent, non-pornographic purposes, but then misused. For example, one can imagine a

paedophile using an illustrated Alice in Wonderland, or a video of junior gymnastics; does such

material thereby become pornographic? Most people would say ‘no’, but I shall address such

issues at greater length later in the paper. For the moment I shall proceed on the assumption that

material is pornographic if it is either produced with sexual content and for purposes of sexual

titillation, or misappropriated and distributed for such purposes, for the sake of its sexual (or

sexually relevant) content. It is, I suppose, possible that Alice in Wonderland be so distributed, but

so unlikely as not to pose a serious problem for my definition, which is not meant to be

philosophically rigorous, but practical.

The moral concerns of this paper require that we distinguish between four possible foci:

the subjects of pornography (actors, models, etc.), the producers (photographers, writers,

publishers, etc.), the consumers (viewers, readers, etc.), and the product (the material itself —

photos, films, etc.). Of course, in some cases an individual might fall into more than one category

(for example: model and publisher), and in other cases one or other of the categories might not

apply (such as subjects in the case of fiction or computer-generated images); where this is relevant

I shall discuss it. More importantly, I shall be little concerned with the product in itself; it’s with

people that my concerns lie.

I start, then, by examining the question of the effects of child-pornography on its subjects

and consumers, and go on to ask about the issue of moral culpability. I then ask whether

anything that could properly be called child-pornography could also be accounted morally

acceptable, before returning to some meta-ethical issues.

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11Tate [1992], p.203. See also Kelly [1993], p.121. This could, of course, equally well be said – mutatis

mutandis – of rape-type adult-pornography.

12loc. cit.

iv. Harm to the subjects

In most discussions of pornography the focus tends to be on the harm caused to society in

general or to women in particular (as the quotations in section i indicate); the issue of child-

pornography, however, places the emphasis squarely on the subjects — on the children

themselves. This is, of course, the point of Susan Cole’s comment concerning the relative neglect

of this topic: the harm is so obvious that there seems to be little to say, little need to say it. It’s

true that this attitude ignores issues such as the status of fiction (including computer-generated

images), and I shall occasionally comment on this. My main concern, however, lies elsewhere; the

nature and the degree of harm is different for different types of material, and in the case of some

types the chief harm might actually be caused elsewhere.

In examining the different types of pornography, the question of consent normally plays

an important rôle, which is why rape-type material comes first in the hierarchy of types. However,

in the case of child-pornography, the distinction seems to dissolve. As Tim Tate puts it: “Child

pornography […] is not pornography in any real sense: simply the evidence – recorded on film or

video-tape – of serious sexual assaults on young children”.11 Although this seems to ignore

nudity-type and especially pin-up-type material, Tate later says, in response to a journalist’s claim

that simply photographing a child doesn’t exploit it: “Perhaps if child pornography was made up

of innocent holiday snaps of naked children playing happily on the beach, she might have a point.

But it is not”.12 I shall come back to nudity-type and pin-up-type material later. With regard to

the first three types, one could argue that the distinctions between them might indeed dissolve

in the legal context, but that morality is a different matter. The law might say that sex between

an adult and a person under a certain age is statutory rape, but morality is concerned with

individuals rather than with classes, and someone who is, say fifteen years and eleven months old

might well be mature enough to give genuine consent.

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13Elliott [1993], p.120.

14It should be remembered that, in my hierarchy of types, I included in the rape-type category material

produced by coercion even when only nudity or near-nudity are involved.

There’s a genuine point here, I think; moreover, whatever harm – immediate or postponed

– is done in cases of statutory rape is added to by the terror and pain of the victim of actual rape,

so the difference in harm done, at least, is significant. On the other hand, the subjects of child-

pornography are not restricted to those children whose maturity allows them to give genuine

consent; a vast amount in fact involves children who are clearly too young to make it reasonable

to suppose them to be capable of such maturity (though Michele Elliott cites Tom O’Carroll

(founder of the Paedophilia Information Exchange) as arguing that “children as young as four can

make informed decisions about having sex with adults”.13 I shall give some grounds in the next

section for disputing such a bizarre claim). In addition, the issue of consent applies not only to

the sexual activity itself, but also to the participation of the child in the production of

pornography.

On the whole, although the distinction between the three types is less clear with regard

to child-pornography than with regard to adult-pornography, I think that there is reason to retain

it. More importantly, I want to retain that distinction because it will play a central part in what

I have to say about the effects of child-pornography on the consumer.

As for the last two types of child-pornography – nudity-type and pin-up-type – the amount

and nature of the harm done to the subject will presumably both depend upon the precise

circumstances, varying from little or no harm (for example, if a child is happy to pose for

snapshots on the beach, and grows up either ignorant of or unconcerned by the use to which the

photos are put) to significant psychological harm (for example, if photographs are taken secretly,

or where there is betrayal of trust by a family member or friend14).

It’s not clear to me that the consumer (or the rest of society) can always (or ever) be sure

what category a particular image falls into — how much harm to the subject it represents;

however happy and carefree the child seems to be, we can’t know what later effects she suffered

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15see, for example, Easton [1994], p.15

16see Elliott [1993] for a relevant discussion

(or, indeed, what further experiences she was subjected to after or as a result of that photograph).

In fact it’s clear that some degree of harm is almost always done to the subject in the production

and distribution of child-pornography of all kinds, that this maps more or less neatly onto the

hierarchy of types that I gave in section iii, and that even if harm isn’t done in a particular case,

we can never be sure of that. To the consensus to which Susan Cole refers, then, I can add little

but my agreement.

One further point remains to be made here, though strictly speaking it involves going

some way outside the concerns of this paper. Paedophiles sometimes use pornography as part

of the process of persuasion, seduction, or initiation of children into abuse.15 Here the harm is

done to children, though not as subjects; moreover, we’ve gone beyond talking about the

pornography, and are in fact dealing with the activity of child abuse itself. Nevertheless, it

constitutes such a direct and serious harm that it shouldn’t be ignored.

v. Effects on the consumers

It’s when we come to those who use – read, view, watch – child-pornography that the hierarchy

of types has to be radically re-evaluated. For the non-paedophile, viewing child-pornography will

doubtless produce a variety of reactions: there will be most divergence concerning material at the

lower end (nudity-type and pin-up-type material), with many people thinking of pin-up-type

images, especially, as being harmless, while others are appalled by them.16 As we ascend the

hierarchy, reactions will homogenise, and the worst material will produce universal horror and

revulsion, even in those trying to preserve a professional detachment (I shall have more to say

about these reactions in section x).

