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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> Prostitution is a victimless crime.

Only in the same sense as selling organs or babies (or conspiring to fix prices) is a victimless crime. There are instances where society legitimately chooses to make certain consensual interactions illegal because of the implications that conduct has for everyone else. As 'tedks points out below, turning sex into a commodity has real implications for the status of women in society as a whole. Moreover, as with selling organs or selling babies, there's a strong belief that such transactions are usually only technically voluntary, and are driven by economic duress more than anything else.

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>Only in the same sense as selling organs or babies (or conspiring to fix prices) is a victimless crime.

Selling your own organs is definitely a victimless crime. Arguably the baby you are selling is the victim of a baby-selling scheme. The victim of a price-fixing conspiracy is the consumer (though every member of the conspiracy has an incentive to defect and sell at a lower price, so presumably the individual members of the conspiracy are also in some ways victims of the scheme, to the extent that the scheme is actually enforced upon them somehow).

> turning sex into a commodity has real implications for the status of women in society as a whole

In a society in which a hefty part of the male population thinks that buying a woman drinks or even dinner entitles them to have a happy ending, this statement is very cynical.

Au contraire, I think that allowing people to pay for sex might actually de-blur some lines here. If you want quick sex for money go to a prostitute. If you want companionship that at some point get intimate enough to end in sex, date someone. If you buy someone dinner do that because you want to and not with an implicit expectation of getting something in return. Jeez.

The biggest difference between sex for money and sex for free is that sex for money usually ends up costing a lot less.

I didn't come up with that but I do feel comfortable quoting it.

>>In a society in which a hefty part of the male population thinks that buying a woman drinks or even dinner entitles them to have a happy ending, this statement is very cynical.

There's a significant difference between buying someone dinner and expecting sex, and paying them money for sex. The former is a favor that is done as a form of signaling and courtship. The latter is a monetary transaction that formalizes the objectification of one party.

I think it crosses some sort of a line away from favour or courtship when one party thinks buying a meal means they are _entitled_.

“You’re not inviting me in? But I bought you dinner!”

I find that sort of logic and thinking very disturbing.

Doesn't that depend on how you define economic duress? If we are talking about voluntary prostitution in a country with a welfare state then does it count as coercion if the person chooses prostitution over a minimum wage job because it pays better?

> If we are talking about voluntary prostitution in a country with a welfare state then does it count as coercion if the person chooses prostitution over a minimum wage job because it pays better?

Here's an interesting question for you: is the public entitled to make prostitution illegal,[1] on the basis that they don't like the sociological implications of selling sex becoming an alternative to getting a minimum wage job? I think they are quite entitled to do that.

[1] Though I prefer how Sweden does it: to make buy sex illegal, but not selling it.

That really depends on how libertarian you are and whether you believe that by definition selling sexual services for money will always make somebody worse off than being poor.

It doesn't have to make the prostitute always worse off, or worse off at all. Many other people might be impacted as a result of the changes in social dynamic from turning sex into a commodity.

That would be a good argument if criminalizing prostitution made it go away, but only a very foolish person would believe this to be the case.

Would it necessarily have any impact outside of the people engaging in it? It won't turn all sex into a commodity.

Everything in the universe is impacted by everything else that happens.

That's a useless tautology.

Even if there is no welfare state or any form of social safety net, it's still better to have the choice between prostitution and starving to death than for starving to death to be the only possible outcome.

> turning sex into a commodity

But prostitution doesn't do this. A commodity has full or near full fungibility, i.e. "one sex" is (almost) substitutable by any other "one sex". Obviously this isn't true for sex.

Well, it's certainly truer for prostitution than it is for conventional relationships. Use fuzzy logic to process the truth here.

For this commoditization to be meaningfully damaging to women (which is what the GP claims), it must cover both prostitution and relational/emotional sex. The kind of sex you have with a prostitute (legal or not) is substantially different from the kind of sex you have with a lover.

I don't think your analogy is particularly accurate.

If I was to sell one of my organs, it would A. have an immediate detrimental effect on my health and B. be permanent. Further, the state has a very high probability of paying for some or all of my medical care post-op.

If I sell a baby, I am selling something that is not my property. If I am the parent, I have some claim to the baby, but not one of direct ownership. So in truth I am selling something that is not mine. In reality, what you would be selling is your lack of action in defense of your paternal rights. That is, in fact, a victimless crime. However, the administration of those rights is not yours alone, but also your community's. You can't sell that, so you'd be lying to whoever you gave the child to if you implied that you could.

Lots of decisions and transactions are only technically voluntary and are driven by economic duress more than anything else. Working a dead end job, working a dangerous job, being a roofer or garbage man or flagger. Joining the military. Being a lumberjack. Hell, being a fisherman in many cases.

A lot of these jobs are dangerous. They're accepted, though. If I work as a lumberjack, it's not because I have a choice. It's because otherwise I would be homeless and this is a skill I can employ to feed and house myself.

I downvoted you because you lumped "Joining the military" in the category of jobs that "are only technically voluntary and are driven by economic duress more than anything else." That's surely true in a few edge cases, but not in the vast majority (unless things have changed dramatically). And I'll accept the downvotes that I'm sure are coming.

Yeah, I meant that it can be. Also remember that we're not simply talking about the U.S. here; in many countries people join the military because they see no other choice, not because they want to.

My ex was career military. It was his dream career, the only thing he wanted since childhood. But, like anything, for some people it isn't so voluntary. The American military is more "color blind" and thus a better opportunity for black Americans than many civilian jobs. So when the Gulf War broke out, blacks were "overrepresented" in the military and this became a political hot potato: What had been a good opportunity in peace time was now a serious risk to life and limb for an inordinately high number of blacks and this was seen as another form of racism in America, basically.

