Wiki Page, [1211_LCENWRD_A63D] - ENCOUNTERING THE WORD IN THE WORLD: Norms for Just Love[text]-2

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2021-10-14T21:04:42+08:00

By: Farley, Margaret. Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2008. pp. 215-231

Some preliminary clarifications are important for understanding the specific norms for a sexual ethic. First, the norms that I have in mind are not merely ideals; they are bottom-line requirements. Second, and as a qualification of the first, all of these norms admit of degrees. This means that there is a sense in which they are stringent requirements, but they are also ideals. In both senses, they are all part of justice. That is, they can be understood in different contexts as norms of what I shall call "minimal" or "maximal" justice. While minimal justice is always required, maximal justice can go beyond this to what is "fitting." Maximal justice may, in fact, point to an ideal that exceeds the exacting requirement of minimal justice. Third, the specific norms arc not mutually exclusive. Although each of them emphasizes something the others do not, they nonetheless overlap enough that, as we shall see, some sexual behaviors and relationships are governed by more than one norm. Fourth, since humans are embodied spirits., inspirited bodies, theirs is an embodied autonomy and an embodied relationality. The norms that I will lay out, therefore, are to be understood as requiring respect for an embodied as well as inspirited reality. I turn now to the specific norms that I propose for a contemporary human and Christian sexual ethic.

1. 1. Do No Unjust Harm

The first general ethical norm we may identify is the obligation not to harm persons unjustly. This is grounded in both of the obligating features of personhood, for it is because persons are persons that we experience awe of one another and the obligation of respect. "Do not harm" echoes through the experience of "do not kill" the other. To harm persons may be to violate who they are as ends in them selves. But there are many forms that harm can take — physical, psychological, spiritual, and relational. It can also take the form of failure to support, to assist, to care for, to honor, in ways that are required by reason of context and relationship. I include all of these forms in this norm. In the sexual sphere, "do no unjust harm" takes on particular significance. Here each person is vulnerable in ways that go deep within. As Karen Lebacqz has said, "Sexuality has to do with vulnerability. Eros, the desire for another, the passion that accompanies the wish for sexual expression, makes one vulnerable capable of being wounded. And how may we be wounded or harmed? We know the myriad ways. Precisely because sexuality is so intimate to per sons, vulnerability exists in our embodiment and in the depths of our spirits. Desires for pleasure and for power can become bludgeons in sexual relations. As inspirited bodies we are vulnerable to sexual exploitation, battering, rape, enslavement, and negligence regarding what we know we must do for sex to be "safe sex." As embodied spirits we are vulnerable to deceit, betrayal, disparity in committed loves, debilitating "bonds" of desire, seduction, the pain of unfulfillment. We have seen in previous chapters the role sex can play in conflict, the ways in which it is connected with shame, the potential it has for instrumentalization and objectification. We have also seen human vulnerability in the context of gender exclusionary practices and gender judgments: "Terrible things are done to those who deviate."

Actions and social arrangements that are typically thought to be harmful in the sexual sphere include all forms of violence, as well as pornography, prostitution, sexual harassment, pedophilia, sadomasochism. Most of these are controversial today, so that they cannot be rejected out of hand, judged without assessment of their injustice or justice. Many of these are governed by other principles for a sexual ethic that we have yet to explore. I will therefore return to them again, though all too briefly, placing them in the whole of the framework for sexual ethics that I am proposing.

"Do no unjust harm" goes a long way toward specifying a sexual ethic, but not far enough. It is necessary to identify additional principles for a sexual ethic that aims to take account of the complex concrete realities of persons. I said above that autonomy and relationality, two equally primordial features of human persons, provide the ground and the content for sexual ethics. They provide a ground or basis, as we have seen, for the principle that forbids un justifiable harm. Together they yield six more specific and positive norms: a requirement of free choice, based on the requirement to respect persons autonomy, and five further norms that derive from the requirement of respect for persons' relationality. Hence, we move from our first norm, "do no unjust harm" to a second norm for a sexual ethic: freedom of choice.

2. Free Consent

We have already seen the importance of freedom (autonomy, or a capacity for self-determination) as a ground for a general obligation to respect persons as ends in themselves. This capacity for self-determination, however, also undergirds a more specific norm. The requirement articulated in this norm is all the more grave be cause it directly safeguards the autonomy of persons as embodied and inspirited, as transcendent and free refer here to the particular obligation to respect the right of human persons to determine their own actions and their relationships in the sexual sphere of their lives. This right or this obligation to respect individual autonomy sets a minimum but absolute requirement for the free consent of sexual partners. This means, of course, that rape, violence, or any harmful use of power against unwilling victims is never justified. Moreover, seduction and manipulation of persons who have limited capacity for choice because of immaturity, special dependency, or loss of ordinary power, are ruled out. The requirement of free consent, then, opposes sexual harassment, pedophilia, and other instances of disrespect for persons' capacity for, and right to, freedom of choice.

