Report: Sexuality
Encyclopedia of Ethics
Are
There Special Ethical Principles for Sex?
The
Morality of Sexual Behavior
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http://www.uno.edu/~asoble/pages/BECKER.htm
SEXUALITY AND SEXUAL ETHICS
This essay appears in Lawrence and Charlotte Becker, eds., The Encyclopedia of Ethics, 2nd edition (New York: Routledge, 2001), volume 2, pp. 1570-77.
There are five logically distinct questions that can be asked about sexual activity. First, we can inquire about the moral quality of a sexual act. Is it morally obligatory, morally permissible, supererogatory, or morally wrong? Second, we can examine a sexual act’s nonmoral quality: does it provide pleasure (nonmoral goodness) or is it tedious, boring, and unenjoyable (nonmoral badness)? A phenomenon deplored (or celebrated) in literature and film is that a disparity often exists between what is morally permissible in our sexual behavior and what is satisfying. Third, we can ask about the legality of sexual activity: is it legally permissible or prohibited? This varies by jurisdiction. Fourth is the pragmatic evaluation of sexual acts. Some sexual acts are medically and psychologically safe or have desired consequences; others are medically or psychologically unsafe or have undesired consequences. Finally, sexual acts can be evaluated as biologically or psychologically natural or unnatural (perverted). It is important to keep these distinctions in mind.
In sexual activity our flawed bodies and infantile fantasies are exposed to scrutiny. We can be dominated by the other’s physical strength, power, or beauty as much as by our own desires. Further, in seeking the pleasure of the body and the comfort of intimacy, we become vulnerable to betrayal, jealousy, and sorrow. Thus there is reason to think that sexual ethics is important. When we acknowledge the potential consequences of sexual behavior--the effect of a child’s existence on its parents, family, and the population it joins; the cultivation or reinforcing of pernicious habits; the transmission of deadly disease--the imperative to judge sexual behavior morally becomes even more clear.
It is one thing to argue that morally evaluating sexual behavior is important, and another to argue that sexual ethics must be restrictive. Yet, given the psychological nature and potential consequences of sexuality, it could be claimed that sexual activity is prima facie morally wrong, is always in need of justification, or must be avoided unless stringent conditions are met. Perhaps, then, we can understand the hostility of the world’s religions to sex. Augustine (354-430 C.E.) provides a sharp example: “A man turns to good use the evil of concupiscence . . . when he bridles and restrains its rage . . . and never relaxes his hold upon it except when intent on offspring, and then controls and applies it to the carnal generation of children . . . not to the subjection of the spirit to the flesh in a sordid servitude.”
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) had equally unkind words for sex: “Sexual love makes of the loved person an Object of appetite. . . . Taken by itself it is a degradation of human nature.” Sexual desire, because it focuses on an embodied person, is ever prone to the objectification of its target. As a powerful urge and hence motivator to manipulation and deception, sexual desire approaches another person as an instrument, without regard for the other’s subjectivity or ends. Thus the quest for sexual pleasure is permissible only when anchored in, or subordinated to, other more valuable goals: love, marriage, procreation.
This grim, conservative characterization of sexuality and the restrictive sexual ethics it implies are rejected by those who think that sexual desire is not intrinsically sinful or selfish. Sexuality is a natural bonding mechanism that, through the power to produce pleasure, forges a psychological joint interest out of two independent interests. At least, the self-interested drive for sexual pleasure can, either by its nature or by proper education, expand into a drive for the satisfaction of another’s desire. Further, sexual pleasure is a good thing in itself, one of the few intense and delectable joys life offers. Its achievement ought to be encouraged and appropriate arrangements devised to make sexual activity less likely to lead to evil consequences. There is nothing about a virtuous life lived well that excludes seeking sexual pleasure for its own sake.
