Comment by slg
3 hours ago
>It creates a moral asymmetry where one group is "defending children" and another group is "defending an abstract concept", but group A wins out primarily due to millions of years of human evolution. It has very little (IMO) to do with the actual underlying concepts being debated.
You aren't actually engaging with why group A wins. Those "millions of years of human evolution" actually instilled in people a desire to protect children.
I am engaging with why group A wins: they win because the emotional prior is doing most of the work, not because the underlying argument necessarily has merit.
Of course, just like it instilled a desire to consume a lot of calorie-dense food. "Desire to protect the children" in this case is a knee-jerk reaction, or a thought terminating cliche.
For example, how many children will this actually protect? How many children will this harm? How many adults will be harmed by inevitable side-effects that arise? Those questions are not discussed or even considered.
Because those questions are meaningless to many people if you aren't offering any solution of your own to address their concerns. For the people who genuinely care about this issue, an obvious response you will get is "how many children are you willing to allow to be sex trafficked to preserve your privacy?"
You can't win a debate by claiming your concerns invalidate their concerns. You need to actually engage with them on the issue they care about.