Derivative from the obligation to respect free consent on the part of sexual partners are also other ethical norms such as a requirement for truth-telling, promise-keeping, and respect for privacy. Privacy, despite contentions over its legal meanings, requires respect for what today is named "bodily integrity." "Do not touch, invade, or use" is the requirement unless an individual freely consents. What this recognizes is that respect for embodied freedom is necessary if there is to be respect for the intimacy of the sexual self.

Whatever other rationales can be given for principles of truth- telling and promise-keeping, their violation limits and hence hinders the freedom of choice of the other person: deception and betrayal are ultimately coercive. If I lie to you, or dissemble when it comes to communicating my intentions and desires, and you act on the basis of what I have told you, I have limited your options and hence in an important sense coerced you. Similarly, if I make a promise to you with no intention of keeping the promise, and you make decisions on the basis of this promise, I have deceived, coerced, and betrayed you. Along with the requirement of free consent, then, these other obligations belong to a sexual ethic as well.

Relationality, I have argued, is equi-primordial with autonomy as an essential feature of human personhood, and along with autonomy grounds the obligation to respect persons as ends in themselves. Like autonomy, relationality does more than ground obligations to respect persons as persons; it specifies the content of this obligation. To treat persons as ends and not as mere means includes respecting their capacities and needs for relationship. Sexual activity and sexual pleasure are instruments and modes of relation; they can enhance relationships or hinder them, contribute to them and express them. Sexual activity and pleasure are optional goods for human persons in the sense that they are not absolute, peremptory goods which could never be subordinated to other goods, or for the sake of other goods be let go; but they are, or certainly can be, very great goods, mediating relationality and the general well-being of persons.

Hence, insofar as one person is sexually active in relation to an other, sex must not violate relationality, but serve it. Another way of saying this is that it is not sufficient to respect the free choice of sexual partners. In addition to "do no harm" and the requirement of free consent, relationality as a characteristic of human persons yields five specific norms for sexual activity and sexual relationships: mutuality, equality, commitment, fruitfulness, and what I will designate in general terms, "social justice." For an adequate contemporary sexual ethic, we need to explore the meaning and implications of each of these norms.

3. Mutuality

Respect for persons together in sexual activity requires mutuality of participation. It is easy for us today to sing the songs of mutuality in celebration of sexual love. We are in disbelief when we learn that it has not always been so. Yet traditional interpretations of heterosexual sex are steeped in images of the male as active and the female passive, the woman as receptacle and the man as fulfiller, the woman as ground and the man as seed. No other interpretation of the polarity between the sexes has had so long and deep-seated an influence on men's and women's self-understandings. Today we think such descriptions quaint or appalling, and we recognize the danger in them. For despite the seeming contradiction between the active/passive model of sexual relations and the some time interpretations of women's sexuality as insatiable, the model formed imaginations, actions, and roles which in turn determined that he who embodied the active principle was greater than she who simply waited — for sex, for gestation, for birthing which was not of her doing and not under her control.

Today we believe we have a completely different view. We have learned that male and female reproductive organs do not signal activity only for one and passivity for the other; nor do universalizable male and female character traits signal this. We can even appreciate all the ways in which, even at the physical level, men's bodies receive, encircle, embrace, and all the ways women's bodies are active, giving, penetrating. Today we also know that the possibilities of mutuality exist for many forms of relationship— whether hetero sexual or gay whether with genital sex or the multiple other ways of embodying our desires and our loves. The key for us has become not activity/passivity but active receptivity and receptive activity — each partner active, each one receptive. Activity and receptivity partake of one another, so that activity can be a response to something received (like loveliness), and receptivity can be a kind of activity, as in "receiving" a guest.

Underlying the norm of mutuality is a view of sexual desire that does not see it as a search only for the pleasure to be found in the relief of libidinal tension, although it may include this. Human sexuality, rather, because it is fundamentally relational, seeks ultimately what contemporary philosophers have called a "double reciprocal incarnation," or mutuality of desire and embodied union. No one can deny that sex may in fact, serve many functions and be motivated by many kinds of desire. Nonetheless, central to its meaning, necessary for its fulfillment, and normative for its morality when it is within an interpersonal relation is some form and degree of mutuality.

