Scott Anderson

There are few participants in academic or policy debates over prostitution who would disagree that steps should be taken to improve conditions for those working in prostitution; so Moen1 is in good and plentiful company with respect to his recommendations.I will focus here on the analysis leading up to his conclusions, and with whether it helps us understand why prostitution is so commonly harmful and what it would take to mitigate those harms.i On these matters I am dubious. The question of whether or not prostitution is harmful would seem, manifestly, to be an empirical question, rather than a philosophical issue. I take it that Moen's aim is to clarify the evaluative task, and then to evaluate the arguments that can be made to show prostitution is harmful—tasks which philosophers can responsibly engage in. But I would suggest that Moen's approach to this particular subject oversimplifies it by abstracting away from key facts about the context in which prostitution takes place, and thus that it does not offer as strong a case for normalising prostitution as he hopes.The basic thesis of Moen's essay is that if casual sex is harmless, then the sale of casual sexual services for money is also harmless, or at …

Many recent theories of coercion broaden the scope of the concept coercion by encompassing interactions in which one agent pressures another to act, subject to some further qualifications. I have argued previously that this way of conceptualizing coercion undermines its suitability for theoretical use in politics and ethics. I have also explicated a narrower, more traditional approach—“the enforcement approach to coercion”—and argued for its superiority. In this essay, I consider the prospects for broadening this more traditional approach to cover some cases that don’t seem to fit this approach, but nonetheless seem coercive, such as the demands routinely made on people by credit card companies, demands on students by higher educational institutions, and demands made by European financial institutions on the government of Greece. I analyze the similarities and differences of these compared to more central cases of coercion, discussing what lessons can be drawn from this analysis.