A letter on pornography and business ethics
written by two prominent public intellectuals—one a Christian, one a
Muslim—sent to hotel industry executives last week.
We write to ask you to stop offering pornographic
movies in your company’s hotels. We make no proposal here to limit your
legal freedom, nor do we threaten protests, boycotts, or anything of
the sort. We simply ask you to do what is right as a matter of
conscience.
We are, respectively, a Christian and a Muslim, but we appeal to you
not on the basis of truths revealed in our scriptures but on the basis
of a commitment that should be shared by all people of reason and
goodwill: a commitment to human dignity and the common good. As teachers
and as parents, we seek a society in which young people are encouraged
to respect others and themselves—treating no one as an impersonal object
or thing. We hope that you share our desire to build such a society.
Pornography is degrading, dehumanizing, and corrupting. It undermines
self-respect and respect for others. It reduces persons—creatures
bearing profound, inherent, and equal dignity—to the status of objects.
It robs a central aspect of our humanity—our sexuality—of its dignity
and beauty. It ensnares some in addiction. It deprives others of their
sense of self-worth. It teaches our young people to settle for the cheap
satisfactions of lust, rather than to do the hard, yet ultimately
liberating and fulfilling, work of love.
We recognize that we are asking you to abandon a profitable aspect of
your business, but we hope that you will muster the conviction and
strength of will to make that sacrifice and to explain it to your
stockholders. We urge you to do away with pornography in your hotels
because it is morally wrong to seek to profit from the suffering,
degradation, or corruption of others. Some might say that you are simply
honoring the free choices of your customers. However, you are doing
much more than that. You are placing temptation in their path—temptation
for the sake of profit. That is unjust. Moreover, the fact that
something is chosen freely does not make it right; nor does it ensure
that the choice will not be damaging to those who make it or to the
larger community where degrading practices and materials flourish.
We beg you to consider the young woman who is depicted as a sexual
object in these movies, as nothing but a bundle of raw animal appetites
whose sex organs are displayed to the voyeurs of the world and whose
body is used in loveless and utterly depersonalized sex acts. Surely we should regard that young woman as we would regard a sister, daughter, or mother.
She is a precious member of the human family. You may say that she
freely chooses to compromise her dignity in this way, and in some cases
that would be true, but that gives you no right to avail yourself of her
self-degradation for the sake of financial gain. Would you be willing
to profit from her self-degradation if she were your sister? Would you
be willing to profit from her self-degradation if she were your own
beloved daughter?
Furthermore, we trust that you need no reminding of the fact that something’s being legal
does not make it right. For example, denying black men and women and
their families access to hotel rooms—and tables in restaurants, as well
as other amenities and opportunities—was, for countless shameful years,
perfectly legal. In some circumstances, it even made financial sense for
hotel owners and operators in racist cultures to engage in
segregationist practices even when not compelled by law to do so.
However, this was deeply morally wrong. Shame on those who denied their
brothers and sisters of color the equal treatment to which they were
morally entitled. Shame on you if you hide behind legality to peddle
immorality in the pursuit of money.
Our purpose is not to condemn you and your company but to call you to
your highest and best self. We have no desire to hurt your business. On
the contrary, we want you and your business to succeed financially—for
your sake; for the sake of your stockholders, employees, and contract
partners; and for the sake of the communities that your hotels serve. We
believe that the properly regulated market economy serves the good of
all by providing products and services at reasonable prices and by
generating prosperity and social mobility. But the market itself cannot provide the moral values that make it a truly humane and just institution.
We—owners, managers, employees, customers—must bring those values to
the market. There are some things—inhuman things, unjust things,
de-humanizing things—that should not be sold. There must be some things
that, for the sake of human dignity and the common good, we must refuse
to sell—even it if means forgoing profit.
Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at
Princeton University. Shaykh Hamza Yusuf is co-founder and a member of
the faculty of Zaytuna College. Affiliations are provided for
identification purposes and do not imply institutional endorsements.
