I’m not going to run through the arguments again that make this a ridiculous over-reaction.

But consider the following:

Grim made a full confession to the affair, which involved sexual contact but not full intercourse.

Sentencing, Judge Paul Darlow told him… ‘In your favour I accept that you pleaded guilty at the first opportunity and you are not only of good character but people have told of your abilities as a teacher to bring on gifted children.

‘There was no intimidation and the relationship was consensual on both sides and with genuine affection.’

The guy is now in prison for ten month.

Somebody should start a campaign to end this ridiculous, infantile, illiberal, treatment of people choosing to have sex.

The relationship was entirely consensual – indeed, it seems that there is the intention that it will continue once the teacher is freed from prison. The evidence in court was that the 15 year old girl was the one who pushed for the relationship to become sexual.

Regina Naughton, for the prosecution, said: “They began to have feelings which were not expected. Miss Goddard said she didn’t see her as a 15-year-old and they would have to wait until she was 16, or for three years. But flirting and the sending of text messages to each other began. The teenager described them kissing and then sleeping with each other, and it was at that point that the girl said she wanted a sexual relationship.

“The girl was told that if she felt anything was uncomfortable at any time they could stop. But the girl said it felt right,” she added.

There are a number of points to be made here.

First: There was talk in the court case about the “psychological injury” done to the 15 year old. Right – well there’d be a damn sight less psychological injury if people didn’t get so worked up about this kind of thing. It was a consensual relationship. They loved each other. Sure it might have ended badly. Yes, it’s possible the young girl would have ended up getting hurt. But is it really worse than getting shagged behind the bike sheds by some spotty 15 year old oik who doesn’t give a damn about you?

Second: No doubt there’s the thought that a 15 year old cannot properly consent to sex when the object of their lust is their 26 year old teacher. Fine. There’s something to that thought. But consent is never straightforward. There are all kinds of things that might undermine our ability to make a proper judgement about how we really feel – or will feel – about a sexual encounter. Maybe we’re lonely, or we haven’t had sex for a long time, or we feel unloved, or we’re desperate for a meaningful relationship. If people don’t have sex simply because they can’t be sure they won’t regret it in the morning, then not many people are going to be having sex.

Perhaps the idea is we’re morally bound to protect 15 year olds, but not 26 year olds, from the consequences of this kind of uncertainty. Well maybe, but this would have to be argued for, since it is not obvious that a 15 year old is going to be any more harmed by an ill-judged sexual encounter than an older person. Indeed, there are at least some reasons to think that the opposite might be the case.

Third: There’s an obvious point about proportionality in terms of the punishment meted out to the teacher in this case. Okay, so maybe on balance we don’t want teachers shagging pupils. But let’s get a grip here. Not all cases are equal. A predatory male teacher pressurising a young female pupil into sex is one thing; a female teacher having a consensual sexual encounter with a horny 15 year old boy is another; and the situation in this case, where the two protagonists were/are in love with each other, is a third thing. Arguably, only in the first of these cases is the teacher/pupil relationship morally relevant (though this is complex).

Okay, there’s more to be said here, but probably I’ve gone on long enough. Except consider briefly this story.

A dentist whipped off his trousers and paraded in front of his practice nurse wearing nothing but a leopard-print thong.

His less than subtle wooing tactics evidently paid off, because the couple began a passionate relationship involving sexual encounters in the surgery.

But three other nurses were offended by his conduct towards them, and yesterday he was brought before the General Dental Council to answer charges of inappropriate behaviour.

The panel heard that the dentist regularly groped nurses’ bottoms, twanged their knicker elastic and tried to undo their brassieres through their tunics.

The first thing to say is that we have no idea how much of this story is true. But here are some of the things the dentist is purported to have done.

When a new dental nurse, Miss C, joined in 2004 the dentist is alleged to have grabbed her bottom and poked her breasts.

‘When she would be walking up the stairs in front of him he would frequently grab her bottom. He followed her down the corridor and when she was alone, pushed on her breast with one finger and said words to the effect, "Are they real?".’

Miss C brushed off Barton when he approached her after work and asked ‘if she fancied some fun’, the hearing was told.

Another nurse, Miss D, did not like his ‘sexual behaviour’.

