In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place. – Mahatma Gandhi
Last week I published “A Necessary Evil”, in which I pointed out that, though neither circumstances nor numbers can wholly turn an evil action good, they can make it better than the alternative. Killing someone in self-defense isn’t good, but it is an evil that is excused by circumstance; likewise the collective theft we dignify with the euphemism “taxation” to disguise the fact that it is both involuntary and accomplished via the threat of violence. In an ideal world, good people would always have the choice to do naught but good, and any evil actions they committed would be the result of moral weakness or loss of emotional control. But in the real world, good people sometimes have to consciously decide to commit evil acts in order to prevent or combat a greater evil; a whore, for example, might have to lie in order to prevent her discovery, abduction, brutalization and confinement by government thugs who might then impoverish her and consign her children to the hell of state custody.
The slope is a slippery one, and the excuse of “necessity” is often used by tyrants and lesser criminals to rationalize the most monstrous of crimes, such as the wholesale trampling of civil rights modern regimes have enacted under the aegis of “security” and “protecting the children” and the all-important “keeping people from enjoying themselves in ways that don’t benefit the rulers.” The faculty which determines whether an evil act is truly necessary or just a cloak for selfish motivations is that which we call “conscience”, and those whose moral compasses are either missing or underdeveloped are the world’s greatest enablers of evil because they subordinate their own personal consciences to the pronouncements of external authorities. In other words, they excuse or even participate in behavior they know to be wrong because an “authority” pronounces that behavior to be “right” in order to further his own purposes.
Of course, the opposite can happen as well; some people accepted as authorities by others have dependable moral compasses, and such people can accomplish tremendous good by helping other good people to recognize evil but popularly-accepted or officially-sanctioned behaviors for what they are. I don’t just mean great philosophers or spiritual leaders, either; every parent, teacher, writer, celebrity or other person with an audience, however small, has the moral responsibility to ensure that any moral pronouncements he makes truly come from his conscience rather than from a misguided need to advance an agenda at the expense of others’ freedom, happiness and physical needs. Bloggers obviously fall under this stricture as well, so I always think long and hard about complex moral issues before taking a stand on them one way or another, for fear of inadvertently influencing people to embrace a wrong merely because it might advance a cause in which I personally believe. Well, there’s an issue I’ve been mulling over for a year and a half now, and I’ve finally decided it’s time to share my judgment on it. In my column for November 5th, 2010 I wrote:
Interrogators have long understood something which both terrorists and pacifists alike fail to understand, which is that human nature tends to respond only to BOTH the promise of reward and the threat of punishment used in tandem. Terrorism fails because it offers only violence, and pacifism fails because it offers only the reward of keeping the non-violent protesters happy, but the classic “good cop, bad cop” scenario works because it offers both. Not even children consistently respond to the promise of the carrot without the threat of the stick; why then should we expect adults to, most especially the self-important adults who set themselves up over their fellows? The civil rights movement worked because Martin Luther King and other peaceful protesters offered an attractive alternative to the race violence which had escalated since soon after the Second World War, but without the looming specter of race war their peaceful protests might never have accomplished anything. In more recent times the peaceful activism of mainstream “gay rights” groups offered an attractive alternative to the disruptive antics of groups like ACT-UP and the quiet violence of “outing”. Perhaps one of the reasons that the prostitutes’ rights movement has languished in futility for four decades is that there is no threatening alternative; maybe the “good girl” activists like those of SWOP, Desiree Alliance and myself need a few “bad girl” groups who run around outing politicians, disrupting fundamentalist religious services and neofeminist meetings, hacking prohibitionist websites and spying on police to publicly expose “stings” so the government will have some compelling reason to consider the reasonable alternative of decriminalization.
