Why Sex Matters

Sex, while personal, isn’t private. Another person is involved, so it’s of interest to society and the state, as are children and family. The whole human dynamic, all of it, wouldn’t exist without people

—to state the obvious—and the decline of marriage and fertility affects the 

future of everything and everyone.

Some weeks back, Public Discourse published an essay by Richard A. Spinello in which he expressed “chagrin” at Pope Francis, and the Catholic Church more generally, for deemphasizing “the gravity of sexual sins,” making such sins seem “far less serious than other sins, especially ‘sins of the spirit.’”

As editor-in-chief, I’m hesitant to publish essays overtly critical of Pope Francis or other religious leaders, partly from a sense of respect and deference but also because publication is interpreted through the lens of politics, ecclesiastical or national, rather than as honest and sincere reflection. Although we publish many essays with which I disagree or agree only in part, accepting a piece indicates we thought it within the bounds of reasonableness and worth our readers’ time. I thought, and continue to think, Spinello’s essay was entirely within fair play. Some readers disagreed.

It’s worth remembering that we quite often publish on sexuality and family; in fact, one of our five pillars is devoted to those themes. Without hesitation we claim that a foundation of any “decent society is the institution of the family, which is built upon the comprehensive sexual union of man and woman.” Anyone perusing our archives will find many dozens of essays about sexual morality, fertility, gender ideology, same-sex marriage, and other related topics. We’ve never shied away from these issues, nor shall we, but comments about the Pope Francis essay occasioned my reflecting on the not-infrequent objection that the journal, and social conservatives in general, make too big a deal about sex. It’s just sex, calm down, and what gives us the right to be so judgmental about the acts of consenting adults, anyway? What’s the hangup?

Presumably, there is something to the idea that sins of the spirit are worse than sins of the flesh (if we use the language of sin). C. S. Lewis is hardly alone in claiming that the “centre of Christian morals” isn’t sexual propriety; pride is the “essential vice, the utmost evil,” and “leads to every other vice.” Making lust pride’s equal seems a hang-up about the body, a bizarre angelism exhibiting pathological disgust at our animality. How bad can a victimless pleasure be, after all, especially when so many sexual vices are the result of passion or weakness rather than malice? Social conservatives seem a little prissy and prudish, as if consumed by self-loathing about nature, the body, and pleasure. Something schoolmarmish is on display, no?

While I understand the rhetorical appeal of these responses, I find them unpersuasive. They misuse the distinction between subjective culpability and the objective wrongness of an act, overemphasizing the pastoral while neglecting the objective. A person acting out of weakness, habit, or fear may have lower moral culpability for a wrong action than another person doing the very same action with full cooperation of will, but the wrongness of the act is not determined by the culpability of the agent. Further, “what’s the big deal?” responses exemplify a pattern noted by Gertrude Himmelfarb, in which virtue is displaced “from the central position it once occupied, as the defining attribute of the good life and the good society” and relegated “to the bedroom and boudoir.” We’re accustomed to “virtue” connoting something small and meddlesome: “we no longer think of the classical virtues of wisdom, justice, temperance, and courage. . . . Virtue is now understood in its sexual connotations.” Virtue is narrowed in its meaning, with that reduced scope belittled and disparaged; virtue seems trivial, fussy, and busybodied.

Except it’s not. Virtue concerns the unity and wholeness of a person. A life without unity is poorly done; it is contradictory to bracket off some aspects of action as irrelevant to our character and habituation, and contradictory to have one set of habits for public acts but a different set for the private domain. The “just man justices,” says Hopkins, correctly noting that our actions spring from our character, our doings from our being, and habituation of desire, taste, and action in one domain always and inexorably shapes the content of our entire character. We acquire a just character by doing just acts until we are just—a difficult task—but once just it becomes easy, a second nature, to act justly. But there’s no part-time justice, no justice only in public. If we are unjust in private, it is we who are unjust, in all our dispositions.

Quite a bit is at stake with respect to sexual morality; with each and every action, of any sort, the character and flourishing of the agent is at stake—a person is at stake, and persons are intrinsically valuable. From this perspective, sexual matters are neither less nor more important than any other, for every voluntary act constitutes (in part) the character of the agent. That sex is immediately tied to the body, instinct, emotions, desires, and passions does not elevate or diminish its relevance to our well-being. We are composite beings—ensouled bodies—not dualistic things, and what we do with our bodies we do, the person does, the entirety of the person does, since there is no self distinct from our body and no body divorced or separated from our self. Virtue is always, in every context, dealing with our body; for virtue is about us, ourselves, and we are a body, and virtue is always and in every instance related to our instincts, emotions, desires, and passions. Virtue orders humans as we are, in our totality.

Furthermore, that sexual acts can be motivated by weakness does not mean pride is irrelevant. In the passage linked above, Aquinas acknowledges that an act dominated by passion is a sin of weakness. A person moved by passion suffers an “impediment” and acts out of weakness, but the very next article indicates that the cause of every sin, including those of passion or weakness, is self-love. An inordinate desire or appetite for natural goods, such as sex, is caused by concupiscence, yes, but concupiscence is itself “reduced to self-love” as its cause.