If the possible consequences and risky psychological nature of sexuality imply that sexual ethics is important and restrictive, they also suggest that there might be special moral principles that apply discretely to this area of life. Sui generis sexual ethics makes sense if sexuality plays a unique role in human life. Sex is by far the primary way to reproduce humans. If procreation has significance precisely as a couples’s contribution to God’s ongoing work of creation, sexuality is supremely important and must be governed by restrictive rules, which might apply only here. The significance of sexuality, however, might be little different from the significance of eating, breathing, sleeping, and defecating; all are instigated by the needs of the natural body. If the desire for sexual pleasure is little different from the desire for food, sexual behavior is to be constrained by moral principles that apply to behavior in general: the ethics of sex is no more (or less) important than the ethics of anything else.
Often, in the popular mind, “ethics” is something that applies primarily to sexual behavior. In a weak sense, then, there is a sui generis sexual ethics, if there is no ethics other than the sexual. This view is shallow, yet it possesses an intriguing grain of truth. Freudians and others have suggested that sexual personality resides at the core of moral personality: how we perceive and behave toward sexual partners both influences and is a mirror image of how we perceive and interact with people more generally. The education of sexuality provides a foundation or pattern for acting--morally or immorally--in the world. The failure to learn to control the pursuit of sexual pleasure undermines the achievement of a virtuous character. Perhaps fostering bad sexual habits or noxious patterns of sexual behavior even destroys the capacity for love. But all this means is that sexual ethics is restrictive and important, if not the centerpiece of morality, not that sexual ethics is sui generis.
If sexuality is assessed in utilitarian terms, by calculating the costs and benefits of sexual activity to participants and society, no sui generis sexual ethics is possible. Such an ethics must be deontological. Causing needless pain and treating people unfairly are often considered intrinsically and irreducibly wrong; injustice is wrong because it is injustice, not because it is a species of something else that is wrong. If sexual activity is objectifying and selfish, except when purified by love or marriage, its wrongness follows from the wrongness of objectification and selfishness. These moral faults are hardly confined to sexual behavior. A sui generis sexual ethics is possible only if there are sexual acts that are intrinsically and irreducibly wrong, not as instances of selfishness, deceit, harm, and so forth, but wrong as sexual acts. Could sexual acts be morally wrong in their own right?
Consider contraceptive heterosexual acts. One could argue that this practice is morally wrong on consequentialist grounds (it weakens the family and the social fabric) or on the grounds that these sexual acts tend to be exploitative or degrading, insofar as such acts overemphasize the goal of pleasure. But if contraceptive sexual acts are wrong for these reasons, they are not wrong because they are sexual. A multitude of similar examples supports the conclusion that “the fact that an act is sexual in itself never renders it wrong or adds to its wrongness if it is wrong on other grounds” (Alan Goldman). Yet perhaps coercing someone into a sexual act is morally worse than coercing someone into other types of acts (giving up money), due to the special psychological and social nature of sexuality; rape can elicit shame and be especially humiliating, in contrast to a mugging. If so, a sui generis sexual ethics might be possible if, from the fact that an additional contribution to the total wrongness of an act is made by the act’s being sexual, it follows that the act is wrong, in part, because it is sexual.
Applied sexual ethics explores the virtues and vices of a wide assortment of activities: abortion, contraceptive intercourse, acquaintance rape, making and viewing pornography, engaging in sexual harassment, sexual objectification, casual sex, adultery, prostitution, homosexuality, sadomasochism, and intergenerational sex. Each of these activities raises its own special questions. But there are four general debates concerning the details of the morality of sexual behavior.
One debate is between a Natural Law approach to sexuality and a secular outlook that is derivable from either Kantian themes or utilitarianism. The sexual liberal emphasizes autonomous choice, self-determination, freedom, respect for persons, and pleasure, in contrast to a tradition that justifies a more restrictive sexual ethics by invoking a Grand Scheme to which human action must conform or by appealing to Reason, which detects modes of human behavior that are contrary to human nature. To a standard list of reasons a sexual act might be morally wrong--it is dishonest, coercive, manipulative, selfish, cruel, dangerous, or unfair--some add “unnatural.”
