Philosophy of Love and Sex

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Philosophy of Love and Sex

• Prostitution

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• A Quick FYI
• The following are illegal by Canadian law
• Living off of the avails of prostitution
• Maintaining a bawdy house
• Public solicitation for the purposes of
  prostitution
• Purchasing the sexual services of a minor

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• Until 1972
• Everyone who commits vagrancy who, being a
  common prostitute or night-walker is found in a
  public place and does not, when required, give a
  good account of herself (S.164.1 of the Criminal
  Code)

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Arkes, Prostitution

• Arkes argues that contemporary law on
  prostitution shies away from moral condemnation
  of prostitution
• The inclination has often been to ban public
  solicitation or restrict the zone of
  solicitation - to treat the problem, in other
  words, as a matter of aesthetic regulation or
  the abatement of nuisances 230

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Arkes, Prostitution

• Some condemn prostitution on the grounds that it
  leads to other harms to society for example, an
  increase in street crime.
• The problem with this approach is that it would
  logically force us also to condemn things that
  dont deserve it for example, baseball games

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Arkes, Prostitution

• Arkes argues that both of these approaches fail
  to show what is fundamentally wrong with
  prostitution.
• In Arkes view, prostitution is intrinsically,
  morally wrong, and any argument that would
  conclude that we should ban it, must depend on
  this insight.

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Arkes, Prostitution

• So what is it about prostitution that makes it
  intrinsically bad?
• Argument A1
• Prostitution inescapably implies that the
  intimacy of sexual intercourse need not be
  connected to any authentic sentiment of love and
  that it need not take place in a setting marked
  by the presence of commitment. In that sense it
  might be said that prostitution patronizes the
  corruption of physical love it reduces physical
  love to the kind of hydraulic action that animals
  may share, and as it does that it detaches the
  act of intercourse from the kind of love that is
  distinctly human. 233

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Arkes, Prostitution

• But we must be careful not to slide here into
  another empirical argument against
  prostitution we shouldnt say that the
  corruption of physical love is bad because it
  strikes at those institutions, like the family,
  which depend most importantly on the ties of
  love. 233 It is bad, rather because the
  corruption of love is intrinsically bad.

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Arkes, Prostitution

• O1A1 Why must all sex be confined to the
  bonds of love? Why must all sex be serious
  sex? We sometimes share food with those
  we love to strengthen the bonds of love,
  and sometimes eat casually for physical
  satisfaction alone. Why should we treat sex
  differently from food?

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Arkes, Prostitution

• R1O1A1 Sex may be different in ways that
  are morally significant. 235
• More specifically
• (i) the sexual bond is uniquely intimate,
  such that entering into it for mere physical
  or commercial purposes violates its nature
• (ii) the connection of sex to the
  portentousness of reproduction, makes it an
  inappropriate means to mere physical or
  commercial satisfaction

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Arkes, Prostitution

• Of course, even if Arkes is successful in
  demonstrating that prostitution is morally wrong,
  this entails that it ought to be illegal only if
  we adopt his legal moralism
• law arises in the most proper sense only from
  imperatives of moral standing moral propositions
  entail the existence of law because the logic of
  morals is a logic of commitment. 232
• people have a claim to the exercise of their
  personal freedom in all of its expressions unless
  they do something that is in principle wrong, and
  it is only on the basis of a principle that the
  law may restrain that freedom. 235

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Jaggar, Prostitution

• Jaggar outlines three positions on prostitution
• The Liberal position
• The Marxist position
• The Radical Feminist Position
• Jaggar finds all three positions plausible, to
  some extent, but argues in favour of the radical
  feminist approach.

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Jaggar, Prostitution

• A. The Liberal Position
• This position has several varieties, but they
  all argue that prostitution should be
  decriminalized.
• They support their view by appealing to the
  classical liberal ideals of equality before the
  law, and the protection of individual rights
  through minimization of governmental interference
  in the private sphere of life.

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Jaggar, Prostitution

• Liberals view prostitution as a contract
  between individuals that is therefore subject to
  regulation as are other contracts, but simply to
  ensure fair trading practices.
• Jaggar criticizes the liberal approach for it
  fails to consider that prostitution may involve
  an illegitimate sort of contract in which one of
  the parties is helpless and sells themselves
  into oppression.
• A closely related criticism is that many
  prostitutes may not enter into their contracts
  voluntarily.

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Jaggar, Prostitution

• B. The Marxist Position
• Marxists are more interested than Liberals are
  in the social context within which the practice
  of prostitution flourishes.
• For Marxists, prostitution is bad, but it is not
  specially bad. In the Marxist analysis
  prostitution is essentially the sale of bodily
  services for a wage thus it is on par with a
  variety of services. Engel speaks of the
  general prostitution of the labourer.

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Jaggar, Prostitution

• Wage labour, generally, is criticized by
  Marxists for its alienating effect on the
  workers. Workers become mere appendages to
  their machines, cogs in the capitalist system.
  Thus the essential, creative human capacity to
  work is reduced and bound to an inhuman system of
  industrial production.
• In this same system wives are reduced to baby
  machines and sexual prostitutes are mere
  commodities.

