Now there could be laws against co-habiting with more than one person, and there are laws prohibiting sex with minors. Liberals and libertarians most likely don’t object to the latter, but they surely object to the former.

What is the libertarian position on polygamy? Now that I think of it, it’s not clear if there’s a libertarian position on marriage of any kind. Why should states be giving people powers to make bonds of this kind?

CM

The correct answer: An elaborate form of rape.”

Is the basement door locked? Is there a reasonably implied threat of violence - by the father himself - if she chooses to leave the basement or doesn’t meet sexual requests. The answer to all of these questions is almost certainly ‘yes’, in any realistic scenario, which is why it is, of course, rape in my opinion.

Importantly, though, it is not rape for the reason you are apparently implying it is rape: information asymmetry impairing so-called “free will”. This is why, e.g. we distinguish sex obtained through implied threat of harm as rape from sex obtained through false pretenses (e.g. saying you’re a rock star), a common form of using information asymmetry to obtain sex.

Also contra Will’s implication, judges and juries aren’t generally sympathetic to claims of “brain-washing”, which isn’t really a scientific idea. E.g. Patti Hearst, Steve Fishman…

So to turn Will’s scenario on him, what if this same hypothetical man asked this basement daughter of his to fly to Indonesia with these tickets and this money and stab a drug-dealer to death for her Daddy God. Would this be a murder she is fully accountable for: yes.

And if this man instead asked her to meet him in Indonesia with these tickets and this money and have sex with her Daddy God there would it then be rape? No, for the same reasons.

The whole point of brainwashing is to make the brainwashed person feel as if they’re making a commitment out of their own “free will,”
There is no free-will. It’s an untenable idea.

and not because they’ve been brainwashed.
We are all the products of our circumstances and there is no essence-of-you that we can compare to the you shaped by your past. How will you avoid agency being denied to you as well as those in the FLDS?

So we can’t take lack of objection as evidence that they’re fine with their situation, and would stay if they had a legitimate option to leave.
What makes an option “legitimate”?

“Admittedly, this brightline seems impossible in practice- the potential for abuse by State bureaucracy is too high. It may be that a bit of child abuse now and then is the price of admission into a free society in the same way that the occasional KKK rally is the price of admission for Free Speech. This is sad, but considerably better than the alternatives.”

To prove the point, folks might check out this story from the Detroit Free Press. A guy mistakenly gave his 7 year old son Mike’s Hard Lemonade at a Tigers game (he doesn’t watch TV and assumed it was regular lemonade). A security guard sees the kid drinking it and next thing you know the kid is in foster care for a couple of days until dad, who is a prof at Michigan, got a law school colleague to help him cut the red tape and get his kid back.

Whatever might be the real problems at FLDS, giving the state the power to intervene in families is like giving matches to, uh, children. The odds of it being used only wisely are very small.

How about explicitly asking them whether they want to stay? If they say they want to, they want to. Informed consent doesn’t matter here either. Uninformed consent is a bit like brainwashing someone someone–most people would object to being inadequately informed if asked, but small children don’t. This is fine, as long as would not object to whatever happens to them later right before it happens. (”I was brainwashed and now I object to it” doesn’t count)

The whole point of brainwashing is to make the brainwashed person feel as if they’re making a commitment out of their own “free will,” and not because they’ve been brainwashed. So we can’t take lack of objection as evidence that they’re fine with their situation, and would stay if they had a legitimate option to leave.

Sorry, I meant Geriniol (or Gerin Oil) and Rohypnol. They’re both mind-altering drugs.

Rohypnol: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohypnol

Geriniol: http://www.anst.uu.se/dla05000/Gerin%20Oil.html

I don’t see the difference between these two.

So if a teen is, say, nutritionally stunted, illiterate, and incapable performing rudimentary tasks
I don’t know what would qualify as “rudimentary tasks”, but your description seems like it could fit most of humanity throughout most of history.

If any of those teen brides had lived with “not weird” folks for a year and then come back, that would be evidence of meaningful consent.
Do not-weird folks then need to spend a year with the weird?

Having had an education that created the possibility for contextualizing and evaluating the decision, that would be evidence consent was meaningful.
Most of humanity for most of history would have found our concept of “education” to be foreign. The dividing line between “education” and “brainwashing” if we are willing to accept the concept also seems vague.

Why are you interested in making the obvious intelligibility of the idea of meaningful or informed consent less than obvious?
I say it is not obvious. Here I stand, I can do no other I seek an objective standard that would not allow people in the FLDS or the like to deny my agency based on more than “I’m right and they’re wrong”, which is a basis that could of course be turned around on me.

It’s laughable to assert that one can’t make normative judgments about human conditions (rape/violence/deprivation=bad) and it should therefore be easy to develop SOME objective, working definition of moral capacity.
I deny just that. I am an emotivist or non-cognitivist, and Will in his diavlog suspects he may be as well. You cannot derive ought from is, nor can we observe moral facts, so I claim there are no normative truths, only subjective opinions. I do have a negative opinion of those things you listed, but I consider them to merely be opinions.

If human conditions (being raped or enslaved) can possess normative values, then clearly any prior condition that prevents one from making cost-benefit decisions about those states is one that we can label “impaired”.
This boils down to “I’m right, they’re wrong, if being raised that way leads them to believe it such an upbringing is wrong”. The problem of course is that you had an upbringing with your beliefs as a result which is just as vulnerable to that criticism from a contrary perspective.

Teaching my daughter that her ‘place is in the kitchen’ differs from locking her in the basement in that in the prior case my daughter is exposed to multiple sources of information (media etc) regarding her ‘place’
And if this is a backward country where the media perpetuates sexism and gender stereotypes?

If human conditions (being raped or enslaved) can possess normative values, then clearly any prior condition that prevents one from making cost-benefit decisions about those states is one that we can label “impaired”. The question seems to be “where does influence transition into abuse?” rather than “can we distinguish abuse and influence at all?”

Teaching my daughter that her ‘place is in the kitchen’ differs from locking her in the basement in that in the prior case my daughter is exposed to multiple sources of information (media etc) regarding her ‘place’. The clearest possible brightline (that I can think of) would be to insist that children not experience a monopolized flow of information.

Admittedly, this brightline seems impossible in practice- the potential for abuse by State bureaucracy is too high. It may be that a bit of child abuse now and then is the price of admission into a free society in the same way that the occasional KKK rally is the price of admission for Free Speech. This is sad, but considerably better than the alternatives.

Most people would object to being drugged if they were asked, so it would be ethically questionable to drug them. 1-year olds would not object to being brainwashed, and they never object to the brainwashing/”abuse” at any point.

Will:

Who decides whether the education is valid (”it’s all true” is fine, but not all education is factual)?

The correct answer: An elaborate form of rape.

So if a teen is, say, nutritionally stunted, illiterate, and incapable performing rudimentary tasks, is that just a different way of developing capacities, or a way of not developing capacities?

You cannot prevent someone from denying something. But you can show that they are wrong to deny it by saying something intelligible about the conditions for meaningful consent and showing that they are met. I don’t even think it takes that much. If any of those teen brides had lived with “not weird” folks for a year and then come back, that would be evidence of meaningful consent. Having had an education that created the possibility for contextualizing and evaluating the decision, that would be evidence consent was meaningful. Etc. Why are you interested in making the obvious intelligibility of the idea of meaningful or informed consent less than obvious?

What if you drugged her first? Would it still be consent? If not, what’s the distinction between one shot of Rohypnol and an extremely high, potent dose of Gerinol, distributed regularly for 18 years?