More often than not, social media can appear to be a den of iniquity. It rarely promotes deep thinking and often tends toward shallow insults and thought. Once, in a while, however, one gets lucky. A current debate taking place on Twitter concerns whether or not society should ban pornography. One commentator has proposed that there is no good reason to keep pornography legal, arguing that it is connected to many of society’s worst problems.
In response, the Canadian Psychologist Jordan Peterson raised the almost inevitable practical concern: “Who defines porn, and how? Do we keep Renaissance nudes?” His argument appears to be that pornography is so difficult to define that it is not possible to ban pornography in a way that would also not ban forms of art that are widely recognized as legitimate. The concern has been a well-known one since Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewert admitted he couldn't define pornography, but wrote that “I know it when I see it.”
In response, one user shared a G.K. Chesterton quotation about pornography:
There is such a thing as a system of deliberate erotic stimulants. It is called pornography. This is not a thing to be argued about with one's intellect, but to be stamped on with one's heel."
I confess that my sympathies are entirely with G.K. Chesterton on the subject. All the clever pseudo-intellectualizing about pornography can neither hide nor obscure the fact that it is irredeemably destructive to both individuals and society. Like a drug, it circumscribes the range of ordinary human interests, harms the individual user, the person used, and all of society. Others have traced its harmful effects; there is no need to belabor the point: It desensitizes the viewer, degrades women by presenting them as tools for the fulfillment of male desire, is fueled by trafficking, rape, and abuse, and is connected to other antisocial behavior.
Libertarian-style arguments in favor of pornography thus can be simply dismissed. Libertarians like to hold that one should not harm others without their consent. But, of course, pornography does not only harm the producer or consumer of pornography, but all of society. It harms members of society who have not consented and do not consent to those harms: women who do not consent to being viewed as objects, children who do not consent to having their parents’ marriage harmed, and society more broadly.
Chesterton also answers the Peterson-style reductio ad absurdum style complaints, “If we start banning pornography, where will we stop?” Chesterton’s use of teleology (explaining something by its purpose) provides an answer. Pornography is created with the purpose or intention of causing erotic stimulation. The Renaissance nudes were not.
Finally, one more serious objection might be made to a pornography ban. Granted that pornography is immoral, should it be illegal? Even St. Thomas Aquinas holds that not everything immoral need be made illegal. His reasoning is instructive:
Now human law is framed for a number of human beings, the majority of whom are not perfect in virtue. Wherefore human laws do not forbid all vices, from which the virtuous abstain, but only the more grievous vices, from which it is possible for the majority to abstain; and chiefly those that are to the hurt of others, without the prohibition of which human society could not be maintained: thus human law prohibits murder, theft and such like.
Human law forbids “grievous vices from which it is possible for the majority to abstain,” such as theft, murder and such.
Is pornography a grievous vice from which the majority can abstain? Well, its seriousness can be (and has been) widely and easily established, including above. It is also a vice that is possible for the majority to abstain from. It is possible because, for the majority of human history, human beings have done just that. The easy access to widespread pornography is a modern phenomenon, a consequence of easy access via the internet. Hence, there is no argument that human beings cannot abstain from such a vice. No one needs pornography; no one will die without it. But some have been harmed or died in making, watching, or even just being adjacent to it.
Making it illegal would enable society to place serious limitations on pornography access via the Internet; and this alone would significantly decrease access to it. Pornographic materials and magazines are physically distributed and published in public, where almost anyone can find them (sometimes by accident); making porn illegal would again decrease access to physical pornography, which was rampant even before the Internet.
It is time to reject misguided modern views of “freedom,” and take a practical step to improve our society. Yes, let’s ban porn.