Re: The Right to be Publicly Naked: A Defense of Nudism

I’ve been wanting to write about the legalization of public nudity for a while now. It’s one of those things that’s a moral no-brainer for me as a social progressive, but society just hasn’t caught up yet.

I found a publication from September of 2018 defending the right to be publicly naked that more or less says all I had planned to say about the topic and more. It was written by Bouke de Vries, and published by Res Publica, a peer-reviewed Journal of Moral, Legal, and Political Philosophy. I read the publication in its entirety. Legal and political philosophy certainly aren’t my areas of expertise, but I agree with the thrust of the publication and decided it was worth sharing.

To boil it down in my own words, the publication argues that the right to be publicly nude when it does not pose a health risk serves important purposes and that any offense public nudity may cause isn’t reason enough to ban it since the nature of the offense taken isn’t inherent, but rooted in harmful prejudices against nudists.