Quote:
Originally Posted by octothorp
I'm going to try to redirect this back to the original question a little bit: to what extent do you think that a viewer of porn should feel morally culpable for the general ills of the industry (and I don't think anyone would deny that this is a very troubled industry)? Either through a religious or secular moral framework?
This is a very different moral argument then we started out in with this thread, which was essentially that viewing porn could be considered equivalent to adultery; in other words, the consideration was how this act affects your relationships and the people closest to you. Now you're talking about it in a very different way: how does watching porn make someone morally responsible for the lives of the people involved in making it? People you've never met, whose name and situations you might never know?
Does it matter whether the act depicted is extreme or conservative? Does it matter whether the performers are enjoying it (or appear to be enjoying it... they are performers after all). Does it matter whether you pay for it; after all, if you're not paying for it, you aren't financially supporting the industry, and is at worst a victimless crime? (And if this is the case, could you argue that stealing porn is actually more morally defensible than paying for porn?!) Should one do research and decide what porn is ethically produced? Is it fair to say that amateur porn is automatically more moral, or is that simply making further assumptions about the people involved that may not be true?
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Well, go down that route and few people wouldn't end up culpable for some abusive situations including women and children in the production of what they consume. I suppose you could say porn is easier to say no to than any product with "made in China" printed on it, but I would think just as few people consider the violence in the making of porn when consuming it as consider the violence in factory production when consuming other imported products from locations with poor production standards.
That is an extreme argument to make, and the questions about how porn affects a person socially, emotionally and neurologically is much more interesting.