Copyright Florida State University Oct 2008
Raja Halwani (ed.), Sex and Ethics: Essays on Sexuality, Virtue, and the Good Life (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), xiv + 276 pp.
Sex and Ethics is the first published volume devoted exclusively to a virtue ethical approach to evaluating human sexual life. Only three of the seventeen essays (those by Roger Scruton, N.J.H. Dent, and Peter Geach) have previously been published. The impetus for bringing together the two fields of philosophy of sex and virtue ethics is that doing so may shed some new light on the debates about sex that have been dominated by both liberal and feminist ethical perspectives; it may transform the way virtue ethics has been done; and it may help determine whether there are vices and virtues specific to the sexual domain as well as which vices and virtues not specific to that domain are relevant to a normative analysis of sex.
The essays are arranged in four sections with an afterword by Alan Soble. The first section, "The Ancients, Kant, and Feminism on Virtue," sets up the later essays, some of which draw on Aristotelian virtue ethics, Kantian notions of respect for autonomy, and the importance of avoiding sexual objectification. Juha Sihvola provides an illuminating overview of what the ancient Greeks (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics) took the relations to be between virtue, the good life, sexual appetite, and different sexual practices. Sihvola's aim is to illuminate how Greek sexual practices and evaluations of sex differ from our own - for example, the ancient Greeks attended more to the active or passive role of sexual partners than to the sameness or difference of the partner's sex. His hope was to invite more careful attention to the social construction of sexuality (a hope that, unfortunately, is only faintly met by subsequent essays). Lara Denis provides an excellent overview of Kant's perfect and imperfect duties, duties to oneself and to others, the duties we have as an animal and moral being, and virtues related to these duties. She argues, quite persuasively, that what Kant has to say about our duties, the virtues, natural ends, and our animal nature does not entail the conclusions Kant himself reached about masturbation and homosexual sex. Martha Nussbaum's essay analyzes sexual objectification as a phenomenon that has a number of distinct dimensions, including the denial of autonomy and the denial of subjectivity. She argues that feminists concerned with sexual objectification might find a virtue ethical approach useful, in part because that approach attends to the formation of character, including the deformation of desire that leads both to men's objectification of women and women's willing submission to it. Like Sihvola, Nussbaum draws our attention to the importance of cultural context. Given that entrenched gender inequalities may shape both desire and an uncritical acceptance of unjust sexual practices, an acceptable virtual ethical approach must have, or be willing to draw on, resources that enable critical evaluation of existing forms of life.
The second, and longest, section of the book, "The Good Life and Virtue," is devoted to an analysis of sexual virtue. Three essays tie sexual purity (Roger Scruton), chastity (David Carr), and temperance (Peter Geach) to a range of interpersonal attitudes that are inherently linked to marital relationships. Carr's essay avoids both Geach's extreme sex negativity as well as Scruton's hyper-idealization of erotic love, offers some interesting observations about how chastity differs from both celibacy and virginity, and takes seriously the difficulty of institutionalizing a chastity-focused sex education in a liberal society. The last three essays in section two are devoted to temperance and intemperance.
To my mind, the greatest strength of this volume is its extensive treatment of the virtue of temperance and the vice of intemperance. Anyone interested in the philosophical analysis of temperance and intemperance will find this book useful, in part because the authors disagree on what kinds and amounts of sex are compatible with temperance, but more so because collectively those essays provide a quite detailed description of temperance and intemperance. By my count, six of the seventeen essays have temperance (or its cousin, chastity) as a central theme. Halwani's two essays and Neera Badhwar's are especially insightful and philosophically well-crafted. Halwani begins by distinguishing sexual desire from sexual appetite, arguing that temperance and intemperance concern belief-based desires and may not involve physiological promptings. Both Halwani and Badhwar, adopting roughly Aristotelian approaches to temperance, emphasize that not all intemperance involves excessive desire; sexual desire can also go wrong by having the wrong object, motives, timing, and attitudes towards others. Among these essays on temperance and intemperance Badhwar's is the standout. Working with the examples of Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons and Sartre's example of a woman who, in bad faith, flees her embodiment enables Badhwar to give a nuanced and substantive account of the ways sexual desire can go wrong without employing a hydraulic model of sexual desire and its absence. While a number of the essays in this volume argue that the human-animal appetite for sex is, like the appetite for food and drink, a desirable part of our constitution, Badhwar's essay is the only one in the book to treat deficient sexual desire as a vice. The essay is thus a refreshing departure from the "sex as danger" undercurrent running throughout much of the book.
The third and fourth sections, "Sexual Orientation and Virtue," and "Some Social Issues and Virtue," take up more specific topics: the difficulty of knowing one's sexual orientation, coming-out and outing, stagnations in moral-sexual development, adultery, pornography, casual sex, and promiscuity. In "Coming Out, Outing, and Virtue Ethics," James S. Stramel argues that, generally, outing is wrong because it violates a prima facie privacy right and "steals from the outee the freedom to disclose according to principles that inform her own conception of a virtuous life, one that balances and integrates private and public matters in a way consistent with her own nature and best judgments" (170). That said, in his view, the self-regarding virtues of self-respect, dignity, integrity, and honesty require that everyone gradually develop a stabile disposition towards being out even if both self- and other-regarding virtues sometimes require selective nondisclosure. In "The Wrongness of Adultery," Dirk Baltzly proposes that adultery harms by assaulting a person's sexual and erotic identities. Mutual sexual desire and mutual erotic love involve both parties' willingness to be "drawn" by the other - to be led in new directions and to have one's self-conception partially constituted by the other's interpretations. Adultery, Baltzly argues, injures one's conception of oneself as someone who is able to "draw" one's partner sexually and erotically. Unlike many who connect erotic love with sexual fidelity, Baltzly takes on the challenge of explaining why one's erotic self-conception normally hinges on an exclusive sexual relationship and of arguing that this is a good thing.
