The degree at which photos of naked woman are incorporated into the daily Dalmatian newspaper Slobodna Dalmacija (Liberated Dalmatia; I hold this translation more apposite than Free Dalmatia) I found hard to accept. Do I generally object the photos of naked women in press? Of course not. We men are entitled to our sexual fantasies and there are instances when visual stimulus is welcomed. However, Slobodna Dalmacija is the main daily newspaper in Dalmatia and I do not expect to run into naked woman photos at my morning coffee.

The Conflict of Public Moral Concern and Private Liberties

A possible way out of the dilemma is to appeal to the concept of nuisance.

Everyone, it might be said, has an interest in being able to go around his business without offensive and distracting sensations, smells, noises and perhaps sights, obtruding upon him, interfering with. Or preventing him from giving his full attention to his projects, or simply marring an otherwise pleasant experience. Just as some noises are so loud or unpleasant that it would be unreasonable to expect people simply to accept them as natural and inevitable consequences of sharing a social environment with others who have different interests and activities, so some deviations from accepted decency might be so gross that a passer-by’s attention would be compelled to them, however distressing they might be to him. According to this view, we all have a right not to have our indignation stimulated to a disquieting degree, provided that we have no convenient way of avoiding the stimulus, that our indignation is not excessive by the standards of our culture, and is not aroused by things that most people in our culture take in their stride.

Stanley I. Benn: Private and public morality: Clean living and dirty hands, in Public and private in social life (S.I. Benn and G.F. Gaus, Eds.), St. Martin Press, New York, 1983.