‘She noticed early on his behaviour was unusual – he would squeeze her sides and stand behind her. He asked her questions about her sex life and whether she had intercourse last night. She became embarrassed and uncomfortable about these conversations. But worse experiences were to come.’

…Barton became bolder and started to touch Miss D’s bottom in the surgery saying: ‘Let’s have a feel.’ She was shocked and unable to say a thing – she was too shocked to speak. The next day he said she should wear a thong. She simply felt unable to go to work so she eventually telephoned in and told the practice nurse what had been going on.’

The dentist stands to lose his licence to practice dentistry, but he is not going to prison any time soon. (And nor should he.) But is it really the case that his behaviour was significantly better than that of Helen Goddard – the trumpet teacher? It doesn’t seem that way to me.

Hot or Not?

Physical attractiveness has certain advantages. Not only do you get to go on more dates if you’re good looking, but research by social psychologists such as Dion, Berscheid and Walster shows that you’re more likely than your less attractive fellows to be perceived as intelligent, pleasant, warm, well-adjusted, sexually proficient, and competent. The benefits of attractiveness start early. Karen Dion, for example, has found that the way that we judge the behaviour of young children is influenced by their physical appearance. Bad behaviour of children perceived to be attractive is more likely to be explained away as a temporary aberration than it is on the part of children perceived to be unattractive. The benefits extend into adult life. Did you get good marks at college? If so, then perhaps you were helped by your looks. Landy and Sigall have found that identical essays will receive significantly different marks depending upon the perception of the attractiveness of their authors. Needless to say, better looking means better marks.

There is an interesting point to be made here about the lives we  live in the virtual world. One facet of internet communication is the absence of many of the cues that we rely on to make judgments about people in the everyday world. If someone has the looks of a supermodel, then likely it won’t be an issue in email communication in quite the same way that it is in a face-to-face situation. Perhaps, then, there is a sense in which communication in cyberspace, especially when one considers that cues to do with sex, age, social-class and race are also frequently absent, is less distorted than it is in everyday life.

However, the internet has not escaped our obsession with beauty. For example, have a look at the web site Hot Or Not? It is a matchmaking service with a twist. You upload a photograph of yourself to the web site, then other visitors to the site are able to rank, on a scale of one to ten, whether or not you are “hot”. A visit to this web site will be enough to dispel the myth that we don’t agree about what constitutes attractiveness. If we didn’t, then each person would score more or less the same mark – because of the effects of averaging over a large number of votes – but they don’t, which goes to show that beauty is not solely in the eye of the beholder.

A more extreme version of the Hot Or Not? phenomenon emerged a few years ago on the LiveJournal blogging community. LiveJournal allows users to create online communities, which are organised around particular topics. The Nonuglies community was established for beautiful people only. To join, it was necessary to post a picture of yourself on the community to see if existing members rated you as a beauty. If they didn’t, then they would tell you so. Bluntly. Here is an example:

You are one ugly bitch [shudder] . You are practically the epitome of ugliness. Double chin, horrid braces, no eyelashes, limp, boring hair, big ears, absolutely no color, shapeless eyebrows, no fashion sense…

Why bother mentioning such gratuitous and crass nastiness? Partly because the Nonuglies community was incredibly successful. It is credited with being the inspiration for a huge number of spin-off communities, including communities for teenagers, gays, lesbians and couples. Morever, there are also communities that are devoted solely to chatting about the Nonuglies phenomenon.

But also because the existence of communities such as these raises a number of interesting philosophical issues. The members of the Nonuglies community were criticised for their cruelty. It was pointed out that many of the people who were judged to be ugly were very young, possibly vulnerable, and were quite likely to be hurt by the criticism and abuse which came their way. The response to this criticism tended to be that people know what the community is for before they post their pictures, so if they don’t want to have their looks criticised, they shouldn’t get involved. However, the problem with this response is that it just isn’t clear that the fact that a person accepts the possibility that they might be hurt justifies the act of hurting them. For example, many people will consider a wager which involves a toss of a coin and a fifty-fifty chance that a person will either receive £1,000 or be electrocuted to be morally suspect, especially if the person taking on the wager has a strong need for the money.

It is an interesting point about closed communities on the internet, such as Nonuglies, that there is no real possibility that dissenting voices will be heard. Gordon Graham makes this point in his book, The Internet: a philosophical enquiry. He argues that the internet encourages the formation of pure confluences of interest.