The sexual ethics of Thomas Aquinas (1225?-1274) are central in the Natural Law tradition. Sexual acts can be morally wrong, according to Aquinas, in two different ways. First, “when the act of its nature is incompatible with the purpose of the sex-act [procreation]. In so far as generation is blocked, we have unnatural vice, which is any complete sex-act from which of its nature generation cannot follow.” Aquinas gives four examples: “the sin of self-abuse,” “intercourse with a thing of another species,” acts “with a person of the same sex,” and acts in which “the natural style of intercourse is not observed, as regards the proper organ or according to other rather beastly and monstrous techniques.” Second, sexual acts can be morally wrong even if natural; in these cases, “conflict with right reason may arise from the nature of the act with respect to the other party,” as in incest, rape, seduction, and adultery. For Aquinas, sexual sins in the first category are the worst: “unnatural vice flouts nature by transgressing its basic principles of sexuality, [so] it is in this matter the gravest of sins.” Kant, too, asserts that masturbation and homosexuality are morally wrong because they are unnatural: “Onanism . . . is abuse of the sexual faculty. . . . By it man sets aside his person and degrades himself below the level of animals. . . . Intercourse between sexus homogenii . . . too is contrary to the ends of humanity.” The masturbator, as well as the homosexual, “no longer deserves to be a person.”
In response to such Natural Law claims, one might suggest that there is no easy equivalence between an act’s morality and its naturalness. Fellatio, cunnilingus, anal intercourse, mutual masturbation, and consensual sadomasochism, even if unnatural, can be performed with Christian “charity” and hence not be morally wrong. The paradigmatically immoral sex act is not buggery or bestiality, but rape. Regardless, nonprocreative sexual activity might be natural to human beings: not only because there may be a genetic foundation for, say, homosexuality, but also because the plasticity of human desire and the variety of acts we enjoy performing result from our developed brains. Homosexuality might even be one of the ways humans were fashioned by a God following a principle of plenitude.
A second debate is about whether, in the absence of harm to third parties, the fact that two people engage in a sexual act voluntarily is sufficient for satisfying morality. Sexual activity between two persons might be harmful to one or both participants; a moral paternalist would claim that it is wrong for x to harm y, or for y to allow x to harm y, even when both x and y consent to their activity. Consent is not sufficient. But a restrictive sexual ethics is more commonly justified by claiming that only in a committed relationship is sexual activity morally licit.
On one view, the fact that participation in a sexual act is voluntary means that the persons are being treated as ends and not merely used. Consent is sufficient, since each person is respecting the other as an autonomous agent capable of making up his or her mind about the activity’s value. On the other view two mutual uses, even when consensual, do not “cancel” each other to create a virtuous act. Kant and Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II) take this position; voluntarily allowing oneself to be used sexually by another makes an object of oneself. For Kant, sexual activity avoids treating a person merely as a means only in marriage, since here both persons have surrendered their bodies and souls to each other and have achieved unity. For Wojtyla, “only love can preclude the use of one person by another,” since love is a unification of persons resulting from a mutual gift of the selves. But the thought that love is the justifying ingredient has immediate application to homosexuality: gay and lesbian seems permissible if it occurs within loving, monogamous homosexual marriages. Further, the appeal to love makes defending the use of contraception easier if sex acts, even the nonprocreative, express and bolster the love spouses have for each other.
A third debate is over what “voluntary” means. Whether consent is only necessary or also sufficient, any moral principle that relies on consent to make moral distinctions among sexual events presupposes a clear understanding of consent: what it is, how to recognize it, how to distinguish the genuine from the bogus. Participation in sexual activity ought not to be coerced or occur in response to threats, nor should it depend on deception or ignorance of that to which one is consenting. But this platitude leaves things wide open. Does the presence of any kind of pressure put on one person by another amount to coercion that negates consent, so that the subsequent activity is morally wrong? In some cases it might be reasonable to say that some pressures do not count as coercion or that some pressures are coercive but not morally objectionable.