Plus, in many countries there is a compulsory term of service.

Selling organs is absolutely a victimless crime. Selling babies, depending on exactly what you mean by the phrase, sounds to me like the baby is the victim.

> As 'tedks points out below, turning sex into a commodity has real implications for the status of women in society as a whole.

The real implications would be that prostitutes would most likely be safer and more wealthy.

> Moreover, as with selling organs or selling babies, there's a strong belief that such transactions are usually only technically voluntary, and are driven by economic duress more than anything else.

A choice made out of economic interest is still "voluntary" under the definition used in this context. Your claim seems to be that if the only two choices are selling your kidney or starving to death, then selling the kidney is not "voluntary." But if those were really the only two choices, and you ban selling the kidney, then the only scenario remaining is that the person starves to death.

> Selling organs is absolutely a victimless crime.

I don't think there is anything wrong with making illegal, as unconscionable, transactions in which the poor give up their most basic human capital. It's "the rich get richer, the poor get poorer" at the most vulgar level.

> A choice made out of economic interest is still "voluntary" under the definition used in this context.

I think that's a very impoverished definition of "voluntary."

> I think that's a very impoverished definition of "voluntary."

Are you suggesting that it's not voluntary if the choice makes the person better off? So is an action only voluntary if it makes the person worse off? That doesn't make much sense to me.

I'm saying that decisions made in the face of economic coercion must be scrutinized and potentially voided, not because they don't directly make the individual better off than they would otherwise be, but because they normalize the coercion and make it harder to prevent a race to the bottom in society as a whole. No transaction is entirely between two individuals. Every transaction happens within and creates signals within a larger market.

> I'm saying that decisions made in the face of economic coercion must be scrutinized and potentially voided

But if the person's only options are 1) starve to death or 2) become a prostitute, then prohibiting the second option means the person will starve to death. If there's a third option, like 3) work as a cook at a restaurant, then the person can choose between options 2 and 3, and if they choose 2, then it must not have been economic coercion like you suggest.

Economic coercion need not mean having only starving to death as the alternative. It can be any situation which a significant differential in economic resources is involved. There's lots of people who can't get a regular job but don't starve to death, for various reasons, but are still in a desperate situation.

> [economic coercion] can be any situation which a significant differential in economic resources is involved

This is a pretty benighted attitude. Where you're choosing between a comfortable life and a more comfortable life, why does picking the second option indicate coercion?

I didn't mean to imply that imminent starvation is the only example of a desperate economic situation. I was just using that as an extreme example.

You implied that just because someone could be a "cook at a restaurant" means there isn't any economic duress. But that's not true. Thanks to modern demand scheduling, many of these service jobs are both extremely poorly-paying as well as physically unpleasant. Taking advantage of someone in that position is taking advantage of economic duress.

Obviously there's no clean line as to how the alternative courses of action have to be before it counts as duress. But we don't have to draw the line clearly in order to be able to make the distinction.

I'm not sure I grasp your argument here. Jobs at places like restaurants are themselves "extremely poorly-paying" and "physically unpleasant" because of economic coercion and the power imbalance between employee and employer; the employees know that if they complain or refuse to come in on short notice, their hours will be given to someone else and they won't be able to pay the bills. Many women actually say they prefer sex work because it doesn't have these coercive power dynamics and they have more control.

You seem to be arguing that women who do sex work are under "economic duress" because the alternatives are so awful, therefore we should make it illegal, forcing them into back those awful alternatives. That seems backwards to me. Surely we should be banning the shitty, coercive minimum wage jobs, not the sex work women are choosing in preference to them?

> Taking advantage of someone in that position is taking advantage of economic duress. Obviously there's no clean line as to how the alternative courses of action have to be before it counts as duress.

It sounds to me like your distinction is that if any person makes less money than any other person, then the first person is under economic duress and thus is incapable of making any voluntary choices.

You're vastly oversimplifying my argument, and reducing complex human interactions to economic platitudes.

Sex is not like every other human interaction. If you forced someone to answer phones for eight hours, it is unlikely they would be traumatized in the same way as if you raped them for eight hours. Its different.

Not every transaction between people in unequal economic circumstances is suspect, but we're not talking about every transaction. We're talking about something much more intimate and emotional. Such transactions are far more suspicious.

We're not talking about rape here. So that's a non-sequitur.

You're moving goalposts.

Ironically, it sounds like he has in essence devised a clever way of stripping poor people of their autonomy.

I don't think there's any dishonesty behind those arguments, but just economic misunderstanding.

All decisions are made in the face of economic coercion, because every decision is made to cater to one's reward function.

What you are saying is absolute nonsense in light of decision theory.

Mike Munger proposes Euvoluntary for the kind of transaction you're alluding to: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2011/06/munger_on_excha.htm...

All employment is driven by economic duress.

Few would work if they didn't have to.

Therefore; work is evil and it is morally imperative that we create a society where it is unnecessary.

Money is an artifact of scarcity.

From each according their desires, to each according to an equitable resource distribution heuristic prioritised on a Maslovian basis.

Let the machines labor so that humanity may be free.

facetiousness factor: 0.5 < n < 0.95

Once we have androids for this task I wonder what will happen to the sex industry. What are the moral implications of buying a female android companion in the 2045 edition of Amazon.com

What are the moral implications of buying a Roomba from Amazon now?

Same thing.

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