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Unsavory Seduction

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Abstract

Among human beings, sexual pursuit takes many forms. Some forms, like courtship, are morally innocuous. Other forms, like rape, are categorically immoral. Still other forms are provisionally immoral. Such forms of sexual pursuit involve a wrongful element sufficient to render them wrongful on balance provided that this wrongful element is not counterbalanced by even more important competing moral considerations. Here my focus is a particular form of provisionally immoral sexual pursuit, unsavory sexual seduction, or unsavory seduction for short.

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Notes

  1. References are to literary characters from Kierkegaard (1959), Hardy (2003), Laclos (1962), Goethe (1994), and Shakespeare (1998).

  2. Several readers of this paper have suggested that the sexual pursuit that we call seduction and regard as provisionally immoral may not be of a single, unified type. Those who think this likely are invited to understand this paper as an attempt to get clearer on a particular subset of such sexual pursuit.

  3. What is sex, precisely? For the purposes of this paper, I wish to leave this contentious question open. We can be precise about some of the ways in which people get one another to have sex without being precise about just what is involved in sex itself.

  4. I am grateful to Mary MacLeod and Seriol Morgan for (independently) bringing this point to my attention.

  5. There are other ways of understanding what is involved in unsavory sexual seduction. Here I seek only to articulate one such understanding, to explore its implications for such seduction’s unsavoriness, and to defend my efforts from several objections.

  6. For a more involved discussion of such motive manipulation, see Cave (2007).

  7. See Kierkegaard (1959), pp. 297–440.

  8. This is roughly Feinberg’s account of harm. See Feinberg (1984), pp. 105–25.

  9. See Kant (1964), pp. 89–104.

  10. This seems to follow, for instance, from Onora O’Neill’s interpretation of the Second Formulation. See O’Neill (1985).

  11. See, for instance, Christman (1991), or Fisher and Ravizza (1988), pp. 170–206, or Mele (2001), pp. 144–73.

  12. For a contractarian version of this principle, see Gauthier (1986), pp. 330–55. For a neo-Kantian version, see Korsgaard (1996), pp. 106–32. And for a broadly utilitarian version, see Mill (1978), pp. 15–71.

  13. For this objection, I am indebted to Seriol Morgan.

  14. For the idea that there are multiple conceptions of seduction, I am indebted to Ian Gold.

  15. I thank an anonymous referee for this journal for suggesting this objection to me.

  16. See www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/ref=pd_dp_ts_b_1. Accessed November 28, 2008.

  17. Again, see www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/ref=pd_dp_ts_b_1. Accessed November 28, 2008.

  18. For convincing me of the importance of this objection, I am indebted to Seriol Morgan, Joe Sartorelli, and audience members at several places where I presented ancestors of this paper.

  19. See the classic 1080s singles’ bar studies of courtship detailed in Givens (1983) and Perper (1985). For a nice overview of social scientific research into human courtship behavior, see Fisher (1992), pp. 19–36. For another, see Buss (2003), pp. 97–122.

  20. See especially Miller (2000), pp. 258–425.

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Acknowledgements

For helpful comments on various ancestors of this paper, I would like to thank Charles Carr, Ian Gold, Mary MacLeod, Seriol Morgan, Joseph Sartorelli, Jeanine Schroer, Robert Schroer, David Shoemaker, Alan Soble, and anonymous referees for this journal. I am indebted as well to audience members at the following events: a colloquium at California State University, Northridge (Northridge, California, November 16, 2001), a meeting of the Society for the Philosophy of Sex and Love (Cleveland, Ohio, April 24, 2003), the conference “Ethical Theory and Moral Practice: How do They Relate?” (Amsterdam, the Netherlands, March 19–20, 2008), and a colloquium at Bowling Green State University (Bowling Green, Ohio, October 31, 2008). My home institution, Arkansas State University, supported some of the work done on this paper with release time from teaching, and with funding for conference travel. In this connection, I would like to thank especially my dean, Dr. Gloria Gibson, my associate dean, Dr. Carol O’Connor, and Dr. Elizabeth Hood, who was Vice Chancellor for Research and Technology Transfer at Arkansas State University while I was working on this paper.

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  1. Department of English and Philosophy, Arkansas State University, P.O. Box 1890, Arkansas, 72467-1890, AR, USA

    Eric M. Cave

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Cave, E.M. Unsavory Seduction. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 12, 235–245 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-009-9163-9

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