Surfers have the opportunity to seek out kindred spirits and to pass over the sort of reforming and refining influences that operate in the normal processes of learning.

If Graham is right, then given the centrality of attractiveness in the non-virtual world as a source of esteem and kudos, it was probably inevitable that some of the beautiful people of the world would band together to form a community such as Nonuglies in an attempt to reclaim a birthright threatened in the virtual world by the fact that cyberspace is normally blind to the body beautiful.

It is, of course, a good thing if this investigation prevents the occurrence of harm to children. Nevertheless, it does bring to light a number of interesting and difficult questions about ethics, the internet and sexual imagination.

Paedophilia is normally taken to mean the sexual attraction of adults to children. The first point to make, therefore, is the obvious one that viewing child pornography is not synonymous with paedophilia. Indeed, it is difficult to see how it is possible to draw any general conclusions about a person from the simple fact that they have looked at pornographic images of children. Consider, for example, that such a person: might be a regular user of child pornography and also might pursue face-to-face sexual encounters with children; might have viewed these images out of curiosity, been shocked to find that they were sexually aroused by them, but have no intention of looking at them again; or might have looked at these images because they were curious about the internet, but have no particular interest in pornography.

The situation is further complicated by the fact that the internet is a relatively new technology. Prior to its advent, possession of child pornography, correctly or incorrectly, was widely perceived to be a good indicator of a propensity to engage in the physical abuse of children. But the internet has removed many of the barriers which in the past might have deterred relatively casual “pornophiles” from amassing collections of photographs. Easier access means that increasing numbers of the simply curious will have viewed this kind of material. In sum, then, the relationship between the use of child pornography, paedophilia and child abuse is complex.

However, it is an important point that the absence of a sexual response when viewing pornographic images of children is not sufficient to guarantee that this activity is morally acceptable. There are apparently strong arguments which suggest that simply viewing child pornography is a moral wrong. For example, one such argument is that the supply of these kinds of images follows the demand for them, and that if people view these images – certainly if they pay for them – they are part of a process which necessarily involves children being harmed.

This is a persuasive argument, but it has its problems. For instance, whilst it is plausibly levelled at the person who regularly downloads child pornography from a commercial web site, it is much less convincing when applied to the person who occasionally downloads a picture from an internet newsgroup.

Also, there is a suspicion that the primary function of these kinds of arguments, regardless of their veracity, is to provide a rational underpinning for prior moral convictions. In other words, even if there was no harm associated with adults finding children sexually arousing, people would still think it wrong; but arguments which show that there <i>is</i> harm associated with these desires perform the useful function of solidifying this baseline moral commitment.

This line of thought raises another thorny issue which is integral to the debate about pornography on the internet. This concerns whether sexual imagination, <em>in and of itself</em>, is the kind of thing about which it is sensible to make moral judgements. For example, if a person fantasises that they are a rapist are they, <em>for those thoughts alone</em>, deserving of our moral condemnation?

Yes, is the answer suggested by the philosopher Gordon Graham, in his book <em>The Internet: a philosophical enquiry</em>. He argues that the causing of an outward harm is not the only mark of a moral wrong. “In an older language,” he writes, “there are gross appetites and interests. People can resist them, fail to do so or wilfully indulge them. Which they do is relevant to moral character, just as whether people’s thoughts about others are charitable or uncharitable, contemptuous or sympathetic, are morally relevant facts even if their outward treatment does not specially reflect these attitudes.”

As ever, though, these arguments are not conclusive. Most significantly, they appear to presuppose what they need to demonstrate; namely, that there <em>are</em> such things as gross appetites and interests where there is no outward harm. Also, it seems possible to come to the opposite conclusion to the one reached by Graham. For example, it doesn’t seem particularly counter-intuitive to argue that the person consumed by uncharitable feelings, who nevertheless behaves charitably, in some sense behaves heroically.

The fact that there are complicated arguments to be had about the internet, pornography and sexual imagination in no way mitigates the harm that some children suffer at the hands of pornographers and predatory child molesters. However, what it does mean is that it isn’t possible to arrive at the truth about the internet, child pornography and its consumers by uncritically taking the tabloid line, and indeed it seems the BBC line, that Operation Ore is about unmasking more than 7000 dangerous perverts.