PHIL 200 Lecture Notes - Applied Ethics, Human Sexuality, Crime Against Nature
12 Jun 2018
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Sure and, unlike the mixed or dual functional of the penis, has no connection with procreation.
Gudorf concludes that the existence of the clitoris in the female body suggests that God intended
that the purpose of sexual activity was as much for sexual pleasure for its own sake as it was for
procreation.
According to Gudorf, pleasurable sexual activity apart from procreation does not violate God's
design, is not unnatural, and hence is not necessarily morally wrong, as long as it occurs in the
context of a monogamous marriage.
27 Gudorf, it seems, is advancing a kind of Christian semioptimistic sexual metaphysics.
Today we are not as confident as Aquinas was that God's plan and design could be discovered by a
straightforward examination of human and animal bodies; but this healthy skepticism about our
ability to discern God's intentions from facts of the natural or biological world would seem to apply
to Gudorf's proposal as well.
That the clitoris, through its ability to provide pleasure, can play a crucial role in sexuality that is
eventually procreative, is not obviously false.
Debates in Sexual Ethics The ethics of sexual behavior, as a branch of applied ethics, is no more and
no less contentious than the ethics of anything else that is usually included within the area of
applied ethics.
Think, for example, of the notorious debates over euthanasia, welfare entitlements, capital
punishment, abortion, environmental pollution, and our treatment of lower animals for food,
clothing, entertainment, and in medical research.
So it should come as no surprise that even though a discussion of sexual ethics might well result in
the removal of some confusions and a clarification of the issues, very few final or absolute answers
to questions about the morality of sexual activity are likely to be forthcoming from the philosophy of
sexuality.
As far as I can tell by surveying the literature on sexual ethics, there are several major topics that
have received much attention by philosophers of sex and provide arenas for continual debate.
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