As of now, I’m officially removing the “perhaps”. The lies of prohibitionists, the oppressive laws, the police brutalization, and the official propaganda have to end; the sick need to control what individuals choose to do with their own bodies, energies and property is such a great evil that, in my deeply-considered opinion, the use of lesser evils in combating it is justified. Not lies, mind you; lying to advance the cause of sex worker rights will in the end only harm us. I was thinking more in terms of fighting lies with truth, namely truth about our oppressors. Though I’ve always believed it was wrong to “out” clients under any circumstances, I have had a change of heart: the situation has become so grave that I will now hail any outing of the sexual practices of prohibitionists, even by the sex workers who would otherwise have the ethical duty to keep their clients’ secrets. This doesn’t mean I will approve of whores’ exposing clients who have made no public stand on the subject one way or another; what I’m encouraging is the outing of politicians, judges, actors, journalists, preachers and other public figures who have publicly harmed or encouraged oppression of sex workers by their laws, rulings, writings, speeches, interviews and the like. It’s time the public knew the truth about the men who publicly condemn us or work to make our lives miserable while secretly forming a large segment of our clientele.
Unfortunately, I can’t start the ball rolling myself; when I retired only six years ago prostitution wasn’t nearly as big an issue as it has become, and I’m unaware of any anti-prostitution actions committed by any of my regulars. I will, however, do this: if any working girl wants to expose such a figure, I’ll be happy to give her space in this column in which to do so. The crusade against people engaging in mutually-beneficial consensual private behavior has to stop, and I’m willing to accept the karmic burden of encouraging and enabling harm against the crusaders in order to hasten the day when it does.
One Year Ago Today
“May Updates (Part One)” reports instances of bad cops and bad customers raping whores, a proposal to decriminalize prostitution and drugs in Detroit, and the effects of drug decriminalization in Portugal.
Hmmm. Not so sure. I’ve always thought it just part of my job to not talk about clients in specifics. But if a client was dangerous, or a rip off I would warn other working girls. I suppose, ethically, this falls under that heading. But we didn’t go public on it.
I’ll have to think about this, very hard. Like you, I’ve been retired now for almost 7 years.
Yes, that was exactly what let me make the final determination; such men are dangerous not merely to individual girls, but to our whole profession. And also not just to the girls they date, but many they’ve never met. They’re basically “bad dates” writ large.
Well I say – it’s about time.
I really don’t see the ethical dilemma here and never have. The thing is – the guys who hold the power will use any means necessary to keep it. They play dirty, they coerce, they use threats of violence. They pump up false fears and they fiddle the public into adopting those fears.
You don’t get anywhere in this rodeo playing “Mr. Nice Girl”.
I would suggest you go even further – and do some “sting” like work like James O’Keefe did on ACORN. Surely a group of call girls, or retired call-girls could get together and do some video stings on cops – starting with the jerks in New Orleans.
And, speaking of New Orleans – what a dump. I just went in to the West Bank on Wednesday to do some movie extra work on a film called “The Tomb” – I’m playing one of the “ninja-looking” prison guards (really wanted to be a prisoner but, oh well) – anyway, that damn place is worse than Tijuana – actually, NOLA makes TJ look like Tokyo. I can’t believe how bad NOLA has gotten.
I agree. My husband says it’s like a Christmas tree: it just doesn’t know it’s dead yet.
I drive a 4-wheel drive pickup and I thought … “goddam I need an ATV to get over these potholes!”
I suspect that an act that is a ‘necessary evil’ committed for ‘the greater good’ is called such not because the act itself is evil, but because there is a flaw in the moral code of the society in which the act has become necessary. Right and wrong are laws that are taught essentially from birth so that a child will grow up in its society with an instinct for which behavior is most acceptable in their society. Moral codes are ‘instinctive laws.’
For example, Murder is not inherently evil, evidenced by societies in which killing, under certain circumstances, was not just consider not evil, but actually a good thing (Viking war philosophy being the most dramatic example, but societies that practiced ritual sacrifice probably did not consider it ‘evil’)
Making it okay to doing something ‘evil’ only opens people to accepting things that really are evil on the promise that it is ‘better than the alternative’ without anyone actually looking too deeply into what that alternative is. If someone is forced into a behavior that is considered wrong by society in order to prevent something considered even more wrong by society (or in many cases, by the individual), obviously someone messed up the rules. One does not design a board game in which a situation can arise where a person needs to break a rule in order to avoid breaking a more important rule! If that happens, you don’t say ‘oh, well, sometimes it’s okay to break the rules’, you change the damn rule, even if the only change is ‘this is the rule unless this happens’. Otherwise, they’re not rules, they’re suggestions.
