1 

 A History of Erotic Philosophy 

 Alan Soble 
 

The most striking distinction between the erotic life of antiquity and our own . . . [is] that the 

ancients laid the stress upon the instinct itself, whereas we emphasize its object. The ancients 

glorified the instinct and were prepared on its account to honour even an inferior object; while we 

despise the instinctual activity in itself, and find excuses for it only in the merits of the object. 

Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (note, 1910) 
 

In the last quarter of the 20th Century a distinct subarea of philosophy arose. Professional 

books and articles on the philosophy of sex were published during this period. University 

courses devoted to the topic proliferated.
1
 Questions addressed by academic philosophers 

included the ontological and analytic, for example, “What is sexual activity?” or “How to define 

‘sex act’?” -- an issue that the public discussed, too, after President William Clinton denied that 

he had “sexual relations with that woman,” Monica Lewinsky. Academic philosophers also 

addressed normative or evaluative questions, such as “What is natural human sexuality?” (in 

contrast to “perverted” sexuality) and “What is morally right or permissible sexual behavior?” 

This new focus of study emerged partially with second-wave feminism’s criticism of the politics 

of heterosexuality and sex discrimination and with the slowly growing legal and social 

acceptance (including network television) of minority sexualities. Scholars working within the 

phenomenological, existentialist, evolutionary, conservative, Marxist, liberal, feminist, and 

diverse theological traditions have written much about the metaphysics and ethics of sexuality, 

although the philosophy of sex remains eclectic and interdisciplinary, not wedded to any 

particular ideological perspective. 

 

In addition to studying specific ontological and moral issues, scholars can also approach 

the philosophy of sex historically. In this project, they explicate the writings of significant 

figures from the past, fashioning into a coherent whole what might resemble a loose set of 

scattered claims. Or they investigate the thought of a philosopher to discern characteristics of the 

period or culture in which he or she wrote. Or they use this history as a mirror (or even as a 

lamp) to see contemporary practices and ideas more clearly or freshly. Another task is tracing an 

argument, theme, or problem (e.g., the nature of sexual desire or arousal) through a series of 

thinkers, showing how it stays the same and how it gets modified over the centuries. 

Philosophers of sexuality have concentrated, so far, on definitional and evaluative matters. The 

history of the philosophy of sex is the least developed part of the field. 

 

Human sexuality is, of course, a topic that is endlessly discussed and over which people 

argue ad libitum et nauseum, not only at scholarly conferences but also in the local tavern or 

coffee shop. The subject is not owned by professional philosophers. Indeed, the glossy volumes 

on the shelves of mall bookstores are written by ordinary people, amateurs, and popularizers of 

evolutionary, psychological, sociological, and theological thought on sexuality. What is the 

difference, if one exists, between professional philosophical examination of sexuality and your 

mother’s “philosophy” of sex or the “philosophy” of sex of the corner grocer? One view is that 

the spirit of Socrates (ca. 469-399 BCE) informs genuinely philosophical thinking about sex: 



 

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emphasizing precision, being willing to challenge received opinion, and persistently searching 

for elusive, hidden truths. But it must be admitted that some non-philosophers manifest this spirit 

as well, and that it is not always exhibited by those traditionally called “philosophers” or those 

formally trained in philosophy. 

 

My presentation in this essay of a history of philosophizing about sexuality, by focusing 

on writers identified as canonical philosophers, is not meant to slight the contributions of other 

disciplines or to imply that what this small group of writers produced is more illuminating. The 

problem might be the reverse: “Ask if it's sex or power that makes the world go round, and you 

can keep the pub open long after licensing hours; in a philosophy seminar, the same question is 

likely to produce only rolled eyes” (Appiah, 1997, p. 5). While I am exploring the history of the 

philosophy of sex, I attempt to show that not only philosophers but also their compatriots in 

other fields have said interesting things about sex. For example, in 1929 James Thurber (1894-

1961) and E. B. White (1899-1985) wrote a small book (Is Sex Necessary?), a parody of the new, 

early-20th-century psychology of sex. We can surely learn from this book, even though it was 

designed to amuse. A man delays marriage, Thurber and White observe, because he has 

 
the suspicion that if he waited twenty-four hours, or possibly less, he would likely find a lady even 

more ideally suited to his taste than his fiancée. Every man entertained such a suspicion. 

Entertained it royally. He was greatly strengthened in his belief by the fact that he kept catching a 

fleeting glimpse of this imaginary person  in restaurants, in stores, in trains. To deny the 

possibility of her existence would be, he felt, to do a grave injustice to her, to himself, and to his 

fiancée. (1975, pp. 96-99) 

 

Thurber and White are not canonical philosophers, but Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) is. In 

Fear and Trembling (1983, p. 91), nearly a hundred years before Thurber and White, he had 

similarly written: 

 
A man is bound to one girl whom he once loved or perhaps never loved properly, for he has seen 

another girl who is the ideal. A man makes a mistake in life; it was the right street but the wrong 

house, for directly across the street on the second floor lives the ideal this is supposed to be a 

subject for poetry. A lover has made a mistake, he has seen the beloved by artificial light and 

thought she had dark hair, but look, on close scrutiny she is a blonde but her sister is the ideal. 

This is supposed to be a subject for poetry. In my opinion, any man like that is an impudent young 

pup who can be unbearable enough in life but ought to be hissed off stage. 

 

Where is the difference in their “philosophies” or their approach? Perhaps only that Thurber and 

White make us laugh at ourselves, while Kierkegaard, the solemn Christian, scorns our wayward 

tendencies. 

 

Thurber and White also broach a perennial conundrum, the difference, if any, between 

sexually desiring someone and loving him or her: 

 
At a certain point in every person’s amours, the question arises: “Am I in love, or am I merely 

inflamed by passion?” It is a disturbing question. Usually it arises at some inopportune moment: at 

the start of a letter, in the middle of an embrace, at the end of a day in the country. If the person 

could supply a direct, simple, positive answer -- if he could say convincingly, “I am in love,” or, 



 

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“This is not love, this is passion” -- he would spare himself many hours of mental discomfort. 

Almost nobody can arrive at so simple a reply. (1975, p. 62) 

 

Among plenty of other scholars, the contemporary philosopher J. Martin Stafford takes on this 

challenge (but humorlessly), contrasting, with a “simple reply,” passion and love: love is a 

special affection, involves acts of prolonged care and concern, and includes wanting to spend 

quality time with (and only with) the beloved, while sexual desire is merely an appetite that 

demands satisfaction, at any place and time, and implies nothing about good will toward other 

people (1995, p. 58; see Lesser, 1980). Perhaps this easy answer is right, even though Thurber 

and White are concerned not with conceptual analysis or definitions, but with the phenomenal 

feels of love and sexual desire (which are, they suggest, often indistinguishable). Some 

philosophers will also wonder whether sexual desire might have the ability to generate the 

benevolence that is usually associated with love, and will ask whether it is really true that love 

by its nature is more constant and exclusive than sexual desire (Soble, 1990). 

 

 One more example. Iris Murdoch was formally trained as a philosopher, wrote some 

straight philosophy at the start of her career, and then turned to the novel, where she was a huge 

success. Should Murdoch be included among the canonical philosophers of sex? Probably, even 

though this permits other novelists, for example Philip Roth and Doris Lessing, to enter that elite 

group, if only because Murdoch’s novels are especially philosophical. Look at a passage in The 

Black Prince (1974, pp. 216-17), which contains some reflections of her protagonist, Bradley 

Pearson (a 60-ish intellectual, head-over-heels in love, or lust, with a girl forty years his junior): 

 
The foreverness of real love is one of the reasons why even unrequited love is a source of joy. The 

human soul craves for the eternal of which, apart from certain rare mysteries of religion, only love 

and art can give a glimpse. . . . Love brings with it also a vision of selflessness. How right Plato 

was to think that, embracing a lovely boy, he was on the road to the Good. I say a vision of 

selflessness, because our mixed nature readily degrades the purity of any aspiration. But such 

insight, even intermittent, even momentary, is a privilege and can be of permanent value because 

of the intensity with which it visits us. . . . Why cannot this release from self provide a foothold in 

a new place which we can then colonize and enlarge until at last we will all that is not ourselves? 

That was Plato’s dream. 

 

The lesson is that we would not do badly by paying some attention to literature as we 

explore the history of the philosophy of sex. The psychological issue raised by Murdoch 

creating a high justification 

for his impossible attachment?  we can bequeath to his psychoanalyst. 

 

The Ancient Greeks 

 

Although philosophical discussion of sexuality, narrow-construed, in the West began 

with Plato (427-347 BCE), the poet Sappho (ca. 610-580 BCE), for reasons I’ve explained, 

should not be slighted. Her ideas re-appear in later canonical philosophers: 

 
When I behold thee 

Even a moment; 



 

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Utterance leaves me; 

My tongue is useless; 

A subtle fire 

Runs through my body; 

My eyes are sightless, 

And my ears ringing; 

I flush with fever, 

And a strong trembling 

Lays hold upon me; 

Paler than grass am I, 

Half dead for madness. 