In the case of that consensual-type and fake-type material in which at least the semblance

of consent is created, there’s room for a more complex response. Both in the written and in the

graphical versions of such material, the children are generally presented as engaging in sexual

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17Feinberg [1987], p.153. See also the “Dirty Old Men” case that I cite in King [unpublished]; details in

Director of Public Prosecutions v Whyte and another [1972] 3 All ER 12.

activity with no sign of coercion, no suggestion of negative emotion. The fiction, frequently

written in the first-person as if by the child, commonly presents her as either surrendering to and

enjoying the sexual advances of an adult, or as actually instigating sexual activity, even pursuing

the adult. In graphical material the point is generally made more obliquely, but again the children

appear to respond with anything from curiosity, through amusement (often in the form of

pleasure at being ‘naughty’), to enjoyment.

Now, even if one accepts that the appearance of the graphical material were to be taken

at face value – that the children were genuinely suffering no immediate harm during the

production of the material – one surely infers that harm is in fact involved, either immediately,

behind the appearances, or at some later stage. This fact – that the harm isn’t seen directly but

is inferred – is significant because of an argument that is frequently offered by defenders of

pornography (or opponents of censorship).

The argument is that pornography doesn’t affect the behaviour, or even the moral nature,

of its consumers; rather, the fact that they’re consumers is caused by the sorts of people they are.

That is, they read or view pornography in the first place because they’re already the sort of people

who behave in certain ways, or who have a certain moral character. Thus Joel Feinberg:

Pornography does not cause normal, decent chaps, through a single exposure, to

metamorphose into rapists. Pornography-reading machos commit rape, but that

is because they already have macho values, not because they read the violent

pornography that panders to them17

Leaving aside the rather odd proviso: “through a single exposure” (how many people would argue

that a single exposure would have such an effect? And would someone who had been exposed

only once count as “pornography-reading”?), there’s something to be said for this. We don’t, for

example, blame the train-spotter’s penchant for hanging about on railway stations in an anorak

on the fact that he’s an avid reader of train-spotting magazines, nor the gardener’s passion for

half-hardy annuals on her possession and use of the R.H.S. Plant Encyclopaedia.

No Plaything É 13

To this it might be objected that the person’s original character traits, which led him to

use pornography in the first place, are likely to be modified – intensified, hardened, extended –

by that use, or that the material could lead to the development of attitudes or beliefs that make

it more likely that the consumer act on his desires. For example, one of Feinberg’s “pornography-

reading machos” might come to believe, through (repeated) exposure to pornography of a certain

kind, that women actually want to be raped, or that once raped they find that they enjoy it; this

might lead him to overcome whatever moral scruples had hitherto prevented him from acting out

his fantasies.

When we turn back to child-pornography, it seems very likely that the person who takes

pleasure in rape-type material falls into the kind of category to which Feinberg refers. We might

not understand such people, but we can be sure that they would only choose to view and read

such material – and could only enjoy it – if they were already morally corrupt, and beyond the

power of the material to affect further. Moreover, the material itself makes no pretence that the

actions it presents are anything but cruel and harm-causing, so there seems to be no room for the

consumers’ self-deception to be encouraged.

With regard to consensual-type and fake-type material, however, the case is very different.

Here it seems likely that someone who is sexually attracted to children, but who retains moral

scruples that hold him back from acting on his desires, might well view or read material that

presents children as being complicit in or even actively desirous of sexual activity with adults; he

might thus come to believe that his previous reluctance to act upon his desires was misplaced —

that his moral scruples rested upon a mistake. That is, although he starts looking at child-

pornography as a substitute for actual sexual abuse of children, the material actually makes it

more likely that he will turn to such abuse. The inference drawn by the rest of us – that, although

there’s no (or minimal) immediate harm, there’s consequent, future, or non-apparent harm –

simply won’t be drawn by the paedophile (or it might be drawn, but then rationalised away).

The consumption of consensual-type and fake-type material is thus actually more likely

to have harmful affects on its consumers and (more importantly) their potential victims than is the

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18There’s a parallel here with complaints about television programmes such as “The A-team”, in which

every week tremendous amounts of violence occur, but no-one is ever seriously hurt.

consumption of rape-type material.18 We see, then, that the situation is more complex than might

have been thought if only the effects on the subjects had been considered. While it’s clearly true

that rape-type child-pornography does greater (generally much greater) harm to its subjects than

do consensual-type and fake-type pornography, that moral ordering is reversed when it comes

harm caused to and through the consumers. And the number of potential victims at consequent

risk from the consumers of the latter two types is very large.

But matters are more complex still, and perhaps even more disturbing. When we turn to

nudity-type and pin-up-type material, we find that the same argument applies: when the children

involved are conscious of and posing for the camera, it will doubtless take little for the paedophile

to read into the images a seductiveness that’s not really there, and then to transfer that to

children in general. Michelle Elliott goes further (with, it seems to me, some justification), arguing

(in Elliott [1992]) that children’s images in the mainstream media have become more and more

sexualised, and that this serves to desensitise society in general to the effects on children of

further exploitation (and, of course, again to justify the views of paedophiles that children are in

fact seducers. See also section viii below).

It’s worth mentioning one further issue: pseudo-child-pornography, in the sense of

material in which adult subjects pretend to be underage. There is, of course, a limit to this —

there’s a limit to how young most adults can make themselves seem. Moreover, much if not most

of this sort of material is ludicrously unconvincing. Nevertheless, some adult women do (or can

be made to) look very young (especially, I think, in the Far East; Japanese nudity-type and pin-up-

type material is full of this sort of thing, the school uniform apparently having a stronger iconic

rôle there even than in the West), so that its effect on the paedophile consumer who is (willing

to be) fooled by it could well be as great or greater than that of the real thing.

