PHIL 200 Chapter Notes -Pope John Paul Ii, Casual Sex, Alan Soble
12 Jun 2018
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Mitted relationship is sexual activity between two people morally permissible.
The free and informed consent of both parties may be a necessary condition for the moral goodness
of their sexual activity, but in the absence of some other magical ingredient their sexual activity
remains mere mutual use or objectification and hence morally objectionable.
About casual sex, for example, it might be said that two persons are merely using each other for
their own separate sexual pleasure; even when genuinely consensual, these mutual sexual uses do
not yield a virtuous sexual act.
Kant and Karol Wojtyla take this position: willingly allowing oneself to be used sexually by another
person makes an object of oneself.
Hence mutual consent is not sufficient for the moral rightness of sexual acts.
For Kant, sexual activity avoids treating a person merely as a means only in marriage, since in such a
state both persons have surrendered their bodies and souls to each other.
30 For Wojtyla, "Only love can preclude the use of one person by another," since love is a unification
of persons resulting from a mutual gift of their selves.
31 Note that the thought that a unifying love is the ingredient that justifies sexual activity has an
interesting implication: gay and lesbian sexual relations would seem to be permissible if they occur
within homosexual marriages that are loving, committed, and monogamous.
At this point in the argument, defenders of the view that sexual activity is justifiable only in marriage
commonly appeal to Natural Law to rule out homosexual marriage.
On another view of these matters, the fact that sexual activity is carried out voluntarily by all
persons involved means, assuming that no harm to third parties exists, that the sexual activity is
morally permissible.
In defending the sufficiency of consent for the moral goodness of sexual activity, Thomas Mappes
writes that "Respect for persons entails that each of us recognize the rightful authority of other
persons to conduct their individual lives as they see fit."32 Allowing the other person's consent to
control when the other engages in sexual activity with me is to respect that person by taking his or
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