Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Reflection on a Blog Discussion of Virtual Ethics - Carmen Lam


The ethical issue of internet pornography is always very controversial in the contemporary society. As the internet create a favorable avenue for the development and spreading of pornography, more people can easily reach the pornographic items anytime and anywhere.


In a blog, All about Sex, a journalist, Michael Castleman posted an entry which was entitled ‘Does Pornography Cause Social Harm?’ He mentioned that pornography make many people feel offended. Some even insisted that porn can definitely cause social harm for example, leading to sexual irresponsibility and divorce. However, Castleman tried to provide some figures of research to against this argument. Firstly, he indicated the statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), since 1990, the teen sex, nation's abortion, venereal disease and even if the divorce rate have fallen. Also, according to the Justice Department's National Crime Victimization, the rate of Rape has declined too. Though, finally, the writer did not show his stand of the ethical issue in internet porn, he proved the evidence that porn causes no measurable harm from a social welfare perspective. He supported that online porn can be beneficial such as in mental health aspect.


As we may know that the web use is becoming a normal part of life for majority of the developed world, people can get the information from the internet more easily. For the issue of online porn, you can assess pornographic items once you have the internet access. Therefore, when you claimed that you are above 18 in the web sites, you can get various kinds of messages especially porn. As porn always encourages people to exchange sex for money and represents the women as sexually active. It is considered to be immoral. Thus, is it significant that the statistic in this article showed porn causes no measurable social harm? If so, then can we say that internet porn is actually moral? This is absolutely a worthy discussion to the public.


In fact, I do not agree that internet porn causes no measurable social harm which can be an indicator that internet porn is ethical or moral. In some cases, some may argue that online porn can provide a unique opportunity for who with alternative sex practices. Yet, in my opinion, most of the porn is only depicting the sex and sexual activities. Some indeed degrade the image of females as porn still represents a limited range of body types as sexually appealing. This leads to another encouragement that female should be like or acting like that. I think that it is a kind of degrading. On the other hand, from my point of view, the discussion could be more interesting if it not only focuses on the moral issue of online porn, but also why people consume the online porn and how the online porn influences the public.


Image Source: http://www.indiavision.com/news/article/international/23763


Article Source: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/all-about-sex/200904/does-pornography-cause-social-harm

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