Susac, I highly recommend that you skip down a bit and read the final segment of this post first, then come back and read the earlier responses.  Only after I wrote the whole thing out did it occur to me that I ought to have done it in reverse order. 

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Not really.  I don't think you really mean to say that everyone's morality is equally valid.  I think you mean to say that everyone's morality is equally good.  This, of course, is self-referential, and if morality really is relative, then it's a nonsense thing to say.  Validity, strictly speaking, is just logical coherency.

Logical coherency, however, is what is going to let us make value judgments about a morality belief.

Consider the Christian value that sexual intercourse before marriage is morally wrong.  In order to reach this conclusion, a Christian must hold to the following premises:

1) Morality is tied to God, not to reason.

2) Since consequence ties morality to reason, morality is not tied (inherently) to consequence.

3) Sex, despite anything that science, reason, or individual desire, is wrong because God says so.

This, of course, is internally inconsistent, for we see quite plainly that morality is tied inherently to consequence, and there's no evidence whatsoever that there is a god, or that our moral feelings are arbitrary.  Christian morality about sex is empirically less valid than other systems.

Having said that, without scientific evidence, we cannot make a statement about sex before marriage, and have it be any more valid, but that's not really the point here.  The point is that some moral systems disqualify themselves because of internal inconsistency.  Others, obviously, disqualify themselves because of scientific inaccuracy.  If a certain action is thought to be good because of a certain consequence, and that relationship is proven not to exist, that moral value is invalid.

For at least the tenth time, I do not accept "equal morality."  If I did, I wouldn't have raked you over the coals about prostitution, would I?

I've avoided that thread because the OP has a history of not discussing things.  You're much better at discussions.  I'll get to genocide.  I promise.

Joseph Campbell was qualified to answer questions about myths, not sociobiology or psychology.

Fine.  My only point is that we have no reason to believe that tribal societies knew enough about philosophy or biology to be able to accurately assess their own situation.  This observation only proves that people have always known that there is a moral instinct, and they were able to react to it.

Well, duh.  A little bit of game theory will explain that.  Reciprocal altruism is simply more effective at creating complex and lasting relationships.

Somewhere, Susac, you bought into a bit of religious mythology.  First, you seem certain that morality must be certain, or humans wouldn't be able to form societies.  Second, you seem to believe that morality's function within society is to make things better for everybody.  Big assumption there!

WHAT!!??

What could possibly lead you to say that?  Every society on earth is being held together, else it wouldn't be a society, would it?

Feh.  Practically the whole Middle East merges church and state.  So does the U.S.  Rule of law and morality are not the same.  Systematic justice is a remarkably recent invention.  You're trying to say that societies who practice these things hold together in terms of individual freedom, or something else you've decided is good, right?  Because you certainly aren't saying that society can't hold together if it doesn't have those things.  We've had many more societies without them than with them.

They're not unstable.  Islam is not just a religion -- it's a culture, and a moral framework, and it's growing faster than anything else on the planet.  In terms of growth, popular acceptance, and memetic virulence, Islam is a hell of a lot "better" than most.  We're getting dangerously close to convoluting things too much.  Law and culture are involved with our moral beliefs, but they are not synonymous.  I'm going to leave this line of discussion because it could get off on a tangent really easily.

Ok, then.

The difference between humans and apes is that humans have the ability to conceptualize abstraction.  When an ape is deciding whether or not he's going to attack the silverback, he's projecting, in his limited way, whether or not he can win.  That's it.  He's not thinking that if he wins, he'll be the king.  He just has the instinctive drive to be king, and acts on it when his very limited powers of prediction tell him its a good idea.  An ape is incapable of thinking of peripheral consequences.  If he fails, will he and his gang be kicked out?  Would it be better to bide his time and help his neighbor, who is younger, but probably will be stronger than the silverback in a year's time?  If he succeeds, what will become of the ten children the silverback has recently sired?

With the ability to conceptualize abstraction comes the ability to assign and weigh relative values.  (Here's what you've been waiting for!) Morality, then, is simply the mental box we reserve for the conceptualized abstraction of peripheral consequences.  We got smart enough to realize that when we do something now, it has predictable consequences in the future, beyond the immediate consequence of the action.

Humans, like all colony creatures, function on two very distinct levels:  individual and superorganism.  Until very recently, evolutionary scientists thought pretty much all of the mechanisms of natural selection functioned on the individual level.  This individual competes against its peers, its environment, etc, and the best individuals survive, and individual survival dynamics create the colonial dynamics.  This view doesn't explain many things, though.  Suicide, war, voluntary celibacy, and many other counter-intuitive behaviors simply defy the individual model.  Therefore, reasoned the scientists, humans are obviously deficient when they behave in a manner that defies individualism.   (Thus, the now-defeated assumption that science could justify absolute morality!)

