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that in practice some may rationalize their bad behavior in this way. However, it does not follow that one legitimately justifies their oppressive conduct by appealing to the fact that the oppression does not necessarily diminish the wellbeing of the oppressed. We have distinguished moral value from wellbeing, so where there are genuinely oppressive or exploitative institutions or individuals, we can condemn them on independent moral grounds. An adequate moral theory should enable us to make these judgments irrespective of whether or not the victims of moral villainy are “worse off” prudentially. Incidentally, we are not convinced that the porn biz is an institution of oppression, like slavery, guilty and in need of condemnation. We will leave those arguments to others writing in this anthology, though.
     
    Afterglow
     
    If our arguments are correct, we have shown that popular opinion about the wellbeing of porn stars is misguided. It is not true that all porn performers are character deficient or flawed, and even if some are it may make no difference to whether they find their lives satisfying. Neither is it necessarily true that working in porn contributes to a lack of wellbeing; some porn stars may find great satisfaction in their work, even if the porn business treats them badly. What constitutes their wellbeing is something that only they, individually, can determine, and it is not for us to pity them or think “we know better” on the basis of misguided social stigmas.
     
    NOTES
     
1 Note that we are not interested in developing a robust account of welfare.We will base the distinction between morality and quality of life on features we believe to be essential to any adequate theory of welfare; e.g., the fact that welfare judgments require a first-personal component, or the perspective of the person whose life it is.
     
2 For a defense of this kind of view, see Vincent Punzo, “Morality and Human Sexuality” in
Reflective Naturalism
(Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hall, 1969).
     
3 We assume that minors are not cognitively developed or informed enough to rationally decide to engage in sex with those older than them.
     
4 Again, we are not interested in deciding the source of those standards, such as desire-satisfaction, personal pleasure, and so forth. Our goal is not to elaborate a fully defended account of welfare, but we are convinced that whatever it is, it is essentially subjective.
     
5 Ron Amundson, “Disability, Ideology, and Quality of Life: A Bias in Biomedical Ethics,” in D. Wasserman et al. (eds.)
Quality of Life and the Human Difference: Genetic Testing, Healthcare and Disability
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 110–13.
     

ANDREW ABERDEIN
     
    CHAPTER 2
     
    STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
The Interpenetration of Philosophy and Pornography
     
    Have You Anything
Philosophical
?
     

    Patrons of pre-revolutionary French bookshops who requested “livres philosophiques” did not receive what their modern counterparts would expect.As the book dealer Hubert Cazin explained to the officers holding him in the Bastille, the term was “a conventional expression in the book trade to characterize everything that is forbidden.” 1 Research by historian Robert Darnton in the extensive archives of the eighteenth-century Swiss publisher Société typographique de Neuchâtel has shown that this use of “philosophical books” was widespread. The term encompassed categories of book we now keep separate: the irreligious, the seditious, the libelous, but above all the pornographic.
     
    What should we make of this curious practice? An initial suspicion would be that Cazin and his colleagues were just trying to put the authorities off the scent. Satisfying the French appetite for clandestine literature was a risky endeavor, but lucrative for the determined and ingenious. One stratagem was to “marry” the unbound sheets of such material with sheets from blameless works, interleaving them to escape