The university professor in New York who sees nothing wrong with adults having sex with 12- and even one-year-olds has been removed from campus.
Stephen Kershnar, a philosophy professor at the State University of New York Fredonia, is also forbidden contact with students.
Kershnar’s bizarre view of adult-child sex went viral this week after the Libs of Tik Tok Twitter feed pulled back the sheets on recorded interviews about the subject. He has published at least one book about it, and also has written that human beings are not morally responsible for what they do.
What He Said
Kershnar’s academic career crashed when he showed up on Twitter to discuss adult-child sex.
“Imagine that an adult male wants to have sex with a 12-year-old girl,” he said in one video interview:
Imagine that she’s a willing participant. A very standard, very widely held view is there’s something deeply wrong about this. And it’s wrong independent of it being criminalized. It’s not obvious to me that it is in fact wrong. I think this is a mistake. And I think that exploring why it’s a mistake will tell us not only things about adult-child sex and statutory rape, but also about fundamental principles of morality.
Nor can Kershnar figure out what’s wrong with molesting a one-year-old.
“The notion that it’s wrong [to have sexual relations] even with a one-year-old, is not quite obvious to me,” he said:
There are reports in some cultures of grandmothers fellating their baby boys to calm them down when they’re colicky.… The grandmothers believe this actually works. If this were to be true, it’s hard to see what would be wrong with it.
Kershnar see nothing wrong with adult-child sex even if the child does not consent. Legally, a child cannot consent to sex, but in any event, forcing a child to have sex is no different than forcing him or her to do homework or attend a family function.
“And we don’t care what they say,” Kershnar said.
No Morality
Understandably, school officials are aghast. Late yesterday, SUNY Fredonia President Stephen Kolison said Kershnar had been exiled.
“Effective immediately and until further notice, the professor is being assigned to duties that do not include his physical presence on campus and will not have contact with students while the investigation is ongoing,” Kolison said. “I cannot stress strongly enough that the independent viewpoints of this individual professor are in no way representative of the values of the SUNY Fredonia campus,” he said.
Maybe, but Kershnar’s views aren’t a surprise, at least for those who have followed his bizarre publications.
“Nonforcible adult-child sex is thought to be morally wrong in part because it is nonconsensual,” he has written. “I argue against this notion. In particular, I reject the accounts of the moral wrongfulness of adult-child sex that rest on the absence of consent, concerns about adult exploitation of children, and the existence of a morally primitive duty against such sex.”
In his book on the subject, Pedophilia and Adult–Child Sex: A Philosophical Analysis, he argues likewise. “This sex intuitively strikes many people as sick, disgusting, and wrong,” the publicity blurb for his book says. “The problem is that it is not clear whether these judgments are justified and whether they are aesthetic or moral.”
Kershnar’s view of adult-child sex, however, is unsurprising. He does not believe in right and wrong, as he explained in Total Collapse: The Case Against Responsibility and Morality.
That book “argues that there is no morality and that people are not morally responsible for what they do,” the Amazon promotional material says:
In particular, it argues that what people do is neither right nor wrong and that they are neither praiseworthy nor blameworthy for doing it. Morality and moral responsibility lie at the heart of how we view the world.… In this book, the author argues that our views on these matters are false. He presents a series of arguments that threaten to undermine our theoretical and practical worldviews. The philosophical costs of denying moral responsibility and morality are enormous. It does violence to philosophical positions that many people took a lifetime to develop. Worse, it does violence to our everyday view of people. A host of concepts that we rely on daily (praiseworthy, blameworthy, desert, virtue, right, wrong, good, bad, etc.) fail to refer to any property in the world and are thus deeply mistaken. This book is of interest to philosophers, lawyers, and humanities professors as well as people interested in morality, law, religion, and public policy.
Kershnar also sees nothing wrong with torturing human beings, particularly if they “consent.”
FIRE Defense
The Foundation for Individuals Rights in Education (FIRE) says the First Amendment to the federal Constitution protects Kershnar’s views.
“Some might charge that Kershnar’s views, if adopted, would be dangerous or lead to the erosion of laws criminalizing sexual abuse of minors,” the group wrote to Kolison:
Kershnar’s writing on the subject has argued that sexual conduct with minors should be criminalized. His arguments generally concern why such conduct should be criminalized, with a critical evaluation of whether morality — as distinct from other reasons to prohibit it — is alone sufficient to impose criminal sanctions. Yet even if Kershnar’s critics are correct in their estimation of his argument, Kershnar’s speech would still be protected by the First Amendment.
