Dude, where is my moral responsibility?

Moral Maze presented a diverse set of viewpoints this week, highlighting our moral ambiguity on prostitution. This led Howard and I to re-think our position. I have blogged on Belle de Jour earlier and argued that my problem with the Belle de Jour case wasn’t about the individual actions themselves but rather their implications and influence on society as a whole. I do accept (don’t have a reason not to accept) as Dr Magnanti expresses; that there are individuals who are willingly go into prostitution. Therefore, I thought that as long as one exercises self governance over their actions and take responsibility for them, then, we should respect his/her decision even if it is conventionally regarded as socially not acceptable. However, discussing it over with Howard, I found a flaw in my argument. The problem should not be about whether she decided to normalize and glamorize prostitution by publishing her account, as I have argued in my previous blog, but what should be questioned is; the action itself, further, this should be examined from a social network perspective. This means that 'I' as an individual may consider as a private action may not necessarily be private, as it takes place within the wider context of being, belonging to, a social world, that is, I am not separated out from it. I think my view on the remit of individual’s moral responsibility was too narrow and limited.

Upon another note, I found the argument put forward by Dr Belinda Brooks Gordon in this programmed was very interesting and certainly provocative. She rejected the idea that a large number of people who go into prostitution belong to the socially vulnerable section of society (75% was presented by other guest in the programme) consequently, the claim is that they are forced into their actions and exploited. She dismissed such arguments on the grounds that there is no scientific evidence to support that position. She then presented some statistics to support her argument. So what is troubling, she dismissed someone else’s statistic and presented her own statistic as a fact in-order to draw an inference and to argue that our view on prostitution is stigmatized. Listening both sides, the conclusion I can draw is whether we are seeing what we only want to see. This may apply to all of us, including Dr Gordon. I think we can only be able to make our minds up when we are presented with the research work itself and not just the numbers so that we can judge ourselves the validity of these studies.