1 Lars, Ericsson, “Charges Against Prostitution: An Attempt at a Philosophical Assessment,” Ethics 90 (1980): 335--66.Google Scholar

2 In my view, Nozick is not a genuine contractarian, as he posits a set of rights that exist before any social contract, hypothetical or actual. I shall not defend this claim here.

3 David, Finkelhor, “What's Wrong with Sex Between Adults and Children?” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 49 (1979): 692-97.Google Scholar

4 I am setting aside the factual issues involved here. Let us grant the assumption, controversially, that divorce is overall harmful to children, even if they recover from the harm. It is possible that acrimonious marriages are at least as bad for children as acrimonious divorces, and that such marriages are common. It may be possible to argue in favor of the badness of marriage with children on such grounds, although I will not attempt to do so here.

5 NAMBLA (North American Man Boy Love Association), for example, insists that such interactions are beneficial. There are clearly pedophiles who do not care about the morality of their actions, but if persons do not care about the morality of their actions, they cannot with consistency complain they are being treated unfairly when those actions are prohibited and punished.

6 Claudia, Card, “What's Wrong With Adult Child Sex?” The Journal of Social Philosophy 33 (2002): 170-77Google Scholar, and Laurence, Thomas, “Sexual Desire and Human Ends,” same volume, 178-92.Google Scholar

7 Thomas “Sexual Desire and Human Ends,” 185.

8 Martha C., Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 263.Google Scholar

9 We might consider how we would feel about breastfeeding if it should turn out that, for one reason or another, breastfeeding is nutritionally inferior to formula. (Breast milk typically contains, e.g., residues of DDT and other chemicals. Perhaps a ‘super-formula’ with all of the benefits of breast milk but none of the pollution could be created.) How would we then feel about a woman who continues to breastfeed simply for the erotic pleasure it gives her?

10 The same problems exist with respect to adult-animal sexual interactions. Such interactions are not as often discussed, but there is no reason to think they are for that reason uncommon. The lack of visible prosecution of such actions is really only evidence of the even greater lack of power on the part of animals.

11 In particular, men who pay women for sex are said to be exploiting them. Cf. Catherine, MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989) 248Google Scholar, and Carole, Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 189–219.Google Scholar Both regard both prostitution and sexual surrogacy of women as exploitative.

12 Here I rely on Alan Wertheimer's understanding of coercion, as defended in Coercion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).

13 Margaret Jane, Radin, Contested Commodities: The Trouble with Trade in Sex, Children, Body Parts, and Other Things (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 133.Google Scholar

14 Elizabeth, Anderson, Values in Ethics and Economics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 155.Google Scholar

15 Indeed, most feminists agree that, as a practical policy matter, prostitution should be in some way decriminalized, since the criminalization harms women. See Laurie, Shrage, Moral Dilemmas of Feminism: Prostitution, Adultery, and Abortion (New York: Routledge, 1994), 82.Google Scholar Shrage herself favors a “socialist and feminist regulation” of prostitution (161), which aims not only at protecting the rights of prostitutes but at reducing its “commercialization.“

16 For example, Ericsson, “Charges Against Prostitution,” and Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice.

17 Pateman, , The Sexual Contract, 193-94.Google Scholar

18 John Stuart, Mill, The Subjection of Women, ed. Susan Moller, Okin, (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1988), 33Google Scholar. What is new, however, is Pateman's insistence that such a contract is a “prerequisite” of the social contract. I shall not evaluate this ambiguous claim here.

19 It appears that Pateman intends by this term ‘classical Liberal’ or ‘libertarian.'

20 Pateman, , The Sexual Contract, 198.Google Scholar

21 Anderson, , Values in Ethics and Economics, 154.Google Scholar

22 Pateman, , The Sexual Contract, 198. See also Pateman, “Defending Prostitution: Charges Against Ericsson,” Ethics 93 (1983): 561-65, 563.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 Pateman, “Defending Prostitution,” 563.

24 Pateman does not seriously consider the possibility that selling oneself into slavery would ever be morally permissible. It is worth noting that libertarians are not so sure. See Robert, Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 331.Google Scholar

25 Pateman, , The Sexual Contract, 206-7.Google Scholar

26 Pateman, , “Defending Prostitution,” 561.Google Scholar

27 A very serious one may be lodged against the premise of this discussion: namely, that we are mistaken in thinking that prostitution is everywhere and at all times the same phenomenon. Laurie Shrage persuasively argues that it would be a mistake to think that prostitution in early twentieth century post-colonial Kenya is the same as what happens on the streets of American urban centers or is the same as what happened in the public brothels of medieval France. I agree and wish only to engage the issue of whether a version of prostitution as it is now practiced in the West could ever be defended if we extricated it from patriarchy. But Shrage makes it clear in her survey of recent histories of prostitution that there have been places and times in which prostitutes suffered no loss in status by virtue of their profession. She does not argue that in those cultures there is no patriarchy. However, she does argue that in those cultures prostitution is not experienced as degrading - which at least gestures toward the possibility of “sound prostitution.” So while there is danger here of falsely universalizing the Western experience, we can avoid this danger by restricting the scope of our analysis. Schrage, Moral Dilemmas of Feminism, Chapter 5: “Comparing Prostitutions.“

28 Ibid., 98.

29 I think it is also due to the fact that women are expected to be the repositories of traditional values. Just as men from developing nations often sport oxfordcloth shirts and Dockers while their wives are encouraged (or forced) to wear ‘traditional’ (non-Western) garb, women are expected to display sexual virtues to a degree that men are not.

30 This is not to say that sexuality is at some level unconstructed. Nussbaum's characterization of Greek eros shows that whatever biological groundings there are for sexual desire, one's culture plays a key role in forming the categories for conceptualization of sexuality and having emotions through those conceptions.

31 Nussbaum, , Sex and Social Justice, 285.Google Scholar

32 Susan Moller, Okin, Justice Gender and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989).Google Scholar

33 Ruth, Sample, Exploitation: What It Is and Why It Is Wrong (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003, forthcoming).Google Scholar

34 Nike pays its workers as little as fifteen cents an hour to produce its running shoes in Indonesia. These shoes, which retail for between $73 and $135 in Europe and the United States, cost a total of about $5.60 to produce. See David C., Korten, When Corporations Rule the World, 2d ed. (Bloomfield, CT and San Francisco: Kumarian Press and Berrett Koehler Publishers: 2001), 115.Google Scholar

35 Elizabeth Anderson, for example, simply asserts that in order to ensure “the full realization of significant opportunities to value heterosexual relationships as shared and personal goods” requires that we reject any commodification of sex. She is not, however, in favor of criminalization of prostitution, for pragmatic reasons. See Anderson, , Values in Ethics and Economics, 155.Google Scholar

36 Granted, sexual relations are by definition not a solitary activity, and if everyone converted to a commodified sexuality, then there would be no recourse for a handful of holdouts.

37 This applies to the case of male prostitutes as well as female prostitutes. While men do not suffer from patriarchy as women do, many male prostitutes are no less vulnerable, but for other reasons.

38 Steven, Seidman, Embattled Eros: Sexual Politics and Ethics in Contemporary America (New York: Routledge, 1992), 187--89.Google Scholar

39 Ruth, Sample, “Why Feminist Contractarianism?” Journal of Social Philosophy 33 (2002): 257-81.Google Scholar

40 Alan, Wertheimer, Exploitation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 278-80.Google Scholar