Analysis 4

Directions:  Use Rationale 2.0 to fully reconstruct the reasoning of the article “The Travesty of Legalized Prostitution.”  Use the advanced reasoning format and write all principles.  Finish this assignment by identifying the subject, the issue, and one clear occurrence of the following four fallaces:  straw man, ad hominem, innuendo, and equivocation.  To do this, either use the template on the last page below, or create a document that looks exactly like it.  Staple the page below to the Rationale 2.0 printout, with the Rationale 2.0 printout in back.   Do not attaché the article.
 
The Travesty of Legalized Prostitution 
By Bonnie Blanchette

The abuse of the human body comes in many forms and one of the oldest is prostitution.  One can produce facile free market arguments that prostitution is just the selling of ones body for money, which every laborer does in one way or another.  You can repeat that until you believe it; but that will not make it true.  The fact is that prostitutes are anything but free. They are trapped in a profession that exacts a terrible price in hopelessness, despair and self loathing.  I should know, I was one.

Of course, whether something is moral and whether it ought to be legal are two different questions.  People living in a free society know that much harm can be done by legislating morality, even when the practices being legislated against are truly wrong.  For example, even though it is clearly wrong to drink to excess, making laws that would regulate how much people can drink in the privacy of their own homes would undermine our basic freedoms.

Now many believe that the same may be said of prostitution.  Sure, prostitution is wrong, they say, but legislating against it will do more harm than good.  When a desired commodity is made illegal, the market for it does not actually disappear; it simply goes underground.  It is easy to ignore what we do not see, but the reality of underground prostitution is, they claim, far worse than the reality of legal prostitution.  Like gambling, it is better to let it go on as a regulated industry where those who profit from in it can be made to pay their fair share of taxes and be protected by laws and government regulations.

Do they have a point?  Sure.  They make a legitimate appeal to basic values of justice and freedom.  But are they right?  No they are not. 

First let me point out the most obvious mistake.  It is foolish to argue that all conceivable products and services must be legal.  I am not allowed to open up a hand grenade store and you are not allowed to sell your children into slavery.  Nobody seriously thinks it should be otherwise.
 
Second, people who believe in legalized prostitution are all too ready to believe that the lives of those working in the sex industry are no different than the lives of any other working people.  They think that prostitutes do what they do because they find the work rewarding, and that they are proud of their contribution to society.  Being well off themselves, they simply do not stop to think about the horrors that constitute the daily lives of a sex-worker.

Legal or illegal, prostitution is an utterly degrading profession.  Even in countries where prostitution is legal like Germany and the Netherlands, prostitutes are women who have been pushed into the trade from a heartbreakingly tender age.  They are typically destitute and often drug-addicted and sexually-abused.  As the liberal New York Times columnist Bob Herbert recently wrote:  “That a city, a state or any other governmental entity in the U.S. could legally sanction the sexual degradation of women and girls under any circumstances, much less those who are so extremely vulnerable, is an atrocity.” 

Liberalism is a fine thing, as is the free market, but we all know that some things simply are just not meant to me freely exchanged on the open market, and the human body is one of them.  Herbert says it well:  “As a society, we should be offering help to the many thousands of women who would like to escape prostitution, and providing alternatives to those in danger of being pulled into it.”  Clearly, this task is far more difficult in any place where prostitution is legal.  

(Scroll down for analysis template.)

Analysis of “The Travesty of Legalized Prostitution” 

Introduction

1.  The subject of this article is the legalization of prostitution.
2.  The main issues of this article are (1) whether or not prostitution should be legal (2) why people believe prostitution should be legal.  

Criticism

The following logical errors occur in this article.

1.  Ad Hominem

Definition:  Evaluating reasoning by calling attention to the character, actions or personal circumstances of the reasoner, rather than examining the reasoning itself.

MOI:  Show how the example focuses attention on the character, actions, or personal circumstances of the reasoner rather than examining the reasoning itself.

Analysis:  In paragraph 6 the author attacks people who believe in legalized prostitution as uncaring rather than examine their claim that making prostitution illegal does not make prostitution go away and only serves to make prostitutes lives worse.

2.  Straw Man

Definition: Attempting to discredit a view (or practice) by criticizing a weak version of it or the reasoning given in support of it.

MOI: Identify both the original view and the weak version of that view.  Show (a) why the weak version is a version of the view  and (b) why it  is weak.

Analysis:   In paragraph 5 the author claims that it is foolish to believe that all conceivable goods and services should be legal.  This is a weak version of the view that a certain goods or services should be legal if it is similar to other goods and services that are currently legal.

3.  Innuendo
Definition:  Exploiting contextual assumptions to suggest a conclusion that has been neither stated nor logically implied, when there are reasons for doubting that one would be willing to claim it explicitly.
MOI:  Identify the suggested conclusion, showing how, in the given context, it might be reasonably inferred despite the fact that it was neither stated nor implied.  Give reasons for doubting that its author would claim it explicitly.

Analysis:  The author suggests without saying so that making prostitution illegal has some positive effect for prostitutes or society in general.  The author does not say this explicitly, presumably because she has no actual evidence for this view. If she did, it would make her case much stronger.

4.  Equivocation

Definition: Using a word or expression in a sense that is alien to the given context without adequate notice or justification.

MOI:  Identify the word or expression in question and identify the two different senses that have been equivocated upon:  (1) the sense that would normally be assumed in the given context and (2) the sense that is being assigned without adequate notice or justification.

Analysis:   In the first paragraph the author equivocates on the term ‘free’.  She appears to be trying to refute the claim that prostitution provides a good that should be freely traded on the open market by denying that prostitutes are free to do anything else.  This confuses freedom in the sense of a lack of constraint with freedom in the sense of a power to improve ones life.