More rights talk:
When we bring this reality into focus, it becomes apparent that the familiar depiction of the debate over pornography regulation as pitting the “rights of individuals,” on the one side, against some amorphous “majority’s dislike of smut,” on the other, is false to the facts. The public interest in a cultural structure—in which, as Dworkin says, “sexual experience has dignity and beauty”—is the concrete interest of individuals and families who constitute “the public.” The obligations of others to respect their interests, and of governments to respect and protect them, is a matter of justice.
It is in a special way a matter of justice to children. Parents’ efforts to bring up their children as respecters of themselves and others will be helped or hindered—perhaps profoundly—by the cultural structure in which children are reared. Whether children themselves ever get a glimpse of pornographic images in childhood is a side issue. A decent social milieu cannot be established or maintained simply by shielding children from such images. It is the attitudes, habits, dispositions, imagination, ideology, values, and choices shaped by a culture in which pornography flourishes that will, in the end, deprive many children of what can without logical or moral strain be characterized as their right to a healthy sexuality. In a society in which sex is de-personalized, and thus degraded, even conscientious parents will have enormous difficulty transmitting to their children the capacity to view themselves and others as persons, rather than as objects of sexual desire and satisfaction.
Is this really a matter for particular justice, rather than legal justice and charity (or benevolence)?
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