Obviously moral codes are not laws and cannot be changed in a court room (despite a lot of, ahem, mean people, who try to do that) In order to change a moral code, one needs to retrain people to think of something that once was bad (or good) as good (or bad). I don’t think violence is always necessary: for example, the ‘quite violence of outing’ was not the same as race wars. That outing was the clue to society on the whole that that problem existed in the first place. If those clue are ignored for too long, if more and more suffering people are brought to light but no changes are made, that’s when the violence starts. I also think that what really is giving the gay rights movement momentum is not that they are starting to fight dirty, but that more people are coming to accept homosexuality as normal and okay. (I actually think that the movie ‘Brokeback Mountain” did a lot more for the gay rights movement than most people want to admit, because people went to see it and realized that gay oppression is wrong, and it’s just taken its time for people to accept that realization. It paved the way for people like Lady Gaga to be able to get away with… a lot… without half of the crap Madonna received for the same behavior (how many of Madonna’s videos were banned vs Lady Gaga’s).
I think that in order to get more people to accept prostitution for what it is, people need to be exposed to its positive side more. No society is going to make laws the majority considers wrong (like SOPA), and if their minds are changes about what is wrong, the laws will change to reflect that.
The more I try to make sense of the world, the more realize that people would be a lot better off if they stopped trying to justify things as ‘moral’ before they actually manage to define what the rules of morality are. Then they could admit that morality is a lot more personal than they originally thought, and they’d stop making laws to change other people’s morality and just focus on making laws that reflect the moral codes we all agree on.
Oh, yeah, and hypocrites should always be called on their antics. Seriously, who do they think they are?
I wrote a column on “necessary evils” last week; this one is a follow-up to it. I think this one makes a lot less sense if read in isolation. My point about gay rights is not that it succeeded by fighting dirty, but rather that the “peaceful” gay rights folks provided an attractive alternative to the “violent” ones, which as I wrote in that earlier-referenced column is the only way peaceful revolutions ever succeed (consider the end of British colonialism in India and the fall of the Soviet Bloc; though in the latter case the largest threat was external, that does not falsify the carrot/stick model).
In your last paragraph, I agree that a moral sense is personal, but morality itself cannot be; the essence of morality is that it governs one’s external actions, not private and consensual ones. That which governs private, consensual reactions is not morality but rather mores, which are a different thing which should not be subject to legislation.
Sorry, I should have made it clear that I agree that the good cop bad cop method is definitely more effective than just one or the other, and I agree that duality is the best solution to conflicts that are not essential morality conflicts. In the case of conflicts that involve morality, like prostitution, I don’t think it’s the only, or even most important, factor in changing things. I think that removing the negative connotations surrounding an oppressed group of people is the only way to resolve the conflict, and that the ‘positive alternative to a negative one’ is just one way to motivate the people who can change the morality of a society to start making those changes. I point this out because, in some cases, dramatic action may not be the safest course, and I think that martyrs are a very terribly casualty to the more active methods.
I don’t think making that distinction between mores and morality is productive since they come from the same source, which is social conditioning. Morality is the rules of engagement for humans, and it various considerably between societies. I’m not sure I understand how you can separate morality into those that are individual and those that are not. If you are Christian, you have Christian morals, and if you’re American you have American morals too, and the only thing that is personal is how those are blended together in your mind. All the problems I see are that people don’t make a distinction between the types of moral codes for the various societies in which they belong. All Americans are Americans, but not all Americans are Christians, and when people with Christian morals forget that, they try and make American and Christian morals the same thing.
I think it’s pretty easy actually.
The dividing line should be drawn at the point that the “conduct” becomes harmful to someone else’s freedom, liberty, or civil rights. I can’t just walk up to someone and punch them in the face (that’s assault). I can’t say things that are untruthful about a person for the purpose of harming them. When I sign a contract – I have to obey it, otherwise the other parties who are part of that contract are harmed. Those are things that society should enforce.
