Just criminalize porn, and leave it to the jury to decide whether or not it’s porn. That’s how we handle most moral ambiguities, isn’t it?
I will assume that the majority of the population shares my definition of porn and is on board with this, creating low risk of an activist jury (otherwise this turns into the harder problem of “how to seize power from the people”.)
Edit: On more careful reading, I guess that’s not allowed since it would fall in the “I know it when I see it” category. But then, since we obviously are not going to write an actual algorithm, how specific does the answer need to be?
Would “It is pornography if the intention is primarily to create sexual arousal, and it’s up to the jury to decode intention” be an acceptably well-defined answer? Would “I’m going to use theoretically possible mind-reading technology to determine whether or not the viewer / creator of the pornography were primarily intending to view / create sexually arousing stimuli” be an acceptably well defined answer? Do I have to define the precise threshold upon which something is “primarily” about a factor with neuron-level accuracy, or can I just approximately define the threshold of “primarily” via a corpus of examples?
I guess what I’m saying is… “how to ban pornography” seems to be “solved” in the abstract as soon as you adequately define pornography, and the rest is all implementation.
Just criminalize porn, and leave it to the jury to decide whether or not it’s porn. That’s how we handle most moral ambiguities, isn’t it?
I will assume that the majority of the population shares my definition of porn and is on board with this, creating low risk of an activist jury (otherwise this turns into the harder problem of “how to seize power from the people”.)
Edit: On more careful reading, I guess that’s not allowed since it would fall in the “I know it when I see it” category. But then, since we obviously are not going to write an actual algorithm, how specific does the answer need to be?
Would “It is pornography if the intention is primarily to create sexual arousal, and it’s up to the jury to decode intention” be an acceptably well-defined answer? Would “I’m going to use theoretically possible mind-reading technology to determine whether or not the viewer / creator of the pornography were primarily intending to view / create sexually arousing stimuli” be an acceptably well defined answer? Do I have to define the precise threshold upon which something is “primarily” about a factor with neuron-level accuracy, or can I just approximately define the threshold of “primarily” via a corpus of examples?
I guess what I’m saying is… “how to ban pornography” seems to be “solved” in the abstract as soon as you adequately define pornography, and the rest is all implementation.