Brian Besong

In a recent essay, Victor M. Salas highlights historical treatment of an ongoing debate regarding what forms of sexual foreplay are permissible. Salas argues against the views of Alphonsus Liguori, contending that forms of oral foreplay are permitted while anal foreplay is not. Here, I evaluate Salas’s alternative proposal, arguing that it has important weaknesses that motivate an alternative account, namely that anal intercourse is objectively degrading and is thus impermissible. Finally, I survey plausible models for how we are to act regarding matters of ongoing moral disagreement like this.

Chapter 3 examines social contract theories in their two dominant contemporary forms: contractarianism and contractualism. Contractarianism, as developed by David Gauthier, resembles a moral libertarianism by imposing minimal duties, making it difficult to condemn nearly any commonsense sexual wrongdoing. Like consequentialism, it permits token cases of bestiality, necrophilia, incest, and cannibalism. However, unlike consequentialism, it lacks a perverse obligation, as it struggles to ground any altruistic duties at all. Contractualism, in contrast, aligns more closely with moral commonsense in recognizing altruistic obligations. Following Thomas Scanlon’s formulation, contractualism grounds moral principles in what no one could reasonably reject. Yet this framework also leads to many of the same strongly counterintuitive conclusions as contractarianism, and adds duties of sexual philanthropy when a refusal to engage in sex could be reasonably rejected by another.

This chapter argues that moral theories are collectively at odds with the prevailing sexual mores of modern Western society. While most contemporary moral theories readily justify progressive sexual attitudes, they struggle to account for lingering traditionalist intuitions. Conversely, natural law theory aligns seamlessly with these traditional sexual norms but conflicts with progressive views. This chapter outlines the structure of the book, which proceeds in two parts. First, it examines what dominant moral theories say about sex, and second, demonstrates that only natural law can justify the more contested aspects of sexual commonsense.

Chapter 7 synthesizes the book’s conclusions with a methodological argument inspired by G.E. Moore. The wrongness of necrophilia, bestiality, and (at least sibling) incest, as well as the goodness of procreative marital sex, should be understood as Moorean facts. Yet, as demonstrated in previous chapters, only natural law provides a cogent explanation of these facts. The progressive sexual norms embraced in the contemporary West—such as the permissibility of same-sex relations—are not plausibly Moorean. Given the strong epistemic justification for Moorean facts, moral theories that best explain them hold a significant advantage, even if there were some epistemic loss in rejecting progressive intuitions. Therefore, despite its opposition to contemporary mores, natural law should be regarded as ultimately more plausible than any competing moral framework.

Chapter 5 looks at the three most prominent forms of contemporary Virtue Ethics, namely the theories of Michael Slote, Rosalind Hursthouse, and Christine Swanton. Although virtue ethics is held together by what might be dubbed a ‘virtue first’ account of moral analysis, there are surprisingly few additional unifying theses. All the same, when it comes to the bedroom, these three forms of virtue ethics have overlapping counterintuitive implications. Slote’s ethics of care is so broad that it can justify almost anything, at least when done from the right motive; for very similar reasons, a dedication to sexual philanthropy—say, in sexually pleasuring so-called ‘incels’—appears highly praiseworthy. Hursthouse’s formulation of ‘v-rules’ allows for similar liberty, particularly in how she formulates rules of temperance regarding sexual pleasure. Even sex with animals, by Hursthouse’s lights, can be enjoyed temperately and thus virtuously. Swanton’s non-eudaimonistic virtue ethics, grounded in factors like a life’s narrative structure, implies that a lifelong commitment to sexual perversity could in fact be a model of virtue.

Chapter 6 looks at natural law, both in its classical and basic goods (or ‘new’) formulation. Although the latter appears to have been formulated partially as an attempt to give the traditionalism of the former new legs in the contemporary philosophical climate, I argue that the basic goods approach is woefully insufficient to secure that desideratum. Classical natural law, alternatively, provides a coherent package of a staunchly conservative nature. The only permissible sex occurs between married (opposite sex) couples engaged in the sort of sex that is aimed at procreation, or “natural sex.” Given its teleological bearings, the classical package includes downstream obligations rarely countenanced by contemporaries, such as the obligation of married couples to satisfy each other’s sexual needs and to live a common life in physical proximity to each other.

Chapter 4 evaluates Kantian ethics of sex, considering both Kant’s original framework and the revised interpretations of Allen Wood and Helga Varden. Kant’s traditional views, alongside classical natural law, are uniquely capable of explaining most commonsense sexual prohibitions—however, only because it seems he borrowed from natural law when it comes to the bedroom. To this he added rigid concerns about objectification and violation of the Formula of Humanity that implies a prudish obligation that couples minimize sex. Kant thus cannot account for the goodness of spousal sexuality. Wood and Varden propose a different natural purpose for sex, allowing far greater sexual liberty than Kant—or common sense, for that matter—could accept.

