Overall Argument

Longino begins by explaining that traditionally, pornography was seen as immoral simply because it was a medium which depicted nudity and sexuality. Such a condemnation of pornography was rooted in puritanical views of sex--e.g., that all sex outside of marriage, or sex not intended for procreation, was forbidden, that certain kinds of sex, whether between married people or not was an abomination, and that sex between same-sex partners was sinful. (41) Of course, this presupposes a certain religious view that not everyone shares today. Moreover, ideally, no religious-based view should affect our laws. So if the intention of proving that pornography is immoral is an initial step to making pornography illegal, it can't be that the immorality of pornography stems from a religious view.

Longino claims that one of the advantages of the sex revolution of the sixties is that it paved the way for non-religious-based arguments for why pornography is immoral. The basic idea was to connect the immorality of pornography with the harm it may inflict on others. Since most people, religious or not, will agree that something is immoral if it causes injury or harm to others, then if pornography can be shown to be injurious or harmful to others, then it can be shown to be immoral, and, hence, there will be grounds for claiming that it should be illegal. So, Longino attempts to prove that "pornography is immoral because it is harmful to people." (42)

Notice that Longino's overall argument, then, is fairly simple:

    Premise 1. If something is harmful or injurious to people (or if can be shown to violate people in some way), then it is immoral.
    Premise 2. Pornography is harmful or injurious to people (or can be shown to violate them in some way).
    Conclusion: Therefore, pornography is immoral.


Premise 1

Longino doesn't argue for premise 1. Rather, she assumes that it is a basic moral principle that all people are (or should be) commited to.

We might discuss in class whether you think this is right or not--for example, whether something is 'harmful' or 'injurious' to a person can often be a complicated matter, such as when a short-term harm or injury is needed to prevent a long-term harm or injury (e.g., dental work), or when the prevention of one person's harm or injury causes harm or injury to another (e.g.,  abortion to save a mother's life). However, it seems fair to grant Longino the truth of 1 for now, since the majority of her article is dedicated to proving the truth of Premise 2.


Premise 2

    Defining Pornography

Longino begins her defense of Premise 2 by defining pornography. This is a typical approach in philosophy: before we can know whether something has a certain property--i.e., before we can know whether pornography is immoral or not--we better know what that something is.

Here is her first pass at a definition of pornography: "verbal or pictorial explicit representations of sexual behavior that...have as a distinguishing characteristic 'the degrading and demeaning portrayal of the role and status of the human female...as a mere sexual object to be exploited and manipulated sexually.'" (42)

She adds: "Not all explicitly explicit material is pornography, nor is all material which contains representations of sexual abuse and degradation pornography." (42)

And: "Books and films may contain descriptions or representations of a rape in order to explore the consequences of such an assault upon its victim."

And finally: "Pornography, then, is verbal or pictorial material which represents or describes sexual behavior which is degrading or abusing to one or more of the participants in such a way as to endorse the behavior." (43, italics Longino's)


    Potential Problems

There are at least three important things to notice about the above definition.

    (I) First, if this definition is used in anyway to argue for premise 2, then Longino skirts awfully close to begging the question--i.e., she appears to be assuming the very thing she is trying to prove, which is circular reasoning. If we assume that pornography is a "demeaning and degrading portrayal of the role and status of the human female...as a mere sexual object to be exploited and manipulated sexually," and that it also portrays these things 'in such a way as to endorse the behavior," (my emphases) then it will follow by the very definition of pornography alone that it harms or violates people. In other words, by loading the definition with certain negative value terms (the ones' I've italicized), she is making so that it follows directly from the very fact that something counts as pornography that it is immoral. Yet this is the very thing she is trying to prove, so she can't just assume it in her definition of pornography.

To put it another way, imagine that her opponent--someone who thinks that Premise 2 is false, that pornography is not immoral--is having a debate with her. Straightaway, he will reject Longino's definition of pornography. He has no reason to accept her definition, since it is already front-loaded with the presumption that pornography hurts people, and he more than likely doesn't think that it hurts people (I am assuming that both Longino and her imagined opponent both assent to premise 1).

