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5/26/2017 8:42 pm  #1


Explaining Catholic teaching on sexuality

I've been cornered before, not knowing how to graciously present such a contested topic to non-Catholics. Any suggestions?

 

5/28/2017 12:30 pm  #2


Re: Explaining Catholic teaching on sexuality

I'm not Roman Catholic, and this may not help with the rhetorical effectiveness part of your question, but I found JPII's Love and Responsibility to be an incredibly compelling philosophical account of Catholic sexual morality (which I 90% agree with despite not being Catholic myself).  Here is the edition I have and is a classic, although there is a new translation that I have heard is available.  Several of the basic arguments in this book can be made to speak to contemporary non-Catholics:

(1) I think many people today will find it compelling that one should not treat the other person in a sexual relationship as a mere tool to one's own end.  This basic Kantian point means that I cannot pursue sex merely as a way of receiving pleasure.

(2) Many people today will be sensitive to the idea that we are essentially embodied beings.  Our bodies are not something merely extrinsic to our true self (this mistake lies behind much of the transgender ideology), so therefore treating another person with love involves taking his or her embodied gender (and one's own) into account.  Thinking that you and I can love one another quite apart from our respective genders implies a kind of angelism.

(3) I think it is a fairly easy argument to make for people who are really worried about being "scientific" that reproduction must at least be a part of any adequate philosophy of sexuality.  The more we talk about reproduction, however, the less compelling many contemporary philosophies of sexuality become.

 

5/31/2017 9:45 am  #3


Re: Explaining Catholic teaching on sexuality

Ironically I find myself wondering whether the denial or points 2 and 3 can be used to push a disputant towards a non-naturalistic position on persons (or at least non-Quinean ScienceTM based naturalism). I would certainly deny both on the grounds that they verge too close to biological reductionism.

Regarding point 1, be careful as the same point can be made about 'classic' Natural Law teachings where the end of relationships and procreation is taken to be self-perfection. JPII and other Theology of the Body proponents make attempts to remedy this however.  

 

5/31/2017 1:31 pm  #4


Re: Explaining Catholic teaching on sexuality

DanielCC wrote:

Ironically I find myself wondering whether the denial or points 2 and 3 can be used to push a disputant towards a non-naturalistic position on persons (or at least non-Quinean ScienceTM based naturalism). I would certainly deny both on the grounds that they verge too close to biological reductionism.

Lots of naturalists and reductionists (Parfit and other mainstream defenders of psychological accounts of personal identity) deny (2). And those folks are among the most likely to think reproduction is not relevant, except accidentally, to sexual ethics (recall Singer's dismissive comment that ethics is not about sex).

Generally, though, there is a gaping difference between taking human embodiment seriously and being a biological reductionist. That the latter is the only way to do the former... there is just nothing obvious about that. Unless one is a reductionist about animals and about life generally, the view that human persons are embodied beings does not seem to threaten biological reductionism.

DanielCC wrote:

Regarding point 1, be careful as the same point can be made about 'classic' Natural Law teachings where the end of relationships and procreation is taken to be self-perfection.

I think the extent to which this is a risk depends on how one conceives the role of perfection and of the notion of the good in intelligent action. My own view (which I take to be Aquinas's view) is that pursuing what is good for human beings is not a means to self-perfection; "self-perfection" is not a goal of intelligent agents in the same sense that "pulling a lever" or "avoiding driving off the cliff" are goals. Goodness is rather the aspect under which what's pursued is judged worthy of pursuit.

So a person having sex is not inevitably doing what he's doing as a means to his self-perfection, and his partner isn't a means to his self-perfection. That he regards it as good is rather constitutive of his pursuing it.

 

5/31/2017 1:59 pm  #5


Re: Explaining Catholic teaching on sexuality

It's sort of shameful, I suppose, given the amount of time I have spent reading and thinking about Catholic teaching on sexuality, that I don't have a direct answer to this question.

I think Elizabeth Anscombe's writings on the topic are fantastic. Here she is in an undated manuscript, only recently published:

Remember that we are intellectual animals, whose vegetative and animal life is part of a life framed by our intellectuality: we are nourished, for example, not like plants but like other animals, but our eating is conducted in a specially human way, reason entering into the getting and preparation of food and into the conduct of meals. Similarly our sexual activity and reproduction is all tied up with our intellect, our not merely animal emotions and our aesthetic feelings. Reason and love enter into most, and certainly into all characteristically human exercise of this vital function. Hence marriage and the celebration of and awe before procreation and pregnancy.

There isn't an argument here, in the sense of an attempt to list premises and defend them against the objections of those who want to deny them. Rather, Anscombe is gesturing toward a fact of every human's at least occasional acquaintance: the saturation of our animal functions by reason. Eating is in one sense just part of our animal need to sustain ourselves in existence, but in humans it is surrounded by what you might be convinced to see as the most absurd pomp and circumstance. And similarly for sexuality: it is typical for humans that sexual activities take place in rather scripted contexts (after a marriage ceremony, say).

And standardly love (a response of the rational appetite, the will) is the human's response to the result of sex, hence "the celebration of and awe before procreation and pregnancy." There's something very odd about a couple which becomes pregnant and is not amazed and excited by it.

Such people have existed at all times; contraception and abortion have always been attempted even if they have only recently become particularly effective. On the other hand, it's not as though people today are uninterested in procreation (I recently saw a statistic that most people still want two or more children, and most women reach infertility before they've had as many children as they want). But what is unique to the post-Sexual Revolution world is the normalization of indifference to pregnancy.

None of that is a response to some pagan who corners you and asks how you dare oppose same-sex marriage. But I think it's a clue into a radically different conception of the point of sex from what most people catechized by their American public schools would recognize. And I think it sets the stage for seeing 'traditional sexual ethics' as what is just the standard human way of life--so that the value and intelligibility of that ethic can perhaps be presented as it is in literature. (This is obviously a much more ambitious project, for which I'm unprepared.)

(As far as the culture war is concerned, and as far as having prepared responses to questions someone might ask you in an elevator, I think the What Is Marriage? book is quite good. Its argument is anticipated mostly by Anscombe's "Contraception and Chastity".)

 

5/31/2017 9:25 pm  #6


Re: Explaining Catholic teaching on sexuality

Romanjoe, who are you thinking of arguing with? I think that unless you know the person is very open-minded and interested in truth above all, there is little point in making a positive argument. You won't get a fair hearing. 

What you can do is point out issues and hidden assumptions in your opponent's position, such as the view sexual morality can rest on the notion of consent alone. I find that, despite priding themselves upon their knowledge and openness, modernists and liberals are incredibly unaware of their own assumptions and prejudices, which they simply unquestioningly absorb  from the zeitgeist, on these matters.

 

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