And civilized society routinely sets a floor for that “work or starve” dynamic, ensuring that there isn’t a race to the bottom and desperate people aren’t forced to take certain kinds of jobs. That’s because we understand that the legality of certain kinds of jobs creates social pressure on people in tough circumstances to do those jobs.

Such regulation inherently requires society to make decisions about what sort of work should be off limits to reduce social pressure to do those jobs. You might not agree that sex work falls in that category, but women themselves decisively do: https://www.vox.com/2016/3/11/11203740/prostitution-legal-me...

And as to your own view, do you think unemployment offices should tell women to look for jobs in sex work before they can get unemployment benefits? After all it’s just another job right?

> And civilized society routinely sets a floor for that “work or starve” dynamic, ensuring that there isn’t a race to the bottom and desperate people aren’t forced to take certain kinds of jobs.

No, not certain kinds of jobs, that's absolutely the wrong way to think about it. People shouldn't be forced into certain kind of working conditions. That's an entirely different perspective. If impersonal sex doesn't bother you, sex work is a perfectly legitimate form of labour as long as the working conditions are just as safe and regulated as any other job they could choose.

> And as to your own view, do you think unemployment offices should tell women to look for jobs in sex work before they can get unemployment benefits? After all it’s just another job right?

The notion that unemployment benefits should be contingent on anything is a notion you've carried into this, but even if we go with it, if a woman could not stand the thought of being a sanitation worker, then she has every right to reject that kind of job. The same argument applies to sex work.

You overlook the inherently collective nature of labor regulation. Labor regulation seeks to prevent individual choices from creating market-wide pressures and a societal race to the bottom. It doesn't matter if being asked to pitch in on weekends without extra pay "doesn't bother you." We ban you from even voluntarily agreeing to do that because we don't want to be pressured to do that too. Individual choices are restricted to create a floor for everyone.

From that perspective, any difference between "type of work" and "working conditions" is wholly artificial. People don't want to be pressured to work on weekends, they don't want to be pressured to do sex work, etc., so we ban those things to eliminate those pressures.

> From that perspective, any difference between "type of work" and "working conditions" is wholly artificial.

It only looks artificial because you cited an example of working conditions, not type of work. The right to refuse certain kinds of work is a perfectly cogent concept and does not require artificially restricting other people's choices.

When desperate people aren’t allowed to take the kind of jobs they would have chosen, they end up even more desperate.

Such rules are not made for the benefit of these powerless people.

No. As I said, they are made for the benefit of everyone else to prevent social race to the bottom.

I'm a woman, and a socialist, so no, I don't think anyone should be forced into sex work. I don't think anyone should be forced into any kind of work.

This is begging the question. It is plainly worse to be forced into some kinds of work (e.g. serving on Russia's front line) than others (e.g. picking apples).

I would think the moral calculus is different when the non-consensual activity is sex vs. eg. cutting timber or cooking fast food. A single rape is a lot more traumatizing then a decade of physical labor. I don't know anything about how common involuntary sex work is, so I won't argue a broader point; I just think the equivalency doesn't hold up.

Okay, but banning or further criminalizing sex work is not going to reduce human trafficking, but increase it, for the same reason that banning drugs doesn't reduce illegal drug sales. The demand is pretty inelastic. HRW has a decent primer on the topic here: https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/08/07/why-sex-work-should-be-d...

> That's how society operates: work or starve

It is more like how biology operates.

I mean, that's false on its face. Plenty of folks don't work and don't starve.

My 8 year old isn't working, but somehow manages to not starve.

We absolutely could structure society to prevent starvation without forcing labor.

I think you're making the same point. While biology would require your 8-year-old to work to survive, the social structure of your family (followed by your broader social network and eventually the state) is such that that's not the case. Blaming society for hunger is similar to blaming charity for poverty. X is probably not the problem if the solution is more X.

My point is not that society is bad because people hunger, but rather that we should structure our society such that they don't. Society itself is emergent and has no moral character. It's our leaders and to some extent ourselves that are at fault, at least in democracies.

What on earth does that mean? That it's biologically impossible to give other people food?

That means that someone have to work to make the food that is given to other people. So get food, someone has to work. If there is no food, someone starves. Society can just redirect who is working and who is starving.

It's not a zero sum game. We have the technology to ensure nobody starves, and not doing so seems transparently evil.