It would be wrong to leave matters here without pointing out that paedophiles aren’t

helpless victims in all this. As rational beings they’re capable of reasoning past the supposed

No Plaything É 15

19See also below, p.22

evidence provided by child pornography, of constructing the same sort of argument that I’ve

offered above. And the same goes for their responses to the behaviour of real children. Children

learn how to behave, how to interact with people, largely by imitation (and, of course, the

younger the child, the more straightforwardly will this be true). They see adults’ interactions, and

they adopt the expressions, tones of voice, and body language that’s used. We’ve all surely

experienced with amusement small children speaking with weary and condescending patience,

pondering a difficult question, giggling flirtatiously. But the point is that the child doesn’t really

feel that weary patience, doesn’t really ponder the deep question, and isn’t really flirting or trying

to seduce. They often don’t know what such behaviour really signifies, nor – in the last case –

what might result from it. It’s play-acting, at the level of the little girl wearing her mother’s shoes.

I can see this; you can see this; if he wanted to, the paedophile could see this. If he

doesn’t, we don’t and shouldn’t blame the child; the paedophile has to shoulder the blame alone.

In the case of pornography, the same principle applies: the paedophile can’t blame the material

as if he lacked the human reason to see it for what it is.19

vi. Wider effects

It’s clear, then, that child-pornography not only harms its immediate victims, the children whose

abuse is at its centre, but also harms other children through the actions and attitudes of its

consumers. Different types of material involve more of one or the other sort of harm, but harm

to children is always made more likely at the very least. This, though, might make it seem as

though we’re dealing with a problem that’s essentially restricted to a sort of shadowy sub-world

of paedophiles and those who pander to them, together with those children who in one way or

another fall victim to that world. In fact matters aren’t that simple; the harm done by child-

pornography is both more pervasive and more insidious.

No Plaything É 16

20Longino [1995], p.39

There’s an argument found in many if not most of the books and articles written against

pornography in general (though, as we saw in section i, in fact dealing almost wholly with adult-

pornography involving women); it is that pornography has harmful effects on women in general,

not only on those who are its subjects or who suffer violence at the hands of its consumers. For

example, Longino points out:

since nothing is alleged to justify the treatment of the female characters of

pornography save their womanhood, pornography depicts all women as fit objects

of violence by virtue of their sex alone. Because it is simply being female that, in

the pornographic vision, justifies being violated, the lies of pornography are lies

about all women.20

She goes on to argue that this is multiply reinforced by the prevalence and the overwhelming

quantity of pornography, and that in particular its emergence from the seedy underworld of sex

shops and plain brown wrappers means that it has the potential to affect us all. Her conclusion

is that the harm done by pornography goes well beyond the direct harm done to those involved

in its production (in fact she doesn’t mention this sort of harm), or the indirect harm done to

those who are the victims of its consumers; it’s also harmful because, first, it constitutes and

serves to disseminate an untrue and damaging view of women, and secondly, in doing so it

supports sexist attitudes, reinforcing the oppression and exploitation of women.

Though there may be room for debate concerning the extent of the various harms, I don’t

think that there’s any room for disagreement concerning the fact of harm. Note, though, that (as

Longino herself points out), the last two forms of harm depend upon the open dissemination and

public toleration of pornography. When we turn back to the issue of child-pornography, however,

we surely have to accept that, as there’s no such dissemination or tolerance, we’re left with only

the direct kinds of harm — and I dealt with that in the previous two sections.

It’s certainly true that the harms done by adult-pornography to women in general are not

precisely mirrored by the harms done by child-pornography to children in general. The latter

material isn’t splashed over top-shelf magazine-covers in full view of those who would not

No Plaything É 17

21loc. cit.

22Elliott [1993], p.218

23loc. cit.

24Elliott [1993], p.220

frequent “pornographic shops and movie houses”.21 Or, rather, child-pornography of the first

three kinds isn’t thus openly, publicly displayed. Matters are very different with regard to nudity-

type and pin-up-type material, however. Michele Elliott, for example, offers a catalogue of

sexually-oriented images of children in the mainstream media — from record covers to the

Sunday Times magazine, from greetings cards to advertising posters:

Most people will never encounter hard-core child pornography. Without doubt

it would disgust and horrify them [...] Child pornography is easily condemned. yet

we are now seeing daily images of children being used as sexual objects to sell

products22.

In other words: “Without our knowing, soft-core child pornography has crept into our everyday

lives and most of us are unaware that this has happened”.23 In this way our emotional responses

are dulled; we’re desensitised, and our attitudes to children are poisoned.

Elliott gives an extensive list of what is involved in this phenomenon, and what its

consequences are. This sort of material, she says:

is contributing to the problem of child sexual abuse. It is condoning the use of

children in inappropriate sexual contexts. It is desensitising the public and setting

new standards for what is acceptable. It is strengthening the argument of paedo-

philes that children are asking for sex. It is exploiting and dehumanising children

without their informed consent. It is glamourising children as sexual objects. It

is saying to children that adults agree with the idea of them being sexualised. It

is suggesting to other children that this is a desirable way to be portrayed.24

Much of this might be dismissed as an overreaction, but I think that Elliott could respond with

considerable justice that such a dismissal serves to confirm her fears: we’ve begun to think of the

sexualisation of children as being normal, and of those who protest against it as being kooks. In

fact my only real quibble (and it’s no more) concerns the claim about the effect on paedophiles;

such mainstream images might bolster the paedophile’s beliefs, but they don’t strengthen his

No Plaything É 18

argument (nor, I’m glad to say, do I see any sign that such arguments receive a sympathetic

hearing either from the general public or from judges and politicians).

There’s further area in which such material might have bad effects, though one that’s a

little more peripheral to my main concerns in this paper. This sort of sexualising of children, it

might be argued, is partly responsible for the way that the fashion industry has moved to the use

of models whose bodies are thin, almost childlike, wearing clothes designed to be at their best

worn by such bodies. This leads to a view of what’s sexually desirable that not only risks adverse

effects on young girls through, for example, eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa, but serves

further to sexualise children by presenting their body shape as sexually desirable. In addition,

children’s fashion has become little more than adult fashion in smaller sizes; little girls no longer

dress like little girls, they dress like adults. Whatever the current erogenous zone is displayed in

adult fashion – midriffs, legs, backs – is faithfully reproduced in children’s clothes. Again, then,

young girls (and to a lesser extent, because of the differences in male and female fashion, young

boys) are sexualised.

