Philosophy of Sexuality

There has been considerable recent discussion of the social effects of “liberalism,” which are said to include a growth in out-of-wedlock childbirth, repudiation of traditions, a rise in populism, increased reliance on technocracy, inequality, environmental degradation, sexual promiscuity, deterioration of civic associations, a diminution of civic virtue, political correctness on university campuses, and a general sense of alienation. There is good reason for skepticism about these claims. Liberalism is not a person, and it is not an agent in history. Claims (...) about the supposedly adverse social effects of liberalism are best taken not as causal claims at all, but as normative objections that should be defended on their merits. These propositions are elaborated with reference to three subordinate propositions: liberalism, as such, does not lack the resources to defend traditions; liberalism, as such, hardly rejects the idea of “constraint,” though the domains in which liberals accept constraints differ from those of antiliberals, and vary over time; liberalism, as such, does not dishonor the idea of “honor.” There is a general point here about the difficulty of demonstrating, and the potential recklessness of claiming, that one or another “ism” is causally associated with concrete social developments. (shrink)

This writing is a review of the 3rd chapter of Katherine E. Southwood's "Marriage by Capture in the Book of Judges".

This essay considers how an “intimacy contract,” as a conceptual tool and a political reality, extends existing critiques of the social contract tradition by accounting for the privatized nature of the post-9/11 US empire. Examining critiques by Carole Pateman and Charles Mills, I argue that an intimacy contract uncovers the coercive power relations underlying neoliberal discourses of entrepreneurial freedom. Focusing on migrant labor on US military bases, I provide an overview of the racial, sexual, and settler contracts and the need (...) to extend Mills’s and Pateman’s critiques of embodiment and spatiality. Next, I suggest how the intimacy contract generates a transnational, embodied account of the labors upholding US empire; a lens into the shifting significance of these labors under neoliberal imperialism; and a chronicling of desire and workers’ interests. In conclusion, I suggest how the intimacy contract exposes multiple resistances to US empire and neoliberal capitalism. (shrink)

Recent studies have revealed how workers’ movements adapted republicanism into a language of anticapitalism in the nineteenth century. Much less attention has been paid, however, to the role feminists played in this process. This essay addresses this oversight by introducing the voices of the utopian socialists under July Monarchy France. These socialists insisted that there could be no social revolution without sexual revolution. Although they are often positioned outside of the republican tradition, this essay argues that the utopian socialists are (...) better understood as rendering the legacy of classical and French republicanism compatible with nascent workers’ movements in the 1830s. By foregrounding the feminist Flora Tristan, this essay shows how utopian socialists weaponized republican tropes to address the social question, thereby expanding what a republican critique of capitalism could look like. (shrink)

This article intervenes in a critical debate about the use of consent to distinguish sex from rape. Drawing from critical contract theories, it argues that sexual consent is a cruel optimism that often operates to facilitate, rather than alleviate, sexual violence. Sexual consent as a cruel optimism promises to simplify rape allegations in the popular cultural imagination, confounds the distinction between victims and agents of sexual violence, and establishes certainty for potential victimizers who rely on it to convince themselves and (...) others that their partners implicitly or explicitly agreed to sex. In each of these cases, the power of consent rests in its tendency to obscure sexual violence in a set of questions around victimhood and agency, rather than to clarify whether or when it has occurred. Following in the critical contract tradition, this article argues that the optimistic attachment to the clarifying power of consent helps to explain the persistent commitment to better sexual consent as a ‘solution’ to the problems of rape and sexual violence, and that this ‘solution’ is insufficient to the task. (shrink)