The book closes with an "afterword" by Alan Soble. The afterword is in fact longer than any essay in the collection and falls more squarely in the genre "book review" than "afterword," since the essay sharply critiques many of the essays as well as one of the book's aims - to focus on virtues, vices, and ethical problems that are unique to the sexual domain. In Soble' s view, sex does not pose ethical problems that don't arise elsewhere in human life. "Adding virtue theory to our ethical toolbox hardly changes the situation, for it can be argued that all the virtues that apply to human conduct and character in general also apply to sex, with no remainder and nothing missing" (232). Soble also raises significant worries that what some of the authors call vice (say, sexual obsession or the absence of remorse and compassion attending sexual violence) in fact falls within the classifications of mental illness in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. And he points out what readers will also surely notice - that a virtue ethical approach to sex will also have to rely on moral principles drawn from some other moral theory. (For me, this was especially evident in the essays on intemperance; if intemperance is, in part, a matter of having the wrong objects of desire, one wants some guidance in determining right from wrong objects.)
Initially skeptical about the editorial choice to include an afterword to an anthology, I ultimately found Soble's essay both refreshingly honest (for example, he objects to "the exaggerated claims about the significance of sexuality" in some of the essays [231]) and a philosophically useful lens for getting critical purchase on the collection.
The book as a whole is of uneven quality. The inclusion of Peter Geach's essay is puzzling. It's not a philosophical discussion of temperance, but a bit of religious dogmatism. Halwani describes Geach as presenting "the Christian view." Were it "the" Christian view, it would be worth considering in a volume designed to capture a plurality of virtue ethical approaches to sex. But this essay is such a bizarre view - that sex is "poison" outside of marriage, that virginity is the human ideal, and that "the best way to begin a consideration of sexual morality" is to observe that it is through generative sex that Original Sin is passed onto the next generation - that it's hard to see this essay as representative of any shared view.
Some of the essays set up what appears to be excessive philosophical machinery given the brevity of the application to sexuality that follows. In three essays, the topic of sex takes a distinct back seat to the topics of the nature of virtue (Jonathan Jacobs's "Sexuality and the Unity of the Virtues"), the nature of both virtue and health (Stephen Kershnar's "Pornography, Health, and Virtue"), the nature of sense-desire (Dent's "Deliberation and Sense-Desire: The Virtue of Temperance"), and the limitations on knowing our own minds on either a theory-theory or simulation view (Heather Battaly's "Intellectual Virtue and Knowing One's Sexual Orientation"). Scruton's essay ("Sexual Morality"), though having a good deal to say about the telos of sex, begins with a distinction between minimal and maximal selves (roughly analogous to Harry Frankfurt's distinction between wantons and agents) that, again, seems like more philosophical machinery than the topic of the essay required. This is not at all to say that these aren't essays worth reading. It is to say that the reader may feel short-changed where sex is concerned.
Part of what makes the topic of sex such a difficult topic to deal with philosophically is the sheer variety of culturally specific sexual and sexrelated practices and the variety of human social contexts of sexuality. To mention but a few - ancient Greek mentoring relationships, friendships, monogamous marriage, sex work, Internet sex, s&m subcultures, celibacy, casual sex, polyamory, polygamy, same-sex sex, coming out, outing, hook-up bars, personal ads, dating services, sexual harassment, sexual role-playing, the writing of romance novels, the production and consumption of pornography, media publicity of the sex lives of public officials and celebrities, and cosmetic (including surgical) alteration of the genitals. The difficulty of dealing with that variation philosophically may explain what I found the most frustrating feature of many of the essays: the lack of specificity about sex and about which virtues and vices one is to bring into play other than temperance and intemperance, the tendency to focus on only some contexts of sex (e.g., erotic love, pornography, casual sex, marriage), and the focus on respect/objectification and temperance/intemperance as the central evaluative terms. Depending on which sexual practice/context one has in mind, other moral virtues and vices might seem more salient: trust and trustworthiness (s&m), nonpossessiveness (polyamory), fairness (polygamy), tactfulness and respect for others' privacy (news stories about others' sex lives), honesty (use of dating services), and tolerance for others' sexual practices (any culturally tabooed sexual practice). There are also a host of moral and nonmoral virtues that make one a pleasant sexual partner- imaginativeness, absence of prudishness, playfulness, cheerfulness, patience, enthusiasm, and adventurousness - that drop out of the picture.
A number of the essays mention that sex is part of human animal nature. Given the cultural elaboration of sexuality and the embedding of sexuality within a huge range of social interactions, one might wonder whether the association of sex with animality (and with danger to rationality and humanity) is correct and just what human animality amounts to.
In sum, the volume makes a significant philosophical contribution to our understanding of temperance and intemperance and contains some gems (especially the essays by Sihvola, Denis, Badhwar, and Halwani). Even if Soble is right that there are no virtues and vices unique to the sexual domain, the book as a whole works as a reminder that there are a plurality of ethical considerations relevant to how one conducts one's sex life that are not neatly captured in an ethics of principle. For teaching purposes, the book has the virtue of containing a balanced array of essays that fall along different points of the sexual conservativism-liberalism spectrum. And the particular emphases of this collection will surely appeal strongly to some.
[Author Affiliation]
Cheshire Calhoun
Arizona State University
