Lucky Green wrote:
Let us assume that it is unethical to force children to participate in the production of child pornography. (For the benefit of Kent and the more ignorant people on this list, I will state that I firmly believe this to be true, despite the fact that doing so should be irrelevant for the argument.)
Furthermore, let us assume that there are a number of individuals who enjoy looking at hard core child pornography.
The question then is: does going after the distributors provide a benefit to the children being (potentially) used for such pictures?
The answer is clearly no. By limiting the distribution of an individual picture, you increase the total number of pictures required to satisfy market demand. That means more children will be required to meet demand.
How do you justify that "clearly"? I think that your analysis is incorrect. This is a supply and demand situation. It is very simple to show (as any microeconomics textbook does) that a tax on the product reduces the amount of product sold and produced. Since a unit of product is probably one picture of a child, there are less units produced if they are taxed. In the case of child porn, all this persecution is a form of tax, although not very quantifiable. igor
Thus, by going after the distributors, Se7en causes more children to be violated by child pornographers.
The only question that remains is: how can he live with this?
Logic != base emotions,
--Lucky Green <shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred.
Put a stake through the heart of DES! Join the quest at http://www.frii.com/~rcv/deschall.htm
- Igor.