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Comment by thepasswordis | Hacker News Reader

Who could have possibly predicted that a company which mechanized the process of targeting and turning young teenage girls into prostitutes would have a dark side?

If onlyfans happened in person, the people behind it would be in prison. They market to teenagers, and as soon as they turn 18 encourage them to prostitute themselves to men over the internet. It is a disgusting, horrible company that we should be ashamed exists.

This company, like other pimps before them, have persuaded young, often times desperate women, into packaging and marketing their humanity to people. It taught them that their friendship and companionship is a product to be sold.

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You have to be 18 to sign up. It's like saying the military is a mechanized process turning young men into troops. Some people sign up for the military before they graduate high school, and gladly. There has to be some arbitrary age where a boys and girls become an adult, when they can and must accept responsibility.

That is low quality comparison.

Whether or not you agree with the high goals of the (US?) military; for a great many people it is a solid career, a role model they never had, and possibly a stepping stone out of an awful life. Also a very small percentage of these are actually fighting in infantry risking their lives.

This is much different than saying "Ooh youre 18 now, look how much money these 3 people make selling their naked videos! And there is absolutely no consequence at all to this, for you or your society!"

Getting naked on camera vs killing people in foreign countries - I know which one I'd like my children to pick.

Getting abused by pimps vs protecting their mother country - I know which one I'd like my children to pick.

Choosing the extreme version of one and the benign version of the other seems pretty handy.

One upside of OnlyFans is that you do not need a pimp.

There is a difference between a random eastern european camgirl and an OnlyFans account.

You can also close your OF account the second you don't want to do it. Try doing that with the military :)

Maybe this is controversial, but I think the US army does less good for society than an OnlyFans model.

> Also a very small percentage of these are actually fighting in infantry risking their lives.

The idea that risk of life in the military is exclusive to the infantry (or even “combat arms” more generally) is...pretty ludicrous.

And the military is systematically and manipulatively marketed to young people at least as much as online sex work is.

you know that military recruiters often target high schoolers, often for enlisted infantry positions right? how is that any better?

It's mostly boys, and vulnerable boys don't seem to matter as much as vulnerable girls.

< Who could have possibly predicted that a company which mechanized the process of targeting and turning young teenage girls into prostitutes would have a dark side?

While I might ethically disagree with their business model I don't think your assessment is fair. Their platform is certainly a step up from those same individuals getting into the industrial porn industry.

But the vast majority of them wouldn't get involved in the industrial porn industry, so you reduce the harm to a small number of people while increasing the harm (by a lesser degree) to a much larger number of people.

This sounds like a utilitarian argument. Unfortunately, that means the weights of the increased harm vs. decreased harm are what determines the morality. And those are arbitrary.

one could believe it is low harm for a young person to use OF, but massive harm to be in the traditional porn industry, and conclude that OF is a net plus. Ie, this argument is circular and based on preconceptions rather than a critical examination of the evidence.

> This sounds like a utilitarian argument. Unfortunately, that means the weights of the increased harm vs. decreased harm are what determines the morality. And those are arbitrary.

Well, yeah and with a deontological argument, chosen moral axioms are what determine the morality, which are equally arbitrary. All arguments of “should” have arbitrary values at their root.

OP was explicitly making a utilitarian argument, one that did not present relative weights or other assumptions about population size. On that, it failed to make its point, which is what my comment was about.

If you wish to say that most philosophical arguments are people reinforcing their previously held beliefs, I would not argue with you.

> OP was explicitly making a utilitarian argument

No I wasn't. I was making an HN comment, not engaging in moral philosophy, which I find boring and arbitrary. It's no coincidence that the preferred moral philosophy under any regime is one that is favorable to that regime. Thus the Greeks had virtue ethics, Nazis a bastardized Nietzscheanism, and our contemporary society Rawlsianism.

I actually agree with your criticisms, they were obvious to me when I wrote the comment, but we must ultimately decide what sort of world we want to live in (or have it decided for us), and I would prefer one without OnlyFans, that such a world is a fantasy for the foreseeable future is besides the point.

You may find the formalization boring and arbitrary, but independent of that, your argument was one of utility.

An alternative argument, if you wanted to avoid such droll dry topics, would have been to say "I don't want OnlyFans to be a thing." Instead, you made an argument based on moral philosophy to support your opinion. That's totally fine! It also doesn't change the fact that your comment evaluated the moral utility of whether our world is better or worse for existing.

You could make this type of criticism of literally any moral argument (swapping out utility for whatever the underlying criteria is in alternative moral frameworks). This is why post-modernist philosophy has become dominant in the modern world. There is no successful response to it other than to ignore it and and realize that it is all, "boring and arbitrary" as I said earlier.

Edit: Also, as I learned from a post-modern adjacent philosopher, Richard Rorty, there is sometimes benefit in making arguments in different moral frameworks even if you believe they are all ultimately arbitrary: different people are convinced by different lines of reasoning. But ultimately, I post on HN because it is fun.

I agree with you, if you are looking for the output of a moral philosophy equation to spit out an answer. However, I think it is more useful as a series of questions that help us understand the reality, as you mention.

If moral philosophy is boring an arbitrary, then what study or language is a better vehicle for discussing these ideas?

> and our contemporary society Rawlsianism.

Uh, what?

Since when is that the preferred moral philosophy in contemporary (presumably American?) society?

It's shorthand. Rawls is certainly compatible with whatever moral philosophy is prevalent throughout American media/legal discourse.

Edit: The reason I chose Rawls is because no one will agree on what moral framework modern society operates under but Rawls is compatible with most such proposals.

Edit 2: I am interested in what you would propose as an alternative, however.

> I am interested in what you would propose as an alternative, however.

I would, rather than suggest a candidate for the prevalent moral framework under which modern society operates, reject as fairly obviously false the notion that such a thing exists; modern society is characterized (even, say, in the US on isolation) by conflict between multiple competing mutually-incompatible moral frameworks, with temporarily dominant coalitions characterized by groups coming together against others that the see as a greater current threat than their current transitory partners.

I agree with that on a micro-level, but zooming out I think there is commonality among all the views present in post-war Europe and USA, in the same way that Greek philosophy has a coherency when seen today despite the incompatibility of its various philosophers teachings.

< But the vast majority of them wouldn't get involved in the industrial porn industry

This is a great claim that has no evidence.

What percentage of people have an OnlyFans? What percentage of people get involved in the conventional porn industry? Is one much higher than the other (yes). Is the evidence rock solid? No. It rarely is, but that doesn't mean you can dismiss it out of hand.

I can dismiss making up numbers and conclusions based on no evidence. Just because you think something is true does not mean it is.

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