Adult topic coming up below...
The first principle of morality is liberty (moral agency).
The first principle of liberty is morality.
Said another way, there are two fundamental truths connecting morality with liberty: 1. The degree to which people aren't free to determine right from wrong for themselves is the degree to which they are not free to choose the right, therefore all moral choices are premised on the free risk that they might choose wrong if left to; 2. While individuals must have the freedom to choose in order for any right option to be chosen, one of the consequences of choosing wrong is always a limiting of freedoms.
Part of the extremely confusing problem of these principles intertwined in this way is that it's super easy to believe illusions about what's right and what's wrong, to be in denial about whether something's wrong, or about the consequences of choosing wrong. And to further complicate things, we're living in a state of: 1. suspended ultimate consequences--very few of the full consequences of our actions are immediate; 2. ignorance as to the true eternal nature of our choices. Because of these two complicating states, we are in a condition that requires faith for every action and we only get partial confirmation of the rightness of our morally correct acts at every faithful experiment.
These complicating conditions make the question of what IS right or wrong extremely difficult, and with liberty being the first principle of morality, the first moral rule is therefore: never impose your own sense of morality on someone else. This is why definitively taking away someone's moral agency in this life is what every society, despite these complicating factors and large cultural differences, has universally considered the most immoral of acts: murder.
The trick in understanding that morality is BOTH a private choice AND an external objective truth acting upon us, then, is to avoid omitting either side of that equation.
The degree to which you forget that the consequences are inevitable, is the degree to which you succumb to selective or total moral relativity: if your only rule is that you can't impose your morality on others, it's easy to just let the immoral acts of others go unchallenged until you've painted yourself out of the responsibility to discern between degrees of morality--and there ARE degrees.
By the same token, the degree to which you forget that morality is a matter of private choice is the degree to which you begin supporting authoritarianism and unrighteous dominion.
The balance, I believe, must lie in the level of imposition/engagement: 1. if others use words to promote an act you find immoral, then using words to convince others of your own sense of morality doesn't impose upon them, but rather respects their agency and calls on them to revise their own sense, and behave accordingly; 2. if others commit immoral acts as defined by the laws of their society (which brings some kind of averaging of individual moral senses into play--which is one way of approaching moral standards as enforced by a legitimate authority), then the society in which those acts are committed using acts to punish immoral behaviors and even using actions as preventive measures doesn't impose upon their sense of morality, but rather imposes a societal standard of behavior.
This is the logical backstopping needed to think about the moral question of prostitution.
What I find striking about the Teen Vogue opinion piece referenced in the below article, and about the medical practitioner writing it, is how far to the morally relative end of the spectrum they go. She uses words to try to convince others of her sense of morality. No harm in that whatsoever. However, the content of those words is a false attempt to equate the morality of: 1. Using expert counselling and medical advice to help individuals have healthy experiences with emotional and physical intimacy between two human beings committed to each other's happiness; with 2. the immorality of commodifying sexual acts for the unhealthy self-gratification of one party. As if the only difference between the work of a doctor and a prostitute is in the credentials they hold.
I find the rebuttals from the ex-prostitute and the former sex crimes prosecutor extremely compelling: calling prostitution "sex work" is a misplaced attempt to remove the stigma of social judgment from immoral choices, because it obfuscates the true nature of the immorality and its consequences. It doesn't "empower" the "workers" involved to remove the stigma of judgment because they themselves report being dis-empowered and nearly universally seek a pathway out of the "work", and instances of traumatic violence and abuse are disproportionately higher in their field of "work" than in others.
This article lends support to the idea that immorality isn't relative, even if individuals must be free to have their own sense of it. It's possible to withhold personal judgment, leaving to God what "shame" a person deserves, and to treat a prostitute with full human dignity and at the same time OPPOSE the immoral ideas people try to use to justify such acts--noting how immoral choices don't lead to the consequences that moral relativists such as this doctor claim, and how they DO objectively lead to harmful consequences and the loss of liberty just as the moralists claim. Also, it's moral to use one's voice to convince others of the flaws in their individual sense of morality (some methods work better than others, that's not this conversation), and to support laws pushing the average standard of moral behavior in one's society toward a more moral position.
My faith has two scriptures I try to live by and help others understand: "Wickedness never was happiness", and "I the Lord will forgive whom I will forgive, but of you it is required to forgive all men." The former forbids all moral relativism, and the latter I take to mean that the only moral position for us to hold vis-à-vis our fellow mortals is to think of them as brothers and sisters of infinite potential just like us, able to be convinced to line their own sense of morality up with that of objective morality, but not our problem if they don't.
https://www.theblaze.com/news/teen-vogue-op-ed-why-sex-work-is-real-work-defends-prostitution-but-former-prostitutes-blast-narrative-to-bits
The first principle of morality is liberty (moral agency).
