Regulations Kill Industries: Porn Edition

Did social conservatives think of this?

This week, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation launched a new war against porn’s potentially reckless ways, proposing a strict initiative that would require male porn stars to wear condoms during vaginal and anal intercourse.

Since California is one of two states in which porn is legal (the other is, only recently, New Hampshire), could this be the end of porn?

Immediately, the porn world was up in arms over the initiative. “Hey, dicks, it’s really quite simple,” says Jeremy. “We don’t mind wearing rubbers, but no matter how you slice it, the viewers don’t want to see them.”

“The fact that these workers’ health and safety has been neglected is a very dangerous situation,” AHF president Michael Weinstein tells The Daily Beast. “It’s a matter of fairness. Why is this the only industry not afforded protection when they go to work?”...

...But Cal/OSHA and the AIDS Health Foundation insist the initiative—a stricter version of the state law—will be easier to enforce on a smaller scale. They need 200,000 signatures by June 5 to add the measure to the November 2012 presidential ballot in L.A. County. Weinstein is confident they’ll amass the votes, since they easily collected 70,901 signatures for the citywide measure. The initiative argues that the adult entertainment industry should have to comply with the same laws as any other private employer in California. Just as construction workers are required to wear hard hats on site, porn stars should have to wear rubbers on set. Cal/OSHA even mandates that porn bosses provide employees exposed to blood-borne pathogens (seminal and vaginal fluids) with dental dams, gloves, and eye protection.

This all raises the question: If condoms are enough to drive viewers away, who’s going to pay money to watch people go at it while looking like CDC agents?

It's a brilliant plan, if it is a plan.

A Utilitarian Framework for Evaluating the Morality of Abortion

<This post is cross-posted to the League of Ordinary Gentlemen.>

Jeremy Stangroom is a British author, philosopher, co-founder of The Philosopher's Magazine Online - one of the premiere philosophy publications on the Internet - and the director of Philosophy Experiments - where users can participate in a variety of interactive thought experiments.  One of the more popular experiments is called Whose Body Is It Anyway; it is about the taboo taboo, touchy touchy subject of abortion.   

I strongly recommend completing the experiment before continuing to read this blog post.

The Whose Body Is It Anyway experiment thus far has had two particularly interesting results: the first is that opposition to abortion tends to come disproportionately from the religious:

(B)y far the biggest predictor of whether a person is going to be opposed to abortion is religious belief. So, for instance, 83% of people with no religion support the right of a woman to have an abortion, compared to only 37% of Christians.  

The second interesting result - a significant result indeed - is that people opposed to abortion tended to be generally inconsistent in their attitudes towards the medical seriousness of miscarriage:

Near the beginning of Whose Body Is It Anyway?...you’re asked to rank the following medical issues in order of seriousness (focusing only on numbers of deaths): cancer, multiple sclerosis, miscarriage, stroke, heart disease and housemaid’s knee. Then, if it turns out that you’re against abortion, the activity complains if you haven’t ranked miscarriage as being a serious medical problem (since, for example, in the United States alone there are estimated to be more than a million miscarriages each year).

I have many problems with this interpretation, but let's focus on only the most substantial ones - those related not to the particulars of the way in which Mr. Stangroom framed his experiment but to the issue itself: first, miscarriage is a natural phenomenon, similar to death by old age, whereas abortion is the direct and predictable result of human action, such as euthanasia. 

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The Virtue of Virtues

Some of the 72 disciples of Confucius at Koshi-byo in Nagasaki

Sharon Begley writes in Science Journal in 2004:

The task was to practice "compassion" meditation, generating a feeling of loving kindness toward all beings.

"We tried to generate a mental state in which compassion permeates the whole mind with no other thoughts," says Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk at Shechen Monastery in Katmandu, Nepal, who holds a Ph.D. in genetics.

In a striking difference between novices and monks, the latter showed a dramatic increase in high-frequency brain activity called gamma waves during compassion meditation. Thought to be the signature of neuronal activity that knits together far-flung brain circuits, gamma waves underlie higher mental activity such as consciousness. The novice meditators "showed a slight increase in gamma activity, but most monks showed extremely large increases of a sort that has never been reported before in the neuroscience literature," says Prof. Davidson, suggesting that mental training can bring the brain to a greater level of consciousness.

Not since David Hume has virtue ethics found a place in the mainstream philosophy community, despite the fact that - more than any other moral framework - virtue ethics serves as the basic moral framework for all of the world's major religions and cultures.

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Social Networks and the Bystander Effect

Malcolm Gladwell's brilliant New Yorker piece, "Small Change", on how the Civil Rights Movement could never have been accomplished with Facebook and Twitter, reminds me of the murder of Kitty Genovese and the bystander effect; basically the more witnesses there are to some horrible event, the less likely it is that any one witness will intervene.  

The basic premise is that, for example, if there is a man dying on the street and there is one witness, there is a 90% chance that that witness will stop to help the dying man; if there are two witnesses, each will stop to help 40% of the time, totalling an 80% chance that the man will be helped; with three witnesses, each will help 25% of the time, totalling 75%; with four witnesses, each will help 15% of the time, totalling 60%; five witnesses, 10%, totalling 50%; 6, 7%, 42%; 7, 5%, 35%; 10, 1%, 10%, etc. 

Rock-solid research has shown such a diffusion of responsibility to be a highly predictable phenomenon: in inverse proportion to the number of witnesses, we are far more likely to do the right thing if other people are not watching.  Even without modern empirical scientific research, however, spontaneously evolved cultural institutions, like the ombudsman or a neutral proxy as absolutely essential to conducting business in Japan, show that the diffusion and avoidance of responsibility is a natural part of being human.

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Religion as Moral Government

Not that kind of Moral Government - Image by RobLisaMeehanToday, I walked by a sign advertising a lecture on an age old question: "Does Religion Make People More Peaceful?"  Well, it sure doesn't seem like it!  Radical Islam has demonstrated conclusively that fervent religious belief doesn't always entail pro-social behavior.  That's the most recent example in a multi-denominational trend that stretches through the Crusades, Inquisition, Hindu chauvinism, Mormon persecution and Mormon murderers.  One caveat to that sad litany: for the vast majority of people religion does make it easier to live a peaceful life.  However, there exists among some of the most feverishly religious people a propensity to engage in barbarism.  Why is it that even though all religions feature prominent scriptural prohibitions on violence, the observant seem particularly capable of unspeakable acts of brutality?  Religion has proven a flawed system of moral government: usually effective, but infrequently disastrous.

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