Journal article
Prostitution: You can’t have your cake and sell it
- Abstract:
- I offer an unorthodox argument for the thesis that prostitution is not just a normal job. It has the advantage of being compatible with the claim that humans should have full authority over their sexual life. In fact, it is ultimately the emphasis on this authority that leads the thesis that prostitution is a normal job to collapse. Here is the argument: merchants cannot (both legally and morally) discriminate whom they transact with on the basis of factors like the ethnicity or the religion of their client; but if prostitutes are ‘sex merchants’, then they cannot (both legally and morally) discriminate whom they have sex with on the basis of these factors. Yet everyone should have the full discretionary power to refuse to have sex under any circumstances.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 147.8KB, Terms of use)
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Authors
- Publisher:
- University of Oxford, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics
- Journal:
- Journal of Practical Ethics More from this journal
- Publication date:
- 2017-12-01
- Acceptance date:
- 2017-11-01
- EISSN:
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2051-655X
- ISSN:
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2051-655X
- Pubs id:
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pubs:810592
- UUID:
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uuid:9516860f-1b88-4f0c-8295-c2841d560a93
- Local pid:
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pubs:810592
- Source identifiers:
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810592
- Deposit date:
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2017-12-12
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- University of Oxford
- Copyright date:
- 2017
- Notes:
- © University of Oxford 2017 except as otherwise explicitly specified. The material in this journal is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported licence. The full text of the licence is available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/legalcode
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