The Ethics of Pornography

As with our earlier post on the Ethics of Gambling, I don’t intend to debate whether the creation, distribution or consumption of pornographic images involving consenting adults is morally right or wrong; if your personal belief system forbids such things that’s your business, and no affair of mine. But the question of whether the creation, sale or consumption of such images is ethical from a business standpoint is another issue – especially considering the case from last month where a young couple had turned to creating amateur pornography (of themselves in the bedroom) in order to pay their mortgage and support their infant daughter. So, if we can, let’s leave the prudes and the perverts to their usual internecine warfare and take a closer look about the ethics of this often maligned business…

To begin with, we have to consider that many of the negatives cited by those who oppose this industry are already criminal (and in some cases, civil) offenses; the use of under-age “performers” or “models” is illegal, as are the use of coercion, drugs, and potentially fatal working conditions. The fact that such conditions do exist within the industry is not irrelevant, to be sure, but it’s not an indictment of the industry by itself, anymore than the prevalence of drunken driving is an indictment of the alcoholic beverage industry or the use of gasoline in firebombs in an indictment of the petroleum industry. If there are individual companies – or even individual people or couples – who are making money, paying their expenses, making a living, paying their employees and suppliers and creating both profit and personal benefits, can we dismiss the entire industry on the grounds that some people within it are abusing their employees, exploiting our right to free expression or committing crimes in order to make money?

On the other hand, there is definitely merit to the argument raised in our Ethics of Boycotts case, that any failure to extend proper respect to another person is wrong, and that the ongoing practice of doing so is degrading not only to the people being exploited but to our entire society. Despite what some of our more wild-eyed critics seem to be implying these days, most businesspeople are not actually willing to do anything for money, and most of us are, in fact, concerned with trying to make a living while remaining within reasonable moral and ethical guidelines. As much as we might all want to enable struggling young couples to raise the money to feed their children and decent business leaders to pay their employees and vendors (and return good profits to their investors), can we accept the consequences of doing so when the products they are producing have this much potential for long-term harm?

Obviously, this isn’t a new question. The actual creation of pornography predates the invention of the camera by at least three thousand years (probably longer), and elements of American society have been obsessed with the question of what is or is not smut for longer than the U.S. has existed. And while it’s doubtful that the Founding Fathers were specifically thinking about pornographic movies when they wrote the First Amendment, there can be no doubt that they found the idea of government-imposed standards for publications to be abhorrent, and were planning accordingly. So in addition to the usual questions of moral good versus commercial/economical good, we should probably also ask if curtailing the civil liberties of our citizens because some percentage of our society does not like their materials is ethically supportable – and if it is, where do we draw that line, and who gets to draw it?

I’m not advocating the creation of dirty pictures (or books, or movies, or .jpeg files) anymore than I am any of the other things I discuss in these ethics posts; I’m just raising the questions. Does the good done by this industry outweigh the harm it causes? For that matter, does the good that might (or might not) result from eliminating it outweigh the harm that would certainly be caused by state-sponsored censorship and the imposition of somebody else's standards of morality on the public? You can consider this industry (and its output) as vile, reprehensible or harmful as you like, but do we, as businesspeople, have any ethical responsibility to anyone to eliminate it (or its output)? And even if we do, can we take any such action without violating our own Constitution?

It’s worth thinking about…