Leslie Green, a distinguished legal philosopher who has written extensively about issues of obscenity and pornography, challenges our case study on online porn filters.

British prime minister David Cameron has announced plans to “crack down” on online pornography. Photo by Moritz Hager, under this license CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Here is Leslie Green’s response to Sarah Glatte’s case study on Britain’s proposed online porn filters.

“I have three reservations about Sarah’s thoughtful comments:

1. I’m not sure if I count as an ‘expert’ but, as far as I know, there is no valid and reliable empirical evidence that shows that: “mainstream online pornography has become both physically and verbally more extreme, violent, and abusive.” More than what baseline? Remember that there has been a massive change in the *selection* effect: now lots of people can *see* what lots of other people find sexually interesting, and it horrifies them. In 1983, most people had no idea at all what most other people actually viewed, let alone what they would have viewed if they could. A valid measure of the sort Sarah needs must give a plausible and consistent index for ‘extreme’ and ‘violent’. We do not have have one. A reliable measure must get the same result when applied in different contexts, by different researchers. We do not have that either. (Indeed, most of the empirical studies about the *character* of online pornography have not had even one replication.) We just do not know whether the pornography actually consumed by people online is, now, worse, or better, or just different than it was pre-internet. (We do know that *more* is consumed. This is not surprising: when the price of a normal good falls, more of it tends to be consumed.)

2. Over-blocking is not the only relevant issue. What do we think about the motivation for, and likely effects of, the requirement that families (adult men, typically) will need *expressly to ask* for access to pornography? I think that part of the motivation for that policy is to *shame* men who use pornography, to *humiliate* them in front of their families, to *expose* them to the likelihood that the ‘smut list’ that will be retained by each ISP will eventually become public–all in order to frighten them from viewing any pornographic material at all, even in the privacy of their homes, even when it is perfectly lawful. I think it is wrong for governments to act with the motivation of shaming, humiliating, and frightening men in this way.

Would we be willing to endorse similar opt-in requirements for access to other online material where there is at least as good evidence that use of that material tends to produce behavioural changes that many regard as malign? Plausibly, viewing material from various fundamentalist religions tends to make its viewers: less tolerant of others, more sexist, more homophobic, and in some case also more violent. (Indeed, mainstream religions–not just fundamentalist ones–are among the *most* reliable vectors of sexist socialisation in the modern world. Strong religious conviction is positively correlated with just about all traits that feminists and liberals deplore. ) Would we endorse an opt-in scheme to protect people from unwilling, or easy, exposure to religious materials online? I would not. Against the speculative social benefits we need to set religious freedom. Everyone sees that. The case of pornography is similar.”

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Plug:

I explore some of the issues about online obscenity in:

‘Obscenity Without Borders,’ in Rethinking Criminal Law Theory (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2012), 75-93.

And this article also takes up other key issues:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9760.00091/abstract

See Sarah’s case study here. We welcome your comments on this topic.

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