Pornography

To the libertarian, the arguments between conservatives and liberals over laws prohibiting pornography are distressingly beside the point. The conservative position tends to hold that pornography is debasing and immoral and therefore should be outlawed. Liberals tend to counter that sex is good and healthy and that therefore pornography will only have good effects, and that depictions of violence — say on television, in movies, or in comic books — should be outlawed instead. Neither side deals with the crucial point: that the good, bad, or indifferent consequences [p. 104] of pornography, while perhaps an interesting problem in its own right, is completely irrelevant to the question of whether or not it should be outlawed. The libertarian holds that it is not the business of the law — the use of retaliatory violence — to enforce anyone’s conception of morality. It is not the business of the law — even if this were practically possible, which is, of course, most unlikely — to make anyone good or reverent or moral or clean or upright. This is for each individual to decide for himself. It is only the business of legal violence to defend people against the use of violence, to defend them from violent invasions of their person or property. But if the government presumes to outlaw pornography, it itself becomes the genuine outlaw — for it is invading the property rights of people to produce, sell, buy, or possess pornographic material.

We do not pass laws to make people upright; we do not pass laws to force people to be kind to their neighbors or not to yell at the bus driver; we do not pass laws to force people to be honest with their loved ones. We do not pass laws to force them to eat X amount of vitamins per day. Neither is it the business of government, nor of any legal agency, to pass laws against the voluntary production or sale of pornography. Whether pornography is good, bad, or indifferent should be of no interest to the legal authorities.

The same holds true for the liberal bugbear of “the pornography of violence.” Whether or not watching violence on television helps lead to actual crimes should not come under the purview of the State. To outlaw violent films because they might someday induce someone to commit a crime is a denial of man’s free will, and a total denial, of course, of the right of those who will not commit crimes to see the film. But more important, it is no more justifiable — in fact, less so — to outlaw violent films for this reason than it would be, as we have noted, to lock up all teenage Negro males because they have a greater tendency to commit crime than the rest of the population.

It should be clear, too, that prohibition of pornography is an invasion of property right, of the right to produce, sell, buy, and own. Conservatives who call for the outlawing of pornography do not seem to realize that they are thereby violating the very concept of property rights they profess to champion. It is also a violation of freedom of the press, which, as we have seen, is really a subset of the general right of private property.

Sometimes it seems that the beau ideal of many conservatives, as well as of many liberals, is to put everyone into a cage and coerce him into doing what the conservatives or liberals believe to be the moral thing. They would of course be differently styled cages, but they would be [p. 105] cages just the same. The conservative would ban illicit sex, drugs, gambling, and impiety, and coerce everyone to act according to his version of moral and religious behavior. The liberal would ban films of violence, unesthetic advertising, football, and racial discrimination, and, at the extreme, place everyone in a “Skinner box” to be run by a supposedly benevolent liberal dictator. But the effect would be the same: to reduce everyone to a subhuman level and to deprive everyone of the most precious part of his or her humanity — the freedom to choose.

The irony, of course, is that by forcing men to be “moral” — i.e., to act morally — the conservative or liberal jailkeepers would in reality deprive men of the very possibility of being moral. The concept of “morality” makes no sense unless the moral act is freely chosen. Suppose, for example, that someone is a devout Muslim who is anxious to have as many people as possible bow to Mecca three times a day; to him let us suppose this is the highest moral act. But if he wields coercion to force everyone to bow to Mecca, he is thereby depriving everyone of the opportunity to be moral — to choose freely to bow to Mecca. Coercion deprives a man of the freedom to choose and, therefore, of the possibility of choosing morally.

The libertarian, in contrast to so many conservatives and liberals, does not want to place man in any cage. What he wants for everyone is freedom, the freedom to act morally or immorally, as each man shall decide.