Part 1

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Objective Summary on Sexual Morality by Roger Scruton

According to the reading, sex has possibly at all times been controversial, a volatile issue that produces powerful social angst, emotions, and religious sanctions. Ethical discussions of sexual morality center on two connected questions. The first concerns the contents of sexual immorality: what is morally good or bad, wrong and right in relation to sex? The other one is about the nature and standing of sexual morality. The subject of sexual morality has attracted the interest of moral philosophers who have attempted to enlighten on its ethical uncertainties. The writer asserts that even Bertrand Russell, whose writing in the sector was a model of rationality, at least for its period, seems to make the identification and condemn plain sex in the absence of love. It is evident from the reading that sexual intercourse with no love has a minimum value and is to be regarded mainly as an experiment action with a view to love.

Rodgers Scruton, who is the writer, asserts that we ought to try to apply the Aristotelian strategy to the subject matter of sexual immorality and enquire whether there is such a thing as sexual virtue and, if so, what does it signify and how is it acquired. Openly, sexual desire, which signifies an interpersonal attitude with the most far-reaching outcome for those joined by it, cannot be morally neutral (McPherson, 2020). Roger Scruton’s model of sexual desire as commonly developing into love and intimacy and several radical feminist deliberations of sex in chauvinist society disputes that the idea of consensus is not helpful and, certainly, irrelevant. According to the reading, traditional sexual morality has, as a result, been the morality of the body. Libertarian morality, by contrast, had depended nearly on a Kantian view of the human focus, as connected to his body by no coherent moral tie (Scruton, 2006). By focusing as he does on a notion of purely personal respect and assigning no idiosyncratic place to the body in our ethical endeavor, the Kantian unavoidably tends towards permissive morality. There isn’t any sexual act that can be wrong only by virtue of its physical character, and the idea of pollution, obscenity, and perversion has no obvious application. His attitude to homosexuality is expediently outlined in this passage from a Quaker pamphlet.

The reading asserts that it is a small step from the preoccupation with sexual virtue to a censure of pornography and obscenity. Obscenity signifies a direct assault on the sentimentality of desire and thus on the social order centered on desire and has individual love as its objective and satisfaction. There is no doubt that normal morality cannot keep being neutral towards indecency any more than it can keep being neutral towards rape and pedophilia. This does not mean that obscenity must also be treated as a crime. It is consequently not surprising that traditional ethical education has entailed restriction of obscene things and powerful stress on purity in words, deeds, and thoughts—an emphasis which is now received with ridicule or irony.

Reference

Scruton, R. (2006). Sexual desire: A philosophical investigation. A&C Black.

McPherson, D. (2020). Consent Is Not Enough: A Case against Liberal Sexual Ethics.