Ethics Topics 1) There is a debate regarding the morality of pornography. On one

Question

Ethics Topics 1) There is a debate regarding the morality of pornography. On one side of the debate, pornography can be degrading to women and is often considered obscene. On the other side, pornography is pleasurable for the viewer and does not cause direct harm to any person, as well as receiving some protections under law as freedom of speech. Nevertheless, there may be indirect harms to account for. Consider that there is erotica (highly sexualized interactions without any intercourse shown) in addition to standard pornography. Examine the moral value of the each of these questions using the moral criteria of two of the following three major ethical theories: Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics, Specific Deontology, or Mill’s Utilitarianism. Make sure to employ both Act Utilitarianism and Social Utilitarianism if you select Utilitarianism. Compare and contrast the two theories. What do you think about the issue, and how are your beliefs borne out by ethical theories?

Explanation / Answer

Traditionally, liberals defended the freedom of consenting adults to publish and consume pornography in private from moral and religious conservatives who wanted pornography banned for its obscenity, its corrupting impact on consumers and its corrosive effect on traditional family and religious values. But, in more recent times, the pornography debate has taken on a somewhat new and surprising shape. Some feminists have found themselves allied with their traditional conservative foes in calling on the state to regulate or prohibit pornography-although the primary focus of feminist concern is on the harm that pornography may cause to women (and children), rather than the obscenity of its sexually explicit content. And some liberals have joined pro-censorship feminists in suggesting that the harms that violent and degrading pornography causes to women's social standing and opportunities might be sufficiently serious to justify prohibiting such pornography on liberal grounds. Many others, both liberals and feminists, remain unconvinced. They are doubtful that pornography is a significant cause of the oppression of women or that the “blunt and treacherous” instrument of the law is the best solution to such harm as pornography may cause. As we shall see, the debate over whether pornography should be censored remains very much alive.
liberals have defended a right to pornography on the grounds of a right to privacy (or “moral independence”, as one prominent liberal defender of pornography calls it), which protects a sphere of private activity within which individuals can explore and indulge their own personal tastes and convictions, free from the threat of coercive pressure or interference by the state and other individuals. The spectre of state intrusion into the private lives of individuals underpins much of the liberal discomfort about censorship of pornography
the traditional liberal defence-pornography is comparatively harmless. Neither the expression of pornographic opinions, nor the indulging of a private taste for pornography, causes significant harm to others, in the relevant sense of ‘harm’ (i.e., crimes of physical violence or other significant wrongful rights-violations). Hence, the publication and voluntary private consumption of pornography is none of the state's business.
the liberal defence of pornography find their classic expression in a famous and influential passage from John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (1859). In this passage, Mill sets out the principle that underpins the prevailing liberal view about when it is justified for the state to coercively interfere with the liberty of its citizens. It is a principle that continues to provide the dominant liberal framework for the debate over pornography and censorship. Mill writes:
The only principle for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with any evil in case he do otherwise. To justify that, the conduct from which it is desired to deter him, must be calculated to produce evil to someone else. The only part of the conduct of any one for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. (Mill 1975: 15)
Mill goes on to stress that the harm principle is meant to apply “only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties”(Mill 1975:15). So the principle permits paternalistic intervention in the case of those who are not competent to make an informed decision about what is in their best interests for themselves, and so who “must be protected against their own actions as well as external injury”: for example, young children or those adults whose decision-making abilities are temporarily or permanently impaired
However, Dworkin thinks, considerations of offence may provide some justification for preventing or restricting the public display of pornography so as to avoid its causing offense to non-consenting adults who might otherwise involuntarily or unwittingly be exposed to it. Joel Feinberg, another well-known liberal defender of pornography, agrees. But Feinberg thinks that such restrictions must be justified by a separate principle to the harm principle, for he thinks that certain sorts of unpleasant psychological states are not in themselves harms. Feinberg calls this additional principle the offense principle. The offense principle says that “It is always a good reason in support of a proposed criminal prohibition that it would probably be an effective way of preventing serious offense (as opposed to injury or harm) to persons other than the actor, and that it is probably a necessary means to that end (i.e., there is probably no other means that is equally effective at no greater cost to the other values).” (Feinberg 1999:78. For a more detailed discussion see Feinberg 1985.)
Despite the efforts of anti-pornography feminists, many traditional liberal defenders of pornography remain unconvinced. They typically continue to maintain either that pornography does not cause harm to women (in the relevant, usually narrow, sense of ‘harm’), or they admit that pornography probably does cause some harm to women's interests, but deny that this harm is sufficiently great to offset the dangers inherent in censorship and to justify the violation of the rights of pornographers and would-be consumers.

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