Sexy Sex Sex!! (for Cash on the Barrel!)
A debate is flourishing on FtB over the morality of pornography and prostitution, and it illustrates some principles of political and moral philosophy that I think are important to disseminate more widely than just among the privileged West, and illustrates how easily the strange realities of the Western democratic world aren’t readily understood or even imagined by those who come from outside of it. It also touches on the philosophy of aesthetics, the metaphysics of human sexuality, and political epistemology. In other words, it spans anyone’s entire worldview, all five Aristotelian categories: semantics/epistemology, physics/metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, and politics. Which those who have read my Sense and Goodness without God will recognize completes the description of any worldview (and I use them there to describe what I believe to be the most credible and coherent atheist worldview).
The Backstory
International freethought heroine Taslima Nasrin has recently joined us at Freethought Blogs, an important voice for the half of the world most of us never know, or know as much about, a hard-core frontliner in our movement who has faced serious oppression and danger (I suspect she’s the only one of us who has had actual mass death marches calling for her murder; plus numerous actual fatwas, which in the West we would call having a contract put out on you). Imagine being an exile from your own country because thousands of people there want to kill you–for no other crime than simply saying women should be treated nice. Her command of English is not perfect, but she writes passionately, and has interesting experience and perspective. (And though American readers might find her self-comparison with Salman Rushdie a bit boastful and self-aggrandizing, it’s hard to find fault with her facts in the matter; except in matters of opinion, perhaps, e.g. I’m unaware of the evidence that “women have complained that Rushdie doesn’t consider them anything more than sex objects” [my emphasis], especially since I don’t exactly trust gossip or tabloid reporting about his relationships, but he does seem to be a bit of an unreliable hound in that department.)
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