Foucault advocated for pedophilia, and that knowledge has tainted him for me. Can he still be a moral authority?
More or less the entire French Intellectual establishment argued at that time for "the decriminalization of all consensual relations between adults and minors below the age of fifteen".
While I agree that seems extremely stupid, it is based on a morally tenable argument that people under that age could give consent. That may be incorrect but if accepted as a premise would justify their position.
So if Foucault believed this and his moral arguments derived from that, it would seem unwise to dismiss all his moral authority just because you believe he was wrong on this point.
I personally think he is totally wrong and that even people at the age of eighteen struggle to know their own minds clearly with regard to consent. However I do not as a result think Foucault is impossible to take a moral lead from.
Then the question is, how does one become intellectual establishement. Sounds like dissenters were somehow excluded from that nebulous subjective category.
Louis Aragon, Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Michel Leiris, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Philippe Sollers, Jacques Rancière, Jean-François Lyotard, Francis Ponge, Bernard Besret
If your (or their, the french intellectual elite's/literati's) philosophy is so morally vacuous that it fails to recognize the sexual exploitation of children and young teenagers as reprehensible, then it is worth less than nothing. It is an evil.
Consent is not enough, is the common modern view. Power structures and actual power matters too.
In some sense, surely advocating (almost successfully, if I recall correctly) for a repeal of age of consent laws must be worse than the crime itself. That is, if we are of the opinion that pedophilia is wrong. Consider the difference between orchestrating many murders and a single murder as an analogy.
No, Foucault (and the others on that list) have been let off the hook for too long. The aesthetician in me is horrified, youth is beauty and they want it defiled?
And a disclaimer; I am of course a conservative in every sense of the word, and this is my perspective.
Talking about power structures while criticizing Foucault is pretty rich.
Not all criticism is moral criticism.
Foucault seemed to think it was, if not proper behaviour, then at least not-unproper. That is a moral judgement.
To suggest that Foucault was above the entire concept of morals as I understand you to do, well I can't agree on that and I don't think he would either. Of course he was trying to be a moral authority, remember that this whole thing was about him (and others) attempting to legalize sexual relations with children. If he did not think himself an authority, on what merit would he petition? And barring that, it is clear that he was and maybe is an authority, because here we are half a century later or so still discussing his position.
His experiences does not excuse him in my eyes. Neither does it impact to the slightest degree the truth-value of his position on this issue, nor of his philosophy overall.
It may be a moral issue, but there are pragmatic or non-moral reasons one may argue as Foucault did. You may find those reasons detestable and disgusting. That doesn't mean he was making any appeal to moral sentiment - he was just acting on what he finds beneficial or detrimental. Whether on behalf of sympathy for prisoners against the carceral state, or another reason.
>If he did not think himself an authority, on what merit would he petition?
He can do so not speaking on moral authority, but on a variety of authorities - the authority of a public intellectual, for instance. I don't think he was being a moral leader, or attempting to be. The people who would listen to him, the public at large, would not do so because of his moral position in their eyes. An authority as an enduring public intellectual with a strong grasp on philosophy and sociology within his tradition, for sure. A moral authority? Nobody has ever quoted Foucault in such a way.
His experiences would not excuse him (in your view; in mine, there is little to need an excuse if you examine his intentions), but they would provide a rational explanation for why he would forgo morality to expound his own opinions in pragmatic or non-moral reasons. He may have just not cared about morality (the same system that troubled him, I don't know) and reasoned on his feelings and pragmatism alone. I'm not trying to excuse him, I'm trying to explain him, though I'm really just speculating.
Its still wrong, but anachronistically wrong a bit like how many elements the founding fathers put in which are good government but did so under the unforgivable sin of slavery. If that's too 'ancient history' for you, let's consider Brendan Eich's contribution to Firefox but also understand he is a homophobe. We can still use and appreciate Firefox's technical advancements without worrying about Eich's homophobia.
Age of consent skeptics are as old as time anyway. It rages on today in the modern libertarian party and incel culture. Anti-authoritarian and reactionary movements often become victimizers of children and women and racial/religious minorities because these groups are often protected by authority. When you remove authority, suddenly they are powerless and easy prey to whatever replaces that authority. The most obvious example are soldiers raping women in towns they take over.