“Do we still keep citing the scholarship of serial harassers and sexists?” asks Nikki Usher in a much-discussed article in The Chronicle of Higher Education. While the answer is — obviously — yes, and Usher’s solution an interesting specimen of anti-intellectualism, her frustration is justified. As Plato understood, the pursuit of knowledge and the practice of virtue are intimately entwined — the true is convertible with the good (and the beautiful). We are right to decry any fracturing of this unity, which implies a fracturing of our nature as humans.

But fractured we are, and the pursuit of knowledge is only possible within a framework that acknowledges this. Just imagine what would happen to the humanities and social sciences if we memory-holed the immoral. Louis Althusser, for example, whose work has shaped much of late-Marxist thought, murdered his wife. Michel Foucault — cited over 900,000 times and without whom two whole generations of academic charlatans would have no one to imitate — murdered any number of young men by intentionally infecting them with HIV (a practice he theorized as the “limit-experience”). Academia, like government, is filled with reprehensible characters who sometimes prove themselves useful or interesting.

Which brings me to the subject of this column, a recent “scholarly” article by Thomas O’Carroll, a figure who has haunted the margins of UK academia and public life for decades. An unrepentant pedophile, O’Carroll has been incarcerated twice, once in 1981 for conspiring to corrupt public morals, and again in 2006 for making and distributing child pornography through his advocacy organization the International Paedophile Child Emancipation Group and its subsidiary, Gentlemen with an Interesting Name. “After a raid involving 100 officers,” the Irish Times reported, “a store of one of the largest child pornography collections of its kind was discovered. Children — predominantly boys and as young as six — had been filmed and photographed being raped and tortured.”

O’Carroll has authored two books, Paedophilia: The Radical Case (1980) and Michael Jackson’s Dangerous Liaisons (2010), the contents of which are easy enough to surmise.

His new article, “Childhood ‘Innocence’ is Not Ideal: Virtue Ethics and Child-Adult Sex,” will appear in the December 2018 issue of Sexuality & Culture, an interdisciplinary journal that “publishes peer-reviewed theoretical articles based on logical argumentation…and empirical articles describing the results of experiments and surveys on the ethical, cultural, psychological, social, or political implications of sexual behavior.” Ostensibly a serious academic journal, Sexuality & Culture does publish the occasional eye-gougingly bizarre piece of “scholarship,” like the recently retracted “Going in Through the Back Door: Challenging Straight Male Homohysteria, Transhysteria, and Transphobia Through Receptive Penetrative Sex Toy Use.” O’Carroll’s paean to the “virtues” of child-rape, however, is in a league of its own.

At 73 years old, O’Carroll has long been a bogeyman for both the left and the right — not to mention the children he has violated. To the right, he’s the perfect condensed symbol for the Sexual Revolution’s true telos — the nihilistic destructuring of human relations. To the left, he’s an albatross, a useful idiot for conservatives intent on establishing a link between homosexuality and pedophilia. He’s also a testament to the degraded standards of interdisciplinary scholarship.

His Sexuality & Culture article, which reads like the senior thesis of a bright-enough undergraduate edgelord majoring in philosophy, attempts to make the case that virtue ethics fails to provide a convincing justification for rejecting sex between adults and children. Moreover, he argues that in an ideal world, virtue would be understood in such a way as to include such practices and even celebrate them.

This is not the space in which to refute the article’s every claim, and such effort is unnecessary. It’s amateurish work that, one hopes, never would have passed the smell test at a serious philosophy journal. The article is interesting, however, as an exemplar of motivated reasoning.

O’Carroll is responding to Agustin Malón’s analyses of the ethics of adult-child sex, which demonstrate that where liberal approaches (i.e., Kantian, utilitarian) fail to condemn all adult-child sexual experiences, virtue ethics succeeds. This is because such condemnation requires a “complex and transcendent conception of human eroticism and sexual conduct.”

Malón relies heavily on Roger Scruton’s approach to virtue ethics, and O’Carroll, to his credit, attempts to grapple with Scruton directly. He fails miserably, of course — Scruton is Britain’s greatest living philosopher — and spends great effort attempting to disguise his hatred for Christianity as a mere distaste for the outmoded. His contempt for Scruton’s “elevation of erotic love to sacral status” blurs into hatred of the man himself, whom he dismisses as the latest of a “long line of largely theologically-oriented thinkers whose…ferocious rhetoric has terrified generations of youngsters.”

Early on O’Carroll dithers about the “cultural parochialism of virtue ethics,” thus telegraphing an almost sublime ignorance of the tradition. In O’Carroll’s rendering, virtue ethics’ vision of human flourishing is reducible to Aristotle’s privileging of endoxa — “those opinions accepted by everyone, or by the majority, or by the wise — and among the wise, by all or most of them, or by those who are the most notable and having the highest reputation.” This strawmanning of the tradition serves a purpose, however. “For Aristotle,” writes O’Carroll, “the endoxa of his day included…the generally accepted view that slavery was acceptable, to say nothing of the subjugation of women and much else that would be unacceptable in modern society.” Moreover, virtue ethics’ “ultimate grounding in traditional endoxa, including those derived from theological dogma and entrenched over centuries of clerical domination, blinkers it against rational, principled objection.” Had O’Carroll actually read Aristotle, and not merely pulled quotes from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, he’d know that virtue ethics is not “grounded” in endoxa, but in one’s participation in what is good in itself. And for Aristotle, who was more of a Platonist than we are wont to acknowledge, the “true and the good stem from one source, and converge in the Beautiful” (Joe Sachs, “Introduction” to Nicomachean Ethics). This rejection of a transcendent ground for ethics is presumed throughout O’Carroll’s argument.

