Abstract
I analyse the tension between a plausible liberal view of sex work and the similarly plausible idea that rape and other forms of sexual violence are made morally worse by their sexual nature. I find no conclusive reason to drop the liberal view of sex work, at least as long as the concept of voluntary and informed consent at the core of it is robust enough to account for the realities of prostitution around the world; nor should we abandon the idea that rape is no ordinary immoral act: reducing sexual violence to non-sexual violence would misrepresent the relevant phenomena and perpetuate injustice.
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Notes
Here is how the World Health Organization defines sexual violence by the way: “any sexual act, attempt to obtain a sexual act, unwanted sexual comments or advances, or acts to traffic, or otherwise directed, against a person’s sexuality using coercion, by any person regardless of their relationship to the victim, in any setting, including but not limited to home and work.” (http://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/violence/global_campaign/en/chap6.pdf) Here see for example Brownmiller (1975), West (1996), Cahill (2001), Gavey (2005), Halley (2008) and Heyes (2016).
Since writing this paper I have been made aware of an argument by David Benatar which has some similarities to my argument here (Benatar 2002), where he distinguishes between a so-called significance view of sexual ethics and a casual view of sexual ethics and uses the distinction to put pressure on some of our fundamental intuitions about acceptable and unacceptable sexual practices. By the end of my paper you will see that differently from Benatar’s, my dilemma will actually move towards a resolution between the two horns. Many thanks to an anonymous referee for this suggestion.
Differently from Benatar (2002), for example.
This is as good a place as any to say the following: we should be weary of focusing too much on rape itself in our analysis; that is clearly the most horrible form of sexual violence but overusing it—in our examples, for one—may direct focus away from the many other widespread forms of sexual violence—sexual misconduct, sexual assault, sexual harassment; that is why here I often go to the trouble of mentioning the longer list instead of always only referring to rape.
If you prefer, this could also be expressed counterfactually: some instance of sexual violence is made by its sexual nature worse than it would have been had it not been sexual in nature—but it’s not clear what that would even mean, given that we are talking about instances of sexual violence.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for this suggestion.
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Di Nucci, E. Sex: we can’t have it both ways. Monash Bioeth. Rev. 37, 38–45 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40592-019-00095-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40592-019-00095-9