On banning prostitution (of a particular sort)

So, this Spitzer thing. Much commentary from male writers on the broader issue of prostitution and the merits of legalizing it; you may fruitfully begin your traversal with Ezra Klein or T. Cowen or even A. Tabarrok (whom I usually find odious).

My comment is simple and not at all original. There are many different ways of exchanging money for intimacy — physical or otherwise — that are not only legal, but mostly socially accepted, as long as one does them discreetly.¹ Here are some of them:

• It is legal to pay someone to go out on a date with you, and even be physically intimate with you (hugs, kisses, cuddling, etc.), as long as there is no explicit quid pro quo w.r.t. genital contact.
• It is legal to pay someone to give you a sensual massage, as long as the massage does not involve direct prolonged genital contact.
• It is legal to pay someone someone to strap you to a bench and strike you with a whip for your sexual satisfaction.
• It is legal to pay someone to take off their clothes and dance in front of you for your sexual satisfaction.
• It is legal to pay someone to perform arbitrary sex acts on camera with you, and then either sell or give away the video.
• It is legal to have sex with someone who would not be having sex with you if you did not buy them many gifts and support their lavish lifestyle. (Fun personal note: I have a (female) friend who knows a girl who once said, quite frankly, "I am not going to sleep with a man until he has spent at least a thousand dollars on me." See also this Valleywag post. See also all four characters on Sex and the City, none of whom ever dated a $25k-annual-salary social worker as far as I know.)

The upshot is that everything is permitted, except the straightforward transaction of exchanging a modest sum of money for someone else to privately give you an orgasm by applying friction in the genital area. If you're sufficiently rich, or if your particular sexual kink does not require penetration, or if you like to have sex on camera, prostitution is legal for you. Laws against "prostitution" — which is to say, one very narrow subgenre of sexual commerce — are a hypocritical, hairsplitting exercise in moral hysteria and a massive waste of law enforcement resources.

Finally, I want to point out one more thing. The argument that (one narrow flavor of) prostitution should be illegal because it's closely linked to organized crime and human trafficking is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

"Prostitution" is undoubtedly tied to organized crime in part because society frowns upon it so much that respectable businesses don't want to be involved in it. Organized crime is fundamentally inefficient, due to unprotected property rights, unenforceable contracts, illiquidity of capital, and all the other standard problems that come with operating a business without the protection of a well-run modern government. If a business like McDonald's or Starbucks ran brothels, they would drive organized crime out of the market pronto. People like Nicholas Kristof heap opprobrium on "prostitution" and then bemoan the inevitable results, namely that women and girls get exploited by criminals.

This is roughly equivalent to the scam whereby Republicans get elected and trash the government every couple of decades, and then point to their own incompetence as proof of their ideology that government doesn't work. It is like pissing on the rug, and then complaining that the rug stinks of piss.²

---

¹ Bonus link: The Purchase of Intimacy, by Princeton sociology professor Viviana A. Zelizer, has been on my to-read list for a long time. Perhaps I will finally order it.

² In fact, I hereby coin a new term for this fallacy of reasoning, akin to "poisoning the well" or "begging the question": "pissing the rug". To piss the rug is to endorse a course of action which leads to a bad outcome, and then blame those who disagree with you for the bad outcome. The grandest example of pissing the rug in recent times is, of course, the Iraq War apologetic wherein liberal war opponents are blamed for the bad consequences that would follow withdrawal. Oh, wait — Kristof did that too. Maybe we should just call it the Kristof Maneuver.

Two intellectually bankrupt argumentative tactics

As follows:

1. "You're getting angry. Thererefore, there must be some merits to the argument you are attacking."

Ridiculous for transparently obvious reasons. The emotional tenor of a debater has no bearing on the correctness or incorrectness of his or her argument. Yet, this tactic is frequently employed in all seriousness, usually by people who have no better counterargument to put forward.

Now, for any particular person, there may be some statistical correlation between one's emotional tenor and one's beliefs about the merits of the argument under discussion. For example, when a position with which I disagree has some merits or subtlety, then I can take some intellectual pleasure in figuring out why it's still wrong. In such cases, my prose tends to remain fairly neutral in tone --- see, for example, my discussion of the death penalty versus war.

However, when an argument strikes me as having no redeeming features whatsoever, then I transmogrify into a volcanic fountain of vitriol and contempt. See, for example, my post about Jonah Goldberg.

In such situations, there are several possibilities. Either the person making the argument knows that it's ridiculous, or he does not. In the former case, he's trying to deceive his audience by making the argument. In the latter case, either he hasn't thought very hard about the argument he's making, which means he's consciously wasting his audience's time, or he's too stupid to see how flimsy his argument is. Now, if he's deceiving his audience, or wasting his audience's time, then I claim that anger (or at least contempt) is, in fact, the proper response to his behavior. He's inflicting harm on his audience, and some altruistic punishment is in order. Only in the last case --- i.e., he's too stupid to see the flaws in his argument --- does he deserve any sympathy. And frankly, when that stupidity is paired with arrogance, as it so frequently is, it's really hard to muster sympathy even in that case.

Now, once again, none of this really demonstrates anything about the merits of the argument under discussion. I could be furious, but mistaken. I just thought it might be worth explaining when and why I, personally, tend to display anger in my own writing when an argument's absolute nonsense.

2. "You just claimed that I possess [bad trait X]. Therefore, you are engaging in ad hominem and your argument is wrong."

Also ridiculous for transparently obvious reasons. People who use this argument unadorned do not understand what ad hominem means --- it denotes an argument wherein one makes the following (invalid) chain of inference:

• Person P has the property X.
• X is bad.
• Therefore, the argument A advanced by P is invalid.

Notice that ad hominem is not a synonym for "insult". If you make a charge of ad hominem, then it does not suffice to show that someone has been insulted. It is necessary to show that the insult was used as evidence that the argument is unsound.

However, I often see the above argument confused with the following one:

• Person P advanced argument A.
• Argument A is so ridiculous that it could only be advanced by someone having property X.
• Therefore, P has the property X.

Now, this chain of argument is perfectly valid. In most cases, it does not take a terribly discerning eye to distinguish this argument from the prior one. If you attack the person first, and use that attack to back up a conclusion about the argument, you probably have argumentum ad hominem. If you attack the argument first, and use it to back up a conclusion about the person's character, then you probably have the latter argument. Nevertheless, many people fail to distinguish the two, and thereby reveal themselves to be idiots.

Exercise for the reader: Which one is the last sentence of the previous paragraph?

A final note: Use of either of the above argumentative tactics demonstrates mere intellectual bankruptcy. To use both of them at once requires a special, additional helping of argumentative incompetence --- because, of course, the first argument is actually a form of genuine ad hominem.

---

p.s. In case you're curious as to what prompted this, all of the above has been a way of mining some usefulness from this random babbling (which came up on Technorati links here) by extracting general rules from a specific instance of intellectual bankruptcy. You can, perhaps, amuse yourself by counting how many times this writer (who claims to have some training in philosophy) makes the above errors, but you're probably better off not clicking the link.