Thought Probe: Is this Sex Ethical?
I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the ethics of certain
types of sex recently. In particular, I’ve been thinking lots about sex between
adults and children. Sex between adults and children is typically thought to be
unethical; most countries have some sort of ‘age of consent law’ prohibiting
sex between most children and adults (sex between parties of similar ages are usually exempt from such laws). I’m 99.9% on board with the thought that
sex between children is unethical in most every case. There is one case that I’ve
been thinking about a lot recently, however, where my intuitions are unclear.
Consider a white, cis, straight 16-year-old from a wealthy
background who’s just been given a car for his 16th birthday. With his
new car, he has more freedom than he previously did and he takes this car to a well-known part of town where he solicits sex with a sex worker—an adult in her
early thirties. She gets into his car and gives him a blowjob. Then they
have penetrative sex with a condom. She does not ask the boy his age nor he does not offer the information. He pays her and drives home.
Is the sex between the boy and the sex worker ethical,
in this case? Would our intuitions about the case change if certain features of the case
changed? For instance, if the sex worker were in her early twenties would this
change our intuitions about the case? What about if the sex worker were in her
late forties? Should the sex worker have asked this boy hold old he was? If she
had asked, and he’d been honest about his age, would that change how we see the
case? If the boy and the sex worker had engaged in different sex acts
would we feel differently? If the pair had had sex in a hotel room, rather than
a car, would we feel differently? What about if it had been in her apartment? Does the social and
financial background of the boy matter? Does the social and financial
background of the sex worker matter? Do the genders of the parties involved affect
our intuitions about this case?
Feel free to share thoughts about this case in the comments
below, I would love to hear what others think about this case!
Did you make him above the Canadian age of consent on purpose? I don't have a strong opinion on whether sixteen is old enough to consent to sex with much older adults, or whether the cut-off should be something higher like eighteen. (Not that I don't think it matters or that there's no good answer--I just think I'd need to know a great deal more about developmental psychology than I do.) But it seems like you're trying to involve some more substantive considerations than just that it's hard to decide when we should set the age of consent.
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