Questions about consent to sex are analogous to those that arise in medicine, business, and law. How specific must consent be in order that a person engage voluntarily in subsequent sexual behavior? Because consent is opaque, when one person agrees “to have sex” with another the first has not necessarily consented to any sensual caress or coital position the second has in mind. How explicit must consent be? Can consent be reliably implied by nonverbal behavior; may we take nonverbal cues as decisively showing that another has consented to sex? How informed must consent be? Does one partner have an obligation to warn the other that their anticipated sexual activity is medically dangerous?
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) wrote, back in the 1920s, that “the intrusion of the economic motive into sex is always . . . disastrous. Sexual relations should be a mutual delight, entered into solely from the spontaneous impulse of both parties.” In this vein, Russell reflected on the sexual activity of married couples: “the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.” Russell’s observation about marital sex was prophetical. In objecting to the economic pressure experienced by women to acquiesce to the sexual demands of their husbands, Russell voiced something close to Robin Morgan’s feminist definition of rape: “Rape exists any time sexual intercourse occurs when it has not been initiated by the woman, out of her own genuine affection and desire. . . . How many millions of times have women had sex ‘willingly’ with men they didn’t want to have sex with? . . . How many times have women wished just to sleep instead or read or watch the Late Show? . . . Most of the decently married bedrooms across America are settings for nightly rape.” The woman who is nagged into sex by her husband worries that if she says “no” too often, he will abandon her, which she fears for economic, social, and psychological reasons. Women will be free to refuse sex to men only when they are the economic and social equals of men. (But maybe we should also acknowledge an ethics of care: the wife is not so much raped by her husband as she has performed a supererogatory sexual act, generously giving in to his impatient wishes instead of satisfying her desire to watch television.)
A fourth debate concerns the extent to which effects on third parties figure into moral evaluations of sexual behavior and what effects on third parties count as harm. Is a person harmed if he or she experiences nausea when seeing two homosexuals kiss in public? Is a spouse harmed by the infidelity she knows nothing about? A narrow notion of harm generates a less restrictive sexual ethics than does a broad notion; here utilitarians such as John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) and H. L. A. Hart square off against James Fitzjames Stephen (1829-1894) and Lord Patrick Devlin. Utilitarian sexual ethics can, in any event, be restrictive or permissive, depending on the truth of empirical assertions about the consequences of sexual behavior (or about the consequences of trying to prevent sexual behaviors). In addition to depending on contestable notions of well-being, the empirical claims underlying utilitarian judgments are difficult to verify. Nevertheless, a case can be made that a prima facie right to engage in sexual activity can be derived from Mill’s utilitarianism. Utilitarian reasons for a right to engage in sex do exist: the value of pleasure per se and its role in the good life, and the contribution shared pleasure makes to the value of personal relationships. Private, consensual sexual activity creates much good and, if harm to third parties is avoided, no bad, and on this score would be blessed by utilitarianism.
Conceptual philosophy of sex analyzes sexual desire, sexual pleasure, sexual sensation, sexual thought, sexual act, sexual perversion, sexual arousal, sexual intention, and sexual satisfaction. What makes a feeling a sexual sensation? What makes a desire a sexual desire? Further, which of these concepts is logically prior to the others, in the sense that the analysis of other concepts depends on its analysis? Shall we understand a sexual act in terms of the sexual desire that gives rise to it, or in terms of the sexual pleasure that the act is performed to provide? Other conceptual questions have to do not with what makes an act sexual, but with what makes it the type of sexual act it is. These derivative sexual concepts, whose definition in part refers to sexuality, include rape, prostitution, homosexuality, objectification, harassment, and pornography.
“Sexual activity” is an intriguing concept; it is difficult to state the conditions that are necessary for an act to be sexual. Consider, first, the proposal that (1) sexual acts are those that involve contact with a sexual body part. But flirting visually, talking over the phone, and sending e-mail messages can be sexual, even though no contact is made with a sexual body part. It seems that contact is not necessary. Further, touching a breast or the genitals is sexual when done by lovers, but not when done during a cancer or gynecological exam. So contact with a sexual body part is not sufficient. “Sexual body part” might be logically dependent on “sexual activity,” not the other way around.