This isn’t the end of it, though. The sort of material with which Elliott is concerned can

have another effect, as can the simple awareness of the existence of worse types of child-

pornography: it can begin to poison our natural, innocent relationships with children. That is,

when children are sexualised by everyday images in advertising, etc., or when we become aware

of the abuse of children in pornography (and, of course, outside it), then a constraint is likely to

creep into the normal relationships between fathers and daughters, uncles and nieces, etc.

Physical contact, horseplay, ordinary gestures of affection might be held up by hesitation or even

avoided altogether. Similarly, parents and teachers come to feel it necessary to make children

think of adults as dangerous and threatening, and can themselves begin to allow such fears to

affect their own behaviour. For example, I’ve seen a mother react with hostile protectiveness

when her daughter was smiled at by a woman on the tube in London. The little girl, of about four

or so, was pretty and lively, and a natural adult reaction would surely be a smile. How such

encounters affect the children and adults involved I don’t know, but they fill me with foreboding.

No Plaything É 19

25There’s a parallel here with issues such as racism. The non-racist can find that her response to members

of other races is affected by her awareness of the existence of racist attitudes — thus racism can infectsociety at large.

26Except in the case of pseudo-child-pornography; see above, section v.

27Mill [1861], chap. 2, ¶19

Those who argue, with Elliott, that one of the harmful effects of pornography is to attack the

essence of childhood, to undermine its fabric, are surely right — but it has that effect, not only

directly, but also through its strengthening of our natural protectiveness towards children to the

point where we risk the distortion or loss of what we’re trying to protect.25

vii. Culpability: producers

So far my discussion has largely been restricted to the question of consequences, bringing out

some of the ways in which different types of child-pornography cause harm, and showing that

such harm doesn’t stop at the effects on the children who appear in the material. (Aside from any

other implication, this points to the fact that child-pornography can be morally wrong even when,

as in written fiction, there’s no actual subject to be harmed.) This doesn’t exhaust the moral

question, though; as the end of section v indicated, we are entitled to ask, not merely ‘is this

activity morally wrong?’ but ‘is this person morally wrong?’ Whereas the former question is

almost wholly concerned with consequences, the latter question is considerably more complex.

In the case of child-pornography, I take it that the question of moral blame attaching to the

subjects doesn’t arise,26 so I shall look first at the producers of such material, then at its

consumers.

It might be thought that, given my utilitarian stance, my concern here will be wholly with

the intentions and motives of photographers, writers, publishers, etc. As Mill puts it:

utilitarian moralists have gone beyond almost all others in affirming that the

motive has nothing to do with the morality of the action, though much with the

worth of the agent27

No Plaything É 20

28King [unpublished]

29In fact there’s good reason to suppose that Mill’s notion of intention included the foresight of

consequences that are not directly willed (in Bentham’s terms, oblique intention). For a discussion of thissee Ridge [2002]; for a discussion of the relationship of the Utilitarian view to the Doctrine of Double Effect,see Oakley & Cocking [1994].

Indeed, this is a common approach in the literature on pornography: a photographer such as

David Hamilton, or Graham Ovenden is to be seen as an artist, while a photographer who takes

similar photographs in order to sell them to paedophile magazines or web sites is to be seen as

a pornographer. The point here isn’t the actual artistic value of the work; one might find David

Hamilton’s photographs and films to be insipid kitsch and the pornographer’s photographs to be

arresting both technically and artistically — still, the former’s motives are taken to protect him

from serious moral condemnation, while the latter’s motives elicit it.

I don’t reject the central rôle allotted to intentions and motives, but I certainly do hold

that we need to take more into consideration. Of course one’s assessment of the moral status

of the people who produce child-pornography will take into account why they produced it, and

what they meant to achieve by it, but as I’ve argued at length elsewhere,28 we also have to take

into account matters such as the agent’s state of knowledge, the (context-dependent) degree of

responsibility for correcting any relevant ignorance, and so on.

It may be, for example, that a photographer intended no harm to his models, to those who

would look at his photographs, or indeed to anyone. His only intention was to make a living. It’s

clear that the moral question can’t stop there. We have to ask whether or not he knew that harm

would, or would be likely to, result from his actions. The doctrine of double effect, met especially

in discussion of euthanasia, simply doesn’t apply here (if it applies anywhere): if the photographer

knows that his actions will have a certain effect, then that knowledge must become part of his

moral reasoning, and thus of his decision to act. The causing of harm isn’t part of his motive,

which is to make a living, but it has to be treated either as part of his intention, or at least as part

of his decision-making process with the same moral status as his intentions. Either way, it plays

the same rôle in our judgement of him as a moral agent.29

No Plaything É 21

30Mill [1861]98], chap. 2, ¶19

Moreover, even if the photographer didn’t foresee that his actions would have harmful

effects, we must still ask whether he should have foreseen it. As moral agents who are ordinary,

limited human beings, we can’t, of course, be expected to reason out all the possible conse-

quences of our actions; if we tried to do so, we’d never act at all. So what responsibility do we

have? This will clearly depend upon the context. If I’m a private individual, whose actions affect

only my immediate friends, neighbours, and colleagues, then I need to weigh my words and

actions less carefully than if I’m a public figure with responsibility for others, and whose actions

affect people whom I’ve never met:

The multiplication of happiness is, according to the utilitarian ethics, the object

of virtue: the occasions on which any person (except one in a thousand) has it in

his power to do this on an extended scale […] are but exceptional; and on these

occasions alone is he called on to consider public utility; in every other case,

private utility, the interest or happiness of some few persons, is all he has to

attend to. Those alone the influence of whose actions extends to society in

general, need concern themselves habitually about so large an object30

Of course, with the shrinking of the world as a result of increased travel and communications,

more of us need to take more care than in Mill’s day.

