it should be band practice.

I don't know about you, but there was all kind of nonsense during band practice. Kids who locked themselves in the instrument lockers, switching instruments and goofing off, it is amazing that anything related to music was learned.

prostitution and morality

Laws are the codification of what society believes are moral and immoral. All modern law is enforced morality.

Most people believe that theft is immoral or wrong, and that consequences for theft are moral and right.

Most people believe that certain business practices are immoral or wrong, and consequences for fraud or false advertising or intentionally confusing consumers are moral and right.

Most people believe that various safety practices are immoral/wrong or are moral/right, and society sets up laws to prohibit the ones they don't like and specify through policy what practices are moral/right.

Most people believe that disturbing others is immoral/wrong, that breaking your word is immoral/wrong, and that all the other civil behavior rules are moral/right or immoral/wrong, so these are codified as civil law.

Generally the laws don't call it morality specifically (although laws some do), but that is what the law represents.

Around the globe, most (but not all) societies have selected that prostitution is immoral/wrong, and codified this into law to be enforced. Some places do not.

Whatever the subject, if you want to engage in a behavior, your best options are to move to a place where the law permits the action, followed by attempting to get the law changed to meet your moral views. It is an option to break the law, but that comes with the consequences of having the law enforced against you as a consequence. Far better to take either of the first options, either go somewhere it is legal or petition for your local law to be changed.

Do you disagree with prostitution stings as well? How is this turning normal people into bad people so they can be arrested? If someone is going to break a law to their benefit, they will do it regardless of whether or not it was setup by a federal agency or not.

That is a somewhat bad example because there is no good reason that some forms of prostitution are illegal. It's the law, and society's false facedness that is wrong here.

89% of prostitutes don't want to be prostitutes, but are either forced to, or have to due to their poverty.
Many are slaves or almost slaves, many are children.

'But if we legalized and regulated it, it wouldn't be a problem because people can just buy sex normally!'

The USA government feels that:
"Legalization of prostitution expands the market for commercial sex, opening markets for criminal enterprises and creating a safe haven for criminals who traffic people into prostitution. Organized crime networks do not register with the government, do not pay taxes, and do not protect prostitutes. Legalization simply makes it easier for them to blend in with a purportedly regulated sex sector and makes it more difficult for prosecutors to identify and punish those who are trafficking people.
The Swedish Government has found that much of the vast profit generated by the global prostitution industry goes into the pockets of human traffickers. The Swedish Government said, "International trafficking in human beings could not flourish but for the existence of local prostitution markets where men are willing and able to buy and sell women and children for sexual exploitation."
To fight human trafficking and promote equality for women, Sweden has aggressively prosecuted customers, pimps, and brothel owners since 1999. As a result, two years after the new policy, there was a 50 percent decrease in women prostituting and a 75 percent decrease in men buying sex. Trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation decreased as well. In contrast, where prostitution has been legalized or tolerated, there is an increase in the demand for sex slaves and the number of victimized foreign women—many likely victims of human trafficking."

"But country Y legalized prostitution, and they say sexual slavery went down!"

Prostitution is legal in some parts of Nevada... and sex-slave trafficking is even more prevalent there, of both children and adult sex-slaves, and they use the legal establishments to provide themselves legal cover.

"This Note explores the complexities Nevada faces in combating sex trafficking and proposes solutions. Part I defines sex trafficking, discusses the profiles of the sex buyers and traffickers engaging in commercial sex, and explains how individuals become victims. As legalization has been promoted as beneficial for Nevada and as a potential solution for reducing sex trafficking in Las Vegas, Part II acknowledges the proffered benefits of legal prostitution but argues that legalization is insufficient to reduce, and may even contribute to, sex trafficking."

Rot in hell, you sinner. ... I'd rather have them pay a hooker than go the Catholic priest route).

Just to be clear, since you twice tied it to Christianity in one post, the Bible's view on this is entirely different than the stereotyped view you apply to Christians (and that, unfortunate, some Christians actually take).

Broad-painting 440,000 priests (and billions in Christianity as a whole) because some of them (~4000) committed a (terrible) crime is biased and unreasonable.
It'd be equally biased and unreasonable for me to claim that all atheists of pedophiles, or to tie pedophilia to atheists (and call it the "atheist route"), just because some atheists publicly state that having sex with children under 8 years should be legal (really).

