Porn - Philosophy for Everyone: How to Think With Kink (5 page)

Ways of Valuing Lives

There are as many ways of valuing lives as there are kinds of values. A life may be morally valuable, aesthetically valuable, intellectually valuable, historically valuable, and so on. For any such value, we can say with a straight face that one leads a “good” or “bad” life; that is, good or bad relative to whatever value we mean when we make the judgment. Sometimes these evaluations overlap. Mother Teresa, for instance, lived a morally and historically significant (that is, good) life.While these values are distinct, the fact that they often overlap and the fact that we use the same evaluative terms for each (good, bad, and so forth) creates ambiguity.This ambiguity is responsible, we think, for the concern that the porn industry propagates poor quality of life. It is based on confusing, once again, the moral quality of one’s life with one’s welfare.

What exactly distinguishes moral quality of life from prudential wellbeing? When we are talking about the welfare, or wellbeing, of an individual we mean roughly how well or ill that person’s life is going. There must be someone whose life is going well, and furthermore, that person must be able to recognize that it is so. Prudential value is the value of your life from
your
perspective; there is an essentially subjective element to welfare. What constitutes welfare varies from person to person, so Dylan’s beliefs about what makes her life worthwhile could radically differ from Dave’s. For example, Dylan may think her life is better off because of her ability to swim, exercise, or have sex for a living, while Dave finds satisfaction in teaching. If Dave tells us that teaching contributes to his life being “good,” or worthwhile, he is not saying at the same time that we all ought to teach and attain that good. Given the subjective nature of welfare, it also seems that the person best positioned to
make
welfare judgments is the individual whose life is in question. Dylan is the best judge of how Dylan’s life is going, in other words.

Morality, if it is worth its salt, is not “optional” in the way our welfare seem to be. Morality and its dictates seem to be universal and not purely contingent on our subjective mental states; that is, if there are moral rules Dave ought to follow or character traits that Dylan ought to develop, then so ought everyone else. Judgments about the moral standing of one’s life, then, need not involve reference to anything subjective. Judging the wickedness of Hitler or Dahmer does not depend at all on whether
they
thought what they were doing was wrong, in other words. It is perfectly possible that one could fail to recognize a diminished or increased moral quality of life. But this, we suggest, is
not
true with one’s own welfare, precisely because what constitutes one’s welfare
depends upon
one’s own subjective viewpoint.
⁴
The two ways of judging the “quality of one’s life” are distinct, and thus it is possible that one could have a low moral life-value and high welfare, or vice versa.

If we are right, then we have advanced our claim that even if the porn business is immoral and subjects its employees to moral harms, it does not follow that the particular porn performer’s wellbeing is necessarily diminished.

“Not so fast, my friend,” Lee Corso might exclaim at this point.“There is an objection to your view that you have not considered.” That is true. So, in the next section, we will consider some important objections to our argument and attempt to show that they fall short of the mark.

Climax: Happy Slaves, Oppression, and Quality of Life

Suppose we were to consider the lot of a slave. What would we think when we considered her life? Most of us, when asked if that slave had a high quality of life, would think that she endures the
worst
kind of life. The slave is oppressed, compelled to work against her will, and enjoys very little opportunity for advancement or prospects for what we might normally associate with factors contributing to wellbeing. Nevertheless, if asked, our slave might report that her life is just fine. In fact, she may claim that she enjoys a high degree of wellbeing. Our intuitions seem to be at variance with her subjective judgment about how her life is going; while she may report satisfaction with her life, we recognize immediately that something is amiss. Intuitively, we see that oppression and slavery
reduce
quality of life.

What the aptly named Happy Slave example supposedly shows is that in order to make sense of these judgments, we must draw a distinction between subjective quality of life (or wellbeing) and objective quality of life.The subjective sort simply depends on the perspectives, preferences, desires, or whatever, of a person (consonant with our position outlined above), but the objective judgment that the slave’s life
is
worse off, despite her subjective mind states, requires some external, objective understanding of wellbeing.Thus, wellbeing does not simply
amount to
whatever we like or find worthwhile – something else matters, too. If this is true, then one may be mistaken about whether one actually enjoys a meaningful level of wellbeing.

We can replace the “happy slave” with the “happy porn star” and we get essentially the question that is the target of our essay. Why isn’t the porn star simply
wrong
about her quality of life? It may
seem to her
as if her life is a good one, but
in fact
it is not.To establish our claim that being a porn star does not necessarily diminish one’s wellbeing, then, requires our dealing with the Happy Slave problem.

Fortunately, others working in the context of medical ethics have blazed a trail for us to follow. Ron Amundson, in defense of the plausibility of subjective accounts of wellbeing, argues against the intuitions “shown” by the Happy Slave problem by pointing out some epistemological problems.We seem to have an upper hand in understanding the slave’s plight because we are third-person observers, that is, outsiders, who recognize the objectification, coercion, and so forth. And we think “if only the slave knew what was good for her, she would recognize how horrible her life really is.” That may be true, Amundson concedes, but that special standpoint does not generalize beyond
obvious
cases like slavery. There are many cases in which third-personal knowledge of a person’s situation does not yield grounds for accurate judgments about another person’s welfare. Amundson points out that precisely the opposite is true with respect to physical disability. A curious fact about quality of life reports from disabled people is that they tend to be about the same, or sometimes even better, than those of “normal” people. That is, their subjective quality of life does not differ on the basis of physical limitations, despite the fact that our “intuitions” tell us that such a life is worse than normal. Who is really in the right position to make the judgment that disability decreases quality of life: a disabled person or an outsider? The answer seems clear – the person who has endured the disability knows better the quality of her life than those of us who have not “walked a mile in her shoes.” Furthermore, Amundson argues, unless we have a robust understanding of what “objective” quality of life consists in, we have no way of telling whether our judgments about the wellbeing of the disabled are legitimate, or the result of social stigmas.
⁵