Thus, a hobby-photographer who takes some photographs of children on the beach (or

a naturist parent who takes snaps of her children at the pool) is not required to take into account

far-fetched possibilities in which his actions have consequences which in turn have consequences

which eventually harm others. Why should he give much thought to such possibilities (and if he

did, how could he ever bring himself to do anything)? On the other hand, a professional

photographer whose work will be published or otherwise distributed must be aware that his

photographs will, in the normal course of events, be seen by a large number of people, and

harmful consequences are correspondingly more likely — as is his responsibility to take them into

account when deciding how to act. Of course, in neither case can we insist that the photogra-

phers get it right — only that they do their best according to the circumstances.

No Plaything É 22

31Scanlon [1972], p.213

32loc. cit.

33Scanlon [1972], p.215

It’s worth making clear that this all concerns the strictly moral issue of blame, not the very

different question of the rôle of the state in terms of law, censorship, and sanctions (though the

two aren’t, of course, completely unrelated). Thomas Scanlon, for example, defends the following

“principle of freedom of expression” from a Millian utilitarian position:

There are certain harms which, although they would not occur but for certain acts

of expression, nonetheless cannot be taken as part of a justification for legal

restrictions on these acts.31

Of the two sorts of harm covered by the principle, the second consists of:

harmful consequences of acts performed as a result of [...] acts of expression,

where the connection between the acts of expression and the subsequent harmful

acts consists merely in the fact that the act of expression led the agents to believe

(or increased their tendency to believe) these acts to be worth performing.32

His main defence of this principle rests on the claim that it follows from “the view that the powers

of a state are limited to those that citizens could recognise while still regarding themselves as

equal, autonomous, rational agents.”33 Harms done by an agent are the responsibility of that

agent, who has to be treated as both autonomous and rational, and who therefore can’t evade

responsibility for her actions on the basis that someone convinced her that they were a good idea.

Whatever the acceptability of Scanlon’s principle in general, can it be applied to the issue

of child-pornography from the moral point of view? Well, yes and no. Yes, for as I pointed out

above (p.15) the child-abuser can’t claim to be the victim of pornographic material that made him

think that his actions were acceptable. No, for the producer of pornography can be held morally

responsible for his part in helping the paedophile to justify to himself his abusive actions. And,

of course, in the case of much child-pornography, production of the material is a moral wrong in

itself, involving as it does the actual and direct abuse of children (and thus justifies legal restric-

tions even if Scanlon’s principle be accepted).

No Plaything É 23

This might all seem very complicated, but in practice I think that the moral culpability of

the producer of child pornography will usually be pretty straightforward. Moreover, it will turn

out to map fairly simply onto the hierarchy of pornography types with which I’ve been working.

The producer of rape-type material will always be deeply morally wrong, while for each

succeeding type there’s a little more (a very little more for the second and third types) room for

the possibility of innocence — if only the innocence of stupidity. Matters again become more

complex, though, when we turn to the consumers of child-pornography.

viii. Culpability: consumers

I have, of course, already discussed one aspect of this issue (above, pp 15f.). In what remains,

questions of intention and motive will again be relevant, as will the type of material involved, but

exactly how we arrive at and justify our moral judgements is what provides the problem. In fact,

what I face here might be seen as a challenge to the utilitarian moral position which I’ve been

assuming throughout the paper so far.

To begin with, I take it that the person who chooses to view – and who takes pleasure

from – rape-type child-pornography is morally corrupt (or, at least, morally crippled in a way that

makes him literally amoral, as in psychopathy; in what follows I shall ignore such cases). There’s

surely no room for disagreement here. By definition, deep harm is an essential part of the

production of such material, and indeed is what is being openly presented; how could we do

other than condemn the person who enjoys the sight (or the written account) of children’s pain

and fear?

‘Well’, the cold-blooded utilitarian might be presented as asking, ‘what’s the relevant

intention or motive?’ It isn’t to harm the children, for that has already been done, and by

someone else. It might even be the case (though this is admittedly rather fanciful) that he has no

desire for more material to be produced, that more children be harmed; he might be perfectly

No Plaything É 24

34I exclude from all this those special cases in which the consumption of the pornographypromotes it or is complicit in its production, as in the case of live performances. The utilitarianposition is perfectly clear there.35

Mill [1861], chap. 2, ¶20

36Similarly, there’s a difference between the emotional response to what we immediately experience

(seeing someone being attacked, or seeing an example of rape-type child pornography) and the emotionalresponse to a concept or idea (the idea of passive euthanasia, the concept of child pornography). There’smore reason to be on our guard in the latter sort of case, because the processes of abstraction andcategorisation are themselves open to question. We’re more likely to find that our reason corrects ouremotional response to an abstract or general idea than to a specific event.

content with what’s already available to him. Must the utilitarian, if she wants to stick to her

principles, account such a consumer morally innocent?34

My emotional reaction to such a suggestion is appalled rejection, similar to my reaction

to the consumer of rape-type child-pornography. As I explained in section ii, as an objectivist I

take our emotions to be at the heart of morality; if the utilitarian really were to suppress her

revulsion and apply a bloodless principle, then something would have gone badly wrong with her

utilitarianism as a moral theory. Mill addresses a similar criticism in Utilitarianism:

It is often affirmed that utilitarianism renders men cold and unsympathising; that

it chills their moral feelings towards individuals; that it makes them regard only

the dry and hard consideration of the consequences of actions, not taking into

their moral estimate the qualities from which those actions emanate35

Also at the heart of morality, though, is reason, and it’s therefore essential to establish grounds

for our condemnation of the consumer of the material in question —that is, to show that our

emotional response has the right origin and the right relationship with our rational nature.36

What are the available approaches here?

First, we might say that the viewing of and taking pleasure from such material is a sign or

symptom of a morally corrupt person. That is, the actions are not in themselves immoral (no

harmful consequences follow from them), but only an immoral person would (would be able to)

perform them.

Secondly, we might say that the relevant harm that’s intended – or, at least, accepted –

is not to the subjects, who are admittedly already harmed, but to the consumer himself and,

through him, to those whom his consequent actions will affect.