(Carman, 1904, fragment VI) 
 

Sappho is tongued-tied, made catatonic by eros, driven crazy by a glimpse of Beauty. We come 

across this theme often in the history of the philosophy of sex. Eros perennially and ubiquitously 

causes irrational behavior. Why did a U.S. president slink around the White House in search of 

sexual experiences? Why did beautiful Helen take up with handsome Paris, leaving family, child, 

and husband? (Or was she seduced, or abducted? See Homer, Iliad, bk. 3.) Why did Murdoch’s 

Bradley Pearson, although not tongue-tied by eros, fall to his knees, kissing the rug upon which 

his young angel had recently stood? 

 

 Plato’s dialogue Symposium examines eros, which he defined as the passion to possess 

the good and beautiful. The Symposium is provocative and rich, an indispensable foundation for 

studying the philosophy of sex. Although in large measure a great pagan defender of eros, Plato 

was not always kind to the sexual impulse. His writings contain the roots of the later Christian 

antipathy to sexuality. For example, the distinction Plato makes in the dialogue Symposium 

between crude (or vulgar) eros and heavenly (or spiritual) eros, first mentioned by Pausanias 

(who was willing, in Freud’s words [see the epigraph], to “honor even an inferior object”), and 

embellished by the priestess Diotima (who was not willing to do so), encourages us to relinquish 

sexual acts in personal relationships and focus, instead, on morally and intellectually improving 

ourselves and our partners. In contrast to vulgar eros, heavenly eros is free from wantonness, 

lust, or lewdness (Symp. 181c-181d, 185c, 209b-210c). In heavenly eros, “the lover and his 

[mentally beautiful] loved one . . . make virtue their central concern.” In Plato’s Republic (403a-

403b), Socrates tells Glaucon that in “the right kind of love . . . sexual pleasure mustn’t come 

into it, . . .  if they are to love and be loved in the right way.” The same rejection of sexual 

activity is expressed by Plato in his complex dialogue Phaedrus (256b-256c), in which his 

protagonist, Socrates, insists that a pair of genuine lovers pursue virtue. Only when overcome by 

weakness of the will (akrasia) or disinhibited by a cup of wine will they engage in sex: 

 
If the victory goes to the better elements in both their minds, which lead them to follow the 

assigned regimen of philosophy, their life here below is one of bliss. . . . They are modest and fully 

in control of themselves. . . . If, on the other hand, they adopt a lower way of living, with ambition 

in place of philosophy, then pretty soon when they are careless because they have been drinking or 

for some other reason, the pair’s undisciplined horses will catch their souls off guard and together 

bring them to commit that act which ordinary people would take to be the happiest choice of all; 

and when they have consummated it once, they go on doing this for the rest of their lives, but 

sparingly, since they have not approved of what they are doing with their whole minds. 



 

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Knowledge and excellence should be the goal, not fleeting and distracting physical gratification. 

Plato, in both Symposium and Phaedrus, praises male-male love or friendship, and his objection 

to male-male sexuality in Phaedrus seems not to be grounded in its unnaturalness. Instead, any 

sexuality is less valuable than pursuing virtue. The children of sexual intercourse do not have the 

substance, and the immortality, of the children of intellectual discourse. Christian clerics later 

scorned women and marriage for much the same reason. 

 

 Plato worried about sexuality also because he was sensitive to its links with power and 

autonomy. His thoughts about sex eventually become central issues in the political and medical 

discussion of sexuality in the 20th Century (Gould, 2006; Price, 1989; Santas, 1988; Soble, 

1996, pp. 146-148). Plato bemoans the powerful governing influence and even, at times, the 

absolute sovereignty that pursuing sexual pleasure can have on a person’s actions and life. We 

become slaves to passion and subservient to others, a distinct threat to freedom and thus the 

happy life. In the Symposium (183b) Pausanias points out, “In the pursuit of his love . . . the 

lover [may] do many strange things. . . . He may pray, and entreat, and supplicate, and swear, 

and lie on a mat at the door, and endure a slavery worse than that of any slave.” Socrates 

(Phaedrus 252a) similarly observes that 

 
the soul of the lover will never forsake his beautiful one, whom he esteems above all; . . . and he 

thinks nothing of the neglect and loss of his property; the rules and proprieties of life, on which he 

formerly prided himself, he now despises, and [he] is ready to sleep like a servant, wherever he is 

allowed, as near as he can to his desired one, who is the object of his worship. 

 

We can laugh at the adolescent antics, inspired by eros (Becky as Beauty), portrayed in Mark 

Twain’s (1835-1910) Tom Sawyer, or in Giuseppe Tornatore’s 1988 film “Cinema Paradiso.” 

And we can sardonically acknowledge that American television plays the power of adulterous 

sexual passion for all it is worth. Yet the compulsive, destructive desire (Tadzio as Beauty) in 

Thomas Mann’s (1875-1955) Death in Venice is sobering. 

 

Aristotle (384-322 BCE) meditates at great length in his Nicomachean Ethics (books 8 

and 9) about philia, or friendship-love, arguing that genuine friends seek the good for each other 

and improve each other’s virtue. Given his interest in moral-psychological relationships, that 

Aristotle said little about sexuality is surprising. Several passages in his texts, though, are 

noteworthy (Sihvola, 2002). Aristotle understands sexual desire as an appetite, as analogous to 

the appetites for food and drink. Others in the history of the philosophy (Augustine and Kant) 

also conflated sex, eating, and drinking as the same kind of thing, animal appetites. After the 

Greeks, many philosophers and theologians similarly embraced a view of human sexuality that 

put it on the disreputable material side in the divide between mind and flesh. But others, as we 

shall see, disagreed. 

 

Aristotle is also well known for his ethics of moderation. The virtue of temperance is 

concerned with, among other things, the control of the appetites for food, drink, and sex (Geach, 

1977, pp. 131-149; Halwani, 2007). Without reason’s guidance, satisfying the appetites can be 

harmful. Excessive attention to desire is bestial and degrading, because desire belongs to humans 

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0868153/


 

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not qua a rational being but qua animal. Temperant people discover the “mean” between excess 

and deficit in the satisfaction of appetite, avoiding both gluttony and starvation. But Aristotle 

claims, “mistaking on the side of deficiency as regards [sexual] pleasure, and taking less than the 

proper amount of delight in them, does not occur often.” “Such insensitivity is not human” (NE 

1119a6-7). Aristotle, that is, worries more about virtue being undermined by too much sexual 

desire and activity than by too little sexual desire and activity. Plato’s concerns about sexuality 

undermining autonomy and happiness here bear fruit. Indeed, abstaining from sex, far from 

being a deficit-violation of moderation, eventually becomes the holy virtue of chastity in 

Christianity. (In the late 20th Century, the American Psychiatric Association reversed this view, 

proclaiming “hypoactive sexual desire” a mental disorder [DSM-IV 302.71]. But not 

“hyperactive sexual desire” -lived flirtation with “sexual addiction” in DSM-

III-R [1980, p. 296].) 

 

Medieval Theology 

 

After the ancients, St. Augustine (354-430) made a lasting impact on the philosophy of 

sex, so his writings deserve sustained attention. As Plato did, Augustine bemoaned the threat 

posed to individual peace and self-mastery by sexuality: “[Sexual] lust not only takes possession 

of the whole body and outward members, but also makes itself felt within. . . . So possessing . . . 

is this pleasure, that at the moment of time in which it is consummated, all mental activity is 

suspended” (City of God, bk. 14, chap. 16). As the Yiddish joke has it, when the penis steht, the 

brain goes out the window (or “when the penis is hard, the brains are soft”; Silverstein, 1984, p. 

35). Only by the grace of God, says Augustine, can we control our sexuality (Confessions, bk. 

10, chap. 29). Augustine has often been the sexual liberal’s whipping boy, but not without good 

reason. Consider this piece of “sex negativity”: 

 
A man turns to good use the evil of concupiscence . . . when he bridles and restrains its rage . . . 

and never relaxes his hold upon it except when intent on offspring, and then controls and applies it 

to the carnal generation of children . . . not to the subjection of the spirit to the flesh in a sordid 

servitude. (On Marriage and Concupiscence, bk. 1, chap. 9) 

 

Further, it was Augustine who notoriously wrote about married sexual activity carried out only 

for pleasure that in these acts the wife is the man’s harlot and the man is the wife’s adulterous 

lover (OM, bk. 1, chap. 17). 

 

How did Augustine arrive at his philosophy? We must examine it in the context of the 

late 4th and early 5th centuries, when three Christian schools of thought existed. First, the right-

wing extremism of St. Jerome (340/42-420 BCE; educated in Rome, became an ascetic hermit in 

the Holy Land, and produced the Vulgate Bible). Second, the left-wing, even radical, disciples of 

Pelagius (354-ca. 420/440): Julian, Bishop of Eclanum (386-455), and the monk Jovinian (died 

ca. 406), who was excommunicated by Siricius (334-399) in part for arguing that marriage was 

as holy as chastity and that Mary, in giving birth to Jesus, lost her virginity. Third, the 

moderates, Augustine and St. Ambrose (337/340-397), Bishop of Milan, who baptized Augustine 

in 387 (Clark, 1986, 1996; Pagels, 1988; Ranke-Heinemann, 1990). 

 



 

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The matter under dispute was not: Did Adam and Eve have sexual relations before the 

Fall? The consensus, based on Genesis’s silence, was “no.” Instead, a sophisticated hypothetical 

question was hotly debated: if Adam and Eve had not fallen, would they have had sex in Eden? 