The problem with this is that it only creates another vacuum.  What made humans deficient?  Without creating another hole, there's no way to answer that.  If humans are deficient creatures, we ought not be here, right?  We should have been selected out of the system long before now, and yet, we are incredibly successful!  It just doesn't gel.  Superorganism dynamics, on the other hand, elegantly and simply answer the questions of otherwise puzzling behaviors.

There was a remarkable study conducted with ants, in which it was discovered that a certain percentage, we'll say 5% because I don't want to look it up, were essentially slackers and ne'er-do-wells.  They would march along a quarter of the way to the food, then turn around and march right back, and repeat this process until there was enough food that they could go mooch a meal that they hadn't worked for.  The researchers carefully removed all of the slackers, and lo and behold, 5% of the remaining colony became slackers.  No matter how they divided the colony, the number of slackers remained constant.  More surprising, an individual's propensity to become a slacker appeared to have no relationship to the quality of its work before.  [EDIT:  Oh, slackers would also go back to work if the percentages demanded it.  They were not "terminally lazy."  Sound like human society?]

Since this experiment, the same kinds of dynamics have been observed in hundreds of colonial animals.  There are some behaviors that are part of the culture, and are clearly not the result of individual failings.  There's a lot more evidence, but I'm trying to be as brief as possible.  The bottom line is that colonial individuals instinctively mold to the group.  It's not the other way around.  Humans are no different.  (This is why you need to read The Authoritarian Specter.  People are instinctively programmed to conform, not to be "good individuals."  The implications of all this for atheism are less than thrilling to me, but I digress.)

The implications for morality are pretty clear.  Game theory explains reciprocal altruism very effectively.  Reciprocal altruism is what makes societies function, plain and simple.  Even when the rules are not consciously known, they are followed, because those individuals who followed them were more reproductively successful.  When we learned to abstract, we began codifying things that we already knew instinctively.  Don't kill your own kind, for anarchy results.  Don't steal from your neighbor, for he is your safety net in times of need.

The thing is, as you've pointed out, these things just don't work all the time.  Sometimes, you need to kill the king because he's an asshole and is hurting lots of people.  Sometimes, you either starve or steal.  As societies started getting huge, and people began to learn a lot more about themselves, the complexities of human interactions became much more pronounced, and our basic instincts became insufficient to intuitively know how to behave in a situation.  When we started coming up with ideas like equal rights and inherent rights, it got even worse.  Obviously, equality is not really equality, and it's inherently unfair to many people.  Inherent rights only go so far, and then they conflict with other people's inherent rights.  Furthermore, no matter how good an idea it seems to be to give everyone a fair shake, precious few people ever behave as if its a good idea.  Religion attempted to solve the problem by providing everybody a single code, but that only made the problem much worse by taking away people's incentive to think for themselves and make decisions based on individual circumstances.

Morality is an ancient, instinctive conceptualization of basic tribal survival.  Human society is FAR too complex for our instincts to be right much of the time.  When social behaviors become farther and farther removed from caveman behaviors, our instincts become less and less effective, but humans are also instinctively programmed to want mental boxes for everything, so we still instinctively love to label actions as good or bad.

In short, people conceptualize behavior using a caveman system applied to a monstrously complicated matrix of overlapping ideals and goals ill-fitted to our brains.  On the one hand, we rationally justify a certain goal as good, and seek to model our behavior to reach that end, even though doing so commits us to a model that necessarily minimizes the chances to achieve another rationally justifiable goal.  The best that most of us ever do is try (instinctively) to pick out the most appropriate goal and (instinctively) guess what the best course of action is.

Ok, so when ask if genocide is wrong, there are two ways that we can answer.  First, we can appeal to morality, which as we've just seen, is not particularly good for answering questions about modern society.  We'll end up with a circular argument.  Why is it morally wrong?  Because it's bad to kill.  Why is it bad to kill?  Because it is... except when you need to...  So if you need, genocide is ok?  No... it's wrong!  Why?... etc, ad nauseum.

The second thing we can do is a little more uncomfortable at first, but it is better in the end.  Anybody can do anything they can do.  There will be consequences, and we can weigh consequences against goals and beliefs.  Individuals' right to life can be rationalized very simply.  If I kill you, that's great for me, but if everyone can kill anyone, I'm very likely to be killed myself.  A better system is one in which nobody kills anyone.  In subscribing to this, I give up the "right" to kill you, but I gain far more by protecting my own life.  If I go on a crusade and kill an entire race of people, bully for me, but I can't kill everyone in the world, and the odds that someone will get a bigger army together and massacre me and all of my armies is very high.  Without appealing to the suffering of individuals, we can easily reason why, in principle, it's a bad idea to commit genocide.

The same works for suffering, too.  The same game theory that treats killing as a simple act applies to the reduction of suffering.  If we all agree to minimize suffering, everyone will suffer less.  Since nobody likes to suffer, it's obvious that it's better to do this.  You don't have to follow a moral code to not kill lots of people.  You just have to be aware of very simple cause/effect relationships.  (That's the thing about Christian morality that's so fucked up.  Christians profess to believe that people act morally in spite of their nature, when in reality, the majority of people act morally precisely because of their nature.)