One could apply the same response, changing what needs to be changed, to the case of the porn star. Is it more like the plight of the slave, or the plight of the disabled? What are the “objective” factors that determine our wellbeing? Do our judgments about the quality of porn star lives simply reflect a social stigma? We are inclined to think the latter is true. Are there objective factors that determine our quality of life? Perhaps there are, but we suspect that
any
putative objective factor offered as an answer will be susceptible to the “anomaly” seen above in the case of physical disability. Our lives may lack some, or many, of the putative objective “facts” about wellbeing, yet nevertheless our subjective reports of prudential value could be “normal” or better. We make psychological adjustments to the objective conditions of our lives, and those adjustments preserve the possibility of our maintaining a high degree of wellbeing.

We are not convinced that the Happy Slave shows what it wants to show in the first place. Are we forced to conclude that there must be some objective factor to wellbeing on the basis of the fact that we make the third-person judgment that the slave is worse off? No.We believe that this example has force precisely because it confuses or conflates the distinction made above concerning moral and prudential value. It is clear that something is
wrong
in the slave case – something immoral occurs when people are forced into servitude against their will, oppressed, and so forth. The patent immorality of the situation confuses us into accepting that the slave’s life must be worse off; she is the non-consensual victim of a wicked institution, cruel treatment, and restrictions on her autonomy. Her life is
morally
worse off, that much is clear. Nevertheless, as we argued above, this does not determine anything with respect to her wellbeing. She may, without contradiction, genuinely judge that her quality of life is high, despite the fact that she suffers ill use at the hands of others. Again, changing what needs to be changed, the same applies to the case of a porn performer.

One might point out that we have good reason to doubt the
sincerity
of a porn star’s subjective report about her wellbeing. How do we know that when a porn performer, like Dylan, tells us her life is great and that she enjoys porn she really
means
it? Is it not likely that her claims are coerced, either directly and indirectly, and if so, why should we believe what she says? The same may be true of the slave, women in oppressive cultures, and regular dudes who work for Budweiser. It is a common occurrence. Few of us are willing to risk getting in trouble by not “towing the party line,” as it were.The porn star risks her livelihood by being honest.Telling the truth about how much porn star lives suck would be a quick route to the industry blacklist.

We concede that this is possible, in practice. Some porn employees may simply be towing the party line when they tell us how much they love their jobs, working in the industry, having hot nasty sex for money, and so on. But suppose we fixed the conditions under which they made assertions about their wellbeing. Suppose we could assure that no one in the industry would ever discover what they said, and do so in a way that promised no repercussions or loss of livelihood? Why then would we doubt what they told us? In principle, the interference or coercion would be obviated, so we would have no reason to doubt their sincerity. Besides, this is an empirical question we could resolve with the right kind of blind survey, and is somewhat beside the point of whether a porn star
could
enjoy a high quality of life despite her industry.

The last objection we will consider might go as follows: “Suppose you are right that being exploited, coerced, and so on does not necessarily diminish one’s wellbeing. Doesn’t this seem to excuse the bad behavior of oppressive individuals and institutions? For example, one may argue that ‘since so-and-so (insert victim or victim group here) is not necessarily “worse off” for my oppression, there is little reason for me to stop doing what I am doing.’ After all, no one is necessarily ‘hurt’ by the oppressive activity – one can live a fulfilling life in spite of it all.”

In response, we concede that in practice some may rationalize their bad behavior in this way. However, it does not follow that one legitimately justifies their oppressive conduct by appealing to the fact that the oppression does not necessarily diminish the wellbeing of the oppressed. We have distinguished moral value from wellbeing, so where there are genuinely oppressive or exploitative institutions or individuals, we can condemn them on independent moral grounds. An adequate moral theory should enable us to make these judgments irrespective of whether or not the victims of moral villainy are “worse off” prudentially. Incidentally, we are not convinced that the porn biz is an institution of oppression, like slavery, guilty and in need of condemnation. We will leave those arguments to others writing in this anthology, though.

Afterglow

If our arguments are correct, we have shown that popular opinion about the wellbeing of porn stars is misguided. It is not true that all porn performers are character deficient or flawed, and even if some are it may make no difference to whether they find their lives satisfying. Neither is it necessarily true that working in porn contributes to a lack of wellbeing; some porn stars may find great satisfaction in their work, even if the porn business treats them badly. What constitutes their wellbeing is something that only they, individually, can determine, and it is not for us to pity them or think “we know better” on the basis of misguided social stigmas.

NOTES

1
Note that we are not interested in developing a robust account of welfare.We will base the distinction between morality and quality of life on features we believe to be essential to any adequate theory of welfare; e.g., the fact that welfare judgments require a first-personal component, or the perspective of the person whose life it is.

2
For a defense of this kind of view, see Vincent Punzo, “Morality and Human Sexuality” in
Reflective Naturalism
(Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hall, 1969).