Or (nearly equivalently) if Adam and Eve had stayed longer in Eden, would they eventually have 

engaged in sex? And, if they would have engaged in sex, what would their sexual relations have 

been like? The theological methodology presupposed by all parties assumed that in order to 

fashion a Christian sexual ethics, one must understand the pre-Fall (prelapsarian) sexuality of 

Adam and Eve, for they were in the original, ideal state of humanity. What humans living after 

the Fall should do is emulate Adam and Eve. 

 

Jerome argued that had Adam and Eve not fallen, they never would have had sex: all 

sexuality results from the Fall, infected by man’s corrupt postlapsarian nature. Sex was not part 

of God’s plan for humans. Ideally, then, we should abstain. Agreeing with St. Paul’s (ca. 5-64) 

epistle 1 Corinthians 7, Jerome did not fear the disappearance of mundane humans, who in God’s 

script are destined to disappear anyway. For Jerome, the good of postlapsarian marriage was that 

it produced virgins for the Church: “Virginity is to marriage what fruit is to the tree” (Against 

Jovinian; Schaff, 1892, p. 347). Adam and Eve would not have engaged in sex in Eden because 

they were immortal; there was no need for replacement. The commandment in Genesis 1:28, “Be 

fruitful and increase in number,” which God had issued to the animals (1:22), meant something 

else, according to Jerome, when God proclaimed it to Adam and Eve: be spiritually fruitful and 

increase your virtue. 

 

Augustine agreed with Jerome that Genesis 1:28 partly meant that Adam and Eve should 

be spiritually fruitful (Clark, 1986, p. 149), perhaps in Plato’s sense. But Augustine also thought 

that God wanted Adam and Eve to have sex and children in Eden (COG, bk. 14, chap. 21). He 

was not concerned that immortal parents bearing immortal children bearing immortal children 

would cause population or environmental problems for the infinite riches of Paradise. (Nor did 

Paul VI [1897-1955] fear this when he reiterated the Catholic prohibition of contraception is his 

1968 encyclical “Humanae vitae.”) Besides, why did God create Eve? As Mark Twain (2000) 

pondered, in effect, “Why not another guy with whom Adam could shoot hoops?” Augustine saw 

the obvious implications of God’s making Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. Eve was created 

not only to be Adam’s companion but also for human procreation. (A really smart God, though, 

would have given her a hook shot in addition to a uterus.) 

 

Augustine, then, argued against Jerome that prelapsarian Adam and Eve would have had 

sex. God intended sex to exist in the ideal state and not only in our corrupt postlapsarian state. 

What emerged after the Fall was not sexuality itself but spiritually diseased sexuality, even the 

sexuality that occurs in marriage. The driving, enslaving nature of postlapsarian sexuality, its 

demand for pleasure and the frustrations that accompany failure are, for Augustine, part of the 

punishment that Adam and Eve (and all humanity) undergo for disobeying God. Augustine gives 

us a taste of this damnation from his own life: 

 
I came to Carthage, where a cauldron of illicit loves . . . boiled around me. I was not yet in love, 

but I was in love with love. . . . My longing then was to love and to be loved, but most when I 

obtained the enjoyment of the body of the person who loved me. Thus I polluted the stream of 



 

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friendship with the filth of unclean desire and sullied its limpidity with the hell of lust. . . . I did 

fall in love, simply from wanting to. . . . I was loved, and our love came to the bond of 

consummation: I wore my chains with bliss but with torment too, for I was scourged with the red 

hot rods of jealousy, with suspicions and fears and tempers and quarrels. (Conf., bk. 3, chap. 1) 

 

Augustine thought that eventually people should refrain from sex and procreation, not right after 

the Fall but after the proper number of saints had come into existence, which Augustine thought 

had happened by the time of Christ. Unlike Jerome, Augustine had to explain Adam and Eve’s 

not having sex before the Fall. He supposed they did not have enough time, eating the forbidden 

fruit too soon after being created. And notice that God’s command for them to be fruitful did not 

specify any particular time for its fulfillment. 

 

The important result of the Fall was that flesh became ascendant over the will. The flesh 

rebels against human spirit the way Adam and Eve had rebelled against God. One of Augustine’s 

examples of the victory of rebellious flesh is that men often cannot get erections when they want 

one, which is disastrous because they then burn with desire; and men often get erections when 

they do not want one, and are embarrassed by their organ’s uncontrollability (COG, bk. 14, chap. 

16; OM, bk. 1, chap. 7). Echoing Plato’s worry about autonomy, Augustine bemoans the “novel 

disturbance of their disobedient flesh” (COG, bk. 13, chap. 13) as a source of shame: we realize 

we cannot control our bodies. ED is not a psychiatric or medical, but a spiritual, disorder. 

 

Augustine’s battle with the Pelagians required more energy. Julian agreed that pre-Fall 

Adam and Eve would have had sex. But he painted a different (and wholesome, from a modern 

perspective) picture of their mutual sexual desire: it was innocent, divinely blessed, and the 

“vital fire” of their relationship (Pagels, 1988, p. 141). Adam and Eve would have rejoiced in 

both procreation and the pleasures of sex. For Julian, what happens to sexuality after the Fall is 

not that it comes into existence (Jerome) or that it becomes corrupt concupiscence (Augustine), 

but that it is troubled with what troubles us today: adultery, promiscuity, prostitution. Julian 

believed that sexual acts should be confined to faithful, heterosexual marriage (as in prelapsarian 

Adam and Eve) and rejects other sexualities. Within marriage, though, sex may be, without guilt 

and reservation, as exciting as the spouses could make it. His conclusion might have been 

inspired by St. Paul’s pastoral advice that conjugal sexuality should be as gratifying as possible 

in order to succeed as a “remedy against sin” (1 Cor. 7:5), for example, to nip adultery in the 

bud. (In John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the sexual relations between Adam and Eve were so 

blissful [2000, bk. IV, line 509] that the Devil “with jealous leer malign Eyed them” as they were 

“imparadised in one another’s arms” [503-505].) 

 

Not so Augustine. Before the Fall, mind is in control. The operation of the sexual organs 

would have been voluntary, Adam’s penis erecting from his willful (God-like) command for it to 

rise, as if he were lifting an arm (COG, bk. 14, chap. 16). Adam never suffered from Masters and 

Johnson’s sexual dysfunctions. But he would not have erected by seeing Eve’s body or smelling 

her (COG, bk. 14, chap. 10). Sex in Eden would have known no arousing teasing, no conjugal 

seduction, no dancing to get in the mood:  

 
Away . . . with the thought, that before there was any sin, there should already have been 



 

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committed . . . the very sin which our Lord warns us against . . . : “Whosoever looks on a woman 

to lust after her, has committed adultery with her already in his heart.” [Matthew 5:28] As happy . . 

. as were these our first parents, who were agitated by no mental perturbations, and annoyed by no 

bodily discomforts, so happy should the whole human race have been, had they not introduced that 

evil which they have transmitted to their posterity. (COG, bk. 14, chap. 26) 

 

Because prelapsarian sex occurs with a tranquil mind, controlled by the will, “those organs 

would have been moved . . . without passion or the pricklings of allurement” (COG, bk. 14, 

chap. 26). Passion was absent, so the excitement and pleasures of sex (as postlapsarian humans 

know them) would also be absent. Yes, prelapsarian Adam and Eve would have had sex, by 

deciding out of love for God to fulfill His command to multiply. (Like thinking about the Queen 

and doing it for the glory of the empire.) But prelapsarian sex would have been only as 

pleasurable as any other voluntary movement of the body a handshake or hug. No ecstatic 

“Oh, God!” in Eden. 

 

Augustine’s philosophy of sex is explained by his account of prelapsarian sexuality, 

which provides the model that humans should emulate: sex must be confined to marriage, its sole 

purpose is procreation, and spouses must not seek sexual pleasure for its own sake. Augustine 

was indebted to Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150-215), who thought (the “Alexandrian Rule”) 

that sexual acts in marriage were virtuous only if done for procreation (Pagels, 1988, p. 29, citing 

Stromata 3:57-58). Married couples should even minimize the pleasure that accompanies sex 

(say, by keeping their clothes on, turning out the lights, and getting the act over with as quickly 

as possible). Consistently, Augustine denounced contraception. If conception is prevented “by 

wrong desire or evil appliance,” spouses “are really not” husband and wife. Their “criminal 

conduct” in blocking conception (or aborting a fetus) means “they have not come together so 

much by holy wedlock as by abominable debauchery” (OM, bk. 1, chap. 17). Given Augustine’s 

conflation of sex and other bodily functions, his criticism of somatic pleasure was general. As a 

bishop, he was susceptible to lustful thoughts and dreams (Conf., bk. 10, chap. 30); he wrung his 

hands over pleasures of eating, because he was caught by food in “the snare of concupiscence” 

(Conf. 10.31); and he was even haunted by the pleasure of hearing beautiful music (Conf., bk. 

10, chaps. 33-34). The lure of Jerome’s asceticism was not lost on Augustine. 