Yet we have learned to be cautious before too high a rhetoric of mutuality, too many songs in praise of it. Like active/passive relations, mutuality, too, has its dangers. Insofar as, for example, we assume it requires total and utter self-disclosure, we know that harm lurks unless sexual relations have matured into justifiable and mutual trust. Insofar as we think that sex is just and good only if mutuality is perfected, we know that personal incapacities large and small can undercut it. We know that patience, as well as trust, and perhaps unconditional love arc all needed for mutuality to become what we dream it can be. But what is asked of us, demanded of us, for the mutuality of a one night stand, or of a short-term affair, or of a lifetime of committed love, differs in kind and degree.

Indeed, the mutuality that makes sexual love and activity just (and, one must add, that makes for "good sex" in the colloquial sense of the term) can be expressed in many ways; and it does admit of degrees. No matter what, however, it entails some degree of mutuality in the attitudes and actions of both partners. It entails some form of activity and receptivity, giving and receiving — two sides of one shared reality on the part of and within both persons. It requires, to some degree, mutuality of desire, action, and response. Two liberties meet, two bodies meet, two hearts come together — metaphorical and real descriptions of sexual mutuality. Part of each person's ethical task, or the shared task in each relationship, is to determine the threshold at which this norm must be respected, and below which it is violated.

4. Equality

Our considerations of mutuality lead to yet another norm that is based on respect for relationality. Free choice and mutuality arc not sufficient to respect persons in sexual relations. A condition for real freedom and a necessary qualification of mutuality is equality. The equality that is at stake here is equality of power. Major inequalities in social and economic status, age and maturity, professional identity, interpretations of gender roles, and so forth, can render sexual relations inappropriate and unethical primarily because they entail power inequalities — and hence, unequal vulnerability, dependence, and limitation of options. The requirement of equality, like the requirement of free consent, rules out treating a partner as property, a commodity, or an element in market exchange. Jean-Paul Sartre de scribes, for example, a supposedly free and mutual exchange between persons, but an exchange marked by unacknowledged domination and subordination: "It is just that one of them pretends... not to no tice that the Other is forced by the constraint of needs to sell himself as a material object."

Of course here, too, equality need not be, may seldom be, perfect equality. Nonetheless, it has to be close enough, balanced enough, for each to appreciate the uniqueness and difference of the other, and for each to respect one another as ends in themselves. If the power differential is too great, dependency will limit freedom, and mutuality will go awry. This norm, like the others, can illuminate the injury or evil that characterizes situations of sexual harassment, psychological and physical abuse, at least some forms of prostitution, and loss of self in a process that might have led to genuine love.

5. Commitment

Strong arguments can be made for a fifth norm in sexual ethics, also derivative of a responsibility for relationality. At the heart of the Christian community's understanding of the place of sexuality in human and Christian life has been the notion that some form of commitment, some form of covenant or at least contract, must characterize relations that include a sexual dimension. In the past, this commitment, of course, was largely identified with heterosexual marriage. It was tied to the need for a procreative order and a discipline of unruly sexual desire. It was valued more for the sake of family arrangements than for the sake of the individuals themselves. Even when it was valued in itself as a realization of the life of the church in relation to Jesus Christ, it carried what today are unwanted connotations of inequality in relations between men and women. It is possible, nonetheless, that when all meanings of commitment in sexual relations arc sifted, we are left with powerful reasons to retain it as an ethical norm.

As we have already noted, contemporary understandings of sexuality point to different possibilities for sex than were seen in the past— possibilities of growth in the human person, personal garnering of creative power with sexuality as a dimension not an obstacle, and the mediation of human relationship. On the other hand, no one argues that sex necessarily leads to creative power in the individual or depth of union between persons. Sexual desire left to itself does not seem able even to sustain its own ardor. In the past, persons feared that sexual desire would be too great; in the present, the rise of impotency and sexual boredom makes persons more likely to fear that sexual de sire will be too little. There is growing evidence that sex is neither the indomitable drive that early Christians (and others) thought it was nor the primordial impulse of early psychoanalytic theory. When it was culturally repressed, it seemed an inexhaustible power, under lying other motivations, always struggling to express itself in one way or another. Now that it is less repressed, more and more free and in the open, it is easier to sec other complex motivations behind it, and to recognize its inability in and of itself to satisfy the affective yearning of persons. More and more readily comes the conclusion drawn by many that sexual desire without interpersonal love leads to disappointment and a growing disillusionment. The other side of this conclusion is that sexuality is an expression of something be yond itself. Its power is a power for union, and its desire is a desire for intimacy.

