Sexual Morality

For most people preventing harm to others is an important part of moral and ethical values. However, I believe that there is room for improvement in thought on this subject. Conservatives emphasize purity, which is another ethical concept. It might be a useful one, but rules that are based on purity are not necessarily given justification on the basis of harm to another person. Some things are just considered disgusting.

However, it is possible to rationally evaluate whether behavior should inspire disgust if we assume that disgust serves a purpose. I believe that it is highly probable that disgust serves the purpose of protecting us from disease. Here disgust is appropriate because there are some diseases that are transmitted sexually. A healthy sense of disgust directed toward certain behaviors might serve the purpose of protecting people from disease.

Harm to others is also a factor. For example, the moral objection to cheating on a boyfriend, girlfriend or spouse goes beyond disgust. There is an offense against a specific person, an injured party. This act might well inspire disgust as well, but there is also the emotional harm that this does to another person.

In fact, the property of this action that it is worthy of disgust is what makes it wrong to cheat on someone for revenge. Retribution is often considered to be a factor in determining whether an act is just. When someone commits an offense, this can provide some justification for retaliation by doing something similar to that person. However, this does not apply to this case. That is because cheating shows a promiscuous tendency. Sexual promiscuity will make a person susceptible to sexually transmitted disease. Thus we would say that disgust is an appropriate response to this behavior.

When we look into how such an act of revenge would be carried out, things get much worse. Who is the injured party to cheat with? Choosing a friend would do more damage to the relationship. Choosing a randomly selected stranger would be more promiscuous. I would say that it is always wise to try to build a healthy relationship. Thus the injured party should either try to help restore the relationship or break up and move on, leaving the door open to a healthy relationship with someone else.

As I have pointed out above, cheating and sexual promiscuity are moral offenses. What I should add is that in addition to carrying the risk of spreading sexually transmitted disease, there is a risk that sexual promiscuity could harm others. The less careful one is in selecting a sexual partner, the more likely it will be that that partner is already attached. That is sexual promiscuity makes cheating easier.

We also need to consider how easy it is to enforce our moral and ethical values by assigning blame. A general principle against sexual promiscuity will need to be backed up with other rules because it is very difficult to observe someones behavior enough to determine how many sexual partners he or she has had. In addition different people might have different ideas about how many is too many. Rules against having sex outside of a committed relationship, too soon in a relationship, in return for financial compensation or outside of marriage fall under this category.

All of these rules are valid and all should apply as long as we also observe the rule against hypocrisy. We must follow the rules that we expect others to follow. Rational selection of the proper rules would lead to adopting all of them. The last rule, against premarital sex, is the most strict and probably for that reason the most controversial. Considering marriage to be a life-long commitment makes it even stricter. However, marriage is the most important relationship of this sort. Setting a rule that gives this relationship the greatest protection possible makes sense.

The danger we are trying to avoid is that if we regard it as unworthy of blame to have sex on a premarital basis, then there is a risk that we would permit someone to act in a way that would be harmful to someone else's marriage. For example, if someone were to enter into a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship there is the possibility that the other person was married. Theoretically it would be possible for such a person to go through a marriage ceremony, but this is less likely. Marriage is entered into officially. It is easy to determine guilt in the case of bigamy, much more so than for a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship. Thus the penalty for bigamy acts as a deterrent to this kind of wrongdoing.