ception of prostitution causes the poor conditions which opponents rail against as a reason to ban it. Furthermore, some liberal-minded people would go so far as to argue that even if these adverse conditions did exist, it is clear that these hazards are voluntarily undertaken by the woman who chooses to be a prostitute – and that we have no right to morally judge them, in the same way how we would not morally object to trapeze artists or firefighters for knowingly taking on such hazardous occupational risks. However, this argument is valid only if you believe anyone who takes up prostitution does so voluntarily with full awareness of the consequences of his/her decision(it goes to say, of course, that children and the mentally incompetent are necessarily excluded from this profession). Jaggar notes that “the sorts of economic considerations that impel some persons into prostitution do indeed constitute a sort of coercion”, and cites the Marxist approach towards prostitution, which views all acts that are based on capital, property ownership and their attendant economic transactions as a form of coercion akin to prostitution in its own right. This argument, however, glosses over the fact that many occupations are filled by people out of economic compulsion, not out of desire. Not everyone wants to be a garbage collector or a janitor, but they might have to fill it in simply because there exist no alternative means of occupation. That does not make the act of garbage collecting morally objectionable – it is merely a statement of economic circumstance.Radical feminst approach to prostitutionA wider argument, often used by radical feminists, is that prostitution is symptomatic of a social perception of females as sexual objects to be used by males in exchange for economic largesse, in addition to reinforcing such attitudes. For the radical feminist, the dynamics of contemporary male-female social relationships, suc...
