Raise Your Own Damn Children, Porn Edition

Noam
Millman responds to Damon Linker and me on sex work and
people’s adult children going into it.

Linker suggested folks rethink their morally-permissive
attitudes toward porn in light of the fact that
someday their children could become porn stars. I said the idea
that your child could wind up in porn, prostitution, or other
erotic arenas was a good argument for decriminalizing and
destigmatizing such pursuits. “You could call this a ‘moral
libertarian’ version of Rawls’s veil of ignorance,” Millman writes
of my position.  

We don’t know what our daughter might decide to do when she is
of age. She might decide to have sex for money. Therefore, we
should examine our political (and moral) attitudes with a view to
who would be most harmed by them – and the person most harmed by a
morally condemnatory attitude is the daughter who decides to have
sex for money, and would be condemned for it.

As with Rawls’s own perspective, this makes perfect sense if you
take the existing distribution is a given – in Rawls’s case, of
wealth; in Nolan Brown’s, of life choices. If you don’t assume that
– if you assume instead that redistribution of wealth will lead to
less production of wealth overall, or that a permissive moral
attitude will lead to an increase in objectively poorer life
choices – then you can’t blithely say that the only thing that
matters is harm reduction for those who make those choices. You
have to weigh the costs on all sides of the equation. This much
should be obvious.

But I still think Nolan Brown’s critique has teeth, because
she’s drawing a distinction between the daughter as thought
experiment and the daughter in reality.

Linker’s daughter-in-porn is a hypothetical. His attitude – he
would be appalled – is rooted in the fact that his daughter
is not involved in porn, and he hopes she never
is. If a grown daughter of his
actually were having sex for money, his attitude
would unquestionably change.

How would it change? I’m going to assume that this
(hypothetical) Linker would make a priority of his daughter’s
well-being, so I can rule out reactions like killing his daughter
for the sake of the family’s honor – or, for that matter, cutting
off all contact with her for the sake of protecting the virtue of a
(hypothetical) younger daughter. In other words, I’m going to
assume that if his hypothetical became actual, Linker
would actually take an approach something akin to what Nolan Brown
hypothesizes. He would likely worry about his daughter being
exploited – which might lead him to try to get her out of the
business, or might lead him to fight to make sure the business is
properly regulated, or any number of other reactions. But I
strongly suspect that revulsion, which he previously
felt, would no longer hold a place in his heart, not if he valued
his relationship with his daughter. And that change, in turn, would
change the baseline from which other people judged their own
hypothetical daughters’ choices.

As a counter-thought-experiment, Millman asks how people would
feel about an actress daughter getting a big break on the TV
show Game of Thrones—and appearing fully nude, in a
simulated sex scene: 

Do you have qualms now? If you don’t, then I’d say all we’re
doing is haggling over the price. … If you do have qualms, then
clearly you should recognize that your private judgments
are not universal. There are just too many
actresses competing for those kinds of parts, and too many of those
actresses have fathers. You should be open to the possibility that
our “morally libertarian” moment has already significantly changed
what we actually feel to be base, and may change it further. And so
you can’t just use your gut as a guide either to whether we’re all
acting in bad faith, nor to what is “essentially” base or
noble.

It’s also terrible policy to make laws based on what you would
want for your own offspring because, as
Adam Ozimek points out at Forbes, “this is a country
of free people,” not millions of your kids. 

Whether you’d want your kid to do something is a terrible,
selfish, and self-centered way to think about policy. You hear
this kind of argument when it comes to drug use too. “Do you really
want your kid to be able to smoke pot?” But the laws of this
country aren’t the rules of your household. Stopping your kid from
smoking pot or becoming a prostitute isn’t our job, it’s
yours. 

Hear, hear! But while Millman seems to agree on this front, he
suggests that the level of exploitation and danger he imagines in
the porn industry may justify trying to discourage its existance.
Sure, “questions of exploitation are relevant to all
industries–even high paying ones,” he acknowleges,
but “consent to sex is more fraught and more fragile than
consent to being a forklift operator.”

This, however, depends on how you define “fraught and fragile.”
I’m guessing not many people take forklift-driving positions
because they just adore the work. People take jobs as forklift
drivers for the same reason people take jobs in porn—to make a
living—and we don’t hear complaints that this situation exploits
forklift drivers because they are under economic pressure to accept
dangerous work. Yet according to the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration, there are
about 85 deaths and 34,900 serious injuries related to
forklifts each year, with 42 percent of these involving the
forklift operator being crushed by a tipping vehicle. How many
people are killed each year by porn?