Category Archives: Consensual Sexual Morality

Teleological Structure of Conjugal Sexual Morality

Conjugal Sexual Morality, Consensual Sexual Morality, Sexual morality

A moral outlook’s theory of good characterizes the good we are to promote and how to promote it But ways of promotion of good are constrained by the definite prohibitions from its theory of evil. Both structurally and materially conjugal sexual morality’s theory of good differs greatly from that of consensual sexual morality. Consensual sexual morality’s theory of evil prohibits violation of sexual autonomy and its theory of good promotes sexual satisfaction. However, protection of sexual autonomy is independent of sexual satisfaction. Autonomy is independent of what sexuality is for. Conjugal sexual morality’s theory of evil is to avoid that which interferes with what sexuality is for – sexuality’s telos. Thus, the evil of conjugal sexual morality is not independent of the good of conjugal sexual morality. Hence, consensual sexual morality can be called a “rights theory of sexual morality” while consensual sexual morality can be called a “teleological theory of sexual morality.” Consensual’ s sexual good is uncovered by asking what sexual desire is for. The answer is sexual satisfaction. Sexual satisfaction is naturally and immediately seen as desirable. Conjugal’ s sexual good is uncovered by asking what are sexual satisfactions for.

The answer of marriage and family is not immediately seen as describing a good. I am a participant in a program for promoting Catholic male morality TMIY (That Man Is You). The challenges of marriage are clearly brought out. It must be admitted that finding sexual satisfactions under the constraints of attaining them only in conditions which are not contrary to what they are for may lead to a diminishing of sexual satisfactions, In one of the sessions on marriage there was a quotation from St. John Paul II: “Spouses are the permanent reminder to the Church of what happened on the cross.” The burdens of marriage are clearly brought out in Bishop Erik Varden in his October 15, 20261 blog post on a Vatican meeting on marriage held ten years after publication of Pope Francis’ Apostolic Letter on marriage Laetitiae Amor.

“The spouses are themselves the agents of the sacrament. They nonetheless make it in church, before the cross. To say yes to the question, ‘Will you love and honour each other all the days of your life and accept with love the children God may send?’, is to consent to a share in the cross. Any spousal and parental love involves suffering. It will pierce the heart. It will require one’s life to be poured out that others may live. 

To embrace this reality knowingly from the start, consenting to a share in Christ’s life-giving cross, will give spouses strength to carry their burdens, making even heavy things seem light. The horizontal relationship between husband and wife, parents and children, will be sustained by a sure, dependable vertical axis. “

Marriage and children certainly can be appreciated as a basic good upon reflection. Nonetheless, the good of conjugal sexual morality is definitely an acquired taste. It’s an adult good.

Is it really an adult good? Rather, is it not an adolescent good? Is it not rather a fantasy for young people who would like their story to be one of meeting, going through the trials and tribulations of courtship before falling completely in love resulting in a life-long marriage in which they live happily ever after? The reply is that we need not be and are not ignorant of the challenges of a lifelong monogamous marriage. The good of marriage is a good of struggle – a good of coping with hardship. The good of conjugal sexual morality is not a good of happiness. Happiness is a static condition. Marriage is a good of struggling. In light of this type of goodness, the basic line of defense for conjugal sexual morality will be that whatever sexual activity weakens us for this struggling is immoral.

Another post on conjugal sexual morality’s good is needed to clarify what I have here tentatively called “a good of struggling.”

  1. Laetitiae Amor – Coram Fratribus

Consensual Sexual Morality Would Condemn Cornell Seven “Orgy”

Consensual Sexual Morality, Moral philosophy

At this time, October 2026, there is much discussion of a September 2024 sexual orgy in the Chi Phi Cornell fraternity house. Since seven young men engaged in various sexual acts with a coed called Jane Doe, the incident is called the Cornell Seven In the New York Times, October 8, 2926, Christine Emba wrote “reliance on consent as the ultimate arbiter of acceptability has left us unable to recognize and critique bad behavior outside of its narrow definition of criminal sex. ” She went on to write “That gap between “legal” and “decent” is where moral criticism does its work, but a lack of a moral language strips us of the nuance needed to empathize with victims and to come up with a social, not just a juridical, response. Without that vocabulary, it’s difficult to express what we want our shared sexual culture to look like. ”