One of the central insights from contemporary ethical reflection on sexuality is that norms of justice cannot have as their whole goal to set limits to the power and expression of human sexuality. Sexuality is of such importance in human life that it needs to be nurtured, sustained, as well as disciplined, channeled, controlled. There appear to be at least two ways which persons have found to keep alive the power of sexual desire within them. One is through novelty of per sons with whom they are in sexual relation. Moving from one partner to another prevents boredom, sustains sexual interest and the possibility of pleasure. A second way is through relationship extended sufficiently through time to allow the incorporation of sexuality into a shared life and an enduring love. The second way seems possible only through commitment.

Both sobering evidence of the inability of persons to blend their lives together, and weariness with the high rhetoric that has tradition ally surrounded human covenants, yield a contemporary reluctance to evaluate the two ways of sustaining sexual desire and living sexual union. At the very least it may be said, however, that although brief encounters open a lover to relation, they cannot mediate the kind of union — of knowing and being known, loving and being loved — for which human relationality offers the potential. Moreover, the pursuit of multiple relations precisely for the sake of sustaining sexual desire risks violating the norms of free consent and mutuality, risks measuring others as apt means to our own ends, and risks inner dis connection from any kind of life-process of our own or in relation with others. Discrete moments of union are not valueless (though they may be so, and may even be disvalues), but they can serve to isolate us from others and from ourselves.

On the other hand, there is reason to believe that sexuality can be the object of commitment, that sexual desire can be incorporated into a covenanted love without distortion or loss, but rather, with gain, with enhancement. Given all the caution learned from contemporary experience, we may still hope that our freedom is sufficiently powerful to gather up our love and give it a future; that thereby our sexual desire can be nurtured into a tenderness that has not forgotten passion. We may still believe that to try to use our freedom in this way is to be faithful to the love that arises in us or even the yearning that rises from us. Rhetoric should be limited regarding commitment, however, for particular forms of commitment are themselves only means, not ends. As Robin Morgan notes regarding the possibility of process only with an enduring relation, "Commitment gives you the leverage to bring about change — and the time in which to do it."

A Christian sexual ethic, then, may well identify commitment as a norm for sexual relations and activity. Even if commitment is only required in the form of a commitment not to harm one's partner, and a commitment to free consent, mutuality, and equality (as I have de scribed these above), it is reasonable and necessary. More than this, however, is necessary if our concerns are for the wholeness of the human person — for a way of living that is conducive to the integration of all of life's important aspects, and for the fulfillment of sexual desire in the highest forms of friendship. Given these concerns, the norm must be a committed love.

6. 6. Fruitfulness

A sixth norm derivative from the obligating feature of relationality is what I call "fruitfulness." Although the traditional procreative norm of sexual relations and activity no longer holds absolute sway in Christian sexual ethics in either Protestant or Roman Catholic traditions, there remains a special concern for responsible reproduction of the human species. Traditional arguments that if there is sex it must be procreative have changed to arguments that if sex is procreative it must be within a context that assures responsible care of offspring. The connection between sex and reproduction is a powerful one, for it allows individuals to reproduce and to build families; it allows a sharing of life full enough to issue in new lives; and it allows the human species to perpetuate itself. Relationality in the form of sexual reproduction, moreover, does not end with the birth of children,· it stretches to include the rearing of children, the initiation of new generations into a culture and civilization, and the ongoing building of the human community.

At first glance, it appears that "procreation" belongs only to, is only possible for, some persons; and even for them, it has come to seem quite optional. How, then, can it constitute a norm for sexual activity and relations? Even if it were recognized as a norm for fertile heterosexual couples, what would this mean for infertile heterosexual couples or for heterosexual couples who choose not to have children, for gays and lesbians, for single persons, for ambiguously gendered persons? For these other individuals and partners, would it signal, as it has in the past, a lesser form of sex and lesser forms of sexual relationships? Or is it possible that a norm of fruitfulness can and ought to characterize all sexual relationships?

It is certainly true that all persons can participate in the rearing of new generations; and some of those who cannot reproduce in traditional ways do even have their own biological children by means of the growing array of reproductive technologies — from infertility treatments to artificial insemination to in vitro fertilization to surrogate mothering. All of this is not only true but significant. Yet an ethically normative claim on sexual partners to reproduce in any of these ways seems unwarranted.