(2) The procreative nature of sexual activity might be employed analytically instead of normatively. Sexual acts, on such a view, can be analyzed as those having procreative potential in virtue of their biological structure. That is, sexual acts are (i) acts that are the kind of act that could result in conception plus (ii) acts that are psychologically or physiologically the antecedents or concomitants of sexual acts so defined. (The second clause is required to be able to include, say, kissing within the sexual.) This analysis is too narrow, for there are acts we ordinarily call sexual that have no connection with procreation (anal intercourse). Acts that occur between people who have the same sexual anatomy would not count as sexual, since none of these acts are procreative. Many sexual perversions (fondling shoes) are sexual even though they bear no substantial resemblance to coitus or its concomitants. And masturbation, when performed by a person at home alone, is neither a procreative act nor a precursor of coitus.
(3) Perhaps sexual acts are those that produce sexual pleasure: holding hands is sexual when sexual pleasure is produced; procreative (and nonprocreative) acts are sexual when they produce sexual pleasure. Robert Gray thinks that “any activity might become a sexual activity” if sexual pleasure is derived from it, and “no activity is a sexual activity unless sexual pleasure is derived from it.” “Sexual act” is here logically dependent on “sexual pleasure.” But if pleasure is the mark of the sexual, pleasure cannot be the gauge of the quality of sex acts. This analysis conflates what it is for an act to be a nonmorally good sexual act with what it is for an act to be sexual per se, which might not produce any pleasure.
(4) Can we rely on intentions or purposes to distinguish the sexual from the nonsexual? A lifeguard’s pressing his mouth against the mouth of a swimmer would be sexual if his intention were to derive sexual pleasure; it is not sexual if he intends to revive the swimmer. Yet the intention to experience or provide sexual pleasure is not necessary for an act to be sexual: a heterosexual couple engaging in coitus, both parties intending (taking the advice of Augustine) only that she be impregnated and not concerned with sexual pleasure, is engaging in a sexual act.
Intentions are plausibly irrelevant in making sexual acts sexual. A rapist might force someone into a sexual act to get sexual pleasure from it, or to humiliate his victim, or assert his masculinity and dominance (say, in prison), or all three. From the fact that in some cases the rapist primarily intends to degrade his victim, to exert power over her or him, it does not follow that the act is not sexual. The rapist might have chosen a sexual act deliberately as an effective method to humiliate, believing that his victim will in forced sex experience shame. Fully consensual sexual acts, too, have many uses--to show affection, to make money, to dissipate excess energy, to kill time--so the purpose one has in engaging in sex cannot be that which distinguishes sexual from nonsexual acts.
(5) Another attempt is to define sexual activity in terms of a logically prior notion of sexual desire. Alan Goldman has approached the analytic task this way, offering the following definitions: “Sexual desire is desire for contact with another person’s body and for the pleasure which such contact produces; sexual activity is activity which tends to fulfill such desire of the agent.” Goldman acknowledges that not all physical touches are sexual: if a parent’s cuddling his or her baby comes from a desire to show affection, and not from a desire for the pleasure of physical contact itself, then the parent’s act is not sexual. That is, if the desire that precipitates the act is not sexual, neither is the act. If so, a woman who performs fellatio for the money she earns is not performing a sexual act. The act does not fulfill the sexual desire “of the agent,” for, like the baby-cuddling parent, the woman has no sexual desire to begin with. The prostitute’s contribution to this act of fellatio might be called, instead, a “food-gathering” act, since it tends to fulfill her desire to eat.
Maybe all the acts we think of as sexual have no common denominator and the conceptual project is doomed from the start. There are good reasons for this view. Acts involving the same body part are sometimes sexual, sometimes not. Some touches are deemed sexual in one context or culture but not in others. The fragrances, mannerisms, and costumes that are sexually arousing vary from place to place and time to time. Bodily movements acquire meaning, as sexual or as something else, by existing within a culture that attaches meaning to them. There are, if this is right, only variable social definitions of the sexual. The history of human sexuality is primarily the history of our customs and “discourse” about sex, as Michel Foucault (1926-1984) might have put it. We create social things by using words. There really is no such item as masturbatory insanity or nymphomania--no medical condition, no psychological character trait, no underlying pathology. Such things “exist” only because we have picked out some behaviors and made up a word for them, not because they have, like Mars, an existence independent of our language, our observations, and our evaluations. Similar considerations apply to “perversion,” “philanderer,” and “homosexuality.”
