Why? There's nothing wrong with sex work, it's just a job. Would it be shitty to pay them to wash your car or whatever?

It would be shitty to drive from your city (where a car wash is $10) to the neighboring tent city and give them only $1 to wash your car, because you know they won't have another option.

If there's no alternative, doesn't that mean they'd starve? Are you saying death by starvation is preferable to sex work?

The charities should instead hire people who aren't predators. People who don't take advantage of the vulnerable people at the catastrophe site.

What if you had a child or sister, who got kidnapped. Then the police came, and said to your child or sister: "Ok, we'll rescue you, if we can have sex with you."

Based on your reasoning, this would be fine to do, to your child or sister. Because if it wasn't for those hero policemen, she'd remain kidnapped, right.

However, the make-sense approach, is to fire those policemen and instead hire others, who took the job because they want to help victims and society, rather than wanting power so they could abuse vulnerable people.

What? That's a completely different situation. The person in the story was doing his job just fine, no blackmail involved. He just decided to spend his free time paying for a sex service.

Hiring a prostitute in your free time is not abusing people.

I get the impression that you have in mind hiring a prostitute, in a well functioning society with no poverty, and with a well fare system that people can fall back on.

Actually I read about someone in the country where I live -- he was working as an artist, made okay with money, and decided to quit his job and work as a prostitute instead. After doing that, he made about as much money as before, and he liked being a prostitute, better than his previous job as an artist. I think he and his customers -- it's fine, I see no problem with that. He also did not have a traumatic childhood or anything like that.

However that's different, from an earth quake disaster site. There, people are struggling for survival and food and shelter, and some of them will do things they don't really want, to stay alive.

I want the aid workers who did not become aid workers to help anyone, but instead to take advantage of vulnerable people, to be fired. And replaced with others who are genuinely interested in helping people -- I think the latter will do a better job. And b.t.w. I think these two groups of people: men looking for cheap sex with vulnerable women and children, versus genuine helpers, are non-overlapping.

OK, fair. I might be assuming the best, but is that really unreasonable? We don't have any details, but I think it's most likely that the guy used protection, wasn't violent and paid properly. My issue in these discussions is just that everyone seems to go on a moral panic and assume the worst whenever sex is involved. Informal jobs in a poverty-stricken country with no legal oversight are an issue I agree, but there's nothing special about the ones that are sexual in nature. Now do you think people would be talking about it at all if what the guy had done was pay someone to carry his luggage for a couple hours?

Sex is a maybe-death thing.

If the woman gets pregnant, there's a relatively high risk that she'll die, during delivery. Or, if there's no man there to help her, when she is pregnant and vulnerable and cannot find her own food, she's at risk of starving and dying.

Maybe / probably those "aid workers" used contraceptives, however, the feelings part of the human brain doesn't understand contraceptives. Those parts of the brain are still in the stone age. The feelings involved, for a woman who gets raped or has sex because otherwise she might starve to death, is not "I carry bags", instead it's more "I might die from this".

(For a man, the feelings can instead be "I'm reproducing, great. No risk for me, I don't get pregnant".)

It's like you're saying that having sex is so terribly bad that it's better to let people starve instead, but that's a bizarre idea considering the fact that sex actually feels really good.

What would you do in the car washing example? Drive back to your city and pay $10 because paying someone who's willing to do it for $1 is exploitative? Surely the people doing it for $1 would rather do it for $1 than not do it for $0.

No-one here is trolling - this is part of a contentious philosophical debate. It does not help to assume bad faith on the part of your opponents: there are strong points on both sides of the argument, and it is a difficult issue.

To sum up what I understand the reasoning to be:

On the one hand, there's the basic "utilitarian" approach. Essentially, regardless of moral values or rules, in which instance would more people end up better off? Between sex with people you don't really want to, and death, if you prefer the former, then the world in which you end up doing so is the preferred world. Taking your example, if the alternative to exploitative policemen were NO policemen, then she'd just end up dead - I'd rather someone were exploited than dead (though obviously I'd also prefer they weren't exploited at all).

Now, on the other hand, there is your argument, well-formulated, that exploiting someone in this way is a pretty crappy thing to do, to put it mildly. You are correct - the approach we would take is to fire policemen who would do such a thing, and instead aim to hire to those that would do their job properly without exploiting people. We have the ability to do so - there are enough people who are good enough and willing enough to become policemen that we are able to make this decision, so we definitely should.

Now, there are some cases where we don't necessarily have this alternative option. Let's take unwilling prostitutes. I think we can agree that it's terrible that there are people who have to have sex in order to get enough money to live. Now, let's say there's someone near the prostitute, with enough money to help her out of her plight, you feel he should give money to her, but he doesn't, and he walks on. How harshly do you judge him? Now, there's a second person with enough money to help her, he instead decides to pay her to sleep with him. Do you judge him more harshly than the first? Why? She's ended up in an overall better situation after her interaction with the second man, than the first, even if her situation overall is still terrible.

Yes, it would be better if the second man gave her the money and went on his way, just as it would be better if the first man did so, but in the absence of being able to convince either of them of doing so, do we win anything by chastising the second man's action as awful? The prostitute is making a choice between unwanted sex, and death, a bad choice to be sure - but taking away that choice is equivalent to forcing upon her the choice of death.

> I'm sure if it was during their own free time, possibly while not in a disaster stricken place it would likely be less of a big deal.

So there is a question of why this would be the case? What is the difference?

Now, of course, I don't feel that those taking part in the disaster relief are absolved. It doesn't sit right with me either, and I also feel like it would be better to have people there who were purer in their intentions. And I would take the fact that they did this as evidence that they might not be as moral in other aspects of their life / job.

The point is - I think that this is a difficult moral question, and just because your moral intuition is strongly repulsed by a certain action does not necessarily mean to say that it is wrong (though it very well might be) - our moral intuition is largely shaped by our society. People in other societies, as well as people from older times in our own societies, judge actions very differently to the way we do today, yet their moral intuitions feel just as strongly.

I think deciding on what is Good requires a combination of feeling and logical reasoning, as well as some discussion and debate. I'm not suggesting that you should change your opinion regarding this specific instance, or even this general moral value.

All I'm saying is that others might have valid reasons for believing the things they do, with as much consideration as you have for the well-being of those under discussion, and that you shouldn't necessarily dismiss the viewpoints of others as trolling just because they don't align with your intuition or viewpoint.

On the other hand, sometimes you should, because sometimes people really are trolling. And sometimes people are just so wrong you can't help them. I'll concede that it can be difficult to decide. But more often than they should, people dismiss others as evil, or their viewpoints as stupid, without giving sufficient consideration to whether they have legitimate, non-strawman, non-selfish reasons for holding them.