PHIL 200 Lecture Notes - Human Sexuality, Concupiscence, Alan Soble
12 Jun 2018
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Voluntary jerkings, and its yearning to master and consume the other person's body.
This is part of what St. Augustine had in mind when he wrote: "Lust ... is the more shameful in this,
that the soul does neither rule itself ... nor the body either, so that the will rather than lust might
move these parts."11 During the act, a person both loses control of himself or herself and loses
regard for the humanity of the other person.
Our sexuality is a threat to the other's personhood; but the one who is in the grip of desire is also on
the verge of losing his or her personhood.
A person who gives in to another's sexual desire makes a tool of himself or herself.
As Kant makes the point, "For the natural use that one sex makes of the other's sexual organs is
enjoyment, for which one gives oneself up to the other. In this act a human being makes himself into
a thing."12 Those engaged in sexual activity make themselves willingly into objects for each other
merely for the sake of sexual pleasure.
Finally, due to the insistent nature of the sexual impulse, once things get going it is often hard to
stop them in their tracks, and as a result we often end up doing things sexually that we had never
planned or wanted to do.
Sexual desire is also powerfully inelastic, one of the passions most likely to challenge reason,
compelling us to seek satisfaction even when doing so involves obvious physical and psychological
dangers.
The one who desires depends on the whims of another person to gain satisfaction, and thereby
becomes susceptible to the demands of the other.
People who are caught up in sexual desire can be easily exploited and manipulated.
Given such a pessimistic metaphysics of human sexuality, one might well conclude that acting on the
sexual impulse is always morally wrong, or that for purely prudential reasons one would do best by
being celibate.
That might be precisely the right conclusion to draw, even if it implies the end of Homo sapiens.
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