But any religious morals? No. Those aren’t societal morals – those are personal and each individual “buys into” them personally – and should be allowed to discard them when he or she wishes. Religious people have no right to live in a religious society unless it’s on a privately owned compound or something and even then they should be subject to the standard societal code of “harm no others”. Now, I’m sure there is something in the Koran that says it’s a “believers” duty to burn cities that live by what Allah considers to be an immoral code. However, in the Christian Bible – which I’m no expert on – the only thing like that which comes to mind is Sodom and Gomorrah – and GOD DESTROYED them (not man). And by dammit – God got every RIGHTEOUS man and woman out of those towns before he destroyed them – so why do Christians worry? Time and again, in the Christian Bible – God enforces his morals through the use of his wrath. The Hindus – well they have Karma, which should be guided by a divine hand (not man’s). So why does God – the “Supreme Being” need any help in enforcing the codes of morality that he has directed men to live by?
He doesn’t. In fact, one of the foundations of just about every religion in existence is the fact that men are imperfect. Even after they’ve embraced the doctrine – they’re still considered imperfect while they reside on this plane of existence. Why does a “perfect” God require “imperfect” beings to enforce his will on other imperfect beings that don’t wish to obey? The answer? He doesn’t.
I don’t think we agree on exactly what a society is. I would say that a society is any group to which an individual belongs. Therefore people can, and most often do, belong to many societies. There are church societies, political societies, geographic societies, philosophical societies, ect. These societies are influenced by the individuals that make them up, and vice versa. I’m fairly certain this definition is supported by modern psychology, but I don’t have any of my books with me right now, so you’ll have to confirm that.
Given that definition, there is little practical difference between a religious society and a political one other than the type of power they can exert over an individual. Currently most of the power resides with political societies, but religious societies still hold sway in a more cultural context. The church can’t legally burn heretics any more, but it can definitely still excommunicate people, and heavily religious communities can shun people who are not a member of the local church with social abuse that can be just as damaging as any stay in prison.
I don’t see how you can say that a political society is any less a choice than a religious one. A child who grew up in a heavily catholic community did not choose that society any more than they chose the country they were born in. Upon reaching adulthood people can surrender their citizenship just as readily (if not as easily) as they can their religion, and they can become the citizen of another country just like they can become a member of another church. The difference is, primarily, that political societies are often bound by geography, and religious ones are not.
It is a moral choice, albeit a philosophical one rather than a religious one, to say that no person has the right to impede on another person’s freedom. That is the foundation of the American society, and we even have our own ‘bible’ (the constitution) that outlines our moral code.
So I still fail to see either the way or the reason to distinguish between a ‘personal’ morality and a ‘societal’ one other than those ways in which I have already specified.
Oh, and, in my experience, using a religious text as a source in a philosophical argument is always a terrible idea because of the prevalence of contradictions in such texts. In one part of the bible God would literally open up the earth and destroy someone who spoke against him, and in another he did… nothing… with no explanation whatsoever as to why the change of heart. Religious texts don’t really try to make sense, they just try not to change (at which they do not succeed).
Such people certainly deserve to be outed. My only concern, especially if you are publishing someone else’s story/claims is their reliability and ability to back up their statements when lawyers start talking about libel actions.
Don’t worry, I’ve considered that as well. I won’t publish anything like that without consulting my lawyer about proper arse-covering first.
Really, what’s to stop some whore-basher from making up a story (“I blew Cheney’s dick!”) and then giggling while you get sued? I hope you and your lawyer are considering the possibilities of outside agitators.
It looks as if it was undercover cops who did most of the spitting on soldiers during the Vietnam years. Today, Occupy is getting advice from some of the old hippies: if anybody is advocating violence, just assume that he’s a plant.
And the “hooker” who starts outing famous people could be a plant, too. I know you’re smart enough to think of this without me, but I feel better having said it.
As far as the morality is concerned, I think a prostitute should take all names with her to the grave… unless her trust, as a prostitute, is betrayed. Hypocrites give up the harlot/client privilege, as far as I’m concerned.
