Current events in the Catholic Church and in U.S. politics being as they are, it seems worthwhile to put together a roundup of blog posts and other readings on sex, romantic love, and sexual morality as they are understood from a traditional natural law perspective.
First and foremost: My essay “In Defense of the Perverted Faculty Argument” appears in my new anthology Neo-Scholastic Essays. It is the lengthiest and most detailed and systematic treatment of sexual morality I have written to date. Other things I have written on sex, romantic love, and sexual morality are best read in light of what I have to say in this essay.
A brief summary of its contents might be useful. The essay has five sections. After the first, which is the introduction, the second section provides an overview of traditional natural law theory and its metaphysical foundations. The third section spells out the general approach that traditional natural law theory takes toward sex and romantic love, and shows how the key claims of traditional sexual morality vis-à-vis adultery, fornication, homosexuality, etc. follow from that approach. As I also explain there, however, understanding certain specific aspects of traditional sexual morality (such as the absolute prohibition of contraception) requires an additional thesis, which is where the perverted faculty argument -- which is (contrary to the usual caricatures) not the whole of the traditional natural law approach to sex, but rather merely one element of it -- comes into play. Section four provides a detailed exposition and defense of that argument, answering all of the usual objections. Along the way, there is substantive discussion of questions about what is permitted within marital sexual relations, and it is shown that the perverted faculty argument is not as restrictive here as liberals and more rigorist moralists alike often suppose. Finally, in the fifth section, I argue that purported alternative Catholic defenses of traditional sexual morality -- personalist arguments, and “new natural law” arguments -- are not genuine alternatives at all. Invariably they implicitly presuppose exactly the traditional natural law “perverted faculty” reasoning that they claim to eschew. Moreover, the “new natural law” arguments have grave deficiencies of their own.
An excerpt from this essay appeared under the title “The Role of Nature in Sexual Ethics” in The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly in 2013. A longer excerpt was presented under the title “Natural Law and the Foundations of Sexual Ethics” in the talk I gave at the Princeton Anscombe Society in April of this year. But those interested in seeing the complete essay should get hold of Neo-Scholastic Essays. (I also presented some of the relevant ideas in The Last Superstition, at pp. 132-53. But the new essay goes well beyond what I had to say there.)
Over the years I’ve addressed various aspects of these issues here at the blog. Here are the main posts:
The metaphysics of romantic love [A discussion of sexual desire and romantic longing from the point of view of natural law and Catholic theology]
The metaphysics of Vertigo [A philosophical and theological reflection on the nature of romantic obsession, with Hitchcock’s Vertigo as a case study]
What’s the deal with sex? Part I [On three aspects of sex which clearly give it special moral significance, contra contemporary “ethicists” like Peter Singer]
What’s the deal with sex? Part II [A discussion of the effects of sexual vice on one’s character, whether the disorder be one of excess -- which results in what Aquinas calls the “daughters of lust” -- or one of deficiency, which involves what Aquinas calls a “vice of insensibility”]
Sexual cant from the asexual Kant [On the trouble with Kantian and personalist approaches to sex and sexual morality]
Alfred Kinsey: The American Lysenko [A 2005 article from the online edition of City Journal]
I’ve also written several posts over the years about controversies over sexual morality as they have arisen in the U.S. political context, and in the Catholic context:
Some thoughts on the Prop 8 decision [On the “same-sex marriage” controversy, its unavoidable connection to deeper disagreements about sexual morality, and the phoniness of liberal neutrality]
Contraception, subsidiarity, and the Catholic bishops [On the way in which the failure of Catholic bishops to uphold Catholic teaching on contraception and subsidiarity facilitated the U.S. federal government’s attempted contraceptive mandate]
Hitting Bottum [On the incoherence of conservative Catholic writer Joseph Bottum’s attempt to justify capitulating on “same-sex marriage”]
Nudge nudge, wink wink [How some churchmen’s ambiguous statements on homosexuality, divorce, etc. inevitably “send the message” that Catholic teaching on these matters can and will change, whether or not these churchmen intend to send that message]
The two faces of tolerance [On “same-sex marriage,” the sexual revolution more generally, and the totalitarian tendencies of egalitarianism]
Though the natural law defense of traditional sexual morality is the most fundamental defense, there are other approaches to defending it. One of these is the appeal to the wisdom embodied in tradition in general, as that idea has been spelled out by writers like Edmund Burke and F. A. Hayek. In my 2003 Journal of Libertarian Studiesarticle “Hayek on Tradition,” I expound and defend this approach to tradition and discuss how it applies to questions about sexual morality.
Finally, for you completists out there, some additional golden oldies. Ten years ago, at the long defunct Right Reason group blog, I wrote up a series of posts on natural law and sexual morality, which can still be accessed via archive.org:
The posts got a fair amount of attention. Andrew Sullivan politely and critically responded to them in his book The Conservative Soul, and I offered a reply to Sullivan here:
I wouldn’t now formulate some of the key metaphysical points exactly the way I did in those decade-old posts, however, so -- again -- see “In Defense of the Perverted Faculty Argument” in Neo-Scholastic Essays for an up-to-date treatment.