Recently in the news there's been several teachers arrested for having sex with kids. It'd be unreasonable of me to tie pedophilia to teaching, despite it having occurred many times in the past as well.

I know many Christians, including my own mom and dad in the 1980s, and my sister and one of my brothers within the past few years, who've spent years helping prostitutes (and other women in need) get out of abusive situations, and drug addictions, turn their life around, and get out of danger. Some turned to Christianity, others didn't - it wasn't a requirement for them to receive help. Some entirely turned their lives around (later on getting married and raising families), other's didn't.

One of the prostitutes was a self-employed professional prostitute who did it willingly, targeting Japanese tourists (and robbing them at the same time :)). But that's the exception - the majority of prostitutes aren't doing it willingly. They may look like it, because it's bad business if their clients feel guilty by realizing they are slaves, and bad business = the slave masters aren't happy, and unhappy slave masters = more physical abuse.

I know an older woman who I worked with (in unrelated ministry) who with her husband, instead of having kids of her own, adopted three girls under the age of 12 who each were being sex-trafficked in the USA. She was telling me of some of the long-lasting traumas and fears her adopted daughters had to come through, such as waking up screaming in the middle of the night. If I recall correctly, it's why she became a psychologist - to help her daughters deal with the trauma (some of which didn't manifest until years later).

There are prostitutes that do do it willingly - apparently one of my cousins was a high-end prostitute for multiple years. But there is overwhelming need for prostitution to be illegal - the 10% legitimate (or, let's say legalization brings that up to 30%) don't benefit society enough to compensate for the vast harm done to society, and still contributes to the culture in a way that drives more business for the illegal abusive rapery 70%.

If you live in the USA and have slept with a prostitute, there's a >70% chance the prostitute was forced into it unwillingly, and only (as far as good business goes) made you think she was a willing partner.

One of the biggest issues is sex-trafficking victims (whether children or adults) are often treated as criminals by the government when caught (and ostracized by society), instead of being provided help. In one situation, after rescuing a bunch of sex-slaves from the streets, the women were put in a building for "protective care", and a few days later the slavers pulled up in several BMWs and just loaded the slaves into the cars and drove off again. I don't have a link for that, since I heard it in a small talk being given by a Christian guy who went to my previous church who has an international ministry working to rescue sex victims.

No matter how much we try to pretend it isn't hurting anyone and it's a 'private'/isolated event, our individual actions often have ramifications that affect other people - whether we know them personally or not.

One sex-trafficking slave-master was anonymously interviewed and said, "You can only sell drugs once, but you can sell a body over and over. It's good business."

it should be band practice.

I don't know about you, but there was all kind of nonsense during band practice. Kids who locked themselves in the instrument lockers, switching instruments and goofing off, it is amazing that anything related to music was learned.

prostitution and morality

Laws are the codification of what society believes are moral and immoral. All modern law is enforced morality.

Most people believe that theft is immoral or wrong, and that consequences for theft are moral and right.

Most people believe that certain business practices are immoral or wrong, and consequences for fraud or false advertising or intentionally confusing consumers are moral and right.

Most people believe that various safety practices are immoral/wrong or are moral/right, and society sets up laws to prohibit the ones they don't like and specify through policy what practices are moral/right.

Most people believe that disturbing others is immoral/wrong, that breaking your word is immoral/wrong, and that all the other civil behavior rules are moral/right or immoral/wrong, so these are codified as civil law.

Generally the laws don't call it morality specifically (although laws some do), but that is what the law represents.

Around the globe, most (but not all) societies have selected that prostitution is immoral/wrong, and codified this into law to be enforced. Some places do not.

Whatever the subject, if you want to engage in a behavior, your best options are to move to a place where the law permits the action, followed by attempting to get the law changed to meet your moral views. It is an option to break the law, but that comes with the consequences of having the law enforced against you as a consequence. Far better to take either of the first options, either go somewhere it is legal or petition for your local law to be changed.

All (or at least most) "modern law" derives more directly from social contract theory, and its alignment with "morals" is typically more usefully seen as a consequence of that, not the other way around.

In this framework, law is nothing more than an agreement about which "rights" that people in that society are willing to give up in return for the assurance that other people also give up those "rights." For instance, I'm willing to give up the ability to steal from people given that everyone else also loses that ability. What's interesting is that this works fine as long as there's a way of ensuring consistent enforcement, and, notably, it doesn't rely on an assumption that stealing is "wrong" in a moral sense, or even that a society agrees that stealing is "wrong." It only requires that the everyone in the society agrees that they'd prefer not having things stolen from them than stealing themselves.

