system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What would be a moral case against Pornography?

I've heard the religious case against porn, but I don't think I've heard a philosophical case against Pornography. Wether it's moral, or ethical, I'd love to hear some thoughts.
gpt
The main argument against pornigraphy, without taking into consideration local psychological or sociological factors, will likely appeal to Kant's second formulation of the categorical imperative: 

"So act as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end and never as merely a means". 

Some objects have instrumental value because of *what* they do (cars, keys, etc). People have value because of *who* they are. Pornography *literally* objectifies the actors and actresses for the sake of sexual pleasure. People have intrinsic worth because of their freedom, rationality, and dignity. When we objectify people, we reduce them to the status of things to be used instrumentally. 

Most libertarians justify pornography by appealing to "self-ownership". However, if we cannot own our bodies and sell them into slavery, we shouldn't be able to rent them out for objectifying sexual purposes either. We *are* our embodied life, we do not *own* our embodied life. This is also why most societies throughout history have considered suicide to be wrong--which would otherwise only be an act of discarding your property, if we own our bodies. 

For religious folks, only God owns our bodies. For secularists, you might think that our bodies belong to the community we are enmeshed in. In either case, our bodies are free gifts from either God or the social back and fourth of our community. Selling or renting our bodies would be akin to selling or renting a personally valuable gift given to us by God, society, our social matrix, or something similar. 

Many conservative philosophers argue that sex is not merely a matter of bodily autonomy. Intuitively, forcing your child to commit sex acts is worse than forcing them to eat a kind of food against their will. If you think the difference is a matter of *kind*, rather than *degree*, you'll think that our sexuality is more than an issue of utility or only bodily autonomy: sex is something more inviolable than pleasures or transactions. 

Secondly, many philosophers (moreso historically) have thought that any legitimate sexual act needs to be open to the creation of life, at least in principle if not in fact. What's good is what's normative for the type of beings we are. Sexuality serves the function of pair bonding, and ultimately pair bonding to enhance the process of reproduction and child development. 

When you decontextualize the pleasure of an act from the *teleos* of the act, then the pleasure can lead to moral dysfunction. That is why we'd say that taking opium is a morally problematic replacement for the feeling of falling in love with someone. You can replicate the feeling of romantic or sexual satiafaction (to a degree), but pleasure is embodied in the context that's normative to our nature. 

Pornography imitates the joys that accompany a loving relationship with a synthetic substitute; just as taking stimulant drugs imitate the excitement, focus, and positive emotions that ordinarily accompany states of psychological flow. 

Given the low-work cost of pornography or drugs, they can lead to addiction or a disordered sense of how actual sex or states of flow should be experienced. For some philosophers, we *should* only have these experiences because and when we embody the entire good action. This is an inverse reason why we *should* feel sad at real and significant loss, even if such sadness could be eliminated by a pill.