Ethics and Sex

Igor Primoratz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN:
  9780415093330
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134871254
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Ethics and Sex presents a systematic study of the nature and moral significance of human sexuality and of the major issues in sexual morality.
The book is divided into two main parts. Part One gives a critical analysis of the key conceptions of human sexuality. Part Two discusses the most important issues in sexual morality: monogamy; adultery; prostitution; homosexuality; paedophilia; sexual harassment and rape.
In this controversial and accessible book, the author demonstrates that many of the prohibitions that make up conventional sexual morality cannot withstand critical scrutiny.

I

The Basics

1

Introduction

Philosophers and Sex

This book discusses a number of questions pertaining to human sexuality. Human sexuality gives rise to many interesting and important questions in several areas. The book will not deal with those that come up in sexology, psychology, sociology, or social and cultural history. This is a philosophical book; the approach will be ethical or, more broadly, philosophical.

When it comes to sex as a topic of philosophy, though, the surprising fact is that it is only comparatively recently that it has come to engage any stronger and sustained interest among professional philosophers. In this connection, it is instructive to refer to “The Metaphysics of Sexual Love” by Arthur Schopenhauer, written in 1844. In view of the unquestionable importance, indeed centrality, of sexuality in human life, Schopenhauer is surprised that philosophers should have ignored the subject almost completely, and left it to poets and novelists. The history of philosophy offers just a few exceptions to this general disregard, and they, in his view, do not amount to much:

It is Plato who has been most concerned with it, especially in the Banquet and the Phaedrus; yet what he says about it is confined to the sphere of myths, fables, and jokes, and for the most part concerns only the Greek love of boys. The little that Rousseau says about our theme in the Discours sur I’inégalité…is false and inadequate. Kant’s discussion of the subject in the third section of the essay On the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime…is very superficial and without special knowledge; thus it is also partly incorrect…. Spinoza’s definition, on the other hand, deserves to be quoted on account of its excessive naivety: Amor est titillatio, concomitante idea causae externae [Love is a titillation accompanied by the notion of an external cause]

(Ethics, IV, Prop. 44, dem.).¹

Accordingly, Schopenhauer concludes: “I have no predecessors either to make use of or to refute…”²

These remarks are somewhat cavalier. There is more on sexuality in Plato, Kant, and Rousseau than Schopenhauer is willing to acknowledge.³ Furthermore, he could have mentioned a few others, at least if the subject is to be conceived broadly enough to include not only sexual attraction, desire, love, as such, but also social rules, practices and institutions pertaining to it. For instance, some utilitarians have discussed the institution of marriage, and offered either its justifications (Hume, Paley) or arguments for its abolition (Godwin). Still, Schopenhauer is right in the sense that, with a few exceptions, philosophers had not tended to show great and sustained interest in human sexuality before his time. Nor, indeed, for about a century afterwards.

This lack of sustained interest in sex as a philosophical subject, which characterizes Western philosophy through most of its history, can be explained in part by the influence of a strong metaphysical tradition, whose sources are in the teachings of Plato and the Pythagoreans, that tended to contrast the material and non-material, the body and the soul, and to extol the latter while disparaging the former. In that context, sexuality tended to be seen as purely physical, and accordingly to be treated as something of little value, if not downright bad. Another part of the explanation is the ideal of the philosopher’s life, or even of good life in general, accepted by many philosophers in antiquity, and in later times too: the ideal of the life of Reason. This ideal, developed in particular by philosophers of the Stoic school, was based on the supreme values of rationality and inner freedom; both were seen as incompatible with and threatened by “passions” such as anger, fear, or sexual desire. The way of achieving inner peace and freedom and realizing the ideal of the life of Reason was one of fighting and subduing one’s passions, including the sexual one. A good statement of this ideal is given by Epictetus:

To-day when I saw a handsome woman I did not say to myself, ‘Would that she were mine!’ and ‘Blessed is her husband!’… Nor do I picture the next scene: the woman present and disrobing and reclining by my side…. And if, though the woman herself…is willing and beckons and sends to me, and even touches me and comes close to me, I still hold aloof and conquer…this is a thing to be really proud of… Go to Socrates and see him reclining with Alcibiades and making light of his beauty. Consider what a victory, what an Olympic triumph, he won over himself… Great is the struggle, divine the task; the stake is a kingdom, freedom, peace, an unruffled spirit.⁴