This sort of law can arise even if anyone is deciding in a purely self-interested manner. If we imagine, for instance, that I don't think stealing is wrong, and that my friends also don't think that stealing is wrong, we could still reasonably agree to establish a system of "law" that prevents stealing (obviously we'd need to establish some neutral way of enforcing it as well) simply because we each, individually and acting in self-interest, prefer not being stolen from to being able to steal.

On the other hand, whether stealing, laws against stealing, or any other things at all are moral depends, by definition, on something extra: whether those things are "right" or "good," not merely whether they're allowed or useful. This is not to say that there aren't laws that come into existence purely because of a society's sense of morality, or that there aren't people who believe that breaking laws is inherently immoral in itself. It's just that neither of these things are necessary for law to exist and be useful for a society, so it's not correct to define law exclusively in terms of morality.

That is still morals.

Trying to define right and wrong by by social benefits is just another way to define morals. You can call them divinely instituted, or instituted for the benefit of having a community, or whatever else, they are still morals.

Appealing to Google, "define morality" brings up: principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior.

Exactly how you determine morals doesn't matter, it is still those morals that are attempted to be codified into law. Something is considered right or wrong. That is why I was careful to describe it in terms of "moral/right" and "immoral/wrong". It does not matter if your morals come from religious teachings, philosophical dogmas, politically designed social contracts, historical study, or some other source, whatever the morals are for the people that is what gets established. Typically the local population defines as right and wrong, moral and immoral, for their society.

The law is still generally based on encoding the predominant local moral beliefs.

Bringing it back around, most (but not all) of the world has decided, based on their own morals or beliefs of right and wrong, that prostitution is "wrong" and encoded it as such in their law. And similarly further back along the discussion, most societies have said it is "right" for police officers to investigate crimes under cover, and in order to be under cover they often will be called on to do things typically considered "wrong", within certain limits, such as possessing contraband being allowed but murdering to protect their cover is not. And then back to the beginning, that in order to catch people who are defrauding people about school (doing "wrong"), to set up a fake school ("wrong") where fraudsters will operate so they can be caught.

That is still morals.

Trying to define right and wrong by by social benefits is just another way to define morals. You can call them divinely instituted, or instituted for the benefit of having a community, or whatever else, they are still morals.

Appealing to Google, "define morality" brings up: principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior.

Exactly how you determine morals doesn't matter, it is still those morals that are attempted to be codified into law. Something is considered right or wrong. That is why I was careful to describe it in terms of "moral/right" and "immoral/wrong". It does not matter if your morals come from religious teachings, philosophical dogmas, politically designed social contracts, historical study, or some other source, whatever the morals are for the people that is what gets established. Typically the local population defines as right and wrong, moral and immoral, for their society.

The law is still generally based on encoding the predominant local moral beliefs.

Bringing it back around, most (but not all) of the world has decided, based on their own morals or beliefs of right and wrong, that prostitution is "wrong" and encoded it as such in their law. And similarly further back along the discussion, most societies have said it is "right" for police officers to investigate crimes under cover, and in order to be under cover they often will be called on to do things typically considered "wrong", within certain limits, such as possessing contraband being allowed but murdering to protect their cover is not. And then back to the beginning, that in order to catch people who are defrauding people about school (doing "wrong"), to set up a fake school ("wrong") where fraudsters will operate so they can be caught.

Well, maybe this is just a question of semantics, or maybe I don't understand what you mean. As you said, morals define the difference between "right and wrong" or "good and bad."

Generally speaking, those concepts are considered to be something altogether distinct from things like utility and pleasure. Something can be pleasurable without necessarily being moral (or immoral). Likewise, something can be useful without needing to be either moral or immoral. That distinction is in fact the fundamental basis of the social contract theory.

Social contract theory says that there are circumstances in which people acting rationally in a society will create laws based only on the concepts of utility and self-interest, even if that society doesn't initially have any sense of right and wrong. I think my example of stealing still holds up: my friends and I will enter into a contract (i.e. create a law + system of enforcement) that prevents us all from stealing, despite the fact that none of us consider stealing to be wrong, or bad, or immoral. Note that each member of the society would rationally, for reasons of self interest alone, and decisions based on self interest don't have any implicit morality or "goodness." The same result follows even if we replace my friends and I with simulations or mathematical models. That is, in fact, precisely what made the theory of social contracts so groundbreaking: it represents an explanation for how laws arise without morality.