    (II) Second, Logion's initial statement of the definition only qualifies as pornography those representations which are degrading and demaning to "the human female". This neglects sexually explicit material that is degrading and demaning to men, children, animals, and anything else one might imagine. So, for example, it seems that male, gay pornography does not count as pornography according to her intial definition.

In her defense, she does ammend this to a more sex- and gender-neutral statement later on, when she claims that pornography is any representation which is "degrading...to one or more of the participants." However, this seems to be unintended as a gender-neutral noun, since all of her examples and arguments for showing how pornography huts people are concerned with only women, and how only they are hurt or exploited.


    (III) Finally, notice that while her definition of pornography seems too narrow in one sense--i.e., it seems only to apply to representations that are demeaning and degrading to women--it seems to broad in another. For example, it may be that certain horror films which we do not typically consider pornography, and which are furthermore not classified in the adult section of the video store, say, are considered pornography according to Longino's definition. This also applies to fashion magazines and other books and movies that are typically not considered pornography.

Now, true. Longino will be happy with the broadness of her definition, for she wants to classify certain alblum covers and magizines such as Vogue as pornography. (47) Yet if her definition strays too far from our intuitive sense of what pornography is, then we will have little reason to accept her definition in the first place. And since she doesn't argue for why her definition is correct, but rather just states it, it shoudl at the very least have some appeal toour common sense notion about what pornography is.


    Moving On: Lies, Magnitude, and Violence

Leaving issues about Longino's definition aside for now, let us move on to her claim that pornography is libelous, and causes violence against women. Note that if she can prove that pornography is libelous against women--i.e., that it hurts women everywhere because it spreads lies about them--, or if it can be shown that pornography causes violence against women in some way or other, without resorting to Longino's definition of pornography, then her arguments for Premise 2 will not (obviously) be circular. So, below, we will summarize her arguments for the claims that pornography is libelous and causes violence against women, dismissing when required any arguments that rely on her definition of pornography.

Longino claims in sections III that "[p]ornography, by its very nature, requires that women be subordinate men and mere instruments for the fulfillment of male fantasies." (45) Of course, if by "by its very nature" Logino means 'folllows by the very definition of pornography', then she's right. However, notice that this is circular, and thus, fallacious.

    Lies

Yet she claims that in order for pornography to accomplish making women "subordinate men and mere instruments for the fulfillment of male fantasies",  that  "pornography must be a lie." She continues, "Pornography lies when it says that our sexual life is or ought to be subordinate to the service of men, that our pleasure consists in pleaseing men and not ourselves, that we are depraved, that we are fit subjects for rape, bondage, tortue, and murder. Pronography lies explicitly about women's sexuality, and through such lies fosters more lies about our humanity, our dignity, and our personhood." (46)

So Longino claims that (i) pornography by its very nature makes women subordinate to men and instruments of their pleasure, and that (ii) in order to accomplish this, it spreads lies about what woman are like and what they want.

Since (i) seems to rest on Longino's definition of pornography, let's look at (ii) alone. For even if (i) is false, if (ii) can be shown to be true, then assuming that libel and slander are immoral (and illegal), then this will be enough to show that pornography is as well.

In order for something to be a lie, there has to be--at the very minimum--some sort of intent to deceive. It would do no good to tell someone (or some ones) something false if they already  knew it was false. So, for example, telling fictional stories or tall tales are not considered lies, since it's assumed that both the teller and the hearer understand that what's being said is false. A lie involves telling someone something you believe to be false, but which you try to convince your listener is true. So, for example, a politician telling his public he did not embezzle money from public funds when in fact he did, and furthermore knows he did, is clearly a lie.

So, is pornography more like the telling of a tall tale--a piece of fiction--or more like that of a politician trying to deceive his public?