Such is the view known as social constructionism. As Robert Padgug expresses the thesis, “the very meaning and content of sexual arousal” varies so much among genders, classes, and cultures that “there is no abstract and universal category of ‘the erotic’ or ‘the sexual’ applicable without change to all societies.” Nancy Hartsock has elaborated this claim: “We should understand sexuality not as an essence or set of properties defining an individual, nor as a set of drives and needs (especially genital) of an individual. Rather, we should understand sexuality as culturally and historically defined and constructed. Anything can become eroticized.”
The claim that “anything can become eroticized” implies that our preferred or desired sexual partners, positions, and activities are strongly under the control of cultural forces. (Adrienne Rich thinks that the eroticization of heterosexuality for women is socially engineered.) It might very well be true that “anything” can be linked to sexual arousal and pleasure; after all, unusual items bring paraphiliacs sexual joy. If so, however, there is a sexual common denominator, an essential even if narrow core: a culturally invariable experience of sexual arousal and pleasure. Hence there is a universal category of the sort Padgug and Hartsock deny. We need to distinguish the dubious thesis that sexuality per se is socially constructed from the more plausible thesis that the sexual derivatives (prostitution, homosexuality, pornography) are socially constructed.
Perhaps we cannot analytically distinguish the sexual and nonsexual because the sexual is inextricably wrapped up with our existence and identities as embodied and gendered creatures. It is understandable, then, that a sexual ethics might apply not merely to discrete sexual performances but also to any behavior of a person that could impinge on or interact with his or her nature as a (sexual) being. A sexual ethics might tell us when and with whom it is permissible to touch another person’s genitals with the intention of producing pleasure; in what cases the impersonal touching of the genitals ought not to become a pleasurable touching; and in what circumstances one may make the touching of genitals one’s profession and contribution to society. Sexual ethics can thus be seen as a large portion of ethics and as a significant area for education. But this does not make sexual ethics sui generis, even if this ethics is important. Nor need it be restrictive: if identity and gender are sexual, that could be just as much reason for a relaxed as for a restrictive sexual ethics. But let’s not get overly sentimental about sex. Margaret Farley sermonizes that “more and more theorists are coming to the conclusion that sexual desire without interpersonal love leads to disappointment and . . . meaninglessness.” At last someone is catching up with those theorists who have concluded that sexual desire with love leads to disappointment and meaninglessness. Indeed, it is not farfetched to think that everything leads to disappointment and meaninglessness. It is not sex, with or without love, that allows us to avoid our fate.
Augustine. On Marriage and Concupiscence, in Works, vol. 12. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1874. Early Christian sexual ethics; quote is from bk. 1, chap. 9.
Baker, Robert, and Frederick Elliston, eds. Philosophy and Sex. 2nd ed. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1984. See also the 1st ed. (1975) and, for a comparison of the two, A. Soble, Teaching Philosophy 8, no. 3 (1985): 250-1.
Davis, Murray. Smut: Erotic Reality/Obscene Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Explores Jehovanist, Naturalist, and Gnostic philosophies of sex.
Farley, Margaret. “Sexual Ethics.” In Encyclopedia of Bioethics, ed. by W. Reich, vol. 4, 1575-89. New York: Free Press, 1978. A history of sexual ethics.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1: An Introduction. New York: Vintage, 1978. Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure. New York: Pantheon, 1985. Vol. 3: The Care of the Self. New York: Vintage, 1986. History of sex by a central proponent of social constructionism.
Goldman, Alan. “Plain Sex.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 6, no. 3 (1977): 267-87. Reprinted in Philosophy of Sex, ed. by A. Soble, 1st edn., 119-38; 2nd edn., 73-92. Conceptual analysis of “sexual activity” and “sexual desire”; Kantian, libertarian sexual ethics; quotes are from Soble, 2nd edn., pp. 74, 85.