It is here that we begin to see why lust is a so-called “capital vice,” since it is the sort of vice “from which other vices arise.” A great disservice is done in the teaching of morality, sexual or otherwise, when morality is treated as tantamount to following rules, as obeying a command. The problems are legion. (I’ll bracket Divine Command Theory for now: but surely something is not true just because God commands it.) 

First, rule-following tends toward moral minimalism, that is, the point is to avoid breaking a rule, and so long as you haven’t broken the rule, all’s well. But this is small-minded and cold-hearted, as if the good life were a negative, not the bad life. Virtue theory, on the other hand, has fullness, completion, or actuality as its goal. In the sexual realm, rule-following looks a lot like a list of things not to do rather than virtues of human excellence that constitute and enable a full, magnanimous, thriving form of life for oneself and others. 

Second, rule-following tends toward decisionism, with the moral life composed of a set of distinct, isolated, atomized challenges or temptations about which one has to decide. A man is presented with options x and y; x is wrong but desirable, y is right but less desirable; he chooses y; a moral decision was made, the context recedes into the past and new contexts appear presenting moral challenges anew. Virtue theory, on the other hand, recognizes that while one must choose to do right and not wrong a further challenge is to become virtuous by means of those choices, and we constitute our character by our actions, creating not a disjointed series of isolated decisions but a unity and constancy of life. 

Third, freedom is understood as freedom of indifference—namely, humans are thought to be free based on their ability to act or not act—rather than, as in virtue theory, as will understood as oriented to the good and free when acting well, when choosing the good. 

Fourth, since commands are external edicts rather than orientations of our nature, and since commands are limits to our freedom of indifference, a moral command is viewed as a cribbing or confining of freedom, as somewhat alien or hostile to us, rather than a pathway to well-being—i.e., rule-following views us as not wanting to follow the rule; it does not understand the moral law to be directing us to our good, our happiness, which we all by nature seek and desire. 

Fifth and finally, in consequence, rule-following views the moral life as defined primarily by strength of will. The rule is alien to us; we don’t wish to follow it, but we grit our teeth, screw courage to a sticking place, and force ourselves to decide correctly, by voluntarism. —The rule is not rather reason guiding us to our good, our flourishing. In the latter perspective, actions form our characters so that we are disposed to want to do the good—easily, willingly, and cheerfully—and take pleasure in so doing.

The happy life is one where persons freely and reasonably live a pattern of self-gift.

In the sexual domain, it’s easy to see why a rule-based account would appear off-putting, inhumane, and ridiculous. Surely there must be more to the moral life, let alone the spiritual life, than not breaking arbitrary rules that fit uneasily with our desires and bodies, and that command our dissatisfaction and unhappiness. From that vantage point we would do well to pay less attention and have less guilt about sex and give more effort to avoiding pride and the “spiritual sins.” Conversely, we might take a richer view, that of virtue, recognizing the moral life is about flourishing, about doing well, yes, but also being well: complete, thriving, excellent, full, happy.

We publish essays for no other reason than this: we want people to be happy—really and fully happy.

The happy life is one where persons freely and reasonably—by the ordinatio rationis, which is an interior law by which we govern ourselves by reason—live a pattern of self-gift. We thrive when we attain the communion of persons, communio personarum. Self-love, self-enclosement—what Kierkegaard called the demonic—a life of objectification, instrumentalization, and pleasure, is not only the cause of all sins but also misery and failure to thrive and be happy. In the end, we’re not publishing about sexual ethics because we are against anything, but because we are for human well-being and happiness—for freedom to attain happiness as is possible through action, either individually or collectively.

The collective matters. Sex, while personal, isn’t private. Another person is involved, so it’s of interest to society and the state, as are children and family. The whole human dynamic, all of it, wouldn’t exist without people—to state the obvious—and the decline of marriage and fertility affects the future of everything and everyone. It’s no accident that every civilization, ever, has reasons to involve itself with the intimate acts of its citizens, and moreover, every society realizes that its rules, habits, scripts, and laws about sex matter to every aspect of that society: manners, mores, literature, business, education, housing, monetary policy, and more. Thinkers as diverse as Himmelfarb, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Edith Stein, Mark Regnerus, Brad Wilcox, Joseph Soloveitchik, Mary Harrington, and Christine Emba, whatever their disagreements, all know sex is a big deal—everyone knows this; it’s self-evident—and to ignore sex, or pretend it’s a private matter about private preference and experiments in living, stretches credulity beyond credibility.

Himmelfarb noticed that virtue had mutated from the center of conversation about a good society to off-stage bedroom discussions. In that context, it seems odd, indeed, to insistently talk about sex. If, however, debates about sex are caught up, and cannot but be caught up, in deliberations about regime and society, it’s not at all odd, let alone schoolmarmish, to host those debates.

In fact, it would be irresponsible not to do so.

Image by WavebreakMediaMicro and licensed via Adobe Stock.