Yes, wrong, for the reason I already gave. I’ll be more explicit:
What “we’ve already established” is that the woman is prepared to have sex with the man for $1M (or whatever the figure is), but that isn’t the same thing as being prepared to do it for (say) $1000, and the “kind of woman” someone’s shown to be by the former is not the same as the “kind of woman” they’re shown to be by the latter. You can apply some term (e.g., “prostitute”) to both, but prostitute-in-sense-1 and prostitute-in-sense2 are very different predicates, apply to very different sets of people, and justify somewhat different sets of inferences about the person in question.
I’ll make it more personal. I would not be willing to have sex with you (in the doubtless extremely unlikely event that you wanted me to) for, say, $100k. I would consider it a betrayal of my wife; I would consider it a violation of my marriage vows; I would be concerned about the possibility of damaging or breaking my marriage; knowing nothing about you, I would have to consider the possibility of contracting an STD; I am not much interested in casual sex; I’m pretty sure you’re male and I happen to be male and boringly heterosexual. These things matter to me, and they matter a lot. But make it a billion dollars and I’m pretty sure I’d consent, simply on effective-altruism grounds; I could do so damn much good with, say, half the takings as to outweigh those reasons, however compelling I find them.
To consider that the latter indicates “what kind of man” I am and puts me in the same pigeonhole as someone who will happily have sex with strangers for $100 a time is rather like saying that there’s no real difference in religious position between an atheist who is 99.9% confident there are no gods of any sort, and a fundamentalist who is 99.999% confident that there is exactly one, namely his own, simply because a sufficiently enormous quantity of evidence might turn one of them into the other.
(I do not, as it happens, share the widespread view that there is something terribly wrong with the “kind of woman” who is willing to have sex with strangers in exchange for moderate sums of money, nor do I think that being that “kind of woman” is good evidence of any more general moral deficiency; but I don’t think my opinion on any of this would be very different if I did. E.g., I do think there is something terribly wrong with the kind of person who is willing to kill strangers in exchange for moderate sums of money, but I think I would be willing to carry out an assassination for a billion dollars if I were really sure of getting the money and remaining unarrested for long enough to give a lot of it to effective charities, and confident that the assassination wasn’t going to do an amount of harm comparable to the good I could thereby do.)
and the “kind of woman” someone’s shown to be by the former is not the same as the “kind of woman” they’re shown to be by the latter
You are just arguing definitions. It’s pretty clear that the conversation, real or not, riffs on the classification of women into two kinds: those who will sleep with a man for money, and those who will not. You may find this classification inadequate or not matching your personal views, but that does not make it “wrong”. It just makes you have a different opinion and prefer a different classification scheme.
The point (and I apologize for not being more explicit about it) is that this binary classification is unsatisfactory not only for prostitution but also for tyranny, which is what the joke was here being used as an analogy to, and that I find Jiro’s argument unconvincing for (inter alia) the same reason as I think the man in the joke is incorrect (albeit funny).
Yes, wrong, for the reason I already gave. I’ll be more explicit:
What “we’ve already established” is that the woman is prepared to have sex with the man for $1M (or whatever the figure is), but that isn’t the same thing as being prepared to do it for (say) $1000, and the “kind of woman” someone’s shown to be by the former is not the same as the “kind of woman” they’re shown to be by the latter. You can apply some term (e.g., “prostitute”) to both, but prostitute-in-sense-1 and prostitute-in-sense2 are very different predicates, apply to very different sets of people, and justify somewhat different sets of inferences about the person in question.
I’ll make it more personal. I would not be willing to have sex with you (in the doubtless extremely unlikely event that you wanted me to) for, say, $100k. I would consider it a betrayal of my wife; I would consider it a violation of my marriage vows; I would be concerned about the possibility of damaging or breaking my marriage; knowing nothing about you, I would have to consider the possibility of contracting an STD; I am not much interested in casual sex; I’m pretty sure you’re male and I happen to be male and boringly heterosexual. These things matter to me, and they matter a lot. But make it a billion dollars and I’m pretty sure I’d consent, simply on effective-altruism grounds; I could do so damn much good with, say, half the takings as to outweigh those reasons, however compelling I find them.
To consider that the latter indicates “what kind of man” I am and puts me in the same pigeonhole as someone who will happily have sex with strangers for $100 a time is rather like saying that there’s no real difference in religious position between an atheist who is 99.9% confident there are no gods of any sort, and a fundamentalist who is 99.999% confident that there is exactly one, namely his own, simply because a sufficiently enormous quantity of evidence might turn one of them into the other.
(I do not, as it happens, share the widespread view that there is something terribly wrong with the “kind of woman” who is willing to have sex with strangers in exchange for moderate sums of money, nor do I think that being that “kind of woman” is good evidence of any more general moral deficiency; but I don’t think my opinion on any of this would be very different if I did. E.g., I do think there is something terribly wrong with the kind of person who is willing to kill strangers in exchange for moderate sums of money, but I think I would be willing to carry out an assassination for a billion dollars if I were really sure of getting the money and remaining unarrested for long enough to give a lot of it to effective charities, and confident that the assassination wasn’t going to do an amount of harm comparable to the good I could thereby do.)
You are just arguing definitions. It’s pretty clear that the conversation, real or not, riffs on the classification of women into two kinds: those who will sleep with a man for money, and those who will not. You may find this classification inadequate or not matching your personal views, but that does not make it “wrong”. It just makes you have a different opinion and prefer a different classification scheme.
The point (and I apologize for not being more explicit about it) is that this binary classification is unsatisfactory not only for prostitution but also for tyranny, which is what the joke was here being used as an analogy to, and that I find Jiro’s argument unconvincing for (inter alia) the same reason as I think the man in the joke is incorrect (albeit funny).