Christian philosophers of the middle ages, such as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, were heirs to this antisexual tradition of their Greek and Roman predecessors. But they also wrote within the religious tradition that commanded “Be fruitful and multiply!” They accordingly tried for a synthesis of the two, and developed theories of sexuality which confined sex to heterosexual genital intercourse within monogamous marriage.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the traditional world view no longer held sway in philosophy. But the idea of the life of Reason was still very powerful, and those committed to it tended to think of sex as but one of the irrational distractions the philosopher had to overcome if he was to be able to devote himself fully to his vocation, rather than a legitimate subject of philosophical consideration. Nietzsche points out that philosophers have tended to feel “genuine irritation and rancour” against sensuality in general, and the sort of sensuality bound up with sex, love, and marriage in particular:

Thus the philosopher abhors marriage…as hindrance and catastrophe on his path to the optimum. Which great philosopher, so far, has been married? Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer—were not; indeed it is impossible to even think about them as married. A married philosopher belongs to comedy, that is my proposition: and that exception, Socrates, the mischievous Socrates, appears to have married ironice, simply in order to demonstrate this proposition.⁵

Those philosophers who did address the subject of sex at all were for the most part content to merely prop up conventional sexual morality by philosophical arguments. Philosophers so different as the utilitarian Hume and the arch-deontologist Kant tended to advance arguments with surprisingly similar and conventional moral conclusions, justifying the institution of monogamous marriage as the sole legitimate framework for sexual activity. There was one important exception to this in the century of the enlightenment: the Marquis de Sade radically repudiated the traditional view of sex and marriage, and forcefully expounded an alternative ideal of extreme naturalism and libertinism, which made his writings infamous to this day.⁶

The middle of the last century was the turning point. Schopenhauer both fully appreciated the intrinsic importance of the subject of sexuality, and did not feel committed to conventional morality. In his “Metaphysics of Sexual Love”, mentioned above, he interpreted human sexual desire and love as but an expression of the blind will of the human species to perpetuate itself. And in his widely read and unabashedly misogynous essay on women, he criticized the traditional monogamous marriage as irrational and unfair, and did not flinch from advocating that it be replaced by polygamy. He argued that polygamy would not only be more in tune with the objective needs of the human species and would benefit men, but would also be good for women.⁷

An impetus towards a new understanding of sexuality and a reassessment of the rules of traditional sexual morality was given by the naturalistic philosophy of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Another important influence was the critique of the bourgeois society in general, and of bourgeois marriage in particular, by socialist and anarchist thinkers.

In the first half of the twentieth century, continental philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre (Being and Nothingness, 1943), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (The Phenomenology of Perception, 1945), and Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex, 1949) made important contributions to philosophical understanding of human sexuality. In Britain, Bertrand Russell’s Marriage and Morals (1929) occasioned considerable debate by its argument for the liberalization of the institution of marriage and sexual morality in general.

But it is only since the mid-sixties that the philosophy of sex has come into its own: that human sexuality is widely recognized as a legitimate and indeed highly interesting and important subject of sustained philosophical investigation and debate. This development can be explained, in part, by the influence of certain social and cultural trends: the new libertinism of the anti-establishment currents among the young, the rise and expansion of contemporary feminism and the gay liberation movement, and the overall change in sexual mores, popularly known as the sexual revolution of the sixties, to which all these currents contributed. Within philosophy proper, the development of the philosophy of sex was made possible, above all, by the fact that by the late sixties and early seventies, the extreme version of the “linguistic turn” that had characterized philosophy in the English-speaking world for decades was being reversed. The view that moral, political and legal philosophy should confine itself to analysis of the basic terms or concepts of morals, politics, and law and leave moral, political, and legal issues to nonphilosophers was losing ground, and a strong interest in the questions of moral, political, and legal norms and values was reasserting itself. Another factor may have been the influence of the continental philosophers mentioned above; their main writings were being translated into English and widely read in the English-speaking countries since the late fifties.