No Plaything É 25

37Note that much child-pornography on the Internet is available from sources such as Usenetnewsgroups. The people who place the material there have no idea how many people look at ordownload a particular posting, and make no money from any such downloads. Consumption ofthis material, therefore, can’t be said to encourage the production of more. Moreover, Internetsites that do charge their customers to view and download pornography, including child-pornography, provide only material that is in fact culled from free-access sources such as Usenetgroups, so that purchase of the material again has no obvious connection with its production.I mention this only to dismiss it as largely irrelevant to my present concerns; it might have aneffect on what we say about the action of buying pornography, but it has little effect on ourjudgements of the buyers’ moral characters.

Thirdly, we might argue that the consumer does indeed intend harm to the subjects, the

children being abused, but that this is vicarious. That is, in viewing the material, the consumer

puts himself in the position of the abuser (or of a complicit observer at the scene).

Fourthly, we might argue that consumption of child-pornography does, in fact, promote

its further production, and that the consumer does or should know that.

I shall work backwards through these suggestions, not with the intention of choosing one

from the list, but in order to discover the scope, strength, and usefulness of each. Beginning,

then, with the fourth possible approach, we find an attempt to account for our moral

condemnation of the child-pornography consumer in straightforward utilitarian terms. That is,

we’re asked simply to deny that my problem case could in fact arise; any consumer of such

material would either want more of it to be created or be indifferent to its creation. In fact I think

that this is perfectly true, and that in practice the utilitarian has no problem finding some grounds

for her moral condemnation. However, I feel that the grounds are too thin and marginal; my

emotional response to the consumer of rape-type material is too deep to be accounted for by his

desire for something that is, however wrong, out of his direct control. So approach four goes

through, but needs to be bolstered by some other approach.37

The third approach is, I think, the most dubious of the four. That’s in small part because

it’s again a claim about what the consumer actually does, which might simply be untrue in some

cases. More of a problem though, is that we seem to be appealing to the consumer’s fictional

actions in a fictional world of his imagination. We don’t, after all, condemn the fan of Clint

Eastwood films because she engages in vicarious gunplay and killing, nor the avid reader of

No Plaything É 26

38Kelly [1993], p.120; see also above, section v

political biographies because he vicariously lies and cheats. I suspect that whatever attraction this

approach has is the result of its relationship with the first approach (of which it can be seen in part

as an elaboration). Before I go on to that approach, however, I need to examine the second.

This is more promising, in fact, with regard to consensual-type and fake-type material (and,

indeed, to nudity-type and pin-up-type material). Liz Kelly discusses the use made by child-

abusers of child-pornography as part of the attempt to:

legitimise their behaviour to themselves […] to override their own knowledge that

what they are doing is abusive. Child pornography ‘normalises’ abuse by

suggesting that it is the children who want it, and that they get pleasure from it.38

Such deliberate self-deception raises philosophical problems in itself, but this isn’t the place to

discuss it. If we accept such accounts, then there is clearly reason to morally condemn such

consumers, and on straightforward utilitarian grounds. However, not only am I uncertain that the

majority of consumers do fit into this category, but what I said in section v about the effects of

rape-type material on its consumers suggests that the second approach is unlikely to ground our

moral response to such people.

So we come to the first approach. It might be argued that, if we take this approach, we’re

effectively accepting the failure of a utilitarian approach to morality; we’re making a moral

judgement independently of either relevant consequences or motives. One could try to sidestep

this by arguing in counterfactual or dispositional terms: a person who enjoys rape-type child-

pornography would, in the appropriate circumstances, be likely to behave so as to cause harm to

children — that is, he is disposed to cause such harm. I’ve no doubt that that’s true in at least

most cases, but it’s an empirical claim and difficult to establish. We’re in danger of accepting such

a claim simply because it follows from just the emotional response whose moral relevance we’re

trying to demonstrate.

In fact my preference is simply to reject the claim that the first approach goes against

utilitarianism. The utilitarian is certainly committed to judging actions in terms of their

No Plaything É 27

39Mill [1861], chap 2, ¶20

40loc. cit.

consequences, but the commitments with regard to judging agents are looser. For the utilitarian,

the intentions of the agent constitute evidence for moral character; they’re not identical with or

exhaustive of that character, nor is their existence a criterion that must be met in order for us to

make appropriate moral judgements. As Mill says:

there is nothing in the utilitarian theory inconsistent with the fact that there are

other things which interest us in persons besides the rightness and wrongness of

their actions39

though he goes on to admit: “in the long run the best proof of a good character is good actions”,40

and so, mutatis mutandis, for a bad character. The first approach, then, is supported or

supplemented by the other three.

The urge to establish a more obviously utilitarian basis for the moral condemnation of the

purely passive consumer of rape-type child-pornography might be, at least in part, the result of

a confusion between morality and the law. In order to justify punitive action against criminals we

generally need as a minimum either clear intent or some sort of culpable negligence; in order to

justify moral condemnation, however, we only need to identify a certain sort of person.

Most of the above concerns the pornography in question being of one of the first three

types in the hierarchy, if not of the first type. What can be said if we turn to the last two types

— nudity-type and pin-up-type material? Matters are complicated by the great variety of material

found in these categories, but essentially we simply apply the same criteria, taking into account

the degree of harm and its apparentness in each case. Consider two rather different sorts of case:

the flood of material from post-communist Eastern Europe and from Japan. The collapse of

communism in the Soviet Union and its European satellites created a great deal of poverty

together with a breakdown of social control; this led to a large-scale industry producing especially

nudity-type material involving children. In Japan, on the other hand, the photographing of young

children – especially girls – has been, at least until very recently, much more socially acceptable

No Plaything É 28

than in most Western countries, with parents sometimes even importuning the better-known

photographers to photograph their children, and paying considerable sums for the privilege. It

seems possible, at least, that the harm done directly to the children in these two kinds of case (as

well, of course, as in specific cases) will be different. In order to assess the moral culpability of

the consumer, I think, we need to assess the harm to the subjects, the degree to which that harm

is apparent to the consumer, and the consumer’s ability to reason to the fact of non-apparent

harm.

