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Pornography, Public Morality, and Constitutional Rights

October 17th, 2011

by Robert P. George

Every member of the community has an interest in the quality of the culture that will shape their experiences, their quality of life, and the choices effectively available to them and their children.

Theorists of public morality–from the ancient Greek philosophers and Roman jurists on–have noticed that apparently private acts of vice, when they multiply and become widespread, can imperil important public interests. This fact embarrasses philosophical efforts to draw a sharp line that distinguishes a realm of “private” morality that is not subject to law from a domain of public actions that may rightly be subjected to legal regulation.

Considered as isolated acts, someone’s recreational use of narcotics or hallucinogenic drugs, for example, may affect the public weal negligibly, if at all. An epidemic of drug abuse, however, though constituted by discrete, private acts of drug taking, damages the common good in myriad ways. This does not by itself settle the question whether drug prohibition is a prudent or effective policy. But it does undermine the belief that the recreational use of drugs is a matter of purely private choice into which public authority has no legitimate cause to intrude.

Much the same is true of pornography. Even in defending what he believes is a moral right to pornography, Ronald Dworkin has identified the public nature of the interests damaged in communities in which pornography becomes freely available and widely circulates. Legal recognition of the right to pornography would, Dworkin concedes, “sharply limit the ability of individuals consciously and reflectively to influence the conditions of their own and their children’s development. It would limit their ability to bring about the cultural structure they think best, a structure in which sexual experience generally has dignity and beauty, without which their own and their families’ sexual experience are likely to have these qualities in less degree.”

In my 1995 book Making Men Moral and elsewhere, I have argued that Dworkin’s efforts to derive from the principle of equality a moral right to pornography never manage to overcome the force of the public interest in prohibiting or restricting pornography that he himself identifies. That interest is not, fundamentally, in shielding people from shock or offense. It is something much more substantial: the interest of every member of the community in the quality of the cultural structure that will, to a large extent, shape their experiences, their quality of life, and the choices effectively available to them and their children in a domain of human affairs marked by profound moral significance.

When we bring this reality into focus, it becomes apparent that the familiar depiction of the debate over pornography regulation as pitting the “rights of individuals,” on the one side, against some amorphous “majority’s dislike of smut,” on the other, is false to the facts. The public interest in a cultural structure–in which, as Dworkin says, “sexual experience has dignity and beauty”–is the concrete interest of individuals and families who constitute “the public.” The obligations of others to respect their interests, and of governments to respect and protect them, is a matter of justice.

It is in a special way a matter of justice to children. Parents’ efforts to bring up their children as respecters of themselves and others will be helped or hindered–perhaps profoundly–by the cultural structure in which children are reared. Whether children themselves ever get a glimpse of pornographic images in childhood is a side issue. A decent social milieu cannot be established or maintained simply by shielding children from such images. It is the attitudes, habits, dispositions, imagination, ideology, values, and choices shaped by a culture in which pornography flourishes that will, in the end, deprive many children of what can without logical or moral strain be characterized as their right to a healthy sexuality. In a society in which sex is de-personalized, and thus degraded, even conscientious parents will have enormous difficulty transmitting to their children the capacity to view themselves and others as persons, rather than as objects of sexual desire and satisfaction.

There is more to the picture. We know that a more or less unbridled culture of pornography can result in a sexualization of children that robs them of their innocence and even places them in jeopardy of sexual exploitation by adults. Can anyone honestly deny that we have ourselves witnessed a shameful sexualization of children in our own culture? The clergy child-abuse scandal is only the tip of an iceberg. The problem of pedophile sex tourism to places like Thailand is a dirty secret that will sooner or later break upon the American consciousness and conscience. Should we be surprised at such a thing? Think about the sexualization of adolescents in contemporary music, television, movies, and commercial advertising. Consider the notorious Calvin Klein ads on New York City buses depicting young people in sexually provocative poses. And now Abercrombie and Fitch has taken things to the logically next step by peddling thong swimwear to twelve-year-old girls.

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  1. Sean
    October 17th, 2011 at 15:55 | #1

    Americans will always place a great deal of emphasis on the right to privacy, and private behaviors. Moralizers have rarely succeeded in imposing their personal beliefs on others. And Americans generally oppose efforts to have the government oppose “fix” the wrongs perpetrated by a bunch of harmless individual actions that end up creating a social harm. Look at cigarette smoking, for example, or climate change: we each insist on doing our own thing, even to our personal detriment, even when it creates a collective malfeasance.

    Ultimately, for things like same-sex marriage, which are personally AND socially beneficial, there’s not much concern about the disconnect between personal behavior and social good.

  2. October 19th, 2011 at 07:27 | #2

    @Sean Pornography isn’t private – it is about as public as it gets!
    There is nothing beneficial to society in sanctioning homosexuality by approval of same-sex faux marriage. No one is preventing you from having a personal contract with one another without state approval. You aren’t interested in marriage – you are interested in the forced social approval faux marriage will give.

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