The Ethics of Sex

An Introduction

Neil McArthur

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781315448824
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The Ethics of Sex: An Introduction systematically and comprehensively examines the ethical issues surrounding the concept of sex. It addresses important questions such as:

• How can we approach questions of sexual ethics in a philosophical way?
• Must we give affirmative consent to all sexual activity, and what would be the impact of implementing an affirmative consent standard into law?
• Can our dating preferences ever be considered a form of discrimination?
• Is BDSM sex compatible with feminism?
• Should we promote monogamy as the best way to live?
• Is it harmful to have a relationship with a robot?
• Should sex work be decriminalized?
• Is there a right to sex?

Including discussion questions and suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter The Ethics of Sex is the perfect philosophical introduction to the perennially topical issue, and ideal reading for students taking courses within the fields of applied ethics, sociology, law, religion and politics.

1Sexual Ethics in the History of Philosophy

DOI: 10.4324/​9781315448848-2

Let me ask a question. How many times of day do you think about property? Now, how many times do you think about sex? Unless you are shopping for a house, or you are a real estate lawyer, the odds are that you think about sex a lot more than you do about property. Philosophy has a long history. And through its many centuries, philosophers have written thousands, indeed hundreds of thousands, of pages on questions regarding property. Yet, there are a relatively small number of philosophers who, at least before the twenty-first century, have written about sex. And most of them are largely concerned to defend the conventional views of their time.

To be fair, philosophers of the past rarely had complete freedom to say what they wanted. Most lived under governments that imposed some degree of censorship. Yet when we look, by way of contrast, at the history of literature, we see that literary authors consistently wrote works that dealt with sex in explicit terms and that challenged prevailing views. At the height of the Christian middle ages, we can find Chaucer's Wife of Bath, who is open about her love of sexual pleasure, and about the power that her own desirability gives her over men. Boccaccio's Decameron, written during roughly the same era, freely references adultery and premarital sex. During the seventeenth century, even as John Locke defended laws against extra-marital sex, the Earl of Rochester was writing poems and plays that were both highly explicit and, at least by the standards of his society, scandalously amoral. It is also interesting to note that many philosophers, Locke included, have endured persecution, exile and even death to challenge accepted views about politics and religion. Yet none took the same risks in writing about sex.

This is not to say that the history of philosophy has no value for this book. On the contrary, many philosophers writing about sexual ethics today draw on the writers of the past, and the history of philosophy provides a valuable resource for understanding the questions discussed here. Some modern philosophers reference the relatively few works from the history of philosophy that deal explicitly with sexual questions, while others apply the most important moral theories developed by philosophers of the past to the problems of sexual ethics. I will refer to these theories at various points in this book.

This chapter provides an introduction to some of the past philosophers who are most frequently discussed in the literature on sexual ethics or whose ideas have the most relevance to the subject in order to provide a framework for the chapters that follow. We will begin with the ancient Greeks and proceed to modern times.

1.1 The Ancient Greeks and Virtue Ethics

The ancient Greeks approached ethics from a broader perspective than do many modern philosophers. They saw it as an investigation not just into how we should behave towards others, but also into how we can best pursue a happy, healthy life. They believed that we should cultivate virtuous traits of character, but their catalogues of virtues included, alongside other-regarding traits such as honesty and kindness, ones concerned with our own self-development, such as temperance and discipline.

Greek discussions of sexual morality reflect this perspective. Greek philosophers consider the impact of our sexual behaviour on our self-development. They trust nature, which they think generally (though not unfailingly) gives us a reliable guide to happiness. And for this reason, they accept desire as a perfectly natural urge, one that deserves satisfaction like any other. But they value self-control, the possession of which supposedly distinguished free men from slaves and which allows people to pursue the other elements of a good life. They worry that sexual desire – eros is the Greek term – poses a perilous threat to a man's, or a woman's, self-control. Eros was often described as a disease or a madness, one that can tear a person's life apart. The Greeks had another term, philia, for the calm, affectionate love that we can experience without being overwhelmed by eros. Philia can sustain and comfort a person and is easily integrated into a virtuous life.

Socrates (c.470–c.399 BCE) famously visited an oracle when he was young who told him, according to Plato (c.428–c.348 BCE), that no one was wiser than he was. But Xenophon (c.430–c.354 BCE), another student of Socrates, tells the story differently. According to Xenophon, the oracle actually told him he was the freest of all men, not the wisest, and this was because he was the most self-controlled. Socrates proudly recalled this as he faced execution. He asks his followers: “whom do you know less enslaved to his bodily appetites than me?”¹ Describing Socrates's teaching to his followers, Xenophon says that “of sensual passion he would say: Avoid it resolutely: it is not easy to control yourself once you meddle with that sort of thing.”²

In Plato's dialogues, Socrates draws a distinction between those who are ruled by reason and those who are ruled by their passions, and he correspondingly distinguishes two sorts of love, passionate and rational. “We should think,” he says in the Phaedrus, “that there is in each of us two things that rule and guide, which we follow wherever they lead: the one is the innate desire for pleasures, but the other is the acquired belief to pursue what is best.”³ Socrates says that people who are dominated by the desire for pleasure are only capable of loving in a selfish and dominating way. They love their beloved in the same way that wolves love lambs.⁴ There is, however, a different, more philosophical form of love, one that is not driven by lust and that is ungenerously devoted to the good of the other.⁵ The term “Platonic love” has become part of our everyday language to describe a feeling of profound affection that transcends physical desire.