This volume explores the major moral theories and their distinctive approaches and controversial implications regarding sex. Despite being a commonplace human activity, contemporary discussions of the norms regarding sex—particularly those that connect with the major moral theories—are relatively rare. This volume shows that the relative silence is important, for all the major moral theories appear to have controversial implications about the morality and value of sex. Consequently, either widespread Western assumptions about sex are mistaken or else the major moral theories have serious problems when it comes to the ethics of the bedroom. Adopting a metaethical Mooreanism about our sexual intuitions offers a potential compromise, such that some of the more novel and controversial Western intuitions are abandoned with resulting room for at least one moral theory to remain viable.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Light That Binds: A Study in Thomas Aquinas's Metaphysics of Natural Law by Stephen L. BrockBrian BesongThe Light That Binds: A Study in Thomas Aquinas's Metaphysics of Natural Law by Stephen L. Brock (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2020), xv + 277 pp.Fr. Stephen L. Brock is arguably one of the most important contemporary contributors to the Thomistic understanding of natural law. Hence, the publication of his updated and revised doctoral dissertation on the topic [End Page 289] of the metaphysics of natural law in St. Thomas will be gladly received by Thomistic scholars and moral theorists alike. In The Light That Binds, Brock's central task is to explain the metaphysics of the promulgation of natural law in man. Put differently although extant literature on natural law may be useful for action analysis—why lying is always wrong, say—less attention has been paid to the way in which natural law has been promulgated by God and is present in the human intellect. What literature is available, either as an explanation of St. Thomas or as criticism of the same, has failed to do Aquinas justice, so Brock argues.The book comprises seven chapters and an introduction. In the first chapter, Brock's central goal is to survey the ways in which (especially more recent) commentators of Aquinas have distorted the sense in which natural law constitutes genuine law, as well as the relationship between natural law and God. For, there is a line of thought on natural law, particularly prominent in the "new natural law" tradition, according to which the principles at the heart of the theory do not fully satisfy the four criteria of legitimate law given by Aquinas. Rival views have natural law constituting a real law, but in virtue of an epistemically explicit reliance on God as lawgiver, among other distortions. Figureheads surveyed in the chapter include Dom Odon Lottin, Ernest Fortin, and Francisco Suárez, among others.In the second chapter, Brock outlines and defends his positive view regarding the legal status of the natural law by way of continued discussion of Lottin, particularly Lottin's contention that St. Thomas was heavily influenced by a mid-thirteenth-century Franciscan tract, De legibus et praeceptis. Brock argues that St. Thomas conceives of natural law as having an even closer relationship to eternal law than is posited by the earlier Franciscan tract, and the rest of the chapter is largely focused on unpacking this close relationship. In sum, natural law is law because it involves a rational ordering by God of our intellect to the goods of our nature, a human participation in an eternal ordering of all things to their ends (i.e., the eternal law). We need not discover the source of the ordering—namely, God—in grasping the first principles of his ordering, as Brock explains here and elsewhere. But the strictly legal status of the principles requires that natural law comes from a legitimate authority, among other essential elements.Chapters 3 and 4 tackle the more human side of the metaphysics of natural law. More concretely, in these chapters, Brock explains the wheres and the whats of our possession of the natural law. For, not all ordering of objects to ends implies the sort of normativity we see in the natural law. Brute animals, among others, have natural inclinations too, and yet they are not governed through these instinctual drives by a natural law. Natural law [End Page 290] is present preeminently in the human intellect, Brock argues, and is not to be confused with the prerational drives that we share as part of our animal nature. God instills these rational drives—the light, as it were—into reason in such a way that an individual can grasp its force autonomously, as basic conceptional truths about what right and wrong consist in (72). Here it would have been nice for Brock to reflect briefly on how Aquinas's views on moral knowledge fit within his broader epistemological commitments, as the natural (conceptual) knowledge of right and wrong at first glance shares common ground with the Franciscan tradition on divine illumination as found in figures...

Although one can find a robust philosophical tradition supporting asceticism in the West, from ancient Greece to at least early modernity, very little attention has been paid to what motivated this broad support. Instead, following criticism from figures such as Hume, Voltaire, Bentham, and Nietzsche, asceticism has been largely disregarded as either eccentric or uniquely religious. In this paper, I provide what I take to be the core moral argument that motivated many philosophical ascetics. In brief, acts of deliberate self-denial are practice in an important part of acting ethically and are thus practically rational as a means to acquiring virtue. And if this argument has been a core motivation for asceticism in the West then arguably philosophical ascetics have been on to something, especially given contemporary empirical research on self-control.