The way in which consent to sexual interactions is understood in the US is undergoing a transformation. Many universities, sometimes at the behest of lawmakers, are moving to adopt ‘affirmative consent’ policies, which define consent in terms of affirmative behavior that goes beyond mere silence or lack of resistance. Although these policies are a move in the right direction, I argue that their content has not been properly understood. In particular, the circumstances in which nonverbal behavior may communicate consent are (...) more limited than might be apparent. And even though these circumstances can be abstractly identified, it is difficult to give people adequate guidance about when some of them obtain. Moreover, I argue that no matter how the allowance for nonverbal behavior is construed, affirmative consent policies unnecessarily prohibit interactions that people may have reason to engage in. I propose an alternative policy that remedies these problems with the affirmative consent policies that are currently being implemented. And I note that the justification for this alternative policy does not turn on any special features of the university setting. Instead, the account I give suggests grounds for reforming the law as well. (shrink)

Human beings talk and co-operate, they build and produce, they work to accumulate and exchange, they form societies, laws and institutions, and, in all these things the phenomenon of reason—as a distinct principle of activity—seems dominant. There are indeed theories of the human which describe this or that activity as central—speech, say, productive labour , or political existence . But we feel that the persuasiveness of such theories depends upon whether the activity in question is an expression of the deeper (...) essence, reason itself, which all human behaviour displays. (shrink)

Kant’s comments on sexuality are commonly found to be at best perplexing and at worst extraordinarily unenlightened and morally offensive. In this paper, I start by reconstructing what seems to be Kant’s view on sexuality as well as providing an overview of the main, existing Kantian philosophical responses and alternative proposals to this account. In the last part of the paper, I outline a new Kantian approach to sexuality that overcomes the shortcomings of both Kant’s own and the existing Kantian (...) accounts. (shrink)

We propose that virtue ethics can be used to address ethical issues central to discussions about sex robots. In particular, we argue virtue ethics is well equipped to focus on the implications of sex robots for human moral character. Our evaluation develops in four steps. First, we present virtue ethics as a suitable framework for the evaluation of human–robot relationships. Second, we show the advantages of our virtue ethical account of sex robots by comparing it to current instrumentalist approaches, showing (...) how the former better captures the reciprocal interaction between robots and their users. Third, we examine how a virtue ethical analysis of intimate human–robot relationships could inspire the design of robots that support the cultivation of virtues. We suggest that a sex robot which is equipped with a consent-module could support the cultivation of compassion when used in supervised, therapeutic scenarios. Fourth, we discuss the ethical implications of our analysis for user autonomy and responsibility. (shrink)

:This article focuses on historical queer cultural geographies of masculinities and to do so it focuses on two cases/places. The first is an archival case/place: a partial assembly of documents of beats and their uses during and in the wake of Gay Liberation in Australia. The second is a literary case/place: Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, a canonical twentieth-century imbrication of male homosexuality and geography. This article will seek to rationalize the mobilization of these two asynchronous cases/places through the insights (...) that both afford, when brought together, for elaborating contributions that queer readings of Nietzsche can make to contemporary queer theories of space, time and masculinities. (shrink)

What are the stakes when we allow sexually explicit images to have wide circulation in our culture? How can we judge the moral status of pornography and erotica? Is the arousal of desire by a depiction and not another person essentially dehumanizing? With Natsha Kyburg, Peter Jemma, and Mark Casale.

Historically, the concept of androgyny has been as problematic as it has been appealing to Western progressives. The appeal clearly includes, inter alia, the opportunity to abandon or ameliorate certain identities. As for the problematic dimension, the central problem seems to be the reduction of otherness to the norms of straight white middle/upper-class Western cismen, particularly because of the consequent worsening of actual others’ marginalization and exclusion from social institutions. Despite these problems, I wish to suggest that androgyny—as evidenced by (...) the enthusiasm felt for it by many Westerners—bespeaks something larger and more important than the concept itself, and that modified conception of it might be helpful in pursuit of social justice. (shrink)