The first principle of liberty is morality.
Said another way, there are two fundamental truths connecting morality with liberty: 1. The degree to which people aren't free to determine right from wrong for themselves is the degree to which they are not free to choose the right, therefore all moral choices are premised on the free risk that they might choose wrong if left to; 2. While individuals must have the freedom to choose in order for any right option to be chosen, one of the consequences of choosing wrong is always a limiting of freedoms.
Part of the extremely confusing problem of these principles intertwined in this way is that it's super easy to believe illusions about what's right and what's wrong, to be in denial about whether something's wrong, or about the consequences of choosing wrong. And to further complicate things, we're living in a state of: 1. suspended ultimate consequences--very few of the full consequences of our actions are immediate; 2. ignorance as to the true eternal nature of our choices. Because of these two complicating states, we are in a condition that requires faith for every action and we only get partial confirmation of the rightness of our morally correct acts at every faithful experiment.
These complicating conditions make the question of what IS right or wrong extremely difficult, and with liberty being the first principle of morality, the first moral rule is therefore: never impose your own sense of morality on someone else. This is why definitively taking away someone's moral agency in this life is what every society, despite these complicating factors and large cultural differences, has universally considered the most immoral of acts: murder.
The trick in understanding that morality is BOTH a private choice AND an external objective truth acting upon us, then, is to avoid omitting either side of that equation.
The degree to which you forget that the consequences are inevitable, is the degree to which you succumb to selective or total moral relativity: if your only rule is that you can't impose your morality on others, it's easy to just let the immoral acts of others go unchallenged until you've painted yourself out of the responsibility to discern between degrees of morality--and there ARE degrees.
By the same token, the degree to which you forget that morality is a matter of private choice is the degree to which you begin supporting authoritarianism and unrighteous dominion.
The balance, I believe, must lie in the level of imposition/engagement: 1. if others use words to promote an act you find immoral, then using words to convince others of your own sense of morality doesn't impose upon them, but rather respects their agency and calls on them to revise their own sense, and behave accordingly; 2. if others commit immoral acts as defined by the laws of their society (which brings some kind of averaging of individual moral senses into play--which is one way of approaching moral standards as enforced by a legitimate authority), then the society in which those acts are committed using acts to punish immoral behaviors and even using actions as preventive measures doesn't impose upon their sense of morality, but rather imposes a societal standard of behavior.
This is the logical backstopping needed to think about the moral question of prostitution.
What I find striking about the Teen Vogue opinion piece referenced in the below article, and about the medical practitioner writing it, is how far to the morally relative end of the spectrum they go. She uses words to try to convince others of her sense of morality. No harm in that whatsoever. However, the content of those words is a false attempt to equate the morality of: 1. Using expert counselling and medical advice to help individuals have healthy experiences with emotional and physical intimacy between two human beings committed to each other's happiness; with 2. the immorality of commodifying sexual acts for the unhealthy self-gratification of one party. As if the only difference between the work of a doctor and a prostitute is in the credentials they hold.
I find the rebuttals from the ex-prostitute and the former sex crimes prosecutor extremely compelling: calling prostitution "sex work" is a misplaced attempt to remove the stigma of social judgment from immoral choices, because it obfuscates the true nature of the immorality and its consequences. It doesn't "empower" the "workers" involved to remove the stigma of judgment because they themselves report being dis-empowered and nearly universally seek a pathway out of the "work", and instances of traumatic violence and abuse are disproportionately higher in their field of "work" than in others.
This article lends support to the idea that immorality isn't relative, even if individuals must be free to have their own sense of it. It's possible to withhold personal judgment, leaving to God what "shame" a person deserves, and to treat a prostitute with full human dignity and at the same time OPPOSE the immoral ideas people try to use to justify such acts--noting how immoral choices don't lead to the consequences that moral relativists such as this doctor claim, and how they DO objectively lead to harmful consequences and the loss of liberty just as the moralists claim. Also, it's moral to use one's voice to convince others of the flaws in their individual sense of morality (some methods work better than others, that's not this conversation), and to support laws pushing the average standard of moral behavior in one's society toward a more moral position.
My faith has two scriptures I try to live by and help others understand: "Wickedness never was happiness", and "I the Lord will forgive whom I will forgive, but of you it is required to forgive all men." The former forbids all moral relativism, and the latter I take to mean that the only moral position for us to hold vis-à-vis our fellow mortals is to think of them as brothers and sisters of infinite potential just like us, able to be convinced to line their own sense of morality up with that of objective morality, but not our problem if they don't.
https://www.theblaze.com/news/teen-vogue-op-ed-why-sex-work-is-real-work-defends-prostitution-but-former-prostitutes-blast-narrative-to-bits
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