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Jaggar, Prostitution

• Classical Marxism seeks to abolish prostitution,
  but not by mere legal prohibition. It seeks
  rather a revolutionary overthrow of the entire
  capitalist system within which prostitution
  flourishes.
• Prostitution, and wage labour more generally,
  are products of economic inequality, and thus can
  be eliminated only when that inequality is
  eliminated.

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Jaggar, Prostitution

• C. The Radical Feminist Position
• For radical feminism (RF), prostitution is the
  archetypal relationship of women to men. That
  is, RF sees most social interaction between
  women and men as some form of prostitution.

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Jaggar, Prostitution

• RF agrees with Marxism both that (i) sexual
  prostitution is not bad in a special sort of way,
  but rather is one expression of a systemic
  inequality and (ii) there is economic coercion
  underlying prostitution.
• RF differs from Marxism in its refusal to
  assimilate prostitution to other types of wage
  labour.
• RF is distinct from liberalism in its broad
  construal of what constitutes sexual services,
  and in its denial that prostitution is a
  victimless crime.
• RF is distinct from both Marxism and liberalism
  in that it defines prostitutes as women.

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Jaggar, Prostitution

• RF calls for the elimination of prostitution,
  but recognizes that this will involve the
  systemic overthrow of patriarchy.
• Part of the solution will be the elimination of
  male demand for prostitutes, which requires us to
  abandon the conventional myth that men have
  biologically stronger appetites for sex and
  sexual diversity than do women.
• Is this indeed a mere myth? Robert Wright, in
  Feminists, Meet Mr. Darwin will argue that it
  is not.

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Ericsson, Charges Against Prostitution

• Arguments against prostitution
• A1 It constitutes a case of sexual
  immorality. Society and conventional morality
  condemn it. 240
• This is because the less a sexual practice
  has to do with the bearing and rearing of
  children, the less sanctioned it is. 240
• O1A1 (i)An explanation of our
  antiprostitution sentiment does not constitute
  a justification of that sentiment.
• O2A1 (ii)Prostitution neither is nor ever was
  a threat to reproduction within the nuclear
  family.Nor has it ever been a threat to the
  family itself. People marry and visit whores
  for quite different reasons.

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Ericsson, Charges Against Prostitution

• A2 Prostitution is intrinsically wrong
  mercenary love per se is immoral.
• O1A2 If two adults voluntarily consent to an
  economic arrangement concerning sexual
  activity and this activity takes place in
  private, it seems plainly absurd to maintain
  that there is something intrinsically wrong with
  it.To say that prostitution is intrinsically
  wrong is in a way to refuse to give any
  arguments.This terminates rational discussion
  where it should begin 241
• (Doesnt Arkes give reasons, regarding the
  intimacy of sex, which show why prostitution is
  intrinsically bad?)

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Ericsson, Charges Against Prostitution

• A3 Prostitution is undesirable because the
  relation between whore and customer must by the
  nature of things be a very poor relation to
  nonmercenary sex. 241
• O1A3 (i) Simply because x is of poorer
  quality than y does not mean that x is bad.
• O2A3 We must be careful not to romanticize
  nonmercenary sex, or excessively denigrate
  mercenary sex.

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Ericsson, Charges Against Prostitution

• A4 Prostitution involves the selling of
  something too basic to human life to be sold.
• O1A4 There is on this ground no more reason
  to despise the sex market and those engaged in
  it than to despise the food market and those
  engaged in it. 243

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Ericsson, Charges Against Prostitution

• A5 Prostitution is wrong because it
  constitutes an extreme instance of the
  inequality of the sexes. 244
• Gives an extramarital outlet for men, and not
  women
• Relation of prostitute to customer is one of
  object to subject
• The prostitutes job is solely to satisfy the
  man she is thus simply a means to an end
• Prostitution reduces woman to a piece of
  merchandise she is thus objectified and
  economically exploited

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Ericsson, Charges Against Prostitution

• O1A5 (i) If it is wrong that prostitution is
  available only to men, the way to redress
  this is to make it more available to women,
  should they desire it.
• (ii) There are many male prostitutes thus it
  is not, as a whole, specially oppressive for
  women.
• (iii)The perils of prostitution call for reform
  to its regulation, not banning it.

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Ericsson, Charges Against Prostitution

• (iv) Prostitutes arent subject to special
  economic exploitation many occupations
  involve selling bodily services for money.
  Moreover, many prostitutes are better thought
  of more as entrepreneurs than as sex slaves.
• (v) Treating a prostitute as a mere means to
  an end, without regard for her personhood, is
  not specially exploitative. Furthermore, being
  primarily interested, when visiting a
  professional, in their professional
  performance, is not equivalent to dehumanizing
  them.

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Ericsson, Charges Against Prostitution

• (vi) Prostitutes also often see their customers
  as a mere means to an end.