Yes, I thought of all that; she’d have to be pretty convincing. At the same time, I couldn’t simply say, “Hey, y’all do that while I sit here and cheer you on” without making some sort of substantive offer.
Yeah, I guess that would be pretty chicken shirt of you. One of the things about taking a stand on principle is that it isn’t as easy as just letting somebody else deal with it. I have to admit that I’m a bit proud of you. Worried, but proud.
That means a lot to me, you know. 🙂
Maggie, one thing I meant to ask you about. About a year ago, Michigan restaurants starting saying they would not serve politicians who supported smokings bans in restaurants. Do you think a similar boycott from prostitutes of politicians, etc. who support prohibition would do any good (assuming it would even be possible)?
I sort of thought this was coming based on your comments on Deborah Palfrey. I had to admire your courage to call for this.
Well, the Spanish escort’s association seems to have had luck with it. The problem here is that American whores aren’t organized yet, and until we are we will have no power. That’s what columns like “An Example to the West” are about.
Just discovered the blog, very nice. I agree with your considered philosophical stance here. Another example: Anyone who brings up Gandhi and the peaceful Indian independence movement needs to also read up on Subhas Chandra Bose and the Indian National Army (which was the aggressive side of that coin, and likely a graver concern to Britain when they pulled out).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_National_Army
This article tangentially reminds me of a moral theory that states that in the presence of aggression you do not have the same moral obligations that you would otherwise have, because in that situation you are in, it is not a moral exchange, thus, to use the often cited example, telling a lie to a murderer at the door who wants to know where their intended victim is, is not evil or immoral.
On side note: Man, do I love a column where the comments section is as interesting and rewarding as the article. On the web, when I read an article that I mostly agree to, I want to read the comment section for dissenting arguments, but mostly don’t because of all the flame wars and non-arguments.
OH YEAH!!1!!! Well look here, you, you…
Yeah, you’re right. 😉
If we ever have a justice system in this country again, people like Elliot Spitzer will end up serving life sentences for aggravated hypocrisy.
-jcr
Instead, he now has his own TV show. And when he says he’s turned over a new leaf and is now advocating for the decriminalization of prostitution, I’ll start watching it.
I’m not holding my breath.
If justice were to be served, Spitzer would have that gummy “where are my dentures” look (that he probably thinks looks pensive and contrite) glued to his face for eternity.
And for a quick and dirty distinction between interpersonal choices properly not subject to laws and those that should be so subject, I recommend Lysander Spooner’s Vice are not Crimes
http://mises.org/books/vicescrimes.pdf
This isn’t even an ethical question. If someone is attacking you under the cover of hypocrisy then fighting back is self defence. No, it’s a business issue: i.e.,, once clients get the idea that discretion isn’t a given, that anonymity isn’t inviolate, then they might pause? But even then, I think not, because where prostitution is legal then criminal activity by a client will be reported by a prostitute – he has not right to privacy in such a situation.
I mean come on, this isn’t about good cop bad cop at all. It’s about people that push for a particular law that they themselves systematically break whilst victimising those in a position of weakness as they are doing it. It’s not “fighting dirty” at all – it’s just fighting.
Reading Krulac above, and reflecting on my own thoughts, is this some sort of male/female difference here? I don’t think too many men I know would think twice about bringing anyone down who was a threat to them and those that depend on them with analogous tactics.
It’s just so simple. If someone were pushing to strengthen anti-fraud laws but was secretly carrying out fraud, you’d expose them. Why is it any different here? It isn’t.
Isn’t this a form of the “ends justifying the means” type of argument? Now, I’ve never been able to understand why the ends shouldn’t justify the means, though this seems the expected philosophical outcome. It does make you think through exactly what your “ends” and your “means” are. Here, your means are (include) the outing of hypocrites, and I guess that your ends include the decriminalization of prostitution and reform of the US police — and politicians; and education of the populace.
Clearly, you need good legal advice. And it might be wise to set up an “outing” website, and to link to it from here, rather than posting here.
Good on you for having the guts.
If it were me it would extend to those supporting criminalization of any consensual activity. The French Revolution showed that witch-hunts don’t stop until they become as dangerous to the people who began them as they are to the intended targets.