I don't think there is anything wrong with making illegal, as unconscionable, transactions in which the poor give up their most basic human capital. It's "the rich get richer, the poor get poorer" at the most vulgar level.
> A choice made out of economic interest is still "voluntary" under the definition used in this context.
I think that's a very impoverished definition of "voluntary."
Are you suggesting that it's not voluntary if the choice makes the person better off? So is an action only voluntary if it makes the person worse off? That doesn't make much sense to me.
But if the person's only options are 1) starve to death or 2) become a prostitute, then prohibiting the second option means the person will starve to death. If there's a third option, like 3) work as a cook at a restaurant, then the person can choose between options 2 and 3, and if they choose 2, then it must not have been economic coercion like you suggest.
This is a pretty benighted attitude. Where you're choosing between a comfortable life and a more comfortable life, why does picking the second option indicate coercion?
Obviously there's no clean line as to how the alternative courses of action have to be before it counts as duress. But we don't have to draw the line clearly in order to be able to make the distinction.
You seem to be arguing that women who do sex work are under "economic duress" because the alternatives are so awful, therefore we should make it illegal, forcing them into back those awful alternatives. That seems backwards to me. Surely we should be banning the shitty, coercive minimum wage jobs, not the sex work women are choosing in preference to them?
It sounds to me like your distinction is that if any person makes less money than any other person, then the first person is under economic duress and thus is incapable of making any voluntary choices.
Sex is not like every other human interaction. If you forced someone to answer phones for eight hours, it is unlikely they would be traumatized in the same way as if you raped them for eight hours. Its different.
Not every transaction between people in unequal economic circumstances is suspect, but we're not talking about every transaction. We're talking about something much more intimate and emotional. Such transactions are far more suspicious.
You're moving goalposts.
What you are saying is absolute nonsense in light of decision theory.
> As 'tedks points out below, turning sex into a commodity has real implications for the status of women in society as a whole.
The real implications would be that prostitutes would most likely be safer and more wealthy.
> Moreover, as with selling organs or selling babies, there's a strong belief that such transactions are usually only technically voluntary, and are driven by economic duress more than anything else.
A choice made out of economic interest is still "voluntary" under the definition used in this context. Your claim seems to be that if the only two choices are selling your kidney or starving to death, then selling the kidney is not "voluntary." But if those were really the only two choices, and you ban selling the kidney, then the only scenario remaining is that the person starves to death.