However, writers who hold what I call “consensual sexual morality” have lifted the notion of consent above its legal context. The bar for morally acceptable consent is high. All of the students involved were intoxicated with alchohol and ketamine. Even if they were predisposed to sexual activity involving more than two people, at the time they were unable to provide genuine consent. See *for an argument that typical college parties prevent conditions for genuine consent. Thus all of the sexual activity described for the Cornell Seven orgy was immoral. The parties involved acted immorally from the prespective of consensual sexual morality. Morality includes more than fundamental rules. There are rules about not providing support for immoral activities and not stopping them. So, consensual sexual morality can morally castigated responsible officials for not preventing these kinds of activities from occurring. Also by-standers can be morally criticized for not trying to intervene.

I conjecture that faculty and professors developed consensual sexual morality to have moral language adequate to condemn behaviour such as that of the Cornell Seven plus one.

My fear is that the language of consensual sexual morality has become our shared moral language; or, at least, the moral language of the opinion forming elite. As a result we cannot morally condemn that type of group sexual activity even if all of the participants were mature, sober and of sound mind.

*James Rocha, College Party Hook Ups: Consent, Apps, and Double Standards

Transition from Consensual Sexual Morality to Conjugal Sexual Morality

Conjugal Sexual Morality, Consensual Sexual Morality

No sex outside of a lifelong monogamous marriage of a man and a woman. That’s the gist of conjugal sexual morality which many love, many hate and most violate. The “sexual revolution” was a revolt against this type of morality. There are many variants of conjugal sexual morality since sexuality includes courting, bonding and genital activity in Erotic Episodes. Adherents of conjugal sexual morality may different on permissible acts and degrees of severity in these three dimensions. For instance, with respect to bonding some may find marriage at thirteen impermissible, with respect to courting some may impose severe constraints are women’s’ style of dress and with respect to genital activity some may regard contraception permissible. So, I will not try to characterize conjugal sexual morality in detail. I am an adherent of the conjugal sexual morality taught by the Roman Catholic church. My examples will reflect that variant of conjugal sexual morality

This admission of variants in a morality is not acceptance of some sort of theory of moral relativity. Consensual sexual morality also has variants. The various circumstances in which a morality is to be applied often require different decisions of what ought to be done. There is good sense supporting a degree of moral relativity. However, any consistent moral theory has to have some core teachings which they hold applicable always and everywhere. For moral thought is universal in the sense of searching for fundamental action guides for all people everywhere at any time. In my comparison of consensual and conjugal sexual moralities, I hope to isolate these fundamental teachings. My strategy for isolating these fundamental teachings come from their stances on the fundamental law of morality: Do good, avoid evil. This fundamental teaching requires a moral outlook to take a stand on what is evil and what is good. Avoiding evil gives rise to what are frequently called definite or perfect duties. Definite duties are frequently expressed as negative categorical imperatives as “Thou shall never do such and such!” Doing good gives rise to what are frequently called indefinite or impertect duties. However, as seen in exposition of consensual sexual morality the perfect duties can be expressed positively as protections against evil. Athough we ought to promote what is good, there is no precision about when, where and how. Thus they are labelled “indefinite” or “imperfect duties”

The practice of calling a moral outlooks basic perfect duties its theory of right and its basic imperfect duties its theory of of good produces an ambiguity.

There is ambiguity with the term “right” when I call specifying what a moral outlook regrads as the basis of obligation – definite obligations as its theory of right but also call consensual sexual morality a rights theory of sexual morality. The ambiguity is using “right” to stand for what ought to be done – the right thing to do – and using “right” to stand for a condition of a person which it is never right to inhibit or remove. To avoid circularity in the definition it is necessary to change the meaning of “right” when it is used in the defineins from that in the defineindum. Sexual pleasure is the sexual good. Personally, I do not find this switching the sense of “right” confusing.

