Why I’m Not A Utilitarian

On 4/7/2022, a user named Aella said the following on the website Twitter:

Child porn is created when people get paid to make child porn; the rarer you make it, the more they get paid. The best way to protect children is to kill the economic demand; flood the market with AI generated, freely accessible stuff that’s created with zero harm to kids.

Aella quickly deleted the tweet after massive amounts of backlash, but the overall argument she made is still interesting — albeit, not in a good way. Assuming the child pornography that’s created is so realistic that it cannot be distinguished from real children, then this plan could very well work. (Mind you, it is also possible that her plan would result in real child pornography increasing in value — especially if one could tell the difference between real children and children generated through artificial intelligence, therefore turning real child pornography into something comparable to a rare trading card.) However, even if this plan could maybe protect children, it is still an utterly nonsensical and downright evil plan to unleash onto the world.

This argument has been showing up more as of late, and it’s especially common in the debates among animated child pornography and if it should be legal. Advocates commonly argue that it would be preferable if actual pedophiles used drawings of children as…