Rousseau’s founding critique of liberalism, the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, takes the ambiguous form of a sweeping myth of civilization. Political theorists usually interpret the myth by reading it as a tale of passage from primordial nature to civil society, but what happens when we privilege another of the essay’s organizing devices, its symbolic depiction of the history of the species as the life of an individual? Interpreted through this metaphor, Rousseau’s myth becomes a charged tale of a (...) ‘life’ gone wrong, one that sheds interesting light on his critique of bourgeois society and selfhood. (shrink)

Camus considered the most crucial philosophical problem to be that of suicide—whether to discontinue your existence by endingit. Alternatively, a most crucial philosophical problem may be procreation—whether to continue human existence by making new humans. The topic has spurred an increasing amount of debate over the past decade, with marked diversion with Anscomb’s comment that it makes no moral sense to inquire whether one should reproduce. One might as well ask why digest food or why should the wind blow. This (...) article reviews some of the most recent literature on this topic, which shows little resemblance to Anscomb’s remark. (shrink)

This article explores the implications of adopting decolonial love as a theoretical and practical model for healing the wounds of coloniality by contrasting its revolutionary potential to the damaging effects of its opposite, colonial love. The latter, based in an imperialist, dualist logic, dangerously fetishizes the beloved object and participates in the oppression and subjugation of difference. Decolonial feminist theorist Chela Sandoval's concept of decolonial love, by contrast, originates “from below” and operates between those rendered other by hegemonic forces. In (...) its acceptance of fluid identities and a redefined but shared humanity, decolonial love promotes loving as an active, intersubjective process, and in so doing articulates an anti-hegemonic, anti-imperialist affect and attitude that can guide the actions that work to dismantle oppressive regimes. Literature that makes central the lived experiences of female subaltern figures works to theorize new ways of being and offers feminist philosophy a different way to understand intersubjective relation that challenges hegemonic thinking. To this end I offer a close reading of Gabriel García Márquez's underexplored Of Love and Other Demons, a novel in which the subversive power of decolonial love challenges Christian, imperialist love to foreground black lived experience and knowledge over and against the Eurocentric. (shrink)

This book addresses the endangerment of children’s bodies in affluent societies. Bodily integrity is an important part of a child’s physical and mental well-being, but it can also be violated through various threats during childhood; not only affecting physical health but also causing mental damage and leading to distortions in the development of the self. The authors give an account of three areas, which present different serious dangers: (1) body and eating, (2) body and sexuality, and (3) body and violence. (...) Through an in-depth examination of the available theoretical and empirical knowledge, as well as a thorough ethical analysis, the central injustices in the mentioned areas are identified and the agents with responsibilities towards children displayed. The authors conclude by providing invaluable insight into the necessity of an ethical basis for policies to safeguard children and their bodies. (shrink)

This article reconsiders the role of sexual and romantic ideology in Heliodorus' Aethiopica, focusing particularly on Persinna's account of her daughter's conception. I contend that the triangulated sexual dynamics of the conception deviate from the binary, symmetrical romantic model embodied by Charicleia and Theagenes, complicating the novel's apparent norms. I suggest that the sexual multiplicity of Charicleia's conception mirrors the narrative complexity of the Aethiopica, as the authorial decision to include the conception story—despite its disruptive potential—privileges the plot-generating creation of (...) Charicleia over and above a monolithic adherence to sexual and romantic ideology. (shrink)

In "Perversion and the Unnatural as Moral Categories" David Levy argues against a number of theories of perversion by means of the method of counter-example. This is inappropriate since many familiar accounts are not attempts to provide a "one-over-many" formula for a core of clear cases. Rather, like Levy himself, many understand perversions as "unnatural" or "non-human" actions, i.e. as distortions of human nature. Here there is agreement on the intension of the term. Differences in the extension arise in virtue (...) of the relational character of the meaning. For what counts as a distortion of human nature depends on the paradigm of human nature one endorses. In these cases the appropriate way to decide between competing lists of perversions is to evaluate the competing paradigms of human nature on which they rest. Typically these paradigms embody important value assumptions. (shrink)