No doubt there could be quite a debate about this. But the important point relevant to Longino's article is that she does not give an argument either way. Rather, she merely asserts that pornography lies, with the added claim that, because of the anonymous nature of the women portrayed in the film, it is a general lie about all women everywhere. (46)

Moreover, notice that if pornography is considered a lie, then all trouble could presumably be solved by having a disclaimer at the beginning of all pornographic material. Something like: "The following material you are about to see does not represent any real person or persons and does not intend to be an accurate representation of any realistic characteristics of any human beings. This is a complete work of fiction; it is fantasy. The makers of this film are entirely exempt from the responsibility of any viewer who takes away from this film any moral message or any true statement about real life. No person acts like this or should act like this and if you, viewer, think that they do, you are one sick puppy." Etc...


    Magnitude

She claims that "[e]ach work of pornography is on its own libelous and defamatory, yet gains power through being reinforced by every other pornographic work." She continues: "The sheer number of pornographic productions expands the moral issue to include not only assessing the morality or immorality of individual works, but also the meaning and force of the mass production of pornography." (46)

Notice that this is a different claim than that pornography is a lie. It is a claims about the magnitude of the moral offense, since production and distribution of pornographic material is so pervasive. And, admittedly, it might be true that if the production of an individual pornographic piece is immoral, then mass production of it would be something even more egregious. (Consider the parallel argument: if killing one person is bad, killing a million is even worse.)

Yet notice that Longino's opponent--again, someone who grants the truth of Premise 1 but denies Premise 2--could agree with Longino's point here. That is, it is easy enough for Longino;s opponent to agree that if pornography is wrong in one case, then it is even worse when there's mass production of it. He could agree, in other words, that the magnitude of an offense can intensify the immorality of it. But all of this is conditional upon morality being immoral in the first place, which is the very thing that is at issue. So Longino's claim about the magnitude of the immorality of the mass production of pornography, while perhaps true, is contingent upon the very conclusion that Longino is arguing for, and which she has yet to prove.

    Violence

Next, Longino claims that there is an empirical link between pornography and violent, sexual acts such as rape and domestic abuse. If there is such a link, then this will be enough to establish the truth of Premise 2.

But there are two points to note here. First, as even Longino herself admits, the empirical evidence supporting this claim is inconclusive at best. Second, as soon as a philosophical problem turns empirical, it no longer becomes a philosophical problem. This doesn't make the argument any worse, of course, but it does make the issue a purely empirical matter that can be solved simply by going out and getting statistics of crime rates and how they are related to availability of pornography. If the empirical data shows there is a correlation, then Premise 2 is true, the case is closed, and all the philosophers can go home. If not, then it is still and open debate whether 2 is true or not, and philosophers may still have some work to do.

   
    Moving On: Pornography and the Law (Free Speech)

Typically, a defense of the rejection of premise 2--i.e. a defense of the claim that pornography does not hurt people, and that, moreover, banning pornography will hurt people--is an appeal to the First Amendment.

The argument we discussed in class went like this:

    Premise 1: Pornography is a form of speech.
    Premise 2: Freedom of speech is protected by the First Amendment.
    Conclusion: Pornography is proteced by tthe First Amendment.

Longino claims that while it is true that freedom of speech is protected by the First Amendment, it is not true that ALL speech is so proctected. For example, "the incitement to violence in volatile circumstances, solicitation of crimes, perjury, misrepresentation, slander, libel, and false advertising" are all forms of speech that are not protected by the First Amendment. So there are limits on the kinds of speech that are allowed, legally. So, the question now is: does pornography count among those kinds of speech that are exempt from protection from the First Amendment, or not? In other words, is pornography, as a form of speech, more like the mere voicing of an opinion, or is it more like slander, libel, or false advertising?

Longino clearly thinks that pornography is like the latter, making it one of those forms of speech that are not protected by the First Amendment. But her argument for this claim is rather short, and arguably unconvincing to someone who doesn't already agree with her. (We will discuss this point further in class.)

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