 

A slightly less negative account of sexuality was elaborated by the theologian St. Thomas 

Aquinas (1224/25-1274). Tutored by Albertus Magnus (1206?-1280), who also merged Aristotle 

with Christianity, Aquinas formulated in the mid-13th Century a Natural Law theory of 

sexuality, in his stupendous Summa theologiae, which became the authoritative foundation of 

Catholic teaching (by AAeterni patris,@ Pope Leo XIII's 1879 encyclical). Heterosexual coitus 
results from a natural inclination implanted by God and in the act the sexual organs fulfill their 

natural, God-designed purpose (Summa contra gentiles, bk. III, pt., chap. 126). Aquinas 

concedes that sexual pleasure is good because God created it. But sexual pleasure, like 

everything God creates, has its purpose and rightful use. (Aquinas’s teleological, Aristotelian 

ontology is like the evolutionary view, now discredited, that every part of a biological organism 

must have resulted from natural selection, that is, was advantageous for survival and 

reproduction.) Sexual pleasure was planned by God to accompany sexual acts that contribute to 

His ongoing work of creation. Aquinas was replying, in advance, to the playwright Arthur 



 

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Miller’s (1915-2005) joke about Augustine’s description of Adam and Eve in Eden: 

 
Eve is bent over from the waist, examining . . . a turtle. [Adam's] attention is caught by her raised 

buttocks, and he approaches, halts, and stares  then looks off, puzzled by an idea he can't quite 

form in his mind. Giving it up, he asks . . . “You want to play volleyball?” (1973, p. 18) 

 

By postulating that humans, like animals, have a natural inclination for intercourse, Aquinas 

overcomes the Adam and Eve’s willingness to obey God’s command to be 

fruitful, in the absence of the sexual pleasure of a natural inclination, be sufficient motive for 

them to engage in procreative sexual activity? And how would they know what to do? 

 

Still, for Aquinas, seeking sexual pleasure is not sinful only if pursued during conjugal 

sexual acts that are procreative in form, otherwise the sexual organs and the pleasure are being 

misused in a way inconsistent with God’s plan. Aquinas argues in part for his view about the 

nature of human sexuality on the basis of the sexuality of lower animals, especially monogamous 

birds (SCG, bk. III, pt. 2, chap. 122, §6). Perhaps he should have taken a better look at the 

variety of sexual lifestyles among the lower animals. What if Aquinas had argued from dogs and 

cats to humans? He might also have taken a better look at human anatomy. As the feminist 

theologian Christine Gudorf remarks, “If the placement of the clitoris in the female body reflects 

the divine will, then God wills that sex is not just oriented to procreation, but is at least as, if not 

more, oriented to pleasure as to procreation” (1994, p. 65)  for women, anyway. “If anything 

served . . . as an argument for the existence of God, . . . it was the thousands upon thousands of 

orgasms dancing on the head of that pin [,] . . . a gift to each and every little girl from God. All 

hail the Maker, a generous . . . guy with a real soft spot for women” (Roth, 1996, p. 434). So 

goes a novelist’s version of “intelligent design.” 

 

Applying Aristotle’s virtue of temperance to sex, Aquinas insists that sexual pleasure 

must be pursued “ordinately,” not “inordinately.” As in Aristotle, “inordinately” means “in 

excess” and does not imply “less than is proper.” Despite acknowledging God’s creation of a 

natural inclination in humans for sexual intercourse, Aquinas agrees with Augustine on another 

matter, contrasting the calm sexual relations of prelapsarian Adam and Eve (ST Ia, ques. 98, art. 

2) with the “violent” sexuality of animals (which is the word Augustine employs to describe 

postlapsarian human coitus [COG, bk. 14, chap. 26]). Yet, as if tipping his hat to the Pelagians, 

Aquinas says that prelapsarian sexual pleasure would have been better, even if not a vital fire: 

“the pleasure of sense would have been all the greater, given the greater purity of man’s nature 

and sensibility of his body.” (This is similar to Wilhelm Reich’s view [see below] that sexual 

relations would be more enjoyable in the paradise of communism.) Aquinas adds, however, that 

“the pleasure urge would not have squandered itself in so disorderly a fashion on this sort of 

pleasure when it was ruled by reason” (ST Ia, ques. 98, art. 2, reply 3). What was on Adam and 

Eve’s daily schedule or routine from which they would be distracted by inordinate, squandering 

sex? Naming the animals? Unlike later theologians who avoided sex by holding study groups on 

retreats, Adam and Eve had no Talmud or scripture to ponder, nor could they devote themselves 

to Plato’s “assigned regimen of philosophy.” And because they had not yet fallen, what was 

there to accomplish by engaging in Jerome’s spiritual procreation? 

 



 

 11 

The most provocative, even notorious, judgments Aquinas made about human sexuality 

derive from his Natural Law ethics (ST IIaIIae, ques. 154, arts. 1-12). He distinguishes between 

two kinds of “sin of lechery.” In one kind, “the act of its nature is incompatible with the purpose 

of the sex-act. In so far as generation is blocked, we have unnatural vice, which is any complete 

sex-act from which of its nature generation cannot follow.” Aquinas provides four examples: 

 
First, outside intercourse when an orgasm is procured for the sake of venereal pleasure; this 

belongs to the sin of self-abuse. . . . Second, by intercourse with a thing of another species, and 

this is called bestiality. Third, with a person of the same sex . . . and this is called sodomy. Fourth, 

if the natural style of intercourse is not observed, as regards the proper organ[s]. 

 

In such acts, procreative organs (and nonprocreative organs, in oral and anal sex) are misused, 

contrary to their God-given design and purpose, for the goal is sexual pleasure alone, apart from 

procreation. Notice that Aquinas talks here about “complete” (ejaculatory) sexual acts, thereby 

focusing on the penis. He does not want the seed wasted by its going elsewhere than into the 

“proper vessel,” the vagina. (Hebrew theology of unnatural sex is similar; see Epstein, 1948, pp. 

132-147.) Aquinas assembles these four vices into a hierarchy of sinfulness. “To compare 

unnatural sins of lechery, the lowest rank is held by solitary sin. . . . The greatest is that of 

bestiality, which does not observe the due species. . . . Afterwards comes sodomy, which does 

not observe due sex. After this is the lechery which does not observe the due mode of 

intercourse.” Masturbation is at the bottom of the list, but it is still unnatural and sinful. 

 

 In the second kind of sin of lechery, “the nature of the act with respect to the other party” 

is sinful. Among Aquinas’s examples are heterosexual incest, heterosexual adultery, 

heterosexual rape, and a man’s seduction of a female virgin who lives in her father’s house. 

These acts can be procreative (in form), so they are not unnatural. They are sinful because they 

violate a justified social morality in which harming others is a moral wrong. To a great extent 

though, the property rights that men have over women are violated, for Aquinas, in adultery and 

seduction. This is the kind of philosophy that made rape in marriage legally unthinkable in the 

West for so long. 

 

Aquinas constructs another hierarchy, between the two types of sin of lechery. “Since . . . 

unnatural vice flouts nature by transgressing its basic principles of sexuality, it is in this matter 

the gravest of sins.” Bestiality, same-sex acts, heterosexual variations, and masturbation are 

cardinal sins, while incest, adultery, rape, and seduction are only venial. Aquinas replies to an 

imaginary interlocutor who argues (with a contemporary ring, sounding like Jeremy Bentham 

and J. S. Mill; see below) that unnatural sex is not the morally worst. “The more a sin is against 

charity,” the interlocutor pleads, “the worse it is. . . . [A]dultery and seduction and rape harm our 

neighbour, whereas unnatural lust injures nobody else, and accordingly is not the worst.” But 

Aquinas tries to refute this reasonable argument, insisting that unnatural sexual vice, including 

masturbation, is “the gravest of sins” and worse than rape, adultery, and so forth. The unnatural 

sins of lechery violate the design of God’s creation and are an “affront to God.” Those people 

who commit them snub their noses at the Lord and impugn His wisdom, whereas committing 

rape, seduction, or adultery violates only “the developed plan of living according to reason” that 

“comes from man.” The interlocutor’s questions -- If unnatural sexual acts are engaged in by 



 

 12 

consenting adults and harm no one, how could they be wrong? Isn’t rape wrong precisely 

because it is involuntary by force or otherwise lacks consent? --  are still much debated today. 

(For a comprehensive account of medieval sexual philosophy, see Brundage, 1987.) 

 

Modern Philosophy through the 19th Century 

 

After the medieval scholastics, from 1550 through the late 1800s, a stream of colorful 

philosophers wrote about sexuality. Michel Montaigne (1533-1592) was well known for his 

skeptical epistemological philosophy (we can know nothing) and for his essay “On Friendship,” 

which contains this famous line about his relationship with Étienne de La Boétie: “If you press 

me to tell why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed, except by answering: Because it 

was he, because it was I” (Essays, p. 139). In the essay “Of the Power of the Imagination,” 

Montaigne elegantly repeats Augustine’s biomedical point: “People are right to notice the unruly 

liberty of this member, obtruding so importunately when we have no use for it, and failing so 

importunately when we have the most use for it, and struggling for mastery so imperiously with 

our will, refusing with so much pride and obstinacy our solicitations, both mental and manual” 

(Essays, p. 72). We are left to decide the relative impudence of Adam’s disobeying God and the 

penis’s disobeying postlapsarian Adam. 

 

Not much later, the French rationalist philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650), whose 

often misunderstood “cogito, sum” (“I think, I am” — no “therefore”) was intended to refute 

skepticism, including Montaigne’s, by displaying some things we can know. Descartes asserted 

about sexuality that 

 
Although we see many persons of the opposite sex, yet we do not desire many at one time. . . . But 

when we observe something in one of them which is more attractive than anything we observe at 

that moment in others, this determines our soul to feel towards that one alone all the inclination 

which nature gives it to pursue the good which it represents as the greatest we could possess. 