Even if you argue that the creation of this law automatically means that we feel stealing is "wrong" on some level (which I disagree with, again, because I would still make the rational choice to forbid stealing even if I didn't consider it to be "immoral" or even ascribe meaning to the word "immoral" in the first place), that's still different that saying that the law represents that morality.

Consider another example: my friend and I discover an island and decide to split it up evenly between the two of us. In this case, it's perhaps justifiable to say that we chose to divide it up evenly because that's the "right" thing to do. That's as far as the "rightness" goes, though. Once it comes time to actually putting this into law, we have to do more, like specifying precisely who gets which piece of land and what happens when we break this rule. If we agree on a law that says that I get the east half and my friend gets the west half and that this is enforced by a fence patrolled by robotic birds, it'd be very strange to say that that represents the inherent morality or rightness of "westness," "eastness," or giant robotic birds. We create these specific stipulations not because they reflect our society's moral beliefs but because they are useful to us, in that they assure that we each get to keep our own half of the island.

All I'm claiming is that the notion that all law necessarily codifies what society considers moral requires, fundamentally, adopting a concept of morality that no longer distinguishes morality from utility. I don't think that's a particularly useful concept, whereas I think that social contract theory does provide some useful predictive power in the domain of individuals acting within rational self interest. I find it almost akin to the idea of evolution vs. creation (not necessarily in a religious sense).

Before natural selection was proposed as a process that drives the evolution of species, "creation" was the best way we could explain it. Once the theory of natural selection was developed and shown to have predictive power, you could say "that is still creation," but at that point the definition of "creation" has lost all usefulness as the basis for the development of species.

EDIT: Here's an even better example of law without morality: in the island example, imagine that, instead of discovering the island with my friend, I built the island and had been living there for 20 years. Then my "friend" comes and decides that he wants the island. I think he's likely to kill me if I try to keep the island for myself, and the robot birds are only willing to enforce a law that we both agree to. I'll willingly and rationally enter into a contract that let's me have half of the island, since the alternative is probably dying, and my "friend" will willingly and rationally enter into the contract because he only needs half of the island and doesn't want to bother/risk killing me just to get the whole thing. This is a perfectly valid law, but the law itself does not encode or represent any "morality" whatsoever. There are plenty of laws just like this in all modern countries that I know of.

Laws are the codification of what society believes are moral and immoral. All modern law is enforced morality.

But are there are also laws that do go entirely against what society thinks are acceptable?

And what about when a society is fairly evenly split on the issue?

Things I am thinking about are Abortion, Prohibition, The war on Drugs. Also in the UK and EU there are laws that are in place by the government to protect peoples well being but that doesn't necessarily have any moral implication (wearing a helmet on a motorbike) or some people could even see them as unjust (some drug laws).

Also there are a lot of laws that are set up to benefit particular members of society(politicians, legal profesionals) that people really do see them as being immoral.

Things I am thinking about are Abortion, Prohibition, The war on Drugs. Also in the UK and EU there are laws that are in place by the government to protect peoples well being but that doesn't necessarily have any moral implication (wearing a helmet on a motorbike) or some people could even see them as unjust (some drug laws).

Is it morally right to allow idiots to not wear helmets on a motorbike, putting their lives in greater danger than needed? (On the other hand. Combining lax helmet laws with opt-out organ donation programs would be a whole other can of worms for morality/ethics.)

Things I am thinking about are Abortion, Prohibition, The war on Drugs. Also in the UK and EU there are laws that are in place by the government to protect peoples well being but that doesn't necessarily have any moral implication (wearing a helmet on a motorbike) or some people could even see them as unjust (some drug laws).

Is it morally right to allow idiots to not wear helmets on a motorbike, putting their lives in greater danger than needed? (On the other hand. Combining lax helmet laws with opt-out organ donation programs would be a whole other can of worms for morality/ethics.)

I wouldn't call it immoral to not force people to wear a helmet. As for the organ donation thing it would probably be immoral to force somebody to opt out of donating their organs but, some people would also say its immoral for people to refuse to donate them.