Gray, Robert. “Sex and Sexual Perversion.” Journal of Philosophy 75, no. 4 (1978): 189-99. Reprinted in Philosophy of Sex, ed. by A. Soble, 1st edn., 158-68. Conceptual analysis of “sexual perversion” and “sexual act”; quote is from Soble, p. 163.
Hartsock, Nancy. Money, Sex and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism. New York: Longman, 1983. A feminist-marxist theory of gender and sexuality; quote is from p. 156.
Herman, Barbara. “Could it Be Worth Thinking about Kant on Sex and Marriage?” In A Mind of One’s Own, ed. by L. Antony and C. Witt, 49-67. Boulder: Westview, 1993. Explores similarities between Kant’s sexual philosophy and feminism.
Kant, Immanuel. Lectures on Ethics (1780). Translated by Louis Infield. New York: Harper and Row, 1963. Traditional sexual metaphysics and ethics; quotes are from pp. 163, 170.
MacKinnon, Catharine. Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989. A feminist legal and social analysis of heterosexuality, rape, pornography.
Mappes, Thomas. “Sexual Morality and the Concept of Using Another Person” (1985). In Social Ethics, 4th edn., ed. by T. Mappes and J. Zembaty, 203-26. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1992. An exploration of libertarian sexual ethics.
Mayo, David. “An Obligation to Warn of HIV Infection?” In Sex, Love and Friendship, ed. by A. Soble, 447-53. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1997. Argues that HIV+ persons have no moral duty to reveal that fact to sex partners.
Morgan, Robin. Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist. New York: Random House, 1977. Quote is from pp. 165-6 (“Theory and Practice: Pornography and Rape” [1974]).
Noonan, John. Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists (1965). Enlarged edn. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. History of philosophical and theological arguments surrounding contraception.
Nussbaum, Martha. “Objectification.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 24, no. 4 (1995): 249-91. Analyzes seven types of sexual objectification.
Padgug, Robert. “Sexual Matters: On Conceptualizing Sexuality in History.” Radical History Review 20 (Spring/Summer, 1979): 3-23. Reprinted in Forms of Desire, ed. by E. Stein, 43-67. Marxist social constructionism of sexuality; quote is from Stein, p. 54.
Posner, Richard. Sex and Reason. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1992. Elaborates an economic model of sexual behavior.
Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (1980). In Rich, Blood, Bread and Poetry, 23-75. New York: Norton, 1986. A classic item of feminist social philosophy.
Russell, Bertrand. Marriage and Morals. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1929. Still worth reading; quotes are from pp. 121-2.
Scruton, Roger. Sexual Desire: A Moral Philosophy of the Erotic. New York: Free Press, 1986. A conservative Kantian theory of sex. See M. Nussbaum’s review, “Sex in the Head.” New York Review of Books (18 December 1986): 49-52.
Shelp, Earl, ed. Sexuality and Medicine, 2 vols. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1987. Essays in biomedical ethics and the philosophy of sex.
Soble, Alan. Sexual Investigations. New York: New York University Press, 1996. Sexual ethics, politics, and conceptual analysis.
------ , ed. The Philosophy of Sex. 1st edn. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980. 2nd edn. Savage, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991. 3rd edn. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997. 4th edn. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002.
Stein, Edward, ed. Forms of Desire. New York: Routledge, 1992. Collection of essays defending and criticizing social constructionism.
Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae, 60 vols. (1265-1273). Cambridge: Blackfriars, 1964-76. Quotes are from vol. 43, 2a2ae, q. 154, aa. 1, 11, 12.
Vannoy, Russell. Sex Without Love: A Philosophical Exploration. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1980. Argues that sexual activity is morally and nonmorally sound without being attached to love.
Wojtyla, Karol. [Pope John Paul II]. Love and Responsibility. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981. A Kantian-catholic sexual ethics; quote is from p. 30.
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