(Philosophical Writings, p. 360) 

 

Sexual desire is exclusive (serially) by its nature, for “at that moment” we cannot desire another 

person. Descartes, unlike Augustine, drew a distinction between sexual desire and the desires to 

eat and drink, for we rarely think that the desire we have for the steak on the menu could not be 

satisfied by any plate of steak to come from the kitchen. This feeling that the object of our sexual 

desire cannot be replaced might be illusory (but see Roger Scruton, below). Note that Descartes 

says only that nature “represents” this good, that is, embracing the object of our attention, “as the 

greatest we could possess,” suggesting (an idea elaborated by Schopenhauer; see below) that 

what we think is for our good is not, after all, for our good. 

 

 Across the channel, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1678) wrote his 1651 masterpiece, Leviathan. 

In light of its most famous passage (§1.13), we could speculate that Hobbes believed that sexual 

encounters were “nasty, brutish, and short” unless you were “poor,” in which case they would 

surely be “solitary.” Hobbes wrote little about sexuality, but one provocative exception is this 

passage from his Human Nature: 

 



 

 13 

The appetite which men call lust, and the fruition that appertaineth thereunto, is a sensual pleasure, 

but not only that; there is in it also a delight of the mind: for it consisteth of two appetites together, 

to please, and to be pleased; and the delight men take in delighting, is not sensual, but a pleasure 

or joy of the mind consisting in the imagination of the power they have so much to please. (§9.15) 

 

Hobbes, too, denies Augustine’s resemblance among the desires for sex, food, and drink, for on 

his account sexual desire is a compound composed of two distinct desires, a desire to be pleased 

by the other person and (surprisingly) a coexistent desire to please the other person. The latter 

desire has no analogue in eating and drinking; as Aristotle says, having good will toward a jug of 

wine is “ridiculous” and at best vicarious shorthand for anticipating that we will enjoy drinking it 

(NE 1155b29-30). Hobbes does not develop his thesis, but at least one contemporary philosopher 

has championed it (Blackburn, 2004, pp. 87-88), making Hobbes a hero for theorizing that 

sexual desire has this dualistic nature. (Contrast Goldman’s [1977] monistic account of sexual 

desire, as a desire exclusively for one’s own sexual pleasure.) Blackburn’s praise, however, 

overlooks the sinister implications of what Hobbes actually says, that a person wants to please 

the other person because doing so confirms one’s sexual powers (a masculine performance 

principle?), not because it makes the other person happy and not even because it adds to one’s 

sensual pleasure. Hobbes apparently thinks that these motives are characteristic of humanity both 

in civil society and in the pre-social State of Nature, which yields a different picture of sexuality 

in Eden: Adam not as Everyman, but as Macho Man. 

 

During the 1700s, David Hume (1711-1776) and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) weighed 

in, well before Thurber and White but without their humor, on the issue of the relationship 

between sexual desire and love. In a chapter of his Treatise of Human Nature entitled “Of the 

amorous passion, or love betwixt the sexes” (bk. II, pt. ii, chap. 11), Hume claimed that 

 
love, which arises betwixt the sexes . . . , is deriv’d from the conjunction of three different 

impressions or passions[:] The pleasing sensation arising from beauty; the bodily appetite for 

generation; and a generous kindness or good-will. 

 

About these three “impressions” or “passions” from which love is “derived,” Hume asserts that 

“there arises such a connexion betwixt the sense [perception] of beauty, the bodily appetite, and 

benevolence, that they become in a manner inseparable.” Remarkably, these three features of the 

amorous passion are, once they come together, “inseparable” even though, as Hume readily 

acknowledges, sexual desire (the “appetite for generation”) and benevolence (“generous 

kindness”) are “too remote [by their natures] to unite easily.” Why, though, are sexual desire and 

benevolence too disparate to be joined? 

 

Kant had an answer: “True human love . . . admits of no distinction between types of 

persons, or between young and old. . . . Human love is goodwill, affection, promoting the 

happiness of others and finding joy in their happiness” (Lectures, Ak 27:384). Here Kant is 

describing the generous kindness component of Hume’s amorous passion. This benevolence is so 

different from sexual desire that they cannot be joined. On Kant’s view, passion 

 
that springs . . . from sexual impulse cannot be love at all, but only appetite. . . . [I]t is clear that, 



 

 14 

when a person [wants] . . . another . . . from sexual desire, none of these factors [the benevolence] 

enter into [it]. . . . Sexual [desire] . . . makes of the [desired] . . . person an Object of appetite. . . . 

[A]s soon as a person becomes an object of appetite for another, all motives of moral relationship 

cease to function, because as an object of appetite for another a person becomes a thing. (Lectures, 

Ak 27:384-385) 

 

Indeed, for Kant, it is not merely that sexual desire and benevolence cannot be combined; the 

latter “deter[s] one from carnal enjoyment” (Metaphysics of Morals, Ak 6:426). Kant, returning 

to Plato’s sharp contrast between vulgar and heavenly eros, is repeating Augustine’s Christian 

thesis about love: “Whoever loves another as himself ought to love that in him which is his real 

self. Our real selves are not bodies. . . . Human nature is to be loved . . . without any condition of 

carnal relationship” (O’Connell, 1969, p. 111). Again we are confronted by the divide between 

mind (love) and flesh (sex). 

 

Hume proposed that benevolence and sexual desire could be joined together by the third 

ingredient of the amorous passion: “beauty is plac’d in a just medium betwixt them, and partakes 

of both their natures: From whence it proceeds, that ‘tis so singularly fitted to produce both.” 

This thesis is a curious (or fascinating) piece of Hume’s account of the relationships among the 

three components of the amorous passion. Hume observes that the amorous passion, the mixture 

of the three, can arise in different ways. A person might feel benevolence toward another person, 

from which both sexual desire and an appreciation of the other’s beauty result. Sensing beauty in 

another because one has generous kindness toward him or her is not psychologically unusual. (It 

is similar to God’s agape, in which God bestows value on humans in virtue of His loving them.) 

But to claim that feeling benevolence toward another person is a reliable cause of feeling sexual 

desire for him or her is implausible. Hume realizes this and admits that rarely does the amorous 

passion arise in this fashion. Instead, most cases of the amorous passion begin by one person’s 

appreciating another’s beauty, which causes both benevolence and sexual desire. (How both, is 

the puzzle.) Hume, having his feet on solid everyday ground, also sees that the relationship 

between beauty and sexual desire is sometimes the reverse: when we are already feeling sexual 

desire (that is, when we are horny), we reach the judgment that the object of our attention is 

more beautiful than he or she really is. A martini, too, can make us inflate the merits of the 

object, as Freud might have put it. 

 

Kant was apparently disgusted by sexuality, for he alleged that after we are satisfied by a 

sexual act we discard our partner like a lemon we have sucked dry (Lectures, Ak 27:384). Maybe 

this is why he denied, in contrast to contemporary liberal Kantian philosophers (Mappes, 2007), 

that as long as competent adults give their consent, their sexual activity is morally permissible. 

Recall that, for Kant, “as an object of [sexual] appetite for another a person becomes a thing 

(Lectures, Ak 27:385). Using another person as an object, which is inherent to sexual activity, 

can be overcome, for Kant, only in marriage (Lectures, Ak 27:388; see Herman, 1993; Soble, 

2001). If this philosophy of sex weren’t grim enough, Kant, despite being an Enlightenment 

thinker, developed a philosophical view of sexual perversion strikingly similar to Aquinas’s 

medieval account (Lectures, Ak 27:391-392; see Denis, 1999; Soble, 2003). Those who engage 

in the crimina carnis contra naturam (masturbation, same-sex sexual activity, bestiality) treat 

themselves as objects and “degrade human nature to a level below that of animal nature and 



 

 15 

make man unworthy of his humanity.” Kant, though, has an interesting view of Adam and Eve: 

 
In the case of animals, sexual attraction is merely a matter of transient, mostly periodic impulse. 

But man soon discovered that for him this attraction can be prolonged and even increased by 

means of the imagination. . . . By means of the imagination, he discovered, the surfeit was avoided 

which goes with the satisfaction of mere animal desire. The fig leaf . . . was a far greater 

manifestation of reason than that shown in the earlier stage of development. (“Conjectural 

Beginning of Human History,” 56-57) 

 

Today, Kant’s philosophy has been mined by feminists and others who criticize the sexual 

objectification of women in rape, sexual harassment, prostitution, and pornography (see, for 

example, Estes, 2008; Nussbaum, 1995). His notion of the wrongfulness in itself of treating a 

person in sexuality as an object, as a thing to be used, again implies, in contrast to liberal sexual 

ethics, that the presence of consent is too weak to justify much sexual behavior. 