The uncomfortable part of this approach to morality is that you must accept the fact that moral codes do not prevent immorality.  If a man is going to commit genocide, a stern morality lecture by the pope isn't likely to change his mind.  He has rationalized his goal as being above morality, so a moral lesson isn't going to help.  Quite simply, people do both good and bad things, and the existence of moral codes has never, nor will it ever, actually do anything to prevent immorality.  It is simply a measure by which we can effectively talk about people.  You know this to be true.  You don't convince a patient to do something because it's morally right.  You convince him to do it because it's logical for him to do it.

The lesson of the ants teaches us that "immorality" is also a function of the superorganism.  There are individual behaviors that are not logically good if you're using abstract reasoning.  Nevertheless, they occur, and they obviously serve a purpose on a group level.  (What is that purpose, you might ask?)  The single most effective way to unite a disparate group of individuals is to form an us/them division.  Common enemies unite people who used to be foes.  In other words, the superorganism, which is unconsciously trying to assert itself over other superorganisms, benefits from internal divisions which unite the majority of the population.  We see this in politics all the time.  Use the small percentage of homosexuals as a community punching bag, and suddenly, you have a united political front, and can go fight a war -- also a very natural course of action for a superorganism.

Regardless of how liberal or conservative a society is, deviant behavior remains remarkably consistent, just like the slacker ants.  Immorality, then, is not so much a measure of an individual's absolute worth as it is a reflection of the superorganism's overall state.

Can we say that an action is moral or immoral, then?  Sort of.  We can say that an action is going to cause more harm than good, and is therefore immoral, but we have to remember that we're always making a reference to an unspoken goal.  Is it immoral to kill your own countrymen?  Yes, unless you happen to be a revolutionary who believes that instituting a better government is a better goal than being loyal to your country.  If that's the case, it's immoral to obey orders.

The foundation for morality, then, is something of a misnomer.  The foundations of morality are sometimes (often?) conflicting sets of ideals, stemming from intensely complicated social networks.  An act can be both moral and immoral, and it can be neutral.  (Whether you hold your fork in your left or right hand is very unlikely to matter in most places.)  For that matter, it can be neutral and moral and immoral!  It's good for you to protect your country against invaders, even though it's bad to kill a man and leave his wife and children homeless, even though it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things, because you were drafted, and don't have a choice!

So, back to the OP (miraculously!)  Is prostitution immoral?  Yes, no, and N/A, and the answer to the question is completely irrelevant, for only reason will effectively convince someone either to do it or not.

  So right on Hamby, and thanks really for all your posts.

I AM a moral guy, who could be delighted to pay a happily willing girl of agreeable age to have the privilege of intense mind boggling orgasm, while hopefully experiencing the  satisfaction of inducing  multiple screaming wild orgasms of joyful delightful pleasure in my partner, while taking the necessary precautions not to spread STDs and unwanted pregnancy or the heart break of a jealous attached other, because like I said, I AM moral.

However, I AM against a law ??? So fuck the prostitution laws as now written ..... 

Set the girls free from the chains of shame, so that we guys will be free too ..... stop being fools of senseless quilt, control and fearful feelings of sexual inadequacy  .....   

I tell my 22 yr old daughter that when she wants a guy to just go ask him if he'd like to be one of HER many "slaves" that she may dismiss at her will ..... Break the ancient chains I explain to her .... because I AM a moral loving guy and a devoted father.

BTW , I have never so called, paid a hooker, or even went a looking for one, but I have loved a few ......  Don't even go telling me that I can't .... I might even decide to give a gal my entire wealth for a little hanky panky  ..... 

Kill religion poison  ..... give the hookers a tip and some loving caring advise .....

Awesome post Hamby, my hat is off to you.  How much of that was from the Authoritarian Specter?  I'm ordering the book through Amazon.

Ok, some question then: 

1)  Given that social constraints are one of the biggest logical consequences of behavior (i.e. don't do genocide because someone will kill you if you do), what are the roles of social institutions in this superorganism, and how do you maintain a system of checks and balances to prevent specific social impulses from running rampant (such as Nazi domination, or the hippie movement for examples)?  Or do you even worry about that?  Do you just let the things work themselves out with all the bloodletting that that might entail?  After all, Hitler's power was checked and he was killed.

On the other hand, there are societies and systems of government (superorganisms) that are capable of doing much better for themselves and their people.  Democracy vs. Dictatorship for example.  Democracy is an order of magnitude more powerful than a dictatorship, but dictatorships. 

2)  How do the stages of moral development fit into all this, and do they apply to superorganisms as well as individuals?

Prostitution should be decriminalized, legalized, regulated, discouraged and then abolished, in my opinion. I cannot imagine how people would want to put themselves at such risk of their own volition. And apart from the whole emotional "you should not give your body away like that" thing (which is just my opinion and therefore not really important), prostitution IS risky business: diseases, unsavoury customers, and I won't even start about the crime that might get and keep people into this trade.