It is natural for us to wonder what should I do, and why? And although a combination of common sense and upbringing aids us in answering our questions, it is also natural for us to seek answers that are grounded in something deeper and more enduring than our personal dispositions and those of our parents. We seek a genuinely good life and the practical wisdom necessary to arrive at happiness. In this Introduction to Ethics, Brian Besong presents a comprehensive and contemporary introduction to the practical wisdom handed down to us by Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, and many others--a position now commonly called "natural law." Written as a beginner's guide, the book systematically explores a range of moral issues including moral knowledge, happiness, right and wrong action, and virtues, to name a few. Introduction to Ethics explains in a lively way how natural law provides principled and persuasive answers to our most fundamental moral questions.

Does having an initially high level of justified confidence in a belief vindicate remaining steadfast in the face of disagreement? According to one prominent view in the literature, namely Jennifer Lackey's justificationist position, the answer is yes so long as one also has personal information that provides a symmetry-breaker. In this article, I raise a problem for the justificationist view. On the most straightforward reading of the justificationist position, personal information always provides a symmetry-breaker in a peer dispute over a belief in which one has high justified confidence. However, this position is implausibly strong because it renders epistemically permissible a dogmatic attitude in a relevant set of peer disagreements. Alternatively, weaker readings of the view fail to provide a perspicuous account of when high justified confidence matters in a disagreement.

According to moral intuitionism, at least some moral seeming states are justification-conferring. The primary defense of this view currently comes from advocates of the standard account, who take the justification-conferring power of a moral seeming to be determined by its phenomenological credentials alone. However, the standard account is vulnerable to a problem. In brief, the standard account implies that moral knowledge is seriously undermined by those commonplace moral disagreements in which both agents have equally good phenomenological credentials supporting their disputed moral beliefs. However, it is implausible to think that commonplace disagreement seriously undermines moral knowledge, and thus it is implausible to think that the standard account of moral intuitionism is true.

Moral intuitionism, which claims that some moral seemings are justification-conferring, has become an increasingly popular account in moral epistemology. Defenses of the position have largely focused on the standard account, according to which the justification-conferring power of a moral seeming is determined by its phenomenal credentials alone. Unfortunately, the standard account is a less plausible version of moral intuitionism because it does not take etiology seriously. In this paper, I provide an outline and defense of a non-standard account of moral intuitionism that I dub the “Prudent Conscience View.” According to this view, phenomenal credentials only partially determine the justification-conferring power of a moral seeming, for a seeming’s justification-conferring power is also determined by its etiology. In brief, a moral seeming is justification-conferring to the degree that the conscience that gave rise to it is functioning properly, and a person's conscience functions properly to the degree that the person is prudent.

One very common style of teaching philosophy involves remaining publicly neutral regarding the views being debated—a technique commonly styled ‘teaching the debate.’ This paper seeks to survey evidence from the literature in social psychology that suggests teaching the debate naturally lends itself to student skepticism toward the philosophical views presented. In contrast, research suggests that presenting one’s own views alongside teaching the debate in question—or ‘engaging the debate’—can effectively avoid eliciting skeptical attitudes among students without sacrificing desirable pedagogical outcomes. Thus, there are good reasons to engage philosophical debates as an educator, not merely teach them.

Empirical research indicates that feelings of disgust actually affect our moral beliefs and moral motivations. The question is, should they? Daniel Kelly argues that they should not. More particularly, he argues for what we may call the irrelevancy thesis and the anti-moralization thesis. According to the irrelevancy thesis, feelings of disgust should be given no weight when judging the moral character of an action (or norm, practice, outcome, or ideal). According to the anti-moralization thesis, feelings of disgust should not be allowed a role in, or harnessed in the service of, moral motivation. In this paper, I will argue against both theses, staking out a moderate position according to which feelings of disgust can (but needn’t always) play a proper role in aid of moral belief formation and moral motivation.

Following the Second Vatican Council, the predominant trend in Catholic moral theology has been decidedly antagonistic toward the tradition that dominated moral theology before the Council, namely the use and formulation of ecclesiastically-approved “manuals” or “handbooks” of moral theology, the contents of which chiefly involved general precepts of morally good and bad behavior as well as the extension of those precepts to particular cases. In this paper, I will oppose the dominant anti-manual trend. More particularly, I will first sketch what I take to be the central aspects of the manual tradition. Second, I will provide several arguments in favor of this tradition. Last, I will raise and respond to objections to this tradition that feature prominently in the works of Pinckaers and Cessario.