 

In the first half of the 19th Century, the Danish Christian-existentialist philosopher Søren 

Kierkegaard, using his playful pseudonyms to good effect, made many provocative observations 

and counter-observations about sexuality. Some are fun to contemplate (even if obscure), which 

shows that he could often be as amusing as Thurber and White: 

 
If it is ridiculous to kiss an ugly girl, it also is ridiculous to kiss a pretty one, and the notion that 

doing a thing one way is any justification for laughing at a person who does it another way is 

nothing more than superciliousness and a complot. (Stages on Life’s Way, p. 54) 

 

Insightfully, he wrote, “When two people fall in love with each other and sense that they are 

destined for each other, it is a question of having the courage to break it off, for by continuing 

there is only everything to lose, nothing to gain” (“The Rotation Method of Crops,” Either/Or, 

Vol. 1, p. 298). He followed this with the counterargument (using a different pseudonym) that 

erotic love and marriage are, after all, compatible (“The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage,” E/O, 

Vol. 2). We also find this contrary repetitive gem: “Marry, and you will regret it. Do not marry, 

you will also regret it. Marry or do not marry, you will regret it either way. Whether you marry 

or do not marry, you will regret it either way” (“Diapsalmata,” E/O, Vol. 1, p. 138). As Kant did, 

but more poetically, the mature Kierkegaard emphasized that eros and Christian agape were 

incompatible: “All pleasure is selfish. The pleasure of the lover . . . is not selfish with respect to 

the loved one, but in union they are both absolutely selfish, inasmuch as in union and in love 

they constitute one self” (Stages, p. 56). As a result, “The more securely the two I’s come 

together to become one I,” the more in loving each other, they love only themselves (Works of 

Love, p. 68). 
 

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), anticipating Darwin’s 

evolutionary biology and Freud’s psychoanalysis, painted a bleak picture of the human 

condition. Plato warned us, in the Symposium, that what we think (consciously) we want in our 

erotic affairs is not really what we want. Eros, our yearning desire for attractive bodies and 

excellent minds, is really eros for an Ideal Beauty that is barely represented by the objects of our 

attachment (211a). We think happiness will result from relationships with beautiful people, but 

we are dissatisfied. Plato means that we eventually tire of the repetition of earthly beauty and 



 

 16 

that it is fleeting and fragile, whether physical or mental. Dissatisfied with ordinary beauty, we 

search for an other-worldly Ideal Beauty. An optimist, Plato thought we could succeed in this 

quest. For Augustine, similarly, the search for the ideal is hidden beneath our erotic loves: 

 
I had not yet fallen in love, but I was in love with the idea of it. . . . I began to look around for 

some object for my [romantic] love. . . . Although my real need was for you, my God, . . . I was 

not aware of this hunger. (Conf., bk. 3, chap. 1) 

 

Augustine, too, was an optimist. We should seek, however, the personal Christian God, not Ideal 

Beauty, Plato’s inanimate universal. 

 

In Schopenhauer’s vision, the beauty of the object of sexual desire is nature’s way of 

tricking a man into thinking that satisfying his erotic desires is for his own individual good. To 

the contrary, sexual love benefits only the species, for the good of which nature makes use of us, 

causing us to give up, irrationally, fortune and freedom to attain our erotic goals (recall Plato’s 

“neglect and loss and property”): 

 
Nature can attain her end only by implanting in the individual a certain delusion, and by virtue of 

this, that which in truth is merely a good thing for the species seems to him to be a good thing for 

himself. . . . It is a voluptuous delusion which leads a man to believe that he will find a greater 

pleasure in the arms of a woman whose beauty appeals to him than in those of any other . . . [and] 

firmly convinces him that her possession will afford boundless happiness. Accordingly, he 

imagines he is making efforts and sacrifices for his own enjoyment, whereas he is doing so merely 

for the maintenance of . . . the species. (The World as Will, pp. 538, 540) 

 

Note the twist that Schopenhauer puts on the Christian view of marital parenthood as being our 

contribution to God’s ongoing creative project. For Schopenhauer, evolution resorts to deceptive 

beauty to enlist the aid of otherwise reluctant humans in nature’s creative scheme. Why do we 

have to be tricked into having sex? Sex is burdensome: pursuing a mate uses resources and the 

act produces children we then have to care for. Further, the “sense of beauty . . . directs the 

sexual impulse, and [is that] without which this impulse sinks to the level of a disgusting need” 

(World, p. 539). As in Kant and Augustine, sexuality is disgusting, so we must be cajoled into it. 

 

Also in the early 19th Century, Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), relying on his utilitarian 

ethics (which tells us to aim always for the “greatest good of the greatest number”), defended 

consensual same-sex sexual activity, on the grounds that it produced pleasure and had no 

damaging or dangerous social effects. Bentham’s “An Essay on ‘Paederasty’,” however, was not 

published during his lifetime; indeed, it did not appear in print until 1978. The essay, then, could 

not have been of any benefit to persecuted homosexuals in 19th-century England. Later in the 

century, Bentham’s student, John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), writing in an unreceptive Victorian 

climate, announced at the beginning of his Subjection of Women that “the principle which 

regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes -- the legal subordination of one sex 

to the other -- is wrong . . . [and] ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality.” Mill’s 

feminist credentials are not in doubt. But he wrote little about sex, unlike contemporary 

feminists, for whom it is frequently the main issue (for example, MacKinnon [1987] on rape, 

pornography, and prostitution). 



 

 17 

In On Liberty, Mill relies on several sexual examples to illustrate the application of his 

utilitarian moral theory. He finds Mormon polygyny disagreeable, yet argues that the consent of 

the women to the arrangement is what counts (OL, chap. 4). Feminists wish that Mill had probed 

deeper into the authenticity of their consent. Mill contends that “fornication” must be tolerated, 

when it is consensual and harms no one, and that houses of prostitution should not be prohibited 

but only regulated: “they may be compelled to conduct their operations with a certain degree of 

secrecy and mystery, so that nobody knows anything about them but those who seek them” (OL, 

chap. 5). Don’t ask, don’t tell. Mill praises and defends extensive social and legal liberty that 

would allow and even encourage “experiments in living” (OL, chap. 3), but he did not draw out 

the obvious implication about the value of a plurality of sexual lifestyles. Mill’s formulation of 

utilitarianism remains popular today, among philosophers, along with the ethics of Kant’s 

Categorical Imperative and Aristotelian virtue theory. These three dominate the secular scene in 

normative philosophy of sex, while Augustine and Aquinas are still strongly influential in 

theological circles. 

 

As was Mill, Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1893) were centrally 

concerned with economic and political questions. Contemporary feminism owes to Marx and 

Engels the idea that prostitution and marriage are not very different. A married woman “differs 

from the ordinary courtesan [only] in that she does not let out her body on piece-work as a wage 

earner, but sells it once and for all into slavery” (Engels, Origin of the Family, Private Property, 

and the State, p. 82; see also Emma Goldman’s 1917 “The Traffic in Women”). In their jointly 

written Communist Manifesto (p. 72), Marx and Engels assert that communism (the abolition of 

private ownership of the means of production) would release women from “prostitution, both 

public and private,” from both streetwalking and loveless marriages contracted out of economic 

necessity. What was wrong with prostitution provided Marx with insight into the defects of 

capitalism: “Prostitution is only a particular expression of the universal prostitution of the 

worker.” His further point is that 

 
Money, inasmuch as it possesses the property of being able to buy everything . . . is the object 

most worth possessing. . . . I am ugly, but I can buy the most beautiful woman. Which means . . . 

that I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness, its repelling power, is destroyed by money. 

 

In the transaction by which the bourgeois male acquires his trophy wife, “Money is the pimp 

between need and object” (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, pp. 133, 165). Marx and 

Engels’s dislike of philosophy and their Victorian attitude toward sexuality are revealed in this 

morsel: “Philosophy and the study of the actual world have the same relation to one another as 

masturbation and sexual love” (German Ideology, p. 103). Disparaging metaphors are often used 

to describe philosophy (“head in the clouds navel-picking”) but comparing it with masturbation 

is double-edged. As Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders announced in 1994, thereby precipitating 

her removal from the Clinton administration, masturbation is safe sex and avoids pregnancy 

(Elders, 1997; Soble, 2006). And while you are reading this philosophical essay, you’re keeping 

out of trouble. 

 

 



 

 18 

The Early 20th Century 

 

Amidst the psychoanalytic twist in psychology, the linguistic turn in philosophy, and the 

advance of evolutionary theory, came an outpouring of sometimes shocking inquiries into sex. 

 

It began with Sigmund Freud’s (1856-1939) Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality 

(1905), which challenged dominant beliefs about children’s sexual innocence and the innateness 

of heterosexuality. His theoretical advance was distinguishing among the sexual instinct (libido), 

the aim of the sexual instinct, and the instinct’s object. An instinct’s aim is the state or condition 

it seeks, while its objects are the items in the world it uses to attain that state. The food instinct 

aims to appease an unpleasant feeling, hunger, and to get nutrition; its objects are edible portions 

of the world. Sex, too, involves an instinct, but it is different. (Freud, to a small extent, broke 

away from the Augustinian conflation of sex, eating, and drinking.) The objects of the food 

instinct are determined by the instinct. Only certain parts of the world -- a genuine hamburger, 

not a menu’s picture of a hamburger, nor a fantasized hamburger -- satisfy the drive. The 

instinct, the aim, and the object are locked. Not so for sexuality. There is no analogue in hunger 

and eating to getting pleasure by masturbating with sexual fantasy; it is masturbation (childhood 

autoerotism, especially) that blows apart the theoretical lock among instinct, aim, and object. In 

sexuality, says Freud, the sexual instinct and its objects are “merely [that is, artificially] soldered 

together” (Three Essays, p. 148). The aim is sensual, bodily, pleasure, and its objects are nearly 

limitless. The hungry, crying child, when given milk, survives; given other fluids (engine oil), it 

dies. But a child wanting sensory pleasure can be touched or rubbed by many things to achieve 

somatic pleasure: males, females, rugs, animals, its own thumb. Hence children, as Freud says, 

are polymorphously perverse. Which of the objects in the world that are eventually preferred for 

pleasure by a person is determined by his or her psychobiography. Hence, for Freud, “Why are 

there homosexuals?” is the wrong question. The task, that is, is explain not only homosexuality 

but also heterosexuality. As soon as the sexual instinct and its objects are kept distinct, no basis 

exists for a Thomistic anatomical or physiological criterion of unnatural sex. Homosexuality is 

off that hook; it is not unnatural merely because it is not reproductive. The criteria of perversion 

must be, instead, psychological, and hence more complex (Neu, 1991). The American 

Psychiatric Association admitted this in the mid-1970s, when it excluded homosexuality per se 

from DSM (Soble, 2004). 

