See Friedrich Engels (philosophical collaborator of Marx): In capitalism, marriage degenerates "often enough into the crassest prostitution"; the married woman "only differs from the ordinary courtesan in that she does not let out her body on piece-work as a wage earner, but sells it once and for all into slavery" (p. 82). This is from his 1884 book, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State . New York: International Publishers, 1942. Peking, China: Foreign Languages Press, 1978. The other locus classicus is this 1917 essay by Emma Goldman: "The Traffic in Women," in the collection Anarchism and Other Essays . New York: Dover, 1969, pp. 177-94. An nice overview of the issue is provided in Alison Jaggar's "Prostitution," in Alan Soble, ed., The Philosophy of Sex: Contemporary Readings , 1st edition. Totowa, N.J.: Littlefield, Adams, 1980, pp. 348-68. Not only Marxists and Feminists have made the point (or drawn the comparison); sociobiologists and evolutionary...

In late 1991 or early 1992 (I forget which semester), Alvin Plantinga, who has written much-praised super-analytic papers defending Christianity from the problem of evil, gave an informal talk in Budapest, sponsored by the philosophy department of the Technical University. I was fortunate to be in attendance. We sat around a large, beautiful wood table (don't ask me the kind of tree it came from, please). Maybe ten people came to hear him. After his presentation, which was on the problem of evil, I asked (roughly): "You've been trying to explain to us why an omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient being permits evil. But the point of the existence of what appears to be unnecessary, purposeless, needless suffering is that such a God cannot or likely does not exist. Why, then, are you searching for an explanation?" Plantinga replied (roughly): "I believe in that sort of God, and therefore there must be an explanation; the suffering must have a purpose." (I had heard that before.) I followed up with, "but...

Plantinga writes, in the quoted passage, " what God sees as better is, of course, better. " Oh? Of course? Having solved to his own satisfaction the problem of evil, can Alvin also solve the Euthyphro-style dilemma that arises here? (1) A world is better because God sees it as better vs. (2) God sees a world as better because it is better.

Plato had much to say about love and sexual desire in his dialogues Symposium and Phaedrus and elsewhere (e.g., Laws , Lysis , Republic ). What we call "Platonic Love," however, may bear little resemblance to what Plato had in mind; "Platonic Love" might be a medieval or Neoplatonist corruption or variation of Plato's own ideas. Be that as it may, we don't talk about "Aristotelian Love" because it is a mouthful. Aristotle did talk about "love," in the sense of friendship, using the Greek word "philia" instead of Plato's word of choice, "eros." For Aristotle's account of friendship, see his Nicomachean Ethics ; the relevant passages, as well as commentary, can be found in my Eros, Agape, and Philia . Also take a look at Gilbert Meilaender's "When Harry and Sally Read the Nicomachean Ethics : Friendship between Men and Women," in Leroy S. Rouner, ed., The Changing Face of Friendship ( Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), pp. 183-96. You might also want to...

Yes, it's a joke, and in various versions a good one. (We could, in the manner of the Aristocrats , tell it a hundred different ways. Let me know if you want to hear the version that involves President Coolidge -- or go to http://fs.uno.edu/asoble/pages/bermant.htm .) But even though a joke, it contains much truth; and jokes can be turned into philosophical arguments or positions. (See, for example, how the content or point of jokes about masturbation have been taken damn seriously by philosophers and theologians: "Masturbation," an entry in my encyclopedia Sex from Plato to Paglia .) As a matter of fact, at least one philosopher of sex [moi] has argued (or only asserted, perhaps) that gays are foolish to press for the right to marry -- they are full of romantic notions about marriage, are not sensitive enough to what a killer institution it is. ( Sexual Investigations , near the end of Chapter 2.) You make your bed hastily, and then suffocate in it.

Let's suppose my general points are even slightly well-taken. Marks asks (1) whether rights are natural or (more positivistically) grounded, say, in social convention, and (2) whether (or when/if) a person has the right(s) about which he speaks. But he doesn't ask what a right is or what the word "right" means. As Vonnegut would say (and has said): "And so it goes." I'd like to know what the sentence "I have a right to decide the fate of X" means -- without (re)turning to "It's mine!" Maybe we should ask: which is more basic, analytically: ownership or rights?

I reply only to: "Can you define 'own' without using another word for it (belong, possess, etc.)?" Make the question more general. Can we define "X" without using other words W, Y, Z , etc.? I often/usually define an "X" by using other words, W, Y, Z. Now, if you tell me that W, Y, and Z don't help you understand the original "X," or that I have not yet succeeded in defining "X," I might try to define W, Y, and Z -- using yet other words. We must avoid a circle, that is, eventually defining "X" in terms of "X" (say, were we to define Z in terms of A and then A in terms of X). Suppose that we define words only by using other words--this looks like a hermeneutic regress. Maybe there are words that are "self-defined" and so do not need to be defined by other words. Then we escape the regress. Are there any such words? Or maybe some words get defined not by words but in some other way--by pointing to the object named by the word (an ostensive or demonstrative defintion). Then we escape the regress. Must all...

