Pornography

2. What is wrong with pornography?

There is also considerable dispute about whether and why pornography is morally wrong, and about whether the nature of any wrongness is sufficient to justify legal restriction or prohibition. Some argue that pornography corrupts those who consume it. Indeed this claim is built into the current British law governing obscenity, which defines material as ‘obscene’ when it has a ‘tendency to deprave and corrupt’ those who are likely to read, see or hear it. A similar understanding of the wrong of pornography is implicit in the Dworkin-MacKinnon Ordinance, which construes pornography as a purveyor of sexist images of women and a corrupting influence on society. For them, pornography acts as a kind of moral poison in the societal water supply, and can serve to legitimize contemptuous attitudes towards women, and possibly even sexual violence against them.

In both cases the charge against obscene material generally, and pornographic material in particular, is that it is morally damaging, either to the individuals who consume it or to society in general.

Others, however, eschew reference to moral harm, either because they are sceptical about the very notion, or because they feel that it should not be appealed to in a legal context. Thus, the Williams Report deems pornography to be wrong only in so far as its production involves the infliction of physical harm, or if it causes offence to unwitting and unwilling observers. Moral wrongness is not, in itself, any part of the case against pornography. Indeed, as was noted above, the Williams Report defines pornography simply in terms of sexual explicitness and makes no reference to its moral status.