In such cases there’s less room for the encouragement of false beliefs concerning the

attitudes and propensities of the models, though this is still a factor, and the vicariousness

approach is less convincing here than in the case of the first three types (though not to be

completely left out of account, I think). I’m also dubious about the claim that the mere fact of

taking pleasure from the sight of children – whether clothed, naked, or in-between – is a clear

indication of moral corruption. Unlike the case of taking pleasure in another’s pain, I can see no

way of moving from the mere fact of taking pleasure in looking at children to the evaluation that

such pleasure – such a person – is immoral. In order for that move to be justified, we’d need

something more: a tendency to act, for example. Morality demands the relevant presence of will,

of intentionality, and of choice; in a slogan: ‘ought’ implies ‘can’. Unless it’s argued that one can

choose what one finds attractive, or even what one is sexually aroused by, then the mere fact of

such a reaction is morally neutral.

To a certain extent we might argue that, while the fact that a person is such as to take

pleasure in the fact of harm to others counts against them, this could be balanced by a determi-

nation not to indulge his tastes. That is, the agent recognises his character flaw and makes a

determined (perhaps successful) attempt to overcome it, at least by not pandering to it. First,

however, I’m not sure that that is morally possible — that a person who enjoys others’ pain could

in fact recognise that such enjoyment is wrong; such a character trait seems to me to be too

strongly corrupting to allow for resistance to it. This, though, is an empirical matter beyond my

current concern (or my competence to establish). More importantly, my concern here is with the

No Plaything É 29

consumer of child-pornography, not with the would-be consumer who manages to defeat his

desires.

ix. Could child-pornography ever be morally acceptable?

This might seem a peculiar – even an objectionable – question, especially given what I’ve said so

far; I’ve left little room for any answer but ‘no’. It is, however, worth examining the question, if

only because that will involve careful consideration of the conditions that would have to be met

in order for a positive answer to be given, and in doing this we should gain a clearer understand-

ing of the reasons that child-pornography actually never is morally acceptable.

It would at first seem that pin-up-type material would offer me the best chance of finding

an example that would both be accepted as pornographic and be accounted morally neutral. The

claim might be that one person’s child-pornography can be another person’s innocent fun. Take,

for example, a television programme showing a children’s beauty pageant such as is, I believe,

fairly common in the U.S. Such events are not only legal, they’re accepted as innocent by many

people (including the parents of the children involved), but accounted sexual exploitation by

others. This won’t do, though, precisely because such examples offer so much scope for

disagreement. It’s not simply that I reject the moral relativism upon which such an example

would depend (though of course I do), but that the two elements needed – that something count

both as child-pornography and as morally acceptable – are separate. That is, those who would

label the film of such an event ‘pornographic’ wouldn’t find it morally acceptable, while those who

found it morally acceptable wouldn’t label it ‘pornographic’. A large part of the problem here is

that the sexual element is, if present at all (and I’d agree with those who say that it is), mainly

covert; it has to be inferred. The example for which I’m looking must involve an overt sexual

element of the right sort, yet still be morally acceptable.

Although it should be clear that graphical examples of the first three categories in the

hierarchy could never provide an example of material that’s morally acceptable, there are media

No Plaything É 30

types that might fit the bill: various kinds of fiction. Here I include both written material and

computer-generated images (those in which there’s no real child involved at all). It might be

argued that no victim is harmed, and that it’s possible for such material to be designed so as to

rule out any self-justificatory use (as discussed in section viii). For example, fiction might give an

account of children’s sexual experimentation in a way that offered no support for the belief that

children would welcome sexual advances from adults. The trouble here is that I’m not sure

whether this could in fact be done with any confidence of success, and I’m reluctant to base my

example on such uncertain foundations.

The search for an example is best focussed on nudity-type material, then, and the most

promising candidates would seem to be the materials (snapshots, etc.) produced by naturist

families in the normal course of their lives: holiday snaps, videos of birthday parties, and so on.

Here we have images of naked children which are surely morally acceptable, but usable (and used)

by paedophiles for sexual purposes.

This won’t do, though. I think that most people would agree that such material is not in

itself pornographic; it becomes so when it’s misappropriated and redistributed to paedophiles (in

the same way, medical photographs would change their status if they were so treated). But such

misappropriation and distribution not only change the category into which we place the material

— they change its moral status. Perhaps we can rule out much likelihood of bad effects on the

consumer, for he views the material because he already enjoys that sort of thing, and he can find

in it no support for the view that children would welcome his sexual advances. There is, though,

almost certainly harm to the subjects and producers — the children and their parents; this may

amount simply to acute embarrassment, but that’s enough to justify (or to give rise to) our moral

condemnation. Of course, this depends upon the children or their parents learning of the misuse

of the material, but not only can this not be ruled out, the widespread availability of images of this

kind on the Internet and on Usenet makes such discovery likely.

So, in so far as naturist images are morally acceptable they don’t count as child

pornography, and in so far as they count as child-pornography they’re morally unacceptable. Can

No Plaything É 31

41I don’t know what the legal position would be; if one owns photographs of oneself as a child, I assume

that one is guilty of no crime, but perhaps that innocence wouldn’t extend to the distribution of thephotographs to others. However, I’m concerned here solely with the moral question.

we find any middle ground? Well, imagine a group of adults who were brought up in naturist

families, and who own quantities of snapshots and other material in which they appear, naked,

as children. Let us suppose that as adults they have no problem about other people viewing this

material, even in a sexual context. Because they’re concerned about the issue of child-

pornography, they form an association with a group of paedophiles. The rules of the association

include the demand that members must eschew all child-pornography except the material that

is provided by the naturist members, which material must consist solely of images of that member

alone or in the company of other members. The parents of the naturists involved, we suppose,

have given their glad consent to this enterprise. In addition, the adult naturists make very clear

to the paedophiles that their acceptance and consent is given in their capacity as adults; as

children they would have been deeply upset if their images had been used in this way.

