There are at least two different sorts of moral questions one might ask about prostitution and modeling. On one hand one might ask about the moral status of a particular agent's engaging in modeling or prostitution, and whether one action is morally worse than the other. On the other hand, one might ask about the moral status of the general practice of modeling and the general practice of prostitution, i.e., is it worse for the society to tolerate prostitution than modeling? (I'm assuming you don't have in mind by modeling the sexual display of one's body, but the modeling of clothes for the LLBean catalog and such.) Regarding both sorts of questions it seems to me that much more should be considered beyond whether the practice or the act is an instance of "selling one's body". In the case of an agent, the moral evaluation of the choice would plausibly depend on the circumstances, the beliefs, desires and intentions of the agent and others involved, the consequences of the choice, etc. And in...

There are lots of complex issues here (as in the previous question r#1796 referred to). In response to the earlier question, I focued on rights and obligations because those were the terms in which the question was asked. Prof. Soble emphasized there that many other moral considerations are relevant in intimate human relations, e.g., what would be virtuous, nice, religiously required, what one should do out of a sense of duty, justice, or reciprocity, etc. I was not answering a question about what would be virtuous or just, but what is obligatory. I took obligations to be closely tied to rights. So I was not asserting that there are no other moral considerations in matters of sex as he seemed to read me, but only that there are some important rights and obligations that are relevant to whether one has an obligation to have sex in marriage. But it is difficult to articulate what rights and obligations there are, and this current question rightly demands clarification. First, we might want to...

I can't comment on the law, but I would argue that one does not have a moral obligation to have sex with one's partner in marriage. In fact, I can easily think of cases in which one has an obligation not to have sex with one's partner, e.g., if one's partner doesn't want to have sex. Another case is one in which one's partner's health is such that one would cause harm to him/her by having sex. You might be wondering, though, about cases in which one partner wants sex and the other doesn't. Does the undesiring partner have an obligation to have sex with the desiring partner? I would argue that there isn't such an obligation or anything even close. Certainly there is no obligation to have sex with someone you don't desire outside of marriage, so the source of the obligation must be marriage. And I have never heard a marriage vow that includes: "and I promise to have sex with you even if I don't want to." It may be that assumptions around the institution of marriage make it plausible that...