On Aristotelian virtue, human flourishing, human sexuality & animal instinct, innocence, erotic neutralization & the view that sex is an exceptional aspect of morality

Childhood ‘Innocence’ is Not Ideal: Virtue Ethics and Child–Adult Sex. Thomas O’Carroll. Sexuality & Culture volume 22, pages1230–1262(2018). Apr 2018. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12119-018-9519-1

Abstract: Malón (Arch Sexual Behav 44(4):1071–1083, 2015) concluded that the usual arguments against sexual relationships between adults and prepubertal children are inadequate to rule out the moral permissibility of such behaviour in all circumstances. Malón (Sex Cult 21(1):247–269, 2017) applied virtue ethics in an attempt to remedy the postulated deficiency. The present paper challenges the virtue ethics approach taken in the second of Malón’s articles by: (1) contesting the view that sex is an exceptional aspect of morality, to which a virtue approach needs to be applied; (2) contesting the view that virtue ethics succeed, where other arguments fail, against the moral admissibility of child–adult sexual relations; (3) proposing that such relations can be seen as virtuous in the context of an alternative view of what constitutes virtue.

Check also Malón, A. (2017). Adult–child sex and the demands of virtuous sexual morality. Sexuality and Culture, 21(1), 247–269. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs12119-016-9392-8

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Why should the sexual dimension, by contrast, remain a closed book in terms either of open-minded theoretical discussion or, even more vitally, at the level of fact-gathering, hypothesis-forming and testing? Unfortunately, these are happening very little, especially as regards the production of quantified scientific research; on a very small scale, though, there have been richly descriptive qualitative studies of an exploratory kind, plus exhortation to study what is normal beyond the usual WEIRD baseline (Blaise 2013; Leahy 1991, 1992; Narvaez 2016; Sandfort 1984, 1987).