Hostname: page-component-6766d58669-h8lrw Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-05-24T05:21:07.962Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Sex

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2009

Jonathan Webber
Jonathan Webber
Affiliation:
Cardiff University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The sexual domain is unified only by the phenomenal quality of the occurrence of the desires, activities, and pleasures it includes. There is no conceptual restriction on the range of intentional objects those desires, activities, and pleasures can take. Neither is there good conceptual reason to privilege any class of them as paradigmatic. Since the quality unifying the sexual is not morally significant, the morality of sexuality is no different from morality in general. The view that participant consent is morally sufficient in the sexual domain therefore requires the more controversial view that it is morally sufficient in general.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 84 , Issue 2 , April 2009 , pp. 233 - 250
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

1 Primoratz, Igor, ‘Sexual Morality: Is Consent Enough?’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 4 (2001), 201–218CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 See, for example: Wertheimer, Alan, ‘Consent and Sexual Relations’, Legal Theory 2 (1996), 89–112, §§ 1–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Archard, David, Sexual Consent (Boulder CO: Westview, 1998), esp. chs. 3–5Google Scholar.

3 Primoratz, ‘Sexual Morality: Is Consent Enough?’, 201.

4 See, for example, Anscombe, Elizabeth, Contraception and Chastity, with sub-headings by Mary Gormally (London: Catholic Truth Society, 2003; first published 1975)Google Scholar.

5 For a recent critical discussion of this view, see Segall, Schlomi, ‘Is Health Care (Still) Special?’, The Journal of Political Philosophy 15 (2007), 342–361CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology, translated by Barnes, Hazel E. (revised edition, London: Routledge, 2003)Google Scholar, §§ III.3.I-II. The phrase ‘double reciprocal incarnation’ occurs on 413. For an argument against taking this, and indeed Sartre's general picture of interpersonal relations, in the usual gloomy way, see my book The Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Philosophy, 2009), esp. ch. 9.

7 Nagel, Thomas, ‘Sexual Perversion’, The Journal of Philosophy 67 (1969), 5–17, 12–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Nagel, ‘Sexual Perversion’, 13–17.

9 Solomon, Robert, ‘Sexual Paradigms’, The Journal of Philosophy 71 (1974), 336–345, 342–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Solomon, ‘Sexual Paradigms’, 344–5.

11 Scruton, Roger, Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986), 339Google Scholar.

12 Scruton, Sexual Desire, 82, 92; see also chs. 2, 4, and 8, esp. 241–51.

13 Scruton, Sexual Desire, 343; see also ch. 10.

14 Scruton, Sexual Desire, 288, 346, 349.

15 Primoratz, Igor, Ethics and Sex (London: Routledge, 1999), 28CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also 40.

16 Scruton emphatically describes paradigmatic sex as an achievement of civilisation: Sexual Desire, 346–61; compare Primoratz, Ethics and Sex, 27.

17 Solomon, ‘Sexual Paradigms’, 343.

18 Love, Brenda (ed), The Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices (Fort Lee NJ: Barricade Books, 1992)Google Scholar, s.v. ‘Fetishism’, ‘Kleptophilia’, and ‘Acousticophilia’.

19 Nagel, ‘Sexual Perversion’, 5.

20 Nagel, ‘Sexual Perversion’, 6.

21 Priest, Graham, ‘Sexual Perversion’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 75 (1997), 360–372, 363–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Anscombe, Contraception and Chastity, 28; see also 24–5.

23 Primoratz, Ethics and Sex, 46.

24 Primoratz, Ethics and Sex, 48–9.

25 Morgan, Seiriol, ‘Sex in the Head’, Journal of Applied Philosophy 20 (2003), 1–16, 4–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Soble, Alan, ‘Masturbation, Again’, in The Philosophy of Sex: Contemporary Readings, edited by Soble, Alan and Power, Nicholas (fifth edition, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), 94Google Scholar. Compare Primoratz, Ethics and Sex, 27.

27 Jacobsen, Rockney, ‘Arousal and the Ends of Desire’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (1993), 617–632, 629CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Solomon, ‘Sexual Paradigms’, 343; Scruton, Sexual Desire, 75.

29 Meston, Cindy and Buss, David, ‘Why Humans Have Sex’, Archives of Sexual Behaviour 36 (2007), 477–507CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

30 Morgan, Seiriol, ‘Dark Desires’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 6 (2003), 377–410CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see esp. 379–80; see also Morgan, ‘Sex in the Head’, 6–7.

31 de Laclos, Pierre Choderlos, Dangerous Liaisons, translated by Helen Constantine (London: Penguin, 2007)Google Scholar. Various film adaptations have been made of this novel, arguably the best of which is: Dangerous Liaisons, directed by Stephen Frears, screenplay by Christopher Hampton (Lorimar Film Entertainment: 1988).

32 Morgan, ‘Dark Desires’, esp. 382.

33 Dworkin, Andrea, Intercourse (London: Secker and Warburg, 1987), 175–6Google Scholar.

34 Morgan, ‘Sex in the Head’, 11.

35 Morgan, ‘Dark Desires’, 380.

36 Love (ed), The Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices, s.v. ‘Salirophilia’.

37 Goldman, Alan, ‘Plain Sex’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 6 (1977), 267–287, 268–9Google Scholar.

38 Goldman, ‘Plain Sex’, 284–5. The point is obscured somewhat by Goldman also describing ‘abnormal’ sexual desires as those desires that have ‘the typical physical sexual effects upon the individual who satisfies them’ (284): taken on its own, this phrase could refer either to the individual satisfying the description or predicate ‘possessing such a desire’ or to the individual acting to satisfy those desires; from the context, I take Goldman to have intended the former of these meanings.

39 Goldman, ‘Plain Sex’, 284.

40 Dworkin, Intercourse, 175–6; see also esp. 79–85; see also Morgan, ‘Dark Desires’, 388–94.

41 Dworkin, Intercourse, 175, 139.

42 Morgan, ‘Dark Desires’, 400–1.

43 This paper has been greatly improved by discussion at work-in-progress seminars in the Centre for Ethics in Medicine and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bristol in autumn 2007 and at the Sexual Ethics Workshop at the University of Bristol on 9th May 2008.