Before moving on to the theory of right for conjugal sexual morality it is helpful to review consensual sexual morality in accordance with this strategy for recognizing the fundamental principles of a moral outlook. Consensual sexual morality holds the following about good and evil on sexual matters. Disregard for sexual autonomy is evil. The evil is manifested in the degradation felt in non-consensual sex. Evil is lack of sexual autonomy. But sexual autonomy is not a good in the sense of being desired. For sexual satisfaction may be enjoyed in both dominating and being dominated. People may find sexual satisfaction in both degrading and being degraded. For consensual sexual morality the sexual good is satisfaction of sexual desire.

We now turn to answering. What is the basic evil for conjugal sexual morality? What is the basic good for conjugal sexual morality?

Consensual Sexual Morality is a Respect Morality

Consensual Sexual Morality, Moral philosophy

What is meant by “respect morality?” A respect morality has a basic imperative that some condition C ought to be promoted and protected regardless of any desire for C. Some examples of C are autonomy, duty and the good of the other. Corresponding imperatives might be expressed as: Protect autonomy for the sake of autonomy, Do your duty for the sake of doing your duty and promote the good of the other for the sake of the good of the other. Respect moralities are also virtue or character moralities because correlative to imperatives to do C for the sake of C there are imperatives to make yourself the kind of person who does C for the sake of C regardless of any desire to be such a person. For consensusal sexual morality in which protecting sexual autonomy is identified with receiving consent, the imperative may, for the purpose of emphasizing the difference between respect and desire, be expressed as protect receiving consent to the sexual act regardless of any desire to wait for consent.

The significance of recognizing some moralities as respect moralities is to point out that these kinds of moral theories need to include in their moral psycholgies another factor besides belief and desire to account for moral motivation. Perhaps belief and desire can account for why people choose what is believed to be good. However, if autonomy is specified what is to be respected, desire cannot account for choosing autonomy because autonomy is the condition for specifying what is good or truly desirable.

In this connection, I close this note by an attempt to reduce respecting sexual autonomy to desiring a certain type of sexual experience. See On Ohio State’s “Consent is Sexy” Posters.

Consensual Sexual Morality & Privacy

Consensual Sexual Morality, Sexual morality

An ancient Greek philosopher, around 300 BC, challenged the rationality of feeling shame about publicly engaging in sexual intercourse. In this connection see also my Sexual Privacy Necessary for New Life . What would Consensual Sexual Morality say about the following classic case described in the Hipparchia article in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy?

[…] Crates of Thebes…was so passionate about Cynic ideas that, leaving behind the wealth of his father, he moved to Athens with his wife Hipparchia, who was an equally zealous follower of his doctrine. And when he wanted to lie down with her in public, and she…pulled over her cloak as a cover, she was scolded by her husband: “obviously you are not yet wise,” he said, “since you don’t dare to do in the presence of others what you know well to be the right thing to do.”
The story of Hipparchia’s Cynic marriage quickly became the premiere example of that virtue, which is based on the Cynic belief that any actions virtuous enough to be done in private are no less virtuous when performed in public. As exemplars of anaideia, Hipparchia and Crates influenced their pupil Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism.

The judgment of Consenual Sexual Morality about this case is clear. Crates acted imorally since he was forcing Hippachia’s consent to public coitus. He was not respecting her sexual dignity. The type of shamelessness called anaideia is not a virtue recognized by Consensual Sexual Morality. It is clearly possible that some people’s authentic desire is for privacy in sexual activity.

But is anaideia a vice?

In the New York Review of Books August 20, 2026, I read the following in a review of John Lanchester’s Look What You Made Me Do by Laura Marsh. Lanchester portrays a couple Jack and Kate Hittlestones who have a way of speaking in code. One of their code terms is “Ho Chi Minh birthday.” This term stands for “the special occasions on which the Hittlestones hire an escort to have sex with Kate while Jack watches.” Consensual Sexual Morality can accommodate the consent of sex workers as authentic consent. Drug addicted victims of sex trafficing do not give authentic consent. But not all sex workers are victims. I suspect that some Consensual Sexual Moralist would commend the Hittlestones for discovering a way to enhance their sex lives. None could condemn it without evidence that some coercion was involved.