The Politics of Chastity

Abstract

The Politics of Chastity Edward Feser Reinhard Hütter has authored an excellent and much-needed essay on the virtue of chastity, with a special focus on the unprecedented threat to this virtue posed by contemporary online pornography.1 His essay addresses the moral and spiritual aspects of the issue, as illuminated by both natural law and divine revelation. But there is also a crucial political dimension that the essay does not address, though it too is illuminated by Hütter’s insights. I propose in this essay to supplement Hütter’s account with some remarks on this dimension. Sex and Human Nature The political dimension I want to address is neither peripheral to chastity nor related to it only contingently. For, together with the moral and spiritual aspects of chastity, it follows directly and necessarily from our nature as rational social animals. This is evident from the traditional Thomistic natural law account of the foundations of sexual morality, so I will begin with an exposition of that. The fundamental way in which we are social animals is by being familial animals. And sex—both in the sense of there being two sexes, and in the sense of the sexual act—exists for the purpose of creating new families. In particular, the distinctive physiology and psychology of male human beings exists for the sake of making them fathers, and the distinctive physiology [End Page 1257] and psychology of female human beings exists for the sake of making them mothers. Of course, not all men and women actually become fathers and mothers, but the point is that that is what their being either men or women in the first place is for. If we did not reproduce in a way that required fathers and mothers, there would be no males and no females. Hence there would be no sex organs, no sexual arousal, and no sexual act. Now, the most obvious respect in which sex has this teleology is that male sexual physiology and arousal have the biological function of getting semen into the vagina, whereas female sexual physiology and arousal have the biological function of facilitating reception of the semen, so as to get the sperm it contains into proximity with an ovum, so that pregnancy will result. It is often assumed that getting this plumbing right is the main concern of the natural law theorist. Nothing could be further from the truth. To be sure, the natural law theorist does insist on getting the plumbing right, but that is because the plumbing ultimately exists for the sake of a larger and more important end—just like a beaver’s teeth ultimately exist for the sake of building shelters for beaver families, their function of gnawing trees so as to provide materials for beaver dams (which in turn provide the setting for the shelters) being merely an essential means to that end.2 The locus classicus for Aquinas’s treatment of these matters is the discussion in Summa contra gentiles III, ch. 2, nos. 122–26. There is a little bit there about emissions of semen and the like, but there is much, much more about what children and mothers need in order for family life to be possible, and how fathers have to provide it. That is to say, Aquinas’s treatment of what it is to be a man or a woman goes well beyond having sex organs of a certain kind and using them in a certain way, and that is exactly what we should expect given that we are social animals, and rational social animals. Sex is for making you a father or a mother, with all that that entails given our social and rational nature, and any deliberate use of sex that positively frustrates that end (with all that it entails given our rational and social nature) is as contrary to what is good for us as breaking off teeth or gnawing only rocks rather than trees is contrary to what is good for beavers. Now, one way this might happen is when a man sleeps with a woman to whom he has not committed himself in the way definitive of marriage. For...