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What's Wrong with Prostitution?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
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Over the last three decades the sexual morality of many Western societies has changed beyond recognition. Most of the prohibitions which made up the traditional, extremely restrictive outlook on sex that reigned supreme until the fifties–the prohibitions of masturbation, pre-marital and extra-marital sex, promiscuity, homosexuality–are no longer seen as very serious or stringent or, indeed, as binding at all. But one or two traditional prohibitions are still with us. The moral ban on prostitution, in particular, does not seem to have been repealed or radically mitigated. To be sure, some of the old arguments against prostitution are hardly ever brought up these days; but then, several new ones are quite popular, at least in certain circles. Prostitution is no longer seen as the most extreme moral depravity a woman is capable of; but the view that it is at least seriously morally flawed, if not repugnant and intolerable, is still widely held. In this paper I want to look into some of the main arguments in support of this view and try to show that none of them is convincing.
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1 I am concerned only with prostitution in its primary, narrow sense of ‘commercial’ or ‘mercenary sex’, ‘sex for money’, and not with prostitution in the derived sense of ‘use of one's ability or talent in a base or unworthy way’. The question I am asking is whether prostitution in the former, original sense is a case of prostitution in the latter, secondary sense.
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43 I have not discussed those arguments against prostitution which I think have been effectively refuted by others. See L. Ericsson, op. cit., on the arguments that prostitution exemplifies and reinforces commercialization of society, that it is an extreme case of the general inequality between men and women, that sex is much too basic and elementary in human life to be sold, and on the marxist critique of prostitution in general, and Lomasky, L. E., ‘Gift Relations, Sexual Relations and Freedom’, The Philosophical Quarterly 33 (1983), on the argument that commercial sex devalues sex given freely, as a gift.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
44 That is, there is nothing morally wrong with it as long as the term ‘morally wrong’ is used in its robust sense, nicely captured e.g. by Mill: ‘We do not call anything wrong unless we mean to imply that a person ought to be punished in some way or other for doing it—if not by law, by the opinion of his fellow creatures; if not by opinion, by the reproaches of his own conscience’ (Utilitarianism, Sher, G. (ed.) (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1979), 47)Google Scholar. This is the sense the term usually has in everyday moral discourse. When we say, e.g., that stealing is wrong, we normally do not mean to say merely that stealing falls short of the ideal way of relating to other people's property, or is not part of the good life, the best use one can put one's fingers to, or something one would recommend as a career to one's teenage daughter; we rather express our condemnation of stealing and imply that it is appropriate to apply the pressure of the moral sanction on those who steal. Of course, those given to using the term in some wider, watered-down sense may well come to the conclusion that prostitution is wrong after all.
45 Simons, G. L., Pornography without Prejudice: A Reply to Objectors (London: Abelard-Schuman, 1972), 96.Google Scholar
46 I have benefited from conversations on the subject of this paper with Carla Freccero and Bernard Gert, and from critical reponses from audiences at Hull, Liverpool, Newcastle, St. Andrews and York, where I read this paper in December 1990/January 1991.
My greatest debt is to Antony Duff, Sandra Marshall, and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, who read an earlier version of the paper and made a number of critical comments and suggestions for clarification and revision.
The paper was written during my stay at the Morrell Studies in Toleration project, Department of Politics, University of York, in the Winter and Spring terms of 1990/91. I would like to acknowledge with gratitude a research grant from the British Academy, which made that possible.
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