Pornography, The Theory: What Utilitarianism Did to Action (review)

Frances Ferguson's goals in Pornography, The Theory: What Utilitarianism Did to Action are not the usual ones pursued in debates about pornography. Although sympathetic to the free speech, pro-pornography position, Ferguson does not set out to participate in the debate directly, at least not on the terms on which the current debate is conducted; rather, her goal is to analyse the discussion for what it can tell us about a surprising range of other topics. Ferguson's general view is that our arguments about pornography are impoverished. Thinking about pornography in terms of liberal versus conservative views, or censorship versus free speech, is insufficiently complex. Her thesis is that pornography and utilitarianism are connected and that both raise issues for modernity: the issues raised include our understanding of actions and their value, the moral standing and value of persons, how pornography relates to literary production, and the role testimony plays in understanding the harm of pornography.

It is worth noting at the outset that while Ferguson writes about utilitarianism as if we all knew exactly what was meant by the term, she has a rather particular usage of it. Readers expecting a discussion of what contemporary utilitarian moral theorists make of the moral status of pornography will be disappointed. First, Ferguson does not engage with the history of utilitarian moral thinking. For Ferguson, utilitarianism is the moral theory of Victorian philosophers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill; Henry Sidgwick does not make an appearance and contemporary utilitarians are nowhere to be found. Second, one might expect a book with utilitarianism and pornography in the title to ask what utilitarianism as a moral theory says about pornography. Ever since the "happy pig" problem was raised in Mill's classic Utilitarianism (1863), utilitarians have had to grapple with the status of base pleasures. On the one hand, pornography produces pleasure, but if feminists are right, pornography also creates great harms. Thus, for the utilitarian the moral status of pornography is largely a matter of calculating pleasures and pains to arrive at a balance. Again, Ferguson's subject is more abstract than this. Instead of being concerned with how the calculation turns out, she is interested in our understanding of action that assigns it value based on outcomes.

Ferguson asks, what did utilitarianism do to action? I would put her question this way: what's the relationship between our understanding of action and the theory of utilitarianism? And how is this related to pornography? Pornography works the way many other features of modern life do, providing ranking schemes of value based on pleasure as an outcome. To understand pornography in a utilitarian analysis, we do not need to refer to an absolute conception of rules separate from persons and social structures, nor need we base our understanding on the God-given worth of persons. Instead, we measure its results, a peculiarly modern preoccupation. Pornography itself is in the business of ranking, and we understand it in terms of its results with yet another ranking scheme.

Ferguson's first chapter explores these themes in Catharine MacKinnon's anti-pornography argument. Ferguson is a sympathetic reader of MacKinnon, and she focuses on the aspect of her argument that examines the role pornography plays in creating and maintaining a system of civil inequality. To MacKinnon, pornography is a practise of exploitation and subordination based on sex that harms women. Ferguson thinks that MacKinnon is right about two of the ways in which pornography is indeed a practise that harms women: first, when women are harmed in the production of pornography; second, when pornography is used in the context of sexual harassment. MacKinnon is right to worry about the harm pornography causes women, thinks Ferguson, but wrong about the scope of the harm. According to Ferguson, the most valuable contribution MacKinnon makes to our understanding of pornography is her focus on what pornography does rather than what...