Pedophilia and the culture wars - debating harmful effects of pedophilia

Public Interest, Wntr, 2000 by G. E. Zuriff

That would be a mistake. What the uproar over the Rind, Bauserman, and Tromovitch article has demonstrated, and what the APA has yet to acknowledge, is that society must abide by its moral intuitions, however vague they may be. Indeed, even the utilitarian calculus is not possible without moral intuition, for it is moral intuition that informs us what goods and evils belong in the calculus and what weights to assign to each.

Even the concept of "psychological adjustment" is itself derived from moral notions of what constitutes the good life. Certainly, in a pluralistic society it may be easier to agree on the psychological effects of a social change than on whether it is moral. And to be sure, one person's moral intuition is often another's bigotry. But for that reason alone, these moral intuitions must be included in our civic discourse, so that we can recognize them, debate them, and look to them for guidance.