Though Plato's philosophy continues to be studied and valued, the writings of his pupil Aristotle (385–323 BCE) have had a greater influence on modern ethical thought, including on writing about sexual ethics. Aristotle has little to say directly about the issues covered in this book. However, he adopts a set of positions that has become central to the theory known as virtue ethics, which many people have applied to questions of sexual ethics. First of all, he, like all of the major Greek thinkers, believes that ethics should be conceived broadly as an inquiry into how we should live and the sort of person we should want to be. Applied to sexual ethics, this implies that private life choices, such as what sort of relationships we choose to have, fall within the scope of ethical inquiry and debate.

Second, in keeping with this broader ethical orientation, Aristotle focuses on the development of character rather than on specific actions or on rules for action. He thinks ethical decisions are complex, and, though general principles may help to guide us, the right course of action cannot be reduced to fixed rules or precise calculations. Instead, acting rightly comes from having the right dispositions, which allow us to respond in particular situations in ways that reasonable people would think was appropriate or admirable.

Third, Aristotle thinks we develop admirable dispositions through habituation. That is, a person becomes virtuous not by contemplating or formulating general rules for action, but by acting virtuously in concrete situations. As we do this, over time, it becomes ingrained in us. As he says in the Nicomachean Ethics:

Virtue of character results from habit … For we learn a craft by producing the same product that we must produce when we have learned it, becoming builders, e.g., by building and harpists by playing the harp; so, also, then we become just by doing just actions, temperate by doing temperate actions, brave by doing brave actions.⁶

Fourth, Aristotle believes happiness comes from pursuing certain basic human goods, which together make up a good life. Virtues are those traits of character that tend to promote these basic goods in ourselves and others. Aristotle never produces a definitive list of the universal human goods, which he seems to assume most people would be aware of and agree on. But they include things like friends, good health, and an honourable reputation. As Martha Nussbaum points out, Aristotle deliberately avoided claiming he had discovered the single right list of virtues that would hold for all time. She says that the Aristotelian virtues “remain always open to revision in the light of new circumstances and new evidence …. All general accounts are held provisionally, as summaries of correct decisions and as guides to new ones.”⁷

Fifth, Aristotle urges us to seek out the “mean” in all things. Virtue lies in avoiding both excess and deficiency. He says that “the man who indulges in every pleasure and abstains from none becomes self-indulgent, while the man who shuns every pleasure, as boors do, becomes in a way insensible.”⁸ In sexual matters, this means that we must try to be temperate, neither avoiding pleasure entirely nor immoderately devoting ourselves to its pursuit.

Finally, Aristotle thinks the state should take a role in shaping people's character and helping them cultivate virtue. He considers direct measures to guide citizens towards virtue, such as laws mandating couples to have children alongside ones limiting the size of families. He mostly focusses on more indirect methods, however. For instance, he thinks the government should provide education for children that focusses on inculcating virtue and teaching them how to be good citizens.

Aristotle's ideas have been adopted in modern ethics as part of an approach known as virtue ethics. Following the Greeks, modern virtue ethicists see ethics in very broad terms. As James Keenan says: “Virtue ethics encompasses our entire lives. It sees every moment as the possibility for acquiring or developing a virtue.”⁹ They also follow Aristotle in focussing on the development of character and on the role of habituation in shaping character. Gilbert Harman says:

Moral virtues are robust character traits possessed by ideally morally virtuous persons … In a typical situation of moral choice, an agent ought to do whatever a virtuous person would do in that situation … The goal is not just to do the right thing. It is to be the right sort of person. One needs to develop a virtuous character.¹⁰

When it comes to sexual ethics, questions about the relationship between our behaviour and our character often play a prominent role in the debates, and such questions will be discussed in this book at numerous points.

Some virtue ethicists adopt the Aristotelian view that we must seek a mean between extremes of behaviour or character. And this includes our pursuit of sexual pleasure. Raja Halwani argues that because sexual pleasures are fleeting, “we should not elevate sex and sexual activity to a high status in our lives. Doing this is misguided, especially if we are capable of more worthwhile things.” Halwani judges our sexual behaviour according to the impact it has on our pursuit of other, more worthwhile activities.¹¹ Many virtue ethicists also share Aristotle's perfectionist view of politics. That is, they believe the state has at least some role in guiding us towards virtuous behaviour, though they do not all think this implies that it should use its coercive power to do so. It may use tools such as public education to nudge its citizens in the direction of virtuous actions.

1.2 Augustine, Aquinas, and Natural Law Theory

During the middle ages, the scholastic philosophers took ideas from Aristotle and the Stoics and tried to reconcile these with Biblical sources. The result was a synthesis that has had lasting influence in the field of morality and of sexual ethics more specifically.

Though Christianity has long been concerned, indeed preoccupied, with regulating people's private sexual behaviour, the Bible hardly mentions sexual morality. The Old Testament is mostly concerned with sexual behaviour that undermines the Jewish religion, such as pagan sex rituals and marriage with non-Jews.¹² At least as he is recorded in the New Testament, Jesus also makes few references to sexual questions, and even Paul, who is often blame...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Sexual Ethics in the History of Philosophy
• 2 Meeting, Dating, and Having Sex
• 3 Consent
• 4 Commitment and Marriage
• 5 Sex and the Law
• 6 Sex and Technology
• Conclusion: Philosophical Principles for Debating Sexual Ethics
• Index