Sexual Ethics

Sexual Ethics

What would a sex-based normative ethics look like? It would make the concepts of sex and procreation the central concepts of ethics not the concepts of happiness or duty, as in utilitarianism and deontology. If those theories recommend maximizing happiness and duty-obedience, then sexual ethics would recommend maximizing sex. I rush to add that by “sex” I don’t limit myself to the act of sexual intercourse but rather include the entire procreative process, including child rearing. I include producing babies as well as producing orgasms—what we might call the orgasm-baby complex. We have no single word for this, which is strange (we could call it “sexeration”), so I will stick to the monosyllabic “sex”, hoping that context makes my meaning clear. I am talking about the whole business of reproduction—from soup to nuts, seduction of partner to education of offspring. People generation. Anyway, my question is what an ethical theory would look like that placed the phenomenon of sex at the center: what would it capture and what leave out? How would it relate to the two conventional theories?

The first thing to note is that sex and the family are and always have been at the center of ethics. God himself initiated this ethical perspective: he created the universe in an act of divine procreation and filled it with sexual beings, animal and human. How he did this is left discreetly silent—not with genitals but possibly with his divine hands. In an act of self-excitation (or some such) he gave birth to reality—Adam and Eve and all their descendants, as well as Jesus his own son. God is our Father, after all. He is no stranger to sex in my broad sense; he invented it. He commanded it, instigated it. And obviously he was very good at matters procreative. We are only copying him in our small mortal way. Second, we are told to be moral in all sexual matters: be considerate lovers, faithful spouses, good mothers and fathers. Sexual immorality is deemed bad. Many forms of it are forbidden: incest, bestiality, rape, etc. The family is regarded as sacred, of great value; in advanced religions we are encouraged to treat strangers as like family. Honor thy father and mother; take good care of thy children. Family morality is foundational. Third, the standard ethical theories include sex in their systems, explicitly or implicitly. Utilitarianism emphasizes pleasure and happiness, but sexual pleasure and happiness are surely central, maybe basic (see below): the joys of sex and family life. Suffering is the absence of these in large part. Deontology also contains edicts concerning sex: don’t rape or commit adultery or practice incest or ignore the sexual needs of your partner. Thus, a good deal of morality is taken up with the sexual kind: sex and family are regarded as intrinsic goods; their absence not so good. They help make life meaningful and worthwhile.

But can sexual morality cover the whole of what we regard as morality? Here we will need to exercise some ingenuity, as the other two theories also do if they are to cover the ground. Can it be the whole truth? Can sex even account for hedonistic morality—what about the pleasures of food? Some may claim that the pleasures of eating are sexual, but I don’t think we need to go that far; what is true is that eating is a necessary prelude to sex. You can’t fuck if you don’t eat (don’t do it on an empty stomach). Nor can you provide for your children if you don’t eat. Biologically, the function of eating is to survive till the point of reproduction; after that, you may as well waste away. And eating is clearly bound up with procreation: the candlelit dinner, food on the family table, warding off starvation in times of famine. We may speak of the ingestion-copulation complex. We don’t eat merely to keep alive, or for the pleasant tastes; it is bound up with our life-projects as lovers and parents. Eating is an adjunct to sex. In animals eating is all about reproducing—there is no gourmet dining. Sex is the main course, the main pleasure. Happiness is sexual happiness. It doesn’t get much better than sex. We may as well say that maximizing pleasure and happiness is maximizing sex (including its aftermath in the family). For most of us romantic love is happiness; it isn’t merely peripheral, one fun thing among others. People can’t wait to lose their virginity; eating oysters can wait.

How about moral duties? Stealing people’s stuff is preventing them achieve their sexual-reproductive goals by removing their resources. Lying likewise, e.g., about how to be sexually attractive or what your beloved really thinks of you. Murder is bad because it deprives the victim of the great joys of life. Adultery is bad because it disrupts family life and sexual trust. Promises should be kept because a happy sex life depends on it. It isn’t difficult to bend the usual maxims into a sexual shape. And even if this seems to be stretching a point, we can always argue that sexual morality is the core of morality, the primary case. Ethics is mainly about sex and the family; the rest is peripheral. The primary moral qualities are sexual; anything else is secondary. Procreation is the chief good. It isn’t some general and ill-defined notion of happiness or pleasure (higher or lower?), and it isn’t defined by a series of unrelated commands groundlessly asserted. It’s about the very real and compelling facts of life—sexual facts. It’s about the person as reproductive animal; that is what we really care about, what gets us out of bed in the morning. It’s about our strongest passion and hence most deeply held values. Ethics as a philosophical subject should therefore be focused on this basic case; we wouldn’t be missing much of consequence if we limited ourselves to it. Sexual ethics is ethics, give or take a bit. It concerns the rights and wrongs of our sexual, reproductive, and family lives. Friends are treated as honorary family members, and strangers can be accepted as family pro tempore. Animals can be literally part of the family and affectionately petted, or regarded as members of our extended species family; after all, we are sexually descended from animals. Sexual kinship radiates outward from the familial core. Ethics is what we have constructed to deal with the facts of sexual life in all their complexity and reach. As George Michael once sang, “Sex is natural, sex is good, not every does it, but everybody should”. That is, put more philosophically, an adequate normative ethics will make sex pervasive and pivotal—procreationism is the correct ethical doctrine.[1]

[1] What would be the worst weapon ever invented? One that annihilated the sex instinct: no sexual desire, no copulation, no babies, no next generation, no more humans or animals. To use such a weapon would be the ultimate evil. It makes genocide look mild. You put it in the water and game over. Sex makes the human (and animal) world.