More on Pornography

Here's a great un-biased article I found on pornography. It's from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and seems to cover all the bases. It's long, but I would highly recommend it.

It covers the liberal support for "freedom of expression" as well feminist objections based on the perceived harm to women's civil rights and the conservative desire for legal moralism and legal paternalism.

"The principle is that mentally competent adults must not be prevented from expressing their own convictions, or from indulging their own private tastes, simply on the grounds that, in the opinion of others, those convictions or tastes are mistaken, offensive or unworthy. Moral majorities must not be allowed to use the law to suppress dissenting minority opinions or to force their own moral convictions on others. The underlying liberal sentiment here is nicely captured in the famous adage (often attributed to the French philosopher, Voltaire):'I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.'"

Some excerpts regarding "harm":

"Ronald Dworkin, for example, writes '…in spite of MacKinnon's fervent declarations, no reputable study has concluded that pornography is a significant cause of sexual crime: many of them conclude, on the contrary, that the causes of violent personality lie mainly in childhood, before exposure to pornography can have had any effect, and that desire for pornography is a symptom rather than a cause of deviance' (Dworkin 1993: 38)."

"The causal connection between consumption of pornography and violent sexual crime, if there is one, is unlikely to be a simple one. As some liberals have argued, it seems implausible to think that consumption of pornography, on a single or even repeated occasions, will cause otherwise 'normal, decent chaps' with no propensity to rape suddenly 'to metamorphose into rapists'.... Consumption of pornography may, on its own, be neither necessary nor sufficient for violent sexual crime

" .... However, the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography in the U.S., which submitted its final report in 1986, found that the clinical and experimental research ‘virtually unanimously’ shows that exposure to sexually violent material increases the likelihood of aggression toward women; and that 'the available evidence strongly supports the hypothesis that substantial exposure to sexually violent materials…bears a causal relationship to antisocial acts of sexual violence and, for some subgroups, possibly to unlawful acts of sexual violence' (Mappes and Zembaty 1997: 215)."

Link: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pornography-censorship/