Now, unless I’ve missed something here, such a situation would involve the existence and

consumption of child-pornography – images of naked children used for sexual titillation – in a way

that’s at least morally neutral (if it reduces the market for abusive material, it might even be

morally good). No harm is done to the subjects or to the producers, and I can see no realistic way

in which harm is being done to the consumers.41

The main trouble, of course, is that the example is hugely hypothetical, depending on a

number of more or less unlikely factors. Nevertheless, it seems to me to be genuinely possible,

and I hope that it serves to bring out what’s morally wrong with actual child-pornography in the

real world (and in fact I’ve used it with students to do just that, with some success), largely by

indicating what exactly the thought experiment has to work so hard to exclude. Similarly it can

be used to expose meta-ethical disagreements. There will be many readers of this paper whose

judgement of the example differs fundamentally from mine —who hold that such use of images

of children is morally wrong, regardless of the question of harm. My disagreement with them lies

No Plaything É 32

42It might be that, without the application of reason to this, such a response could in itself lead to

addiction to child-pornography. While I doubt that this often (or ever) actually happens, the possibilityserves to emphasise the essential rôle of reason in the moral process; without it, a morally good emotioncan easily lead to morally bad actions.

outside the scope of this paper, but I shall finish by discussing some relevant meta-ethical

considerations.

x. Meta-ethics again

I’ve made considerable play of the rôle of utilitarian considerations of harm, and said something

of the ways in which that rôle has to be supplemented by considerations of the agent’s intentions,

motives, and knowledge. I now want to discuss the rôle of an objectivist account of the nature

of the moral sense itself. What is it, after all, that makes me say that child-pornography is morally

wrong rather than, say, socially undesirable? In what is our moral response grounded, and how

does it relate to the utilitarianism with which I have been working? The answer, as indicated in

section ii and in a number of places throughout this paper, lies in a certain combination of our

emotional responses and our reason.

The first point to note is that, although our emotional responses are at the heart of

morality, that isn’t a simple matter of positive or negative reactions. When, for example, in my

research for this paper, I encountered rape-type material, I didn’t simply feel a general, amorphous

revulsion — a sort of psychic backing away from or warding off of what I saw; rather, my revulsion

was accompanied by – or better, informed by – a directedness to action: to intervene. That is,

while in the case of the paedophile the material may arouse emotions that involve fantasising that

he’s involved in the abuse of the children, in the non-paedophile it elicits emotions that involve

fantasising that one is intervening in the abuse, rescuing or protecting the children.42

I take it that that emotional urge to act – to rescue or protect – is what’s essential to the

moral response, not merely the passive ‘boo’ of the crude emotivist. Mere revulsion might

indicate no more than a kind of squeamishness (as in those who are happy to eat meat, but who

No Plaything É 33

43Nagel [1978], p.29

recoil from the sight of animals being slaughtered or butchered). The rôle of reason in all this is

in part to develop our moral sensitivity. I don’t mean to go down the Nagelian road here:

considerations […] about the interests of others cannot motivate me to act

without a desire being present at the time of action. That I have the appropriate

desire simply follows from the fact that these considerations motivate me43

I have no problem with the first part of this, but the second part intrudes reason too early in the

process. My emotional response, including the urge to act, flows directly from my empathy —

my recognition that another sentient being is in pain, and the same sort of urge to stop that pain

as I feel in my own case.

Reason has a number of rôles to play. It allows us to extend our moral responses (for

example by inference) beyond the immediate appearance of harm, or where we have become

desensitised to harm by social custom or education. For example, one might reason to a

vegetarian position despite the fact that one has been brought up to eat meat, and thus has no

emotional response to it. This is the rôle with which I’ve been primarily concerned in this paper,

but reason can also help us to see past immediate harm, as when we see someone in a dentist’s

chair, or a small child being given an injection. And, of course, reason has a major rôle in

directing our empathic responses into appropriate action. The relationship between reason and

emotion is complex (in fact, I prefer to think of emotion as being a key part of reason rather than

a separate faculty), but this is not the place to discuss the matter at length.

Thus, for child-pornography of the types lower down the hierarchy, reason allows us to

recognise harm that isn’t obvious or immediate; we infer the presence of the harm that lies in the

child’s future or behind her eyes. When this happens, one of two things might follow: either the

appropriate emotional response is evoked by our reasoning, or we stay at the level of the rational

recognition of the fact of harm. In either case, we are now in a position to act morally (for

example, as a vegetarian of some thirty years, I still have no emotional response to the sight of

people eating meat, though I do to the sight of fur. My moral response, however, is the same in

No Plaything É 34

both cases, because my reason has led me to the same position with regard to meat-eating as my

emotions have with regard to fur-wearing).

xi. Conclusions

The conclusion of this paper is that child-pornography is morally wrong. Well, did it need so

much effort to tell us that? No, but I hope that I’ve done more. The consensus invoked by Susan

Cole (in section i) was that harm was involved. Now that is vague enough to allow for many very

different moral judgements. One that I hope to have ruled out is that child-pornography can be

analysed simply in the way one analyses normal pornography involving adult subjects. That is,

that there’s a fairly straightforward sliding scale of wrongness (from ‘hard’ to ‘soft’, from ‘strong’

to ‘mild’), and that this scale roughly matches the hierarchy of types with which I’ve been working.

Whatever the truth and appropriateness of that analysis as applied to normal pornography, it

clearly doesn’t apply to child-pornography.

The hierarchy is roughly right with regard to the degree of harm done to the children who

are its subjects (its primary victims), and perhaps also with regard to the moral culpability of its

producers. When we examine its effects on and the moral culpability of its consumers, however,

we find a different story: the hierarchy is virtually inverted, with the material that does least harm

to its primary victims being capable of having the greatest effects on its consumers, and through

them doing great harm to its secondary victims (the children who are abused in consequence).

In the case of much pin-up-style material, its consumers include anyone who has a television set.

Our moral emotions are most (and most directly) aroused by the first three types of child-

pornography – rape-type, consensual-type, and fake-type material – but I hope that I’ve shown

that our reason must serve to educate our emotions, to show us that what might seem a less

appropriate object for them can in fact be even more appropriate. In doing all this, I hope also

to have demonstrated the benefits of an objectivist meta-ethics in combination with a utilitarian

approach to moral judgements.

No Plaything É 35

Acknowledgements

I should like to thank Andrea Christofidou for her comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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