Something more is at stake. Beyond the kind of fruitfulness that brings forth biological children, there is a kind of fruitfulness that is a measure, perhaps, of all interpersonal love. Love between persons violates relationality if it closes in upon itself and refuses to open to a wider community of persons. Without fruitfulness of some kind, any significant interpersonal love (not only sexual love) becomes an égoism e à deux. If it is completely sterile in every way, it threatens the love and the relationship itself. But love brings new life to those who love. The new life within the relationship of those who share it may move beyond itself in countless ways: nourishing other relation ships; providing goods, services, and beauty for others; informing the fruitful work lives of the partners in relation; helping to raise other people's children; and on and on. All of these ways and more may constitute the fruit of a love for which persons in relation arc responsible. A just love requires the recognition of this as the potentiality of lovers; and it affirms it, each for the other, both together in the fecundity of their love. Interpersonal love, then, and perhaps in a special way, sexual love insofar as it is just, must be fruitful.

The articulation of this norm, however, moves us to another perspective in the development of a sexual ethic. There are obligations in justice that the wider community owes to those who choose sexual relationships. Hence, our final norm is of a different kind.

7. Social Justice

This norm derives from our obligation to respect relationality, but not only from this. It derives more generally from the obligation to respect all persons as ends in themselves, to respect their autonomy and relationality, and thus not to harm them but to support them. A social justice norm in the context of sexual ethics relates not specifically to the justice between sexual partners. It points to the kind of justice that everyone in a community or society is obligated to affirm for its members as sexual beings. Whether persons are single or married, gay or straight, bisexual or ambiguously gendered, old or young, abled or challenged in the ordinary forms of sexual expression, they have claims to respect from the Christian community as well as the wider society. These are claims to freedom from unjust harm, equal protection under the law, an equitable share in the goods and services available to others, and freedom of choice in their sexual lives — within the limits of not harming or infringing on the just claims of the concrete realities of others. Whatever the sexual status of persons, their needs for incorporation into the community, for psychic security and basic well-being, make the same claims for social cooperation among us as do those of us all. This is why I call the final norm "social justice." If our loves for one another are to be just, then this norm obligates us all.

There is one way in which, of course, this norm qualifies sexual relationships themselves, obligating sexual partners as well as the community around them. That is, sexual partners have always to be concerned about not harming "third parties." As Annette Baier observes, "in love there are always third parties, future lovers, children who may be born to one of the lovers, their lovers and their children." At the very least, a form of "social justice" requires of sexual partners that they take responsibility for the consequences of their love and their sexual activity— whether the consequences are pregnancy and children, violation of the claims that others may have on each of them, public health concerns, and so forth. No love, or at least no great love, is just for "the two of us," so that even failure to share in some way beyond the two of us the fruits of love may be a failure in justice.

My focus in articulating this norm, however, is primarily on the larger social world in which sexual relationships arc formed and sustained. It includes, therefore, the sorts of concerns I identified above, but larger concerns as well. A case in point is the struggle for gender equality and (in particular) women's rights in our own society and around the world. This is relevant to the sexual ethic I am proposing because it has a great deal to do with respect for gender and sexuality as it is lived in concrete contexts of sexual and gender injustice.

Here we could identify numerous other issues of utmost importance. Sexual and domestic violence might head the list, both at home and abroad. But it would include also racial violence that is perpetrated on men and women and that all too often has to do with false sexual stereotypes. Development, globalization, and gender bias would be high on the list of the issues I have in mind. The myths and doctrines of religious and cultural traditions that reinforce gender bias and unjust constriction of gender roles become important here as well. Included, too, must be the disproportionate burden that women bear in the world-wide AIDS pandemic.

We have already seen in the previous chapter the kinds of injustices inflicted on persons whose gender and sexuality do not fall into the usual categories. We should add issues surrounding the explosion of reproductive technologies — many of which have proven to offer a great benefit for individuals, but many of which remain questionable, such as technologies for sex-selection. Other issues also require moral assessment, such as the availability (or not) of contraceptives, and the repercussions for some women of the marketing of male remedies for impotence. It is neither possible nor necessary to detail all of these issues here. My point is only that they, too, fall within the concerns of an adequate human and Christian sexual ethic. They signal social and communal obligations not to harm one another unjustly and to support one another in what is necessary for basic well-being and a reasonable level of human flourishing for all. These obligations stretch to a common good — one that encompasses the sexual sphere along with the other significant spheres of human life.