ka1igu1a,

I don’t want to be rude here, but, in all frankness, how do you have any idea whether or not my position on the so-called “sex industry” is “a load of dialectical drivel” or not? The way to determine that would be to read and engage with the arguments that I give in favor of my conclusion; but your post doesn’t show any signs of having engaged with such an argument, and the only writing of mine that you link to on the topic — my remarks on MacKenzie’s paper on exploitation — deliberately doesn’t give the argument in favor of that conclusion, bracketing that as something to discuss at a later date. (I decided to so bracket it because the remarks were intended as commentary on another paper, and I wanted to highlight one possibly interesting area of discussion, but didn’t want to spend long elaborating on such a tagential point.)

If you want to find out what my argument actually is, the essay that Roderick and I co-wrote on Libertarian Feminism discusses some over-arching reasons for radical libertarians to prefer feminist commitments to non-feminist commitments (or a “thin” non-commitment); and some reasons for preferring radical feminist commitments to non-radical feminist commitments. On pornography and prostitution in particular, you will find some discussion of each at my blog (in the categories for Prostitution and for Pornography; however, note that I’ve been writing that blog for more than 7 years now, and I don’t necessarily agree with everything in the earliest material I wrote on those topics). However, I think that many of the best reasons for the position that I take are simply to be found in radical feminist works on prostitution and pornography — works which certainly take a more complex position than simply claiming that the sex industry “is a by-product of female exploitation/oppression in the context of male-dominated patriarchical power systems” (for one thing, antipornography and antiprostitution feminists generally claim that pornography and prostitution are not mere by-products, but actually themselves serve to express and reinforce the oppression of women), and which also are certainly aware that there is a distinction between the labor conditions for women working in, say, “mainstream” American pornography and those faced by women and girls trafficked in the international sex trade. (Antipornography feminists are not especially positive on the former, but they recognize that the latter are much worse; however, the feminist case against pornography has to do not only with exploitation at the point of production, but also with what they argue to be the effects on men and male culture at the point of consumption.)

If you’re interested in discussing these things at greater length, I would be happy to do so; or, if not, I’d be happy not to do so. But in either case it seems to me that you’ve hardly provided any evidence for the claim that you know whether my arguments are good arguments or bad arguments.

And, for what it’s worth, while Roderick and I agree broadly about the desirability of libertarians committing to an anti-statist form of radical feminism, on this particular issue I am speaking only for myself. I don’t know how far Roderick does or does not agree with my views on prostitution and pornography specifically. And whatever Roderick’s specific views may be, in general, one could accept the argument for a thick libertarian commitment to radical feminism, while also arguing that the particular form of radical feminism one should be committed to is a form that is not antiprostitution or antipornography (e.g., the so-called “sex-positive” radical feminism of someone like Ellen Willis). That would be no less a form of “thick libertarianism” than the form I defend; although I would disagree with it on that specific point, I wouldn’t characterize it as somehow less “thick” or more “thin” than what I do agree with.

Roderick:

So one can nonthickly argue that it’s not that case that we must be thicklib. But one can’t non-thickly argue that it is the case that we shouldn’t be thicklib.

Well, thick libertarianism is the claim that libertarianism as such provides good reasons for libertarians to care about other commitments besides a rigorous commitment to non-aggression. So it’s true that if, for example, a would-be thin libertarian is arguing that we should abandon a particular nonviolently held philosophical view about libertarianism (viz. the thick conception of it) for, e.g., reasons of libertarian strategy, then she is really advancing a form of thick, not thin, libertarianism.

But couldn’t a woud-be thin libertarian instead argue that we ought to abandon a particular nonviolently held philosophical view about libertarianism (viz. the thick conception of it) for other reasons distinct from and alongside our libertarian commitments? For example, that it should be abandoned for reasons of intellectual clarity, considered as desirable in itself rather than as a means to libertarian triumph or whatever else?

If so, then, while I would certainly disagree with the argument for abandoning a thick conception of libertarianism, I wouldn’t think that the argument is internally contradictory. The appeal only becomes an appeal to thickness if the reasons being given are reasons that the libertarian is supposed to have qua libertarian, rather than (for example) qua philosopher or qua clear thinker.

William:

We may not be able to directly speak of “all that really matters,” but we can get closer and closer by refusing to hold to our existing macroscopic abstractions.

Are you claiming that something like, say, the loaf of cornbread that I stuffed into my mouth earlier today is a “macroscopic abstraction,” whereas stuff like, say, up and down quarks are not abstractions, but rather concretes?

Really?