PJ Media

Jeffersonian:

The moral argument against using or engaging in prostitution is that sex is far too valuable to be treated so shabbily, and money is not the proper currency or reward for intimacy with another immortal soul. We justly feel disgust when a person marries for money or convenience but not for love and companionship and children because money and convenience are not the proper currencies or reward for marriage whereas love and companionship and children are. But sex is the ceremony of marriage: You have never made love to another human being without in some sense marrying your soul to theirs.

It is true that pornography and masturbation and cynicism and love affairs conducted foolishly and ended badly and the cheapening of the whole subject in Hollywood movies and by the example of others have, collectively, rendered most folk insensate to the above. It is like deadening a nerve, or building calluses on one’s fingertips. A lifetime of staring at the sun or a moment of stabbing out one’s own eyes can render a person oblivious to the beauty of a magnificent painting even when standing right in front of it: The painting is still beautiful; he has lost the faculty of seeing it.

The person who does not intuitively perceive at least some inkling of the way the nature of sex makes it unbuyable without doing violence to the intrinsic dignity of humanity is in the same position as a man who cannot gaze up at a redwood tree without thinking “lumber” and who cannot perceive the ocean as anything more meaningful than so many billion tons of cold salt water. It is not (unless they are a psychopath in general) that they were born without the ability to sense the holiness of human physical love. It is only that modern life and culture and our own decisions so often tend to kill this awareness in us, just as southern plantation culture used to kill awareness of slavery’s evils in the hearts of otherwise good folk in the early 1800′s.

There’s the moral argument. Of one’s own volition, one ought not be a prostitute or use their services.

Having said all of that, prostitution should probably be legal. For the question of legality greatly involves morality (there is no such thing as legislation that does not, in some sense, “legislate morality”) but the question does not end with “is the thing moral or not?” For prostitution, both its offer and its use, we have that answer: But now we proceed to further questions, such as:

1. Is it moral for me to use or threaten force against my fellow citizens to prevent them engaging in sexual activity for bad reasons, when they are the only two persons harmed by it?

2. If the answer to Q.1 is “No,” then the further question is, “Is it moral for me to employ an intermediary or agent to do something on my behalf which it isn’t moral for me to do, myself?”

I think the answer to Q.1. is “No”: It would not be moral for me to wave a gun at someone to prevent them from harming each other through consensual sexual activity, immoral or not. It is not that they have a “right” to do it, in the moral/natural-law sense, for there is no such thing as a natural right to do a morally wrong thing. It is only that, if they do the wrong thing, I have no just moral right to prevent or punish it by the use or threat of force.

I am even more confident that the answer to Q.2 is “No”: I have no just moral authority to send an employee (which includes the government) to do something I myself have no just moral authority to do. After all, the government “derives its just authority from the consent of the governed” and is delegated any authority it has from the states or the people (c.f. Amendment X). One cannot delegate what one does not have.

Therefore,

YES, prostitution is immoral; and,
NO, it ought not be outlawed because using force to prohibit prostitution is also immoral, whether that force is exercised personally by the individual or by his employees, the government.