 

The British philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) also caused a stir. His Marriage 

and Morals (1929) mixed a prescient and formidable feminism (he was an outspoken activist for 

the equality of women) with a utilitarian criticism of marital sexual fidelity  a defense of what 

we now call “open marriage.” Marriage and Morals was, for some, a lecherous book, and cost 

Russell an appointment at the City University of New York. Yet “so much of what [Russell] . . . 

called for . . . has been achieved by the sexual revolution and the feminist movement that I 

suppose no one reads [Marriage and Morals] . . . any more” (Nagel, 2002, p. 65). On Russell’s 

view, “sexual relations should be a mutual delight, entered into solely from the spontaneous 

impulse of both parties.” This seems tame, although Russell employed the principle to justify 

honest adultery. His main purpose was to condemn a common motive for sex different from 

mutual delight and spontaneous impulse: “the intrusion of the economic motive into sex is . . . 



 

 19 

disastrous.” Russell opposed not only blatant commercial prostitution but also the more subtle 

conjugal sex that took place only because wives were economically dependent on husbands. 

Russell, maybe hyperbolically but consistent with some feminism (Morgan, 1977, pp. 163-169), 

asserted that “the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in 

marriage than in prostitution.” This shows how marxist Russell was, or how liberal Marx and 

Engels were. 

 

Then, during the thick of World War II, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) wrote Being and 

Nothingness. Buried in this thick metaphysical treatise is a section on sexuality, as a central case 

of human attitudes. Sartre proclaimed that the battle of the sexes was the tip of an iceberg that 

would have frozen even the hard-nosed Hobbes: 

 
Sadism and masochism are the two reefs on w

troubled disturbance toward an appropriation of the Other’s flesh or, intoxicated with my own 

trouble, pay attention only to my flesh and ask nothing of the Other except that he should be the 

look which aids me in realizing my flesh. It is because of this inconstancy on the part of desire and 

its perpetual oscillation between these two perils that “normal” sexuality is commonly designated 

as “sadistic-masochistic.” (BN, pt. 3, chap. 3, sect. 2) 

 

Reaching back to G.W.F. Hegel’s (1770-1831) account of the “master-slave” relationship 

(Phenomenology of Spirit, §§178-196), Sartre theorized that in sexual interactions one person 

always desires to capture the freedom of another. That endeavor is doomed to fail or to shoot 

itself in the foot. For if we capture the other’s freedom, we see that our victory is nugatory; we 

have nothing significant left to dominate or control. Soon after Being and Nothingness came The 

Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), Sartre’s companion and lover, which expressed 

primordial yet fertile feminist accounts of sex and gender: “One is not born, but rather becomes, 

a woman” (p. 267), she famously wrote, emphasizing that culture played a more important role 

in the formation of gender than biology. Beauvoir’s essay “Must We Burn Sade?” helped garner 

for the Divine Marquis a scholarly appreciation, at least among French scholars. Of some interest 

to historians is that Sartre and Beauvoir’s relationship was like the open, honest infidelity 

advocated by Russell. Depending on which biographer is consulted, this bold (Millian) 

experiment in living was either a mediocre success or a miserable failure, causing much anguish 

to Simone. Still, they share a tomb in Paris. 

 

Coming before and after the existentialists Sartre and Beauvoir were a number of radical 

social and political philosophers, including Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), Herbert Marcuse (1898-

1979), and members of the Frankfurt School. Reich and Marcuse thought that Marxism, which 

lacked a psychological “branch,” was as a result theoretically insufficient for understanding 

economic and political history. Hence they blended Freudian psychoanalysis with Marxism to 

liberate human sexuality from oppressive Victorian morality and capitalist political tyranny. 

Freud had argued in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) that human sexuality must be 

curtailed, at the expense of the happiness of individuals, for the sake of the greater goods of 

civilized life. (In this regard, Freud’s view is close to Hobbes’s argument in Leviathan.) Freud 

thought that this exchange was overall a fine deal, but also that contemporary (for him) social 

arrangements required too much curtailment of sexuality, that the leash could be loosened so that 



 

 20 

people would be better off sexually without harming civilization. Marcuse, who grabbed himself 

a place in the history of pop culture by advising young people to “make love, not war,” 

continued Freud’s project in his 1955 Eros and Civilization. Marcuse coined the term “surplus 

repression” for the excess and hence unnecessary restriction of sexuality required by oppressive 

economic and political regimes, arguing that the leash could be loosened more than Freud had 

thought. Marcuse also coined the term “repressive desublimation” to describe how Western 

consumer capitalism could loosen the sexual leash and manipulate the resulting pseudo-sexual 

freedom for its own advantage. 

 

Reich also argued that economic and political changes had to made for the sake of 

freedom, so that people would have more satisfying sex lives. He got himself into trouble for 

setting up birth control clinics in Berlin in the early 1930s. Reich was not only a political activist 

but also a theoretician, an epistemologist of human nature. He developed the idea (which was 

hinted at by Freud in Future of an Illusion) that if we want to discover the genuine nature of 

human sexuality, we can do so only when people are free from social influences and can thereby 

explore sexually whatever they feel like (see Sex-Pol and Sexual Revolution; Soble, 1986, pp. 

10-37). In this way, the Garden of Eden and Hobbes’s State of Nature make their way into 

radical sexual politics. The irony is that Reich thought that pure human sexuality would be 

heterosexual, and that the sexually unnatural acts that Aquinas, Kant, and others condemned 

were symptoms of the influence of economic and social corruption on human behavior. (Strains 

of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s [1712-1778] Discourse on Inequality can be discerned here.) Reich 

offered a psychological and political approach to the problems of sexual relations, as opposed to 

the theological approach of Augustine and Aquinas, but in effect arrived at a similar picture of 

the perfectly healthy sexuality of the communist comrades Adam and Eve. 

 

Contemporary Philosophy 

 

Many professional philosophers wrote about human sexuality in the last quarter of the 

20th Century and beyond, so many that describing what each or even a large set have contributed 

to the field would be unwieldy. Several figures stand out, however, as being the most significant, 

by peer reviews of their writings and how often their work is cited. A few words about them is in 

order. 

 

In 1969, Thomas Nagel anglicized Hegel and Sartre, fashioning from them, in “Sexual 

Perversion,” a non-Thomistic and non-Freudian theory of psychologically perverted sexuality. It 

is routinely acknowledged that Nagel’s essay inaugurated contemporary philosophy of sex, for it 

was immediately followed by a swarm of sophisticated elaborations and rebuttals (Nelson, 

2006). Though there is no consensus that Nagel was successful in his novel way of 

understanding sexual perversion, he stimulated the philosophical investigation of sexuality in 

fruitful directions. On Nagel’s view of human sexuality, self-consciousness plays a role that is 

missing from animal sexuality. At the beginning of a sexual episode, I am aroused by sensing 

(touching, looking at, smelling) you. You, too, are aroused by sensing me at this basic (merely 

animal) level. While I am aroused by sensing you, I perceive myself as a sexual subject. As our 

interaction proceeds, I respond with increased arousal to noticing that you are aroused by sensing 



 

 21 

me. Now I perceive myself as the object of your sexual consciousness; I become aware of myself 

through your gaze. If the same holds for you, we both perceive ourselves at once as both subject 

and object in the sexual episode, which phenomenon makes human sexuality distinct from and 

more interesting than animal sexuality. This configuration is characteristic of natural human 

sexuality, according to Nagel, so that perversion is a preference for sexual acts that avoid this 

reciprocal recognition of sexual arousal (Soble, 2008, Table 1). Voyeurism is a good example of 

a Nagelian perversion. The voyeur prefers to remain a sexual subject, keeping himself hidden 

from the look of others, never experiencing the self-conscious embodiment of a sexual object. 

(Aquinas agrees that voyeurism is unnatural, but for a different, biological reason. They disagree 

about homosexuality, which is psychologically natural on Nagel’s scheme.) An illuminating 

feature of Nagel's account is how it captures what happens when a prostitute feigns enjoying the 

sex for which she is paid (or when a spouse pretends, for the sake of the pleasure of the other 

spouse, to enjoy their boring sexual activity). To be rid of the client and save time, the prostitute 

helps him reach orgasm quickly. She feigns arousal, knowing that when this “arousal” is 

perceived by the client, this will increase his arousal in a Nagelian spiral. The client becomes 

conscious of himself as both subject and object; finding this state blissfully pleasurable, he loses 

no time achieving orgasm. 

