Simply the whole situation should be treated exactly the same way
Treating every situation the same way basically means that you want to ignore the empiric reality of how different situations differ from each other. It means not optimizing for the way different situations differ from each other.
Legalizing prostitution should mean treating the prostitutes as standard employees with standard employee rights (and duties: taxes, insurance), not just ignoring the whole business.
The problem is that you have women in the brothels who are under the threat of force and therefore won't tell the police that their rights are violated.
The employees should be able to sue their employers, if necessary, and get legal assistance.
Of course they can do that, the legal framework gives them the possibility. A person who's physically abused and afraid to speak out still doesn't do this in practice.
if some organizations would decide that it is cheaper to kidnap programmers and keep them locked in basement, making them write Java code for food, and torturing them if they refuse.
Programmers can't work if you drug them in a way from preventing them to think clearly. As a result you simply don't have reactions where organizations put programmers in a similar state.
Programmers can't work if you drug them
But they can work if they are kidnapped, imprisoned, threatened with force, afraid of police, disapproved of by much of the population, etc.; almost none of what's special about (many) prostitutes' situation couldn't happen to software developers. So Viliam's thought experiment is a good one: what would and should we do if it did?
I'm not sure it's so obvious that people wouldn't be calling for criminalization it, say, half of all software was made by imprisoned blackmailed kidnapped slaves. (Note: I have no idea wh...
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