What harms said development, in my view, is mostly restricting one’s reading/watching/hearing to a limited range of perspectives, or uncritical consumption of any particular item; and the critical eye is itself best developed by exposure to a wide range of content. Therefore, I’m primarily concerned with the breadth of what my hypothetical child takes in, rather than any particular thing it may or may not contain, and I mean to make a point of discussing everything with them.

Could you give some examples of material that you would consider intrinsically harmful to children’s moral development?

Which is it? Or is there a d) I’ve missed?

Gerv

Even in the parent/child case, the furthest I would ever go with my own (hypothetical) child is “That book will make more sense to you when you’re older. If you really want to read it now, you can try, and I’ll try to explain anything that doesn’t make sense, but I may not be able to make it make sense.” Or perhaps “No, you may not watch that scary movie right now, because you have school tomorrow, and the last time you watched a scary movie you didn’t get any sleep the night afterward. Maybe on the weekend.” I have a good deal of faith in my hypothetical children’s ability to handle stuff, I guess.

I’d be interested to hear Cato/Brutus scenarios that you think are interesting, though. It is quite possible that I am missing something important.

The hosting provider for this site, under limited circumstances and with great caution, will provide anonymous hosting for people not resident in the USA where the content to be hosted “is critical of [the author’s] government in a manner that would be Constitutionally protected speech in the United States.” (Further elaboration.) I don’t know, at all, how this plays out in practice; but I find it an interesting case study.

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I do NOT sympathize with the notion that Cato’s only recourse should be to publish a rebuttal. That just plain doesn’t work. Arishat may have a much bigger megaphone, or Cato may be in a position where anything he could say would only make the situation worse.

I also don’t (for purposes of this discussion, anyway) agree with the notion that Cato should have total, unauditable control over his own publication space. That leads directly to the situation where Cato deletes every comment that disagrees with him even a little; which can be a big deal even when Cato is a private citizen (see “baleeting” in the context of online flamewars) and is definitely unacceptable when Cato is, say, a government running a forum that is supposed to be for debate of its policies, but could easily turn into an echo chamber of yes-men.

By the way, I just edited your post to correct a typo (Arishat is a she). I could have modified your text to make you sound like a caricature of yourself, and WordPress wouldn’t show any evidence that it hadn’t always been that way. I didn’t, but I could have. Are you really happy with that?

Now, if we ever get Diamond Age style matter compilers, this will become a much more serious issue—but at that point I would advocate that it is hopeless to try to police the use of the devices, and we should work instead toward a society where no one is so disgruntled that they want to take out a city.

I think that these scenarios get far more interesting when you consider the relationship between Brutus and Cato than when you are thinking about Arisha and Cato.

Gerv

BTW, I may trust the Belgian courts (i.e. the courts of my country), but I’m far from certain that I would trust a US court in a case between me and, hm, let’s say Microsoft or Google.