Sexual ethics

Overview

Recall questions on religious teaching about sex before and outside marriage and same-sex relationships, Christian, Jewish and Muslim positions, secularism, legal change in Britain, the harm principle, natural law, situation ethics, Kantian ethics and utilitarianism applied to sexual ethics, and whether sexual choices are private.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   What have religious traditions generally taught about sex before marriage?

   Model answer

   The mainstream position across Jewish, Christian and Muslim tradition has been that sexual intercourse belongs within marriage. The reasons given are that marriage provides the stable commitment that the possibility of children requires, that sexual union expresses a total self-giving which only a permanent bond can honestly represent, and that sex outside it exposes people, especially women in earlier societies, to serious harm. Traditions differ in how they treat those who depart from this, but the norm itself has been widely shared.

2. 2

   What have religious traditions generally taught about sex outside marriage?

   Model answer

   Adultery is condemned considerably more sharply than premarital sex across Jewish, Christian and Muslim teaching, since it involves the breaking of a covenant, deception of a spouse and damage to children and to the wider community. It appears among the prohibitions of the Ten Commandments and is treated in Islamic law as a serious offence. Where traditions have relaxed teaching on other sexual matters, the prohibition on betraying a marriage has generally remained.

3. 3

   What have religious traditions traditionally taught about same-sex relationships?

   Model answer

   Historically the major monotheistic traditions taught that sexual acts between people of the same sex were forbidden, reading certain scriptural passages as prohibitions and arguing that sex is ordered towards the union of a man and a woman and towards children. Positions today vary widely both between and within traditions. Buddhist and Hindu traditions have no single teaching, and interpretations in both range from disapproval to acceptance depending on school, region and teacher.

4. 4

   What purposes has religious tradition assigned to sex within marriage?

   Model answer

   Three are commonly named: procreation, the bringing of children into a stable family; union, the deepening of the bond between the couple; and, in much Christian and Jewish teaching, the mutual comfort and pleasure of the spouses. Catholic teaching has held that the procreative and unitive purposes must not be deliberately separated. How much weight each purpose carries, and whether they can come apart, is precisely what modern disagreements turn on.

5. 5

   Which teachings have most shaped religious thinking about sexual ethics?

   Model answer

   The creation narratives, read as establishing marriage as the setting for sexual union and as making childbearing a blessing; the prohibition of adultery among the commandments; teaching attributed to Jesus tightening the grounds for divorce and locating wrongdoing in desire as well as in action; letters of Paul urging self-control and treating the body as belonging to God; and in Islam, Qur'anic material on marriage and lawful conduct together with the practice of the Prophet. Each is read differently by different communities, which is why shared texts produce divergent conclusions.

6. 6

   How did early Christian thinking about sexual desire shape later teaching?

   Model answer

   Augustine, in the fourth and fifth centuries, connected sexual desire with the disorder introduced by the Fall, arguing that lust represents the loss of rational control over the body and is the channel through which original sin passes to each generation. This gave Western Christianity a lasting suspicion of desire itself and encouraged the view that celibacy is a higher calling and that sex is justified chiefly by procreation. Much subsequent liberalising argument within Christianity has been an attempt to recover a more positive account.

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