I've had a few people email me to ask "if prostitution is so great, how come you're not a prostitute?" Huh?
Look, first of all, there are lots of jobs that I would never want to do. I like to shoot a little hoops now and again, but I would never, ever want to be a professional basketball player. Nor would any of my friends--I mean, they might like to be Michael Jordan, but they wouldn't want to do the actual job of spending hours a day running up and down a court, practicing shots, and lifting weights. I do not therefore consider myself qualified to proclaim that no one in the entire world wants to be a professional basketball player.
Second of all, can we all concede that at least part of the reason that women do not want to be prostitutes is that there is a severe social stigma attached to women who are promiscuous, and particularly to women who rent their promiscuity to men--a stigma far, far greater than that which attaches to their clients? This makes any argument from my desires entirely circular. Kerry is arguing for eliminating that stigma. If I'd grown up in a culture that thought of "prostitute" as a job like "CPA" (another job I'd hate), I probably still wouldn't want to be one. But the fact that I am repulsed by the idea of turning tricks, having grown up in a society that thinks there's something deeply wrong with turning tricks, is not actually proof that there is something deeply wrong with turning tricks. White people in the south were also genuinely repulsed by the idea of drinking from a water fountain that a black person had touched. Your gut is not a good replacement for reasoning from first principles.
So I need a better reason than "it's icky" or "there's something wrong with a woman who would do that" to justify either a moral or a cultural ban on the practice. I'm probably more open than Will or Kerry to being convinced, but I'd take some pretty strong convincing that prostitution is so inherently damaging to society that we should declare war on it. I start with the principles that sex has equal moral significance when performed by a man or a woman; that it isn't anyone's business how many or what kind of partners you choose; and that government intrusion on private, voluntary exchange should be sharply limited to a) practices which produce demonstrable harm to third parties, and b) you can reasonably expect to control. This quickly leads me to "don't you have something better to do than poke your nose into someone else's hotel room?"
MM -- So let's reason from first principles:
A) Law and culture tend to reinforce each other. If the law says 'x' is legal, culture tends to more readily accept 'x'.
B) If 'x' is both legal and accepted, it tends to occur more often. When something occurs more often, all consequences, positive and negative, are increased and/or dispersed more broadly in society than they otherwise would be.
C) Any industry dealing in vice (such as gambling and liquor stores) tends to attract large amounts of money and violence, even when legal.
Consequent of things like these, several good arguments and examples have been made/cited in past threads to the effect that legalizing prostitution tends to increase the incidence of sexual slavery, increase the incidence of disease (and that among populations that are often unable to afford the health consequences), work against social constructs designed to protect social order, and increase the overall incidence of violent and violent sexual offense, against women and children in particular.
Interestingly, none of these made the final cut when you wrote this post.
Why?
Prostitution has been legal in the US in times past, is legal in some other western and non-western countries now, and given mankind's general fascination with the purient, plenty of literature has been created to document what kind of social, cultural, and legal consequences arose from these arrangements. Many of them are not so good.
The purist libertarian position would be to let all things come to pass in liberty, then sort out the conflicts as they arise. Unfortunately, this has serious problems in practice. But beyond that, you have previously argued for non-libertarian expansions of the state and presented good arguments that more harm will come from allowing people to move about unchecked than will come from limiting their freedom. Thus, unrestricted freedom is no longer a good fallback option for you if someone else has different priorities for non-libertarian expansions on the same basis.
So, regarding prostitution: Now it comes to pass that your opponents have argued in favor of non-libertarian expansions of the state and presented good arguments that more harm will come from allowing people to move about unchecked than will come from limiting their freedom. Perhaps you could respond to those in like kind, rather than trying to reframe the argument back to the point where you don't have to address those things.
Posted by anony_mouse_ | March 13, 2008 7:31 PM