Scott A. Anderson

Prostitution and Sexual Autonomy: Making Sense of the Prohibition of Prostitution*

By now, it is well known that prostitutes in Western nations frequently live and operate in truly disastrous conditions. These conditions are typically worst for the many economically and/or racially marginalized women who earn their livelihoods through prostitution, but many other female as well as male prostitutes suffer gravely. Prostitution is also commonly thought to harm the public health and quality of life of many others not directly active in it. The extent of these problems varies across countries, in part due to differences in the regulations and social programs that govern and buffer prostitution in the developed West. Nonetheless, prostitution presents significant social problems in virtually every Western country and society, testifying to the seeming intractability of these difficulties. The United States is one of the few Western nations in which all

Of Theories of Coercion, Two Axes, and the Importance of the Coercer

Recent accounts of coercion can be mapped onto two different axes: whether they focus on the situation of the coercee or the activities of the coercer; and whether or not they depend upon moral judgments in their analysis of coercion. Using this analysis, I suggest that almost no recent theories have seriously explored a non-moralized, coercer-focused approach to coercion. I offer some reasons to think that a theory in this underexplored quadrant offers some important advantages over theories confined to the other quadrants. In particular I suggest that much of our interest in coercion depends on facts about the coercer, such as the sorts of powers coercers must possess to be able to coerce, and on the coercers intention in using those powers to constrain or alter the coercees activities.

How Did There Come To Be Two Kinds of Coercion

Political theorizing throughout the modern era uses the term “coercion” and its cognates (compulsion, force) in so many ways that one may despair of finding neat conceptual boundaries for it. Historically, as now, “coercion” appears to be a catch-all term, rather than one that clearly demarcates, say, acts of domination from acts of badgering or arm-twisting. Typically, however, it is used to capture a way that agents with considerable power can constrain the wills, actions, opportunities, bodies, and lives of others. Throughout this literature, coercion generally refers to the sort of power that states possess against their inhabitants, war victors hold over the vanquished, or even a church hierarchy holds over priests and laity, and husbands have sometimes wielded over their wives. These uses suggest a sort of irresistible power, which can operate through various mechanisms, including physical force and violence, threats, positional authority, and social pressure. Until relatively recently, few theorists paused to give a careful analysis of its meaning or conditions; more typically, they have taken for granted that the term is understood, and that the sort of power it invokes is evident when in use. There is an interesting story to be told about how the concept of coercion became a philosophical topic of its own. However, I will focus here on the slightly different, later story, of how in the course of philosophical investigation, theorists came to find and distinguish two kinds of coercion, and then to attend to one to the virtual exclusion of the other. In the process, I will offer some reasons for thinking that the bifurcation of this topic is significant, and in some ways problematic. After elaborating the distinction between the two kinds of coercion, I will show that the recognition of a categorical distinction in kinds of coercion is historically locatable. I will consider some of what can be said for and against the distinction, but I will be principally interested to trace how it entered, virtually unnoticed, into theorizing about coercion. I conclude by highlighting a few of the difficulties that arise if one does not attend to this history. Contemporary philosophical writing on coercion as a special subject begins virtually from scratch with essays by Robert Nozick in 1969 and Harry Frankfurt in 1973, and a collection of essays on the subject in the NOMOS series, published

Book ReviewsAlan Wertheimer, .Consent to Sexual Relations.New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xvi+276.

Alan Wertheimer has written a solid and valuable book about the difficult question of how best to understand consent and its role in legitimizing sexual activity between men and women. At its core, it offers an extended discussion of how to decide whether an apparent token of such consent should be regarded as valid. There is much to admire in the breadth of resources he brings to his discussion, as well as the overall reasonableness of his approach. There are, however, some concerns theorists might raise against his approach, which, although not grounds to reject it outright, make one wish for an even fuller treatment of his subject. The book can be divided into roughly five sections past its introduction. The second chapter reviews the current legal response to rape and sexual assault, as well as some important historical trends leading up to today’s laws. The following three chapters discuss the psychology of sexual relations—especially the psychologies of people going into and coming out of nonconsensual sexual relations. Chapters 6 and 7 consider the importance and “ontology” of consent, with a view to explaining what consent is and what it does without diving too deeply into metaphysical murk. (Wertheimer stresses repeatedly the necessity of investigating his topic empirically, and he resists those who favor more overtly political or conceptual approaches to the subject.) Chapters 8–11 provide what seems to me the main positive results of the book: a start on developing what Wertheimer calls “principles of valid consent” (PVCs), which can be used to decide whether a woman’s consent to sex with a man should be taken to make his action morally and/or legally permissible. The final chapter stands more or less by itself and discusses the rather novel question of whether and when one partner in an established sexual relationship ought to consent to sex with her lover—the sort of issue that arises especially when two people in a committed relationship have divergent levels of interest in having sex. Before discussing Wertheimer’s particular arguments, it is worth remarking briefly on several general features of his approach. First, Wertheimer allows that there may be different answers to the question of whether it is permissible for A to have sex with B, depending on whether we are discussing moral or legal permissibility. Also, when he discusses the effect of consent on the legal permissibility of sex, he is mostly concerned with what the law should say, rather than what it in fact does say. I mention these nuances here because, although Wertheimer attends to them, I will ignore them in the remainder of what I say. Second, a more important matter: Wertheimer constricts his topic almost exclusively to the matter of consent by women to sex with men. Virtually all of the examples he considers are explicitly gendered and involve a man (A) who

70.00 (cloth);

Sabina Alkire has written a very good book for philosophers working in ethics and social and political philosophy, especially those interested in what we learn when ethical theories are put into practice in the field. A development economist who has worked for the World Bank, Alkire is now senior research associate at the Von Hügel Institute, University of Cambridge. She is philosophically studied and acute, and her book reflects this in its attention to both theory and practice. Her practical concern is the need for people working in development to be able to assess, prospectively and retrospectively, the value of particular aid projects. The theoretical question she addresses is explicitly philosophical: how can outsiders (such as those in positions of economic power) best understand and respond to the poverty of others in a way that provides for ethically defensible assessments of such interventions, given that the values and culture of the beneficiaries may be quite different from those of the outsiders? Alkire concentrates on one answer to the philosophical question, namely, the “capabilities approach” developed by Amartya Sen. Alkire spends the first five chapters of the book on an effort to refine and “operationalize” the capabilities approach in a way that would underwrite evaluations of poverty reduction programs by being sensitive to the particular values of the direct beneficiaries. In the last two chapters, Alkire then goes on to show how her philosophical labors are useful for assessing (as well as complicated by) three particular Oxfam development projects in Pakistan. This is an ambitious and challenging book. It carefully surveys a large and varied body of research in ethics and development economics, and it attempts to make original contributions in each area. It will take many of its readers (whether philosophers or economists) into unfamiliar areas discussed at a specialists’ level of understanding. As I am myself challenged by the more technical aspects of her analysis of the case studies, I will focus my discussion on the issues that I am best able to judge, the philosophical discussion of the capabilities approach. That said, the two applied chapters at the end of the book are nevertheless valuable for philosophical readers, since Alkire displays an attention to details there that should provoke caution among ethicists who find themselves discussing applied matters from the comfort of an armchair. After an introductory chapter, chapter 2 begins a philosophical exploration of how one might use the capabilities approach to assess the pluses and minuses of changes wrought as a result of a development project. While driven by development practice, this question should be of interest to anyone who has tried to explain what we mean by human flourishing or to think about how to account for one’s quality of life. Although Sen has done as much as anyone to highlight the shortcomings of simpler, more common ways of measuring human wellbeing (such as income or gross domestic product), Sen’s own version of the