Ethics in Practice by LaFollette Hugh

Author:LaFollette, Hugh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2013-12-16T16:00:00+00:00

Note

This essay is abridged and edited from chapter 2 of On Liberty.

36

“The Price We Pay?” Pornography and Harm

Susan J. Brison

Defenders of civil liberties have typically held, with J. S. Mill, that governments may justifiably exercise power over individuals, against their will, only to prevent harm to others.1 Until the 1970s, liberals and libertarians assumed that since producers and consumers of pornography clearly didn’t harm anyone else, the only reasons their opponents had for regulating pornography were that they considered it harmful to the producers or consumers, they thought it an offensive nuisance, and they objected, on moral or religious grounds, to certain private sexual pleasures of others. None of these reasons was taken to provide grounds for regulating pornography, however, because (1) individuals are considered to be the best judges of what is in their own interest (and, in any case, they cannot be harmed by something to which they consent), (2) what is merely offensive may be avoided (with the help of plain brown wrappers and zoning restrictions), and (3) the private sexual activities, of consenting adults anyway, are no one else’s, certainly not the state’s, business.

In the 1970s, however, the nature of the pornography debate changed as feminists argued that what is wrong with pornography is not that it morally defiles its producers and consumers, nor that it is offensive or sinful, but, rather, that it is a species of hate literature as well as a particularly insidious method of sexist socialization. Susan Brownmiller was one of the first to take this stance in proclaiming that “[p]ornography is the undiluted essence of anti-female propaganda” (1975, p. 443) On this view, pornography (of the violent degrading variety) harms women by sexualizing misogynistic violence. According to Catharine MacKinnon, “[p]ornography sexualizes rape, battery, sexual harassment, prostitution, and child sexual abuse; it thereby celebrates, promotes, authorizes, and legitimizes them” (1987, p. 171).

The claim that women are harmed by pornography has changed the nature of the pornography debate, which is, for the most part, no longer a debate between liberals who subscribe to Mill’s harm principle and legal moralists who hold that the state can legitimately legislate against so-called “morals offenses” that do not harm any non-consenting adults. Rather, the main academic debates now take place among those who subscribe to Mill’s harm principle, but disagree about what its implications are for the legal regulation of pornography. Some theorists hold that violent degrading pornography does not harm anyone and, thus, cannot justifiably be legally regulated, socially stigmatized, or morally condemned. Others maintain that, although it is harmful to women, it cannot justifiably be regulated by either the civil or the criminal law since that would cause even greater harms and\or violate the legal rights of pornography producers and consumers, but that, nevertheless, private individuals should do what they can (through social pressure, educational campaigns, boycotts, etc.) to put an end to it. Still others claim that such pornography harms women by violating their civil right to be free from sex discrimination and should,

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