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LIBERTARIANISM AND THE SEX TRADE ARGUMENT

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 December 2015

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Abstract

The work of MacKinnon, Pheterson and others is cited to examine what are commonly described as libertarian arguments for the decriminalization of sex work. Original Marxist lines of analysis are also examined, and it is concluded that the dangers of sex work outweigh the notion that there is no compelling state interest in suppressing it.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2015 

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References

Notes

1 Hugh La Follette, The Practice of Ethics, Malden (MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 180.

2 Robert Nozick, as cited in Tom L. Beauchamp, Philosophical Ethics (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1982), 236. (Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), n.p.)

3 This group, the name of which was an acronym for ‘Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics’, was active in the San Francisco Bay Area decades back, and its meetings and demonstrations were often reported in the local media.

4 Catharine A. MacKinnon, Are Women Human? (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 249–250.

5 Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press), 51–2.

6 The very term is in dispute, and for reasons that mirror the debate itself. An excellent compendium of pieces on this and related topics is Prostitution and Pornography, ed. Jessica Spector (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). In that volume Tracy Quan notes, ‘Th[e] acronym for ‘commercial sex worker’ [CSW] infuriates some activists – who prefer Sex Worker – because ‘commercial sex work’ is a term invented by researchers and bureaucrats.’ (342).

7 Spector, in ‘Introduction’, ed. Spector, 3.

8 Gail Pheterson, The Prostitution Prism (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996).

9 Pheterson cites some particularly telling examples on pages 32–3.

10 See, for example, Raqiyah Abdallah, Sisters in Affliction: Circumcision and Infibulation in Africa (London: Zed Press, 1982).

11 Pheterson, Prism, 93–4.

12 Pheterson, Prism, 17–18.

13 Ibid., 14.

14 Elizabeth Bumiller, May You be the Mother of One Hundred Sons (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1990), 115.