Catharine MacKinnon | Only Words | Philosophers Explained | Stephen Hicks

"Protecting pornography means protecting sexual abuse as speech."
The subject of this video is the 1993 book "Only Words" by Catharine MacKinnon. MacKinnon argues for a new definition of pornography and that censorship of pornography is necessary.
Philosophers, Explained covers major philosophers and texts, especially the great classics. In each episode, Professor Hicks discusses an important work, doing a close reading that lasts 40 minutes to an hour.
The playlist of current videos can found here: • Philosophers Explained
Stephen R. C. Hicks, Ph.D., is Professor of Philosophy at Rockford University, USA, and has had visiting positions at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., University of Kasimir the Great in Poland, Oxford University’s Harris Manchester College in England, and Jagiellonian University in Poland.
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Nietzsche and the Nazis audiobook: • Nietzsche and the Nazi...
Playlists:
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Entrepreneurship and Values: • Entrepreneurship and V...
Nietzsche: • Nietzsche

[@StephenHicksPhilosopher]

Other episodes in the series include: 3. Plato on the Allegory of the Cave 4. Galileo Galilei on Reconciling Science and Religion 5. Ayn Rand on Individual Rights 6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau 7. René Descartes on Radical Doubt 8. Jean-Paul Sartre on Existentialism as a Humanism 9. Socrates on Defending Philosophy 10. Martin Heidegger on Why Being Exists 11. Arachne and Athena and Divine vs. Human Justice 12. Aristotle on Ethics and Virtue 13. Albert Camus on the Myth of Sisyphus

[@Jules-Is-a-Guy]

The porn industry needs to be better regulated, I think that's pretty uncontroversial. However, should the minority subset of women high in sociosexuality, someone like Aella, be legally permitted in a free society to do things like porn? Yes, there's free society on the one hand, and there's functional society on the other hand, we obviously want both. I'm not exactly knowledgeable enough to compare/contrast how, for example the Netherlands (Amsterdam) handles this kind of problem, more or less effectively than for example the US or UK. But, (for the most part in the Anglosphere,) we allow certain kinds of drugs to be bought and sold, but do not allow "open drug scenes" (except recently, in woke dystopian downtown urban areas). We allow certain kinds of sexual transactions, but do not allow public prostitution, or sex trafficking. Also, I just heard Jonathan Haidt discuss in relation to regulating (or not regulating) smartphone usage for early adolescents, how children are a different case from adults in various ways. Haidt says, the cases where even Libertarians tend to agree that lines should be drawn legally, for restricting materials and activities available to children, involve sexual content and addiction (developing brains are different, we cannot have responsible, mature citizens, if they are psychobehaviorally damaged during adolescence). Personally, I'm mostly a consequentialist, pretty much Civil Libertarian, mostly Classical Liberal, and approximately a centrist. And, I think there's one important caveat, related to Haidt's summation: I think things involving sex and sexual content, and also PHYSICAL addiction, should not legally be available to children. Although neuroscience shows that lots of influences, can "nudge" people of all ages, and therefore that SOME of what the social constructivists say, has SOME validity, these observations do not constitute a justification for restricting all content, or suspending all liberties. I maintain that the ultimate defense for a free and liberal society, is that the public sphere is its own laboratory, and involves a massive experiment that's being run all the time. This includes the way in which formal education is 'administered,' as one important variable. The truth is, assuming the ultimate arbiters are human health, and replicable empirical observation, while Nietzsche and the pragmatists respectively, were wrong about which methods work best at the macro-level of society, and the micro-level of formal education, nevertheless their fundamental observations about humans and behavior, are largely being proved correct. Blank slate is wrong, the existence of "individuals" on the traditional definition is wrong, and Sapolsky and others explain how determinism is essentially being proved correct. So, why should we not all become Nietzschean pragmatists? In what sense is Classical Liberalism still defensible? Well another question is: since blank slate was disproven, should we have immediately adopted a "guilty until proven innocent" legal precedent, whereby all defendants are convicted or not, based primarily on immutable characteristics? The ultimate question to address this predicament is: what is philosophy? Answers might differ, but if it's essentially: the most adaptive set of heuristics by which people typically engage with the world, and also seek to develop and maintain a functional society, then Classical Liberalism is entirely defensible. Liberalism's claims cannot be proven literally correct, in a neuroscience research lab, just the opposite. But, as a set of adaptive heuristics, there's hardly any argument to be made AGAINST Liberalism. I'm not a philosopher, not sure if I have this part exactly right, but it seems to me that (perhaps strangely,) it's effectively been through the process of proving Liberalism's epistemology to be false, that we've proven its ontology to be all the more accurate, and have thereby ultimately strengthened the paradigm.

[@KingRyanoles]

Does MacKinnon address that her definition of porn as a powerful male exploiting a weak female would potentially exclude gay and lesbian sex? Or even heterosexual sex if the power dynamics are equal or inverted in the future, which her social constructivist views imply is entirely plausible?

[@StephenHicksPhilosopher]

Not in this book.

[@egezort]

​@@StephenHicksPhilosopher but she does address it elsewhere, so does Andrea Dworkin. I don't remember exactly where though