Immorality and “self-abuse”

Ross Douthat’s response to the Noah Millman post I discussed here says most of what I think it ought to have said, but I think it still trades too heavily on the language of “self-abuse” that I was objecting to:

Selling or buying sex is a grave form of self-abuse, rather than a minor one. It’s a public vice, rather than a private one. It’s hard to stamp out, but you don’t have to invade people’s homes to significantly restrict it. And it’s a practice that “the greater part of the multitude” are perfectly capable of abstaining from, since there’s no innate inclination toward buying or selling sex. Whereas sodomy laws, by forbidding gays and lesbians from pursuing sexual and romantic intimacy, attempt to enforce a heroic adherence to natural law, anti-prostitution laws are far more minimalist in their aims, and far less invasive. It’s cruel and unreasonable for the law to demand that Andrew forswear sexual relations with the man he loves; it’s perfectly reasonable, and not at all cruel, for the law to demand that Eliot Spitzer forswear sexual relations with a high-class hooker.

To which Will Wilkinson can very easily respond:

Even granting the assumption that paternalistic efforts to protect adults from the consequences of their own choices are justified, which I certainly don’t, the claim that prostitution is, by its nature, a kind of self-harm is pretty clearly false.

Exactly – or, rather, that’s exactly what you get when you transform what is for most people the straightforward issue of the plain-and-simple immorality of prostitution into the much more complicated question of the kind of “abuse” it does or doesn’t involve. Note, for instance, the difference between the talk of “vices” and “evils” in the passages from the Summa that Ross cites, and the language that Ross himself employs: for Aquinas, it’s not just the question of whether a behavior is abusive that we need to consider in determining whether it’s a candidate for prohibition (although abusiveness is, of course, one thing that can contribute to making a behavior immoral), but rather the much meatier question of whether it’s something that’s wrong to do.

Now obviously this, too, is an issue about which the Wilkinsons and Douthats of the world are going to disagree, as is that of whether governmental “paternalism” can extend, in the right circumstances, to banning certain immoral behaviors simply on the basis of their immorality, and not just protecting citizens from whatever allegedly harmful “consequences” they might have. But while we’re on the topic of arguments we can win, it seems to me that we might as well stick to developing the kinds of positions that are going to be persuasive to the average person. And it’s highly likely, I think, that such a person’s way of thinking about why prostitution ought perhaps to be (or remain) criminalized has got a lot more to do with his or her beliefs about its immorality simpliciter than with the question of whether it is or isn’t a form of “self-abuse” (whatever exactly that is supposed to mean). Moreover, ordinary people’s intuitions about what makes something immoral tend to be pretty robust, but I doubt whether the same is true for the putatively self-abusive. And so why should we saddle ourselves with the commitment to put the point in the latter sort of way?

To be fair, I think that this is pretty much what Ross was trying to get at with his talk of “grave self-abuse”, and he does employ the language of “vices” now and again in this second post. But that doesn’t change the way that people are reading what he’s saying (see, for example, the first sentence of this response), and so I still think that this is a strategy that complicates things unnecessarily, and makes this debate an unduly hard one to win: until I remind myself that there’s a sense in which any sinful behavior can be understood as self-abusive, Wilkinson’s case against putting prostitution in that category actually strikes me as pretty compelling. But is it “pretty clearly false” that the buying and selling of sex is immoral? No, definitely not.

[UPDATE: With Ross, let me also associate myself uncompromisingly with what Jim Manzi says here.]

[ANOTHER UPDATE: James Poulos gets it:

[...] the reason why prostitution is illegal must not be because ‘the state’ has some kind of ‘compelling interest’ in people not…not what? We can’t characterize the interest as compelling – and then describe what compelling even really means – until we plunk prostitution into some more abstract category that accounts for why it’s bad. This is the ultra-absurd version of what ought to be the real discussion, which begins from the notion that prostitution in and of itself is bad, that in describing prostitution we automatically describe why it’s bad, and therefore don’t need any vaguer and broader and more comprehensive set of badness terms against which we can put prostitution and say – aha! there, you see, prostitution threatens liberal values, ‘the state’ of the sort which we have can’t ‘be seen to support’ such behavior, or ‘has an affirmative interest in disincentivizing’ such behavior, etc., etc.

“Prostitution should be illegal because it is bad, and bad things should be illegal” – this is the logic of a culture with the confidence to take its own side in an argument. Incidentally it is also one that looks at politics as something slightly superfluous – we don’t need ‘the state’ to know that prostitution is bad and should be punished, even if we do delegate to ‘the state’ the not very noble task of going around and doing the punishing.

Exactly. Exactly, exactly, exactly.]

Filed under: government/law, morality, politics, religion