 

In his erudite and philosophically elegant Sexual Desire (1986), politically conservative 

British philosopher Roger Scruton rehabilitated everything traditional, from sexual fidelity in 

marriage to Aquinas’s and Kant’s condemnation of masturbation, and in a social climate already 

highly sensitive to issues surrounding sexual orientation, Scruton was not afraid to doubt and 

criticize the normality, morality, and social effects of homosexuality. Scruton, using his notion 

of “individualising intentionality” (1986, pp. 103-107), strongly distinguished, against Kant and 

Augustine, sexual desire and the desires for food and drink: the object of human sexual desire, in 

contrast to animal desire, is an irreplaceable individual (contrast Soble, 1990, pp. 293-298). He 

thus drew a line between focused human sexual desire and wide-ranging animal horniness, 

which humans also experience, but act on only at their peril. As part of his traditionalism, 

Scruton rehearsed a standard way of contrasting sex and love: 

 
Love has a tendency to grow with time, while desire has a tendency to wither. The course of love, 

therefore, leads of its own accord to the state which the Platonists [and Christians] recommend to 

us. Eventually desire is replaced by a love which is no longer erotic, but based in trust and 

companionship. The trouble of desire is then at an end. (1986, p. 244) 

 

Scruton, with candor, immediately points out that “The problem [now] is, how to shut out the 

third party, who will begin it again, how to prevent the calm love of nuptial union from being 

shattered by the turbulence of a new desire. Not only how, but whether.” To cheat or not to 

cheat, that is the question. Or why “shut out” the third instead of inviting him or her in? 

 

Traditional sexual philosophy is also defended by Karol Wojtyla (1920-2005; Pope John 

Paul II) in an ambitious project that combines the “personalist norm” of Kantian ethics (do not 

use people or treat them as objects) and the Christian love commandment. Written while he was 

still a philosophy professor in Poland, well before Wojtyla became pope, his book Love and 

Responsibility tackles in an intellectually honest way puzzles that plague Catholic sexual ethics. 



 

 22 

For example, he seriously investigates why, in Catholicism, contraception is prohibited but 

natural family planning, or “periodic continence,” is licit (pp. 237-244). Wojtyla makes it clear 

(as Kierkegaard did) that in Christian marriage, eros takes a back seat to agape: 

 
The most important concept here is that of love. . . . For there exists, especially if we start from the 

Christian ethics born of the New Testament, a problem which can be described as that of 

“introducing love into love.” The word as first used in that phrase signifies the love which is the 

subject of the greatest commandment, while in its second use it means all that takes place between 

a man and a woman on the basis of the sexual urge. We could look at it the other way round and 

say that there exists a problem of changing the second type of love (sexual love) into the first, the 

love of which the New Testament speaks. (Love and Responsibility, p. 17) 

 

This is Wojtyla’s way of saying that in marriage “desire is replaced by a love which is no longer 

erotic” (Scruton) and that a man must not turn his wife into his harlot (Augustine). Some find in 

the sometimes outrageous, and hardly Orthodox, writings of Rabbi Shmuley Boteach (Kosher 

Sex, 1999; Kosher Adultery, 2002) the antidote to this conservative and Christian condemnation 

of hot married sex. The Rabbi out-pelagians the Pelagians by suggesting techniques that married 

couples can use to keep the vital fire alive in their sexual relationship. 

 

Several legal scholars have made important contributions to the philosophy of sex. In Sex 

and Reason (1992), law professor and U.S. circuit court judge Richard Posner expounded a no-

nonsense, pragmatic, utilitarian ethical and legal philosophy of sex, articulating what we should 

expect from homo economicus (for example, a man can be expected to rape a woman if that is 

the least expensive or only way of injecting his genes into the next generation). Law professor 

and political philosopher, Catharine MacKinnon, after her early influential and innovative work 

on sexual harassment (1979), dramatically escalated the battle of the sexes in Only Words and  

Feminism Unmodified. She seemingly declared that in patriarchy (e.g., the contemporary U.S.) 

all heterosexual intercourse is rape, because women, universally and deeply oppressed, are 

unable to give genuine consent to sexual activity with men, who are economically, socially, 

politically, and psychologically more powerful (compare MacKinnon, 1997, with Estlund, 1997, 

Soble, 1996, pp. 244-247). Judge Posner, among others, especially male scholars who legally 

defended pornography, came under attack (MacKinnon, 1997). Some commentators have 

sympathetically perceived affinities among MacKinnon’s gruesome depiction of heterosex, the 

often frightening descriptions of contemporary heterosexuality penned by her colleague Andrea 

Dworkin (1987), and the sexual metaphysics of Kant (Herman, 1993; Nussbaum, 1995). 

Comparisons like these fuel the interpretation of current radical feminism (as opposed to liberal 

feminism) that this form of feminism is conservative sex-negativity disguised by fashionable 

emancipatory jargon (Soble, 2002, pp. 195-197). 

 

A third lawyer and philosopher, John Finnis, joined by theologian Germain Grisez (1988) 

and other New Natural scholars, undertook to modernize Thomas’s sexual philosophy. Denying 

that same-sex sexuality and same-sex marriage are morally permissible, Finnis (1994) defended 

the controversial Catholic distinction between the morally permissible sexual intercourse of a 

contingently, medically infertile heterosexual couple and the morally illicit sexual activity of a 

necessarily sterile gay or lesbian couple (Koppelman, 2008; Nussbaum, 1994). This distinction 



 

 23 

has connections with another contentious Catholic distinction, between morally impermissible 

heterosexual coitus in which procreation is deliberately impeded by contraception and morally 

permissible heterosexual coitus that is not procreative because the couple has confined the act to 

the (probably) infertile stage in the wife’s cycle (see Noonan, 1986, appendix). 

 

Of special significance is the French “renaissance” scholar Michel Foucault (1926-1984), 

who caused a thunderstorm among philosophers, historians, and other theorists of sex with his 

Histoire de la sexualité (1976-1984). Foucault sparked “genealogical” studies informed by the 

heuristic idea that not only are patterns of sexual desire and behavior socially engineered, as 

foreseen by Beauvoir and promulgated by Adrienne Rich (1986), but also that the concepts of 

our sexual discourse are equally socially constructed: “Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind 

of natural given which power tries to hold in check. . . . It is the name that can be given to a 

historical construct” (History, Vol. 1, p. 105). Foucault was in part reacting against the type of 

discourse about natural sexuality, found in Freud, Reich, and Marcuse, as that which would be 

uncovered as layers upon layers of socialization were gradually peeled away. Foucault greatly 

influenced gender studies, feminism, Queer Theory, and the debate about the resemblance and 

continuity, or lack of it, between ancient and contemporary homoeroticism (Davidson, 2002; 

Halperin, 1990). One issue is whether homosexuality as an orientation began existing when the 

Magyar sexologist Károly Mária Benkert (1824-1882) coined the word “homosexual” in 1869, a 

word unknown among the ancients, who could well have invented it had they deemed doing so 

to be medically, socially, or even philosophically meaningful. Medical sexology in late 19th-

century Europe did detect value in picking out a class of persons as “homosexual” 

particular objects for therapy. This focus on sexual orientation and sexual identity continues 

today, not necessarily for psychiatric reasons, but also for the political advantage of the LGBT 

community. 
 

Where does the philosophy of sex stand today? The earliest contemporary philosophers 

of sex, who contributed to the rise of the field in the 1970s through the 1990s, are getting older 

and nearing retirement or retired. Younger scholars have moved into the field, carrying, perhaps, 

less obnoxious 1950s baggage with them as they explore in their own way their own distinctive 

set of sexual topics in the 21st Century. As philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn famously 

observed, progress (or at least change) in a discipline comes about as much by attrition and 

replacement as it does by new and better discoveries. I might venture the opinion that the older 

contemporaries repeated in great measure, albeit with their own idiosyncratic styles and twists, 

philosophies that had been around during the whole course of the history of the philosophy of 

sex, from Plato through Russell. Whether younger philosophers of sex -- not by forgetting 

history, but by transcending it -- will be able to fashion more illuminating discourses is unclear. 

Marx might bemoan yet another case of the effect of the weight of history on human thought and 

practice. Philosophy can defend itself only by reminding us that it is unique in being a discipline 

in which no advances are made except the continuation of the discussion, where that prolonged 

discussion is the whole, and valuable, point of the activity.
2 

 

 

 



 

 24 

Notes 

 

1. Leading textbooks and reference works include Baker et al., eds., 1998; Divine and Wolf-

Devine, eds., 2003; Feder et al., eds., 2004; Gruen and Panichas, eds., 1997; Kuefler, ed., 2007; 

Nye, ed., 1999; Primoratz, ed., 1997; Soble, 2008, Soble, ed., 1989, 1997; Soble and Powers, 

eds., 2008; Solomon and Higgins, eds., 1991; Stewart, ed., 1995; Trevas et al., eds., 1997; Tuana 

and Shrage, 2003; Verene, ed., 1995. Especially useful is Soble, ed., 2006, which contains 

entries on the topics and figures mentioned in this review. In 1977, a professional organization 

was formed to support this field, The Society for the Philosophy of Sex and Love. Its web site is 

at www.philosophyofsexandlove.org. 

 

2. This review is partly derived from lectures delivered at the University of West Florida (2003), 

Agnes Scott College (2003), Amherst College (2006), Cape Breton University (2006), and 

Wichita State University (2007). 

 

 

 

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