Why is pedophilia wrong?

[sirawit]

I am new here, and I don’t think other sites would give any worthy discussion of this topic, as a lot of people online seems to wish me death (or similar) when I try to come up with this discussion. I am not sure if there exists a precise earlier discussion on this topic, but I couldn’t find one here. There are, however, relevant adjacent discussions: Pedophile Problems (which I think still didn’t consider my thesis statement directly) and Social Dark Matter (which considers a generalization of this topic, i.e., on social stigma as a whole). This is my first post, and please let me know if any actions of mine are wrong or are discouraged.

First of all, I’d like to state a list of statements that I believe to be true:

1. No one can choose to be born a pedophile or not.

2. There is currently (as of 2026 and as of my knowledge) no way of “curing” pedophilia.

3. Being a pedophile does not itself harm anyone. Pedophilic attraction is a risk factor for child sexual abuse, which is illegal and morally wrong.

4. Many people with pedophilic attraction never offend. Many child sexual abusers are not pedophilic.

5. People (as far as I have seen) mostly judge pedophiles as wrong and wish them death.

In my reasoning, if pedophilia were to be wrong, then by the first statement, someone’s existence would’ve been judged without their choice (i.e. mere existence is already wrong), and this is against one of the core values of mine, that one shouldn’t be morally judged as wrong by something one cannot choose^[1].

Moreover, I feel sad already at the current state. Pedophiles did no harm, and I feel sad for them that the society looks down on them and wishing them death. And even then, when I label myself as a pedophile supporter, most people seem to have a strong reaction against my existence.

From what I have tried to think things out (i.e. made a guess), a reason that made a lot of people judge pedophiles as bad is because they identify a correlation between pedophilia and child sexual abuse, and then generalize the claim into “all pedophiles perform child sexual abuse”. I argue that this generalization isn’t very reasonable. A more reasonable^[2] claim would be “pedophilia is an important risk factor towards actual child sexual abuse, and therefore we must stigmatize it”. Under the assumption that stigmatizing a risk factor would result in reducing social damage, this reasoning looks reasonable to me, but I’m attacking this assumption itself (i.e. I don’t think stigmatizing bad things help in this case).

Therefore, I’d want to hear everyone out on this topic and find a less wrong conclusion.

1. ^

   I acknowledge that this is not a universal belief, i.e., it isn’t absolute, and one may disagree with this.

2. ^

   in my opinion

[Archimedes]

I’d guess that “pedophilia” is largely conflated with CSA, and most people don’t care to disentangle them. So your argument isn’t against a coherent, considered opinion so much as a gut reaction.

[Dagon]

Private thoughts are not punished. You can feel and believe literally any crazy or harmful thing, without repercussion. As long as you don’t express it, call for normalization or acceptance of it, or act on it. Private = undetectable, harmless, and no basis for judgement of others.

Those actions (including acts of communication) CAN carry judgement and reprisal, as society tries to protect itself from variations in dimensions it considers harmful.