Quote:
Originally Posted by Moejoe
What your proposing is 'back-door censorship' where somebody or some board, usually of a ridiculously prudish nature, gives a coded message to other prudes as to the content of the book. It's a sneaky "WARNING: EXPLICIT LYRICS" and should appall any free thinking individual. If we had your system in place then a book like Steinbeck's the Grapes of Wrath would come with this message on the reverse:
Contains scenes of violence, nudity, and some foul language.
Are you advocating a world where a few prudes and their misguided attempts to shield 'children' from 'bad things' would put nasty little coded warnings on the books of every other person? Besides all that, whatever your concerns or worries, if you have a thirteen year old, they'll be reading whatever they like whenever they like and there's little you can do to stop them. What you can do is 'discuss' with them what they like and why, maybe treat them with some respect and not be so afraid at some 'sex' in a book.
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I tend to agree almost exactly with what you're saying, Moejoe, but I worry that your polemical approach might get in the way of your argument. Here's what I'm getting from your position: as a guardian and guide for one's children and their reading habits, there's a tradeoff between your convenience and efficiency in filtering (or curating) documents on the one hand, and your ability to control the moral system with which that filtering process occurs on the other. Moejoe, it sounds like you (as I do) loathe the thought of anyone prescribing your morals (and by extension) your children's morals for you. Consequently, you're likely either to trust your children's own developing morality---possibly as an extension of other shaping forces you've engineered in their environment---and let them read whatever they want. Griffonwing, you seem to find your morality closer in step with that advocated by the ethical boards you invoke, and as a result, stand to benefit from that infrastructure, leveraging it to do your book selection (and moral engineering) for you and your children.
So long as these prospective ethical boards don't exert any pressure beyond providing you with information that you can choose to act on or not, is there any reason to be prescriptive about their existence? Moejoe and I, and our respective children, can ignore them the way we probably already ignore their equivalents on films and music albums. We probably feel badly for Griffonwing's children, but whether or not that's our business is another argument.