He also bowdlerizes phenomenological discourse in order to reject Malón’s claim that “the interpersonal reciprocity of normal eroticism is impossible in the child, and paedophilic desires are intrinsically perverse.” Interpersonal reciprocity requires “intentionality” — the capacity of one’s subjective consciousness to be directed towards some object. Scruton argues that with regard to intentionality “the child is not yet a person but only its prelude.” Scruton’s use of the word “person” is obviously — and uncontroversially — narrow, yet O’Carroll intentionally misconstrues him to be dehumanizing the child in a way reminiscent of American chattel slavery. Writes the sophist:

The assertion that children are incapable of reciprocal sexual relations is empirically unfounded. Where is the evidence? A comparison with animals is again suggested. Dogs appear to be perfectly capable of reciprocity in loving relationships with human beings, often to the extent of being every bit as devoted and loyal in their affections towards their owners as their owners are towards them, and perhaps even more so. Again, even the personhood-restricting Scruton has acknowledged this (Scruton 2013, 2014). Dogs may lack a sophisticated appreciation of the other’s “intentionality”, on which Scruton sets so much store as a qualifying criterion of moral agency within sexual relations, but this appears to be no barrier to reciprocity in what many would consider to be its morally essential features. There should be mutual affection and attention to the other’s wishes. What else is needed, really? It may be thought this analogy is insufficiently close because dogs are not sexual partners of their human masters. But they can be. Dogs are not shy about expressing sexual interest in humans, and when their owner reciprocates that interest a sexual (and loving) relationship may develop, as has been attested in Dearest Pet, a book by Dutch controversialist (and children’s writer!) Midas Dekkers, and endorsed in a review by philosopher Peter Singer (Dekkers 2000; Singer 2001). (emphasis mine)

And:

If even a dog can experience the requisite feelings in a reciprocal relationship of interpersonal (in all but name) character, why would a child be incapable of doing so? (emphasis mine)

O’Carroll proceeds to argue that intentionality is not “ethically relevant.”

For Scruton, as Malón says, some essential traits of the person include “self-awareness, continuity or responsibility, as well as the authority and sincerity of the first person.” The moral output of these traits is what ought to concern us, not the psychological quality of “intentionality” that goes into them.

This question-begging dismissal of intentionality serves a dark purpose: the banishment of “consent” as a relevant category of concern. Consent, after all, is predicated upon intentionality. This is much too reminiscent of Peter Singer’s argument for bestiality, which can be summarized thusly: We eat animals without their consent, so why not screw them? Children, especially young children, consent to little of what we subject them to, so why shouldn’t we let O’Carroll bugger babies?

Having done away with consent (without daring to declare so openly), O’Carroll shifts his focus to the notion of “sexual innocence.” Sing, O’ Sophist!

Malón does not define “innocence”, nor does he defend the concept against the charge that it represents a state of ignorance in which children are deliberately kept by adults in order to control them. Drawing on Scruton again, he does more to admit the charge than reject it, saying “our image of sexual development is intimately related to the process of initiation into adulthood. The value of virginity and its loss, for example, is connected to the division separating the child from the adult” (Malón 2017, p. 251). What is left unstated in this valorisation of virginity is its role in the control by men of women’s sexuality in traditional patriarchal societies. (emphasis mine)

Now one understands O’Carroll’s hesitancy to draw an explicit connection between intentionality and consent. He hopes to enlist feminism to his cause (in spite of a fear that the #MeToo movement might impede pedophilic progress). The following pages fulminate over the sins of the “patriarchy” in an attempt to equate the suppression of women, not with the suppression of pedophilic desire, but with the suppression of child sexuality.

One suspects there are better ways for women to stick it to the patriarchy than to offer up their children to the ravages of male desire.

There’s plenty more to take issue with in this paper, not the least of which is O’Carroll’s insistence that pedophilia is “a sexual orientation like any other.” Is-ought fallacies are peppered generously throughout, as are baldly dishonest denials of the existence of research demonstrating the harms of adult-child sex — not to mention the insistence on reversing the word-order to “child-adult,” an obvious linguistic ploy to paint the child as initiator. Child-rape is continuously minimized as a form of “play” akin to affectionate rough-housing between parent and child. And in an obscenely racist juxtaposition, O’Carroll even situates a discussion of the pedophilic behavior of Bonobo chimpanzees (“our closest mammalian kin”) alongside a discussion of child marriage as practiced in “large swathes of central Africa,” intending, apparently, to demonstrate the “naturalness” of pedophilia.

Plenty more could be said — the paper is bloated as a river-sodden corpse — but I don’t have any steam left. Wading through this feculence has been morally exhausting. Stare too long into the abyss and you’ll need to take a shower.

But I have to give credit where it’s due: O’Carroll is right that, in order to be logically compelling, the case against pedophilia must be grounded in an anthropology that sees human sexuality as sacred. Any ethic premised in liberal individualism will inevitably leave room for the acceptance of adult-child sex. How could it be otherwise, when the arbitrary exuberance of the human will is held to be the highest good? We’re left with only the will-to-power of the individual or the intersubjective will-to-power of the collective. Either way, we’re left with nihilism.

“At the heart of liberty,” wrote Anthony Kennedy, that arch-sophist, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, “is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

For Thomas O’Carroll, for all of us, that “mystery” covers a multitude of sins.

Justin Lee is a columnist at Arc Digital. Read more of his work and follow him on Twitter.