Frej Klem Thomsen

Prostitution, disability and prohibition

Criminalisation of prostitution, and minority rights for disabled persons, are important contemporary political issues. The article examines their intersection by analysing the conditions and arguments for making a legal exception for disabled persons to a general prohibition against purchasing sexual services. It explores the badness of prostitution, focusing on and discussing the argument that prostitution harms prostitutes, considers forms of regulation and the arguments for and against with emphasis on a liberty-based objection to prohibition, and finally presents and analyses three arguments for a legal exception, based on sexual rights, beneficence, and luck egalitarianism, respectively. It concludes that although the general case for and against criminalisation is complicated there is a good case for a legal exception.

Good Night and Good Luck: In Search of a Neuroscience Challenge to Criminal Justice

This article clarifies what a neuroscience challenge to criminal justice must look like by sketching the basic structure of the argument, gradually filling out the details and illustrating the conditions that must be met for the challenge to work. In the process of doing so it explores influential work by Joshua Greene and Jonathan Cohen, and Stephen Morse respectively, arguing that the former should not be understood to present a version of the challenge, and that the latters argument against the challenge is unpersuasive. This analysis allows the article to flesh out the challenge, and demonstrate why it is currently non-completeable. However, the article argues that contrary to what is often assumed the burden of proof falls on the defenders of criminal justice, and that they will find meeting it a monumental task.

Stealing Bread and Sleeping Beneath Bridges - Indirect Discrimination as Disadvantageous Equal Treatment

Abstract The article analyses the concept of indirect discrimination, arguing first that existing conceptualizations are unsatisfactory and second that it is best understood as equal treatment that is disadvantageous to the discriminatees because of their group membership. I explore four ways of further refining the definition, arguing that only an added condition of moral wrongness is at once plausible and helpful, but that it entails a number of new problems that may outweigh its benefits. Finally, I suggest that the moral wrongness of indirect discrimination is best accounted for in terms of the harm it does to discriminatees and sketch three ways in which it may do so. I conclude that the analysis provides both a clearer understanding of the concept of indirect discrimination as well as indirect support for a harm-based account of the wrongness of discrimination, while suggesting that our moral obligations qua non-discrimination may be more extensive than is frequently assumed.

There but for the Grace of My Orbitofrontal Cortex

The human brain, with its 100 billion neurons working in intricate collaborations to create the physical basis of the memories, perceptions, thoughts, and emotions that together make me the person that I am, is surely one of the marvels of the world. We tend to forget how extraordinary it is, as well as the extent to which who we are and what we do depends on the brain, perhaps because it is such a seemingly inert and uninteresting part of the body, immobile and hidden inside our heads. At least, that is, until something goes wrong. Imagine the following scenario— doing so is likely to be uncomfortable, but bear with it for a minute: you are a happily married, ordinary, lawabiding citizen, but over the course of a few months you develop stronger and stronger sexual urges and fight a series of steadily less successful battles against them. You begin to use pornography almost addictively, and to your horror and shame you find yourself increasingly sexually attracted to pre-teen children. You struggle with these urges, developing headaches, while concentration and focus become more and more difficult. Your spouse learns that you have been flirting with your stepchild and promptly kicks you out and presses charges. The police discover child pornography among the enormous stash of porn on your computer. Your life is in ruins. Faced with a choice between prison and treatment you opt for the latter, only to find yourself expelled from the program when you cannot stop yourself from making overt sexual advances towards the other clients and staff. Having failed to complete the program, your prison sentence is effectuated, but the night before it is to commence, the situation comes to a head. You are confused and dizzy, in the grip of enormously strong impulses, and terrified both at what has happened to you and what is to *Frej Klem Thomsen is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy & Science Studies at Roskilde University, Denmark. Email: fkt@ruc.dk Criminal Justice Ethics, 2014 Vol. 33, No. 3, 220–235, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0731129X.2014.988520