phlogma

Notes on Catherine MacKinnon, “Pornography: On Morality and Politics”
264
In contemporary industrial society, pornography is an industry that mass produces sexual intrusion on, sexual access to, possession and use of women by and for men for profit. It exploits women’s sexual and economic inequality for gain.
This understanding of the reality of pornography must contend not only […]

Notes on:
Michael Tooley, “Abortion and Infanticide.”
44
I do not share the general pessimism about the possibility of resolving the issue of abortion and infanticide because I believe it is possible to point to a very plausible moral principle dealing with the question of necessary conditions for something’s having a right to life, where the conditions in […]

Notes on:
Carole Pateman, “Defending Prostitution: Charges against Ericsson.”
[See also Ericsson on prostitution.]
561-2
Feminists do not see prostitution as unacceptable because it distributes benefits and burdens unequally; rather, to use Ericsson’s language of inequality, because prostitution is grounded in the inequality of domination and subjection. The problem of domination is both denied by and hidden behind Ericsson’s […]

Notes on:
Allan Janik, “From Logic to Animality or How Wittgenstein Used Otto Weininger”.
To begin with we must grasp that Weininger is not concerned with making an empirical generalization about the mentality of actual people, rather, he is producing an ‘ideal type’ or model of what it is to be immoral in itself. The point […]

From a 1984 article in Esquire entitled, “Why Men Love War”, by William Broyles Jr., a well-known screen writer and decorated Vietnam War veteran:
…Like all lust, for as long as it lasts it dominates everything else; a nation’s other problems are seared away, a phenomenon exploited by kings, dictators, and presidents since civilization began.
And I […]

Luno is clearly willing to accept the condemnation of pornography expressed in Longino’s article, indeed, the rightness of the censure he finds rather overdetermined. But the condemnation is a condemnation of something much more than many feminists and their critics, alike, seem willing to admit.
—Editor’s note
 
Notes on:
Longino, Helen E. “Pornography, Oppression, Freedom: A Closer Look”.
Immoral…
41-2
The […]

Notes on:
Sylviane Agacinski, Parity of the Sexes.
131
Though in many ways “modern” in its sophistication regarding sexual mores and the appreciation of one sex for the character of the other, France still seems to have marked out the sphere of public power for men.
132
Private morality is never brought up to qualify a public one. [The Clinton-Lewinsky […]

Aristotle on matricide

Notes on: Edward J. Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight Against White Slavery 1870-1939

Notes on:
Lars O. Ericsson, “Charges against Prostitution: An Attempt at a Philosophical Assessment”
[See also