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.

What is it Like to be Gay?

Answer: I don’t know, and neither do you if you are a straight man. For I have never had the desires or experiences of a gay man; I therefore don’t know what it is like to have such desires or experiences. The case is just like the bat or the blind. Of course, I have some idea of what it’s like to be a gay man, since I have knowledge of heterosexual sex and there is obviously an overlap. Again, it is like the bat case, since I do have the sense of hearing and I know what it is like to navigate through space by means of sense perception. But my knowledge is only partial; there is something about it that I don’t get. Presumably, the gay man feels the same about me: he doesn’t know it is like to be sexually attracted to women (as lesbians don’t know what it’s like to be attracted to a man). We are all aliens to each other in our sexual predilections (and vive la difference!). We don’t need to go to the order of bats in order to make this point. We could make all the same points about the mind-body problem by starting with the sexual preference case. It may be that some supporters of the gay lifestyle will resist my assertion of ignorance, insisting that I do know; but the same could be said by supporters of bat rights—I know what it’s like for them too (some people do say this). The point is that the familiar line of thought applies equally to the gay and the bat-like. And the same point about sexual orientation could be made by going further afield zoologically: do we humans know what it is like to be sexually attracted to an octopus or a warthog or a snake? Doubtful—though we can understand a description of their brains (ditto gay men). The sex cases provide good examples with which to make the point made by reference to bats.[1]

[1] This is another exercise in sexual philosophy: being open to sexual subject matter in the course of philosophical inquiry. I am sure that phenomenological ignorance of the gay mind has fueled intolerance of that mode of life, but that is not a topic I am discussing here. My point is that the argument of “What is it Like to be a Bat?” can be made by a case closer to home (not that its author ever said anything different); it has nothing essentially to do with alien species and strange senses. I note that the author of that paper also published a paper called “Sexual Perversion” so he is not averse to sexual subject matter. He could have decided to write a paper called “What is it Like to be a Pervert?” and made the same points (or a perverted bat).

On Perception, Belief, and Knowledge

 Consciousness gets defined as there being something it is like. This isn’t a classical analysis in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, but it manages to elucidate what consciousness is (more or less); it captures the concept intuitively, if gnomically. In that spirit, I define knowledge as the world impinging on the soul—the affecting of the I by the It. Gnomic but suggestive. The main purpose of such definitions is to contrast the thing defined with other things in the conceptual neighborhood—in the case of consciousness, the physical world. In the case of knowledge, it is perception and belief: knowledge is different from these; they are not what knowledge is. So, what are they? If we knew this, we could say that knowledge is not that. In the same style, I will venture an answer—a suggestive formula not a classical analysis. It is something you might say to a child or an alien to get them to cotton onto the concept, or what sums up for an expert what these things amount to. Thus: perception is the world making itself felt, and belief is the mind taking itself into its own hands. Perception is the senses feeling the impact of the world, its causal power; the senses are what primarily are impacted not the mind or soul or self. These are so-called peripheral organs, unlike the intellect, and the impact may not be accepted by more central faculties—as in the case of visual illusion. We need not be swayed by what our senses tell us, but we cannot help being swayed by what our intellect tells us—what our faculty of knowledge tells us. Perception does not ipso facto reach as far as the soul, the inner sanctum where true knowledge resides. The senses are peripheral reflexes, psychophysical mechanisms, modular and mindless. They do what they are told by the stimulus, thoughtlessly. But the soul questions, resists, refutes; it doesn’t take the world’s impingent lying down. It impinges, I decide. Knowledge is less stimulus-world dominated than perception, though it takes the world very seriously, that being where knowledge ultimately comes from. In addition, the senses differ among themselves as to mode of causation and phenomenology, whereas knowledge is not modality-specific. You don’t feel your knowledge as in one sense modality rather than another. The soul (the central system) has stripped it of its original phenomenology. Knowing may be a type of seeing, but it isn’t the same as sensory seeing, i.e., the senses operating alone. Knowledge is above all that, proudly, autonomously. Knowledge is the master and perception is the servant. Knowledge is in me, but perception takes place outside of me—in my periphery (physically and psychologically). Knowledge belongs in the inner sanctum not the outhouses and reception rooms.

