The Immorality of Pornography
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Ken Stoye
Ethics 2050 – 014
April 19, 2005
The Immorality of Pornography
The argument over the morality of pornography can take shape in many different ways. In order to take a stance, its important to identify what exactly is included in the definition of pornography. In this paper, pornography will be defined as sexually explicit materials in which the acts depicted degrade or subordinate women. The degradation and subordination can occur through various different acts, but in an attempt to curtail the wordiness of the definition, those words are used to include any act that misrepresents or defames women. Erotica on the other hand, which is not part of the moral argument of pornography, is sexually explicit material that portrays the man and woman as more or less equals. It is with this distinction in mind, with regard to the philosophies of care ethics, utilitarianism, and deontology, that pornography is in fact wholly immoral.
Care ethics provide us with a good foundation for the belief that pornography is immoral. Care ethics is a branch of feminine ethics that defend, elucidate, and develop an attitude of care toward others based on the approach that women tend to have toward morally problematic situations. Followers of this idea do not argue that pornography is immoral due to its offensive nature. Instead, pornography is immoral because it is a type of sexual discrimination. Pornography subordinates women. As Catherine MacKinnon states, “Pornography isnt just a harmless fantasy, it is a practice that institutionalizes the sexuality of male supremacy” (MacKinnon 452). The women portrayed in pornography arent treated as equals, they are objectified and there to be used or violated. It is with this understanding that one can interpret that pornography doesnt necessarily create a feeling of pleasure for the viewer, but instead a feeling of power. To illustrate the immorality of the acceptance of the inequality that appears in pornography, MacKinnon provides a great analogy with regard to race.
“If you see Black people as different, there is no harm to segregation; it is merely a recognition of that difference. To neutral principles, separate but equal was equal. Similarly, if you see women as just different, even or especially if you dont know that you do, subordination will not look like subordination at all, much less like harm. It will merely look like an appropriate recognition of the sex difference” (MacKinnon 457).
Along with the inequality that pornography creates between the sexes, it also instills wrong beliefs in its audience. Through pornography, acts that are abusive towards women are able to be seen simply as sex. These include but arent limited to: rape, sexual harassment and battery. Thought it doesnt intend to, the portrayal of these acts in pornography has the effect of promoting and legitimizing them to its audience. Pornography is able to have this affect because to the viewers it isnt simply a fantasy, it is a sexual reality. It creates the illusion that women want to be treated as objects. With this misunderstanding of the wants of women, what is viewed in pornography is completely misinterpreted. MacKinnon covers this point very well: “What in the pornographic view is love and romance looks a great deal like hatred and torture to the feminist. Pleasure and eroticism become violation. Desire appears as lust for dominance and subordination” (MacKinnon 455). It is clear that through the depiction of women in pornography they are debased in society.
Utilitarianism also demonstrates the immorality or pornography. Before I can show how utilitarianism supports my thesis, let me first explain what this ideology is based upon. Utilitarianism is based on the principle of utility. Jeremy Bentham defines utility, whether it refers to an individual or the community, as “property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness or to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered” (Timmons 102). This states that the idea of utilitarianism is based upon judging the ends or results from the action, and not the action itself. Bentham goes on to describe utilitarianism by the principle of utility. “According to the principle of utility, the morality of an individual action depends on how much utility that action would produce, where utility is measured in amounts of pleasure and pain” (Timmons 102). In this belief, when an action has a tendency to produce more happiness than pain then it is said that the action is essentially moral. The difficulty with this ideology is the ability to judge whether the pleasure outweighs the pain. To do this there are seven factors that are used to weigh the pleasure versus the pain: the intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity (chance it has of being followed by sensations of the same kind), purity (chances it has of not being followed by sensations of the opposite kind), and the extent (the number of people that are affected by it)
In order to show the immorality of pornography with regard to utilitarianism, we must weigh the pleasures and pains created by it through each of the factors mentioned above. The pleasure or happiness that can be taken out of pornography would be through experience of catharsis for the individual viewing the material. The pain that is caused due to pornography would be the inequality and objectification of women that was mentioned previously. In comparing the two in terms of utility it is apparent that the pain of pornography would far outweigh the pleasure due to the extent and duration of the pain. This is true because the number of people who are affected negatively by pornography far exceeds those who experience pleasure. When an individual watches pornography, he alone is experiencing the pleasure at that time. By contrast, the entire population of women, as explained above, is being hurt indirectly by the ideas expressed almost subconsciously in pornography. This alone would seem to be enough to justify its immorality, but one could also take into account duration of the experience felt afterwards. The individual will enjoy a short-lived pleasure and those who profit from pornography will receive pleasure in the form of monetary augmentation, but that cant be considered to be of equal importance to the defamation of all women. This idea is reinforced by Roger Paden when he says:
“Pornography is designed for instant self-gratification, and that is a dangerous decadent character deforming way of life to teach children. It blunts