I wonder if Nicholas is telling us more about The Perfect/Good Life/Relationship than about ideal romantic love per se. But maybe they overlap.

Why merely "no" and "no" without some reason for the answers? This web site is AskPhilosophersDotOrg, not GiveMeYourBriefOpinionDotCom. (My philosophy is that an answer proferred on this web site ought to be one that the panelist would recite in the classroom, and in that context mere "no's" are an embarassment to the discipline.) One of many appropriate ways to answer (1), "Is friendship necessary for romantic love?", is to provide plausible analyses (they need not strictly be of the necessary and sufficent condition sort, but that would be nice) of both "romantic love" and "friendship" and to argue that there is inadequate overlap between them. I think the "no" answer is right, but that is because I tend to think of friendship along the lines of perhaps Aristotle and C.S. Lewis, while my understanding of romantic love places more emphasis on the "romantic" than on the "love" (were that not the case, there might well be something pointed in the question after all). I might go farther and claim that...

Yes and no. Although, mostly yes. For the most comprehensive treatment of the issue (Kant and/on sex) that I know, see my essay "Sexual Use and What to Do about It: Internalist and Externalist Sexual Ethics," Essays in Philosophy 2:2 (June, 2001) [online journal, at Humboldt State] or, better, the longer versions reprinted in my Philosophy of Sex , 4th ed., and posted on my website, at http://fs.uno.edu/asoble/pages/sexuse.htm (yet more of the territory is covered in detail in my "Kant and Sexual Perversion," The Monist 86:1 (2003), pp. 57-92; also found on my web site. Insert, at the end of the URL, the file name kmonist.htm instead). Plenty of references to other essays on Kant and/on sex are provided. You'll have to consult the Vorlesung ( Lectures on Ethics ; Heath's edition) and the Metaphysics of Morals (Gregor) to make up your own mind.

So many interesting questions, so little time. . . . For now, only a few brief comments. (1) See the US Supreme Court case ROSE v. LOCKE, 423 U.S. 48 (1975). A man compelled a woman at knifepoint to submit to cunnilingus; he was convicted of violating Tennessee's "sexual crimes against nature" law; he appealed, arguing that the law was unconstitutionally vague and did not explicitly prohibit male-to-female oral sex; the Court ruled against him; Justice Stewart dissented, agreeing that the law was unbearably vague, but added that the man should have been prosecuted for assault and battery (not "rape"). (2) Debates about the "mens rea" of rape heated up after the 1976 British House of Lords case, Regina v. Morgan. That case is notorious for concluding that an honest even if unreasonable belief in the consent of the raped person exculpates. For more recent thinking on this issue, see Stephen Schulhofer's 1998 book Unwanted Sex . (3) I suggest that a more careful survey of contemporary rape statutes will...

You might want to consult question #341 on this web site. There I wrote, in response to the obverse question, "Why monogamy?", the following wiseacre answer that, nevertheless, contains some truth [which answer I have mildly revised, since it was first written on November 3, 2005]: Here are some standard replies to the question "Why monogamy?" (some worse than others): (1) Why not? [Vy a duck?] (2) Monogamy reduces your chances of contracting an STD; polygamy implies that you must trust more than one spouse or mate to be sexually faithful and to practice safe sex effectively if not faithful. (3) Monogamy is better than polygamy because you barely have enough time and energy and money for one relationship, let alone two. [Woody Allen: You want an orgy ? We can barely get 4 people together for bridge or bowling.] But: it is not necessarily true that it is more difficult to get along with 2 or 3 or 4 spouses in one dwelling than with only 1. The presence of the other spouse(s) may very well...

This is not exactly a "sex" question. I think it belongs under "law": what are the proper limits of the law in prohibiting behavior; what is the relationship between law and morality (bad taste, indecency); what are the various senses of "privacy" and how should the law handle violations of privacy? There are indeed many entires in the "law" area of this web site that speak to these questions. One problem I have with the question is that it does not state the law (statute) under which the man was prosecuted. Does Sydney have an explicit law that prohibits the use of photographic equipment on beaches where there is nude sunbathing? If so, why? Or was some other law invoked to prosecute this fellow? (Public nuisance? Environmental hazard?) I once lived, many years ago, in Austin, Texas; in the town there was [still is?] a large pool, Barton Springs, at which women were permitted to be topless. Men would gather around or outside the pool and watch/look/leer and take pictures. No one, as far as I know, was...