How about belief? Now this is another article altogether, a different kettle of mental fish. I said it is the mind taking itself into its own hands, not handing the job over to the world; world-impingement is not its sine qua non. It owes little loyalty to the world; it is all about itself, save per accidens. How can I be so accusatory? Because of wishful thinking, rash inference, emotional interference. Belief is the mind making itself felt, impinging on itself, shaping its own contours. Belief is internally propelled in its essence, though it may hook up with perception and knowledge when they suit its purposes. This makes belief quite different from knowledge—more like emotion. Belief is a sentiment. Belief is what you say in your heart, passionately. Knowledge is what you register in your brain, soberly. Your mind has a hold on your beliefs and bends them to its will. Beliefs can result from guesswork, inspired or otherwise, but knowledge never can. Belief loves conspiracy theories; knowledge abhors them. There is no such thing as wishful knowledge or irrational knowledge or baseless knowledge. But beliefs can thrive in an atmosphere of ignorance and emotion and prejudice. Knowledge is precious, but belief is often junk (unless allied with knowledge). The mind indulges in belief, but not in knowledge. Knowledge is open to the world, but belief is closed to it; a person could have a mind wholly constituted of false belief, but not false knowledge. Belief is subject to the will (possibly unconsciously), but knowledge is independent of the will. That’s why there is wishful belief but not wishful knowledge—wishful thinking but not wishful knowing. There could be a knowing mind without any beliefs at all, and the world be better for it. Beliefs are demons, or can be; they are the opposite of knowledge. Beliefs resent the impingement of the world (truth, reality).

If we picture the cognitive mind as consisting of three continents, we can say that these continents are separated by vast oceans and have very different geologies. They are made of different stuff. Roughly, perceptions are made of impressions, beliefs are made of volitions, and knowledge is made of facts: feelings, wishes, and truths. The geological strata may be overlaid by other strata, but when you dig down deep this is the material you come up with: igneous, metamorphic, sedimentary. Belief is a friable volatile rock; perception is a sturdy but breakable rock; knowledge is a solid dependable rock. Plato should have had a parable of the rocks in which he compared and contrasted perception, belief, and knowledge. To change the image: perception is like the wind, belief is like showers, and knowledge is like snowfall. Wind is tolerable and generally manageable, showers are annoying and you wish they would stop, and snow is occasionally unwelcome but always beautiful. (Consciousness is like a bright sunny day—that’s what what-it’s-like is like.)

What about the will? It too needs its summary formula, its striking image. I propose this: the will is the creature reaching out into the world. I envisage an octopus extending its tentacles, and lava flowing from a volcano, and a thunderstorm. I say “creature” because action is primordial and doesn’t even require sentience (see A. Schopenhauer). The reaching out is the creature extending itself into the world, tentatively, hopefully, adventurously. It is the soul impinging on the world in more advanced creatures. It is obviously not the same as perception, belief, and knowledge, though it can be joined to them. In willing the soul acts on the world instead of the world acting on it—the reverse of knowledge. We might even say, metaphorically, that it is the soul becoming known to the world. It is as if our artifacts have knowledge of us. We can impinge on the soul of the world (literally, if the world has a soul).[1]

[1] It will be observed that we are far from traditional conceptual analysis here, though the foregoing can be described as conceptual elucidation. It might even be called conceptual poetics—what a poem about knowledge, belief, and perception would look like. Alternatively, it is vernacular description—how our ordinary language would characterize the things in question. It is not uptight. It is impressionistic and imaginative. Its model is not Principia Mathematica but Alice in Wonderland.

Sex and God

There has always been the feeling that there is some sort of tension between sex and God, as if sex were not quite his thing. He turns a blind eye to it, even though he is supposed to have created it. You definitely don’t have sex in church—that would be sinful. It is just about OK in marriage. I want to make a philosophical point, focused on Berkeley’s idealism. According to that view, so-called material objects are ideas in the mind of God—that’s what you see and feel when you deploy your senses. It is also what you act upon when (say) you kick a ball. But that means that when you have sex with someone you are really having sex with an idea in God’s mind; not with God himself, strictly speaking, because God is an infinite spirit not a collection of ideas, but definitely with the contents of his mind. These ideas are his, what constitutes his mental world; presumably, he allows them to be in there. He is complicit in the sex—he consents to it, engages in it. So, we all, animals included, have sex with a part of God. And his ideas also have sex with us: it goes both ways. Isn’t this group sex on a grand scale? Isn’t God amazingly promiscuous? But God can’t be promiscuous; therefore, Berkeley’s idealism must be false. The only way to avoid this conclusion is to claim that God and his ideas are separate things—as if they are just his body distinct from his spirit. But this is crazy. Sex refutes Berkeleyan idealism. The world must exist outside of God.