The period from the mid-sixties to late seventies was marked by the publication of several pioneering works in the philosophy of sex. In 1965 two systematic, book-length discussions of sexual morality were published: Sexual Morality by Ronald Atkinson,⁸ and Logic and Sexual Morality by John Wilson.⁹ Systematic studies of sexual ethics had been published before, of course, but they tended to take the point of view of particular religious traditions; Atkinson’s and Wilson’s works were the first philosophical books on the subject. The same period saw the publication of several pioneering papers, which have since been accorded the status of minor classics in the field: Thomas Nagel’s “Sexual Perversion” (The Journal of Philosophy, 1968), Robert Solomon’s “Sexual Paradigms” (The Journal of Philosophy, 1974), and Alan Goldman’s “Plain Sex” (Philosophy & Public Affairs, 1977). By the mid-seventies, there was enough good material for the first anthology of contemporary philosophical writings on sex to be put together.¹⁰ And the last two decades have seen considerable philosophical activity focused on the subject of sexuality. Numerous papers and quite a few books have been published, both on the nature of sexuality in general and on various specific issues, such as monogamy, adultery, prostitution, homosexuality, sexual harassment, pornography, or rape. An International Society for the Philosophy of Sex and Love has been active 1977.¹¹ The philosophy of sex has clearly come of age.

Plan of the Book

The first part of the book is devoted to the basics of the philosophy of sex. It focuses on two main questions: What is sex? How is natural or normal sex to be distinguished from unnatural or abnormal sex? With regard to the first question, I will look into four main accounts of sex to be found in the literature: the view of sex as meant for procreation; the view that it is, or ought to be, bound up with love; the view of sex as a type of language, used to express certain important feelings and attitudes; and the view that it is simply a source of pleasure. All four accounts are advanced primarily as ways of understanding the nature of sex; but each one also tells us something about the significance and value of sex in human life in general, and about its moral status in particular.

Talk of the nature of sex seems to entail the distinction between natural and unnatural, normal and abnormal sex. This distinction is very much in use both in our ordinary, everyday discourse about sex and in attempts of psychologists, sociologists and others to offer scientific explanations of some of its varieties. The negative side of the distinction is usually encapsulated in the idea of sexual perversion. This idea will be the subject of a separate chapter.

The second part of the book is devoted to the main issues in sexual morality. I will discuss the rights and wrongs of marriage, adultery, jealousy, prostitution, homosexuality, pedophilia, sexual harassment, and rape. I think that every one of these topics is very interesting in its own right; but their discussion is also bound to lead us back to certain wider problems in the philosophy of sex or to raise some important questions in moral and social philosophy. Thus marriage, adultery, or jealousy cannot be discussed without asking the more basic question about exclusivity in sexual relations. Thinking about prostitution inevitably brings up the distinction between intrinsically significant and merely instrumental social relations, as well as that between personal and impersonal social intercourse. The problems of sexual harassment and rape raise questions about the inequality and oppression of women.

Having discussed these issues of sexual morality, in the concluding chapter I will briefly reconsider the very idea of sexual morality. Is there anything special about sex from a moral point of view, so that there is, or should be, a specifically sexual morality? Or is sex as such devoid of any distinctively moral significance, morally neutral, so to speak, so that moral guidance regarding sexual behavior is provided by the same general moral rules and values that apply in other areas?

2

Sex and Procreation

Sex, Procreation, Marriage

Today, the view is no longer generally accepted that the single most important fact for our understanding and evaluation of sex is that it makes procreation possible and that, accordingly, its proper place is within marriage. But it did reign supreme in the West for almost two millennia, in discourse about sex, at least, if not always in sexual practice. Even when it came to be questioned, it retained its central importance, for it served as the point of departure in discussions about sex. And if today it no longer exerts the influence it once did, it is still one of the main accounts of the nature and value of sexuality we have.

Historically, its main source is the Christian view of human nature and human sexuality in particular. This view was heir to the Old Testament idea of marriage as the proper institutional framework for carrying out the commandment “Be fruitful and multiply!”. On the other hand, it was also informed by the Pythagorean and Platonic tradition of a negative attitude to the body, and the Stoic understanding of sexuality as one of the passions that are in constant conflict with the demands of reason.

The utterly negative view of sexuality characteristic of early Christianity is expressly stated, while at the same time its practical implications are circumscribed, in the famous passage of Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians:

It is well for a man not to touch a woman. But because of the temptation to immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. … Do not refuse one another except perhaps by agreement for a season, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, lest Satan tempt you through lack of self-control. I say this by way of conce...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations Used in the Notes and Bibliography
• I The Basics
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Sex and Procreation
• 3 Sex and Love
• 4 Sex as Language
• 5 The Pleasure of Sex
• 6 Sexual Perversion
• II The Issues
• 7 Marriage, Adultery, Jealousy
• 8 Prostitution
• 9 Homosexuality
• 10 Pedophilia
• 11 Sexual Harassment and Rape
• 12 Concluding Remarks
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index