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Judging just by the quotes I don't find the Destiny/Murphy example convincing. In particular it's not clear who's employing pretextual arguments (both?).
Murphy gives an example of an (alleged) harm that she claims accompanies the sex industry. Destiny responds by proposing a situation where the harm does not occur. But that does not address the argument against prostitution as a whole -- if the industry is necessarily accompanied by harm, you can be against it as a whole, and if you're against it as a whole then it's common to be against it in every case, if only because blanket rules are less corruptible than arbitrarily large decision trees. After all, almost every "unethical" behavior has some corner case where it's actually a good choice, does that invalidate the concept? Destiny's argument reminds me of politicians who talk endlessly about the advantages of clean coal, only to build more of the dirty kind.
You're by no means the first to find that particular example lacking, and it's my fault that I didn't include at least a summary of the discussion that preceded it. See here for that.
The goal of the questions Destiny was employing was explained well by @curious_straight_ca in considering a parallel on alcohol:
If you don't know exactly why someone supports/opposes a thing, then it's pretty damn hard to discuss the thing.
The alcohol example may be illuminating: note that the counterfactuals have different forms. In the alcohol case, the hypotheses apply to alcohol as a whole, whereas in the prostitution one they only apply to a specific worker. If I told you (a teetotaler) that my mate Paul drinks a fifth every day, has the liver of a man half his age, and actually drives better drunk, would that change your mind on the merits of drink? Now, I may well be imputing an argument that Murphy would not support and did not speak to. One can charitably assume that both speakers abbreviate the rigor of their arguments, and attempt to beat steelmen out of the plowshares (?) they provide.
I'm not understanding why the distinction between whole and individual matters in this context. If you told me (as a teetotaler) about Paul my response would probably be something along the lines that an individual's remarkable account is weak counter-evidence. If you told me about a class of people like Paul, a possible response would probably cite a utilitarian calculus.
The alcohol and prostitution examples are not meant to map onto each other perfectly. It was meant to describe what the purpose of questions are, to figure out and draw the boundaries for why people hold positions.
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