A Japanese woman running a sex worker-dispatching business sued the state on Wednesday, saying its blanket exclusion of the sex industry from a cash handout program to support small companies hit by the coronavirus is discrimination banned under the Constitution.

That's dipping way outside the bounds of logic and more into the arena of philosophy. I'll actually throw out that I agree in principle about the unprovability of ethics. Unless you find God, which makes it waaaaaaaay easier because you don't even have to discuss the ethics you just have to argue the logic of faith.

I just had another thought to add: the reason so many people jumped down your throat for that comment is because it at least appears to be a colossal strawman. When I was saying that argument is indefensible, it's not to agree with you - I'm saying that probably wasn't the argument. The second half of what the dude says suggests he's concerned about the negative environments created by prostitution - one way to eliminate these would be for ALL PROSTITUTION TO STOP. Banning obviously cannot accomplish this, so banning it is therefore not the solution. This argument has absolutely nothing to do with your rephrasing, that laws shouldn't exist because they don't stop what they prohibit. You can argue that legalizing or decriminalizing prostitution wouldn't accomplish the desired goal (whatever that might be) but you're totally misrepresenting the argument as is.

For example, if I was concerned not about the moral implications of murder but about the murdered bodies stinking up the joint, I might say "the solution is not to outlaw murder, but to fund corpse disposal teams to deal with those smelly victims". In this case, because I don't really give a shit about the absolute instances of murder but about one of its secondary consequences, I can make an argument to dismiss outlawing it on the grounds that it will not and cannot fix my actual problem. I can also simultaneously have an ethical problem with rape and want an anti-rape law to mitigate the absolute instances of rape, because I actually want there to be fewer of them.

And now I've REALLY wasted a ton of time typing this garbage, so thanks for that.

/r/worldnews Thread Parent Link - japantoday.com