By Norman E. Anderson
This is a draft of the preface to a book that is in the process of being conceptualized and written. For the time being, it can serve as a prospectus.
The critical point to be made right at the beginning is that this is not a book about sexual mores. It is not about various customs having to do with sexuality and marriage that have come to be regarded as normative. This book is instead a history of reflection on sexual right and wrong.
To drive home the point while also intimating the difficulty of holding to the distinction, this is not even a book about the justification of traditional sexual mores; although to exclude such justification would not only debilitate a contextual understanding but would so distort the flow of thought that this book might as well be called a history of sexual heresy, which would not meet the intent.
The focus here is on reflection regarding the content of sexual right and wrong and on what makes that content right or wrong. That content may be understood traditionally or non-traditionally, but either way it is the reflection, the rationale, that counts for the purposes at hand.
To some this will sound like a contradiction in terms. How can there be ethical thought about a non-traditional sense of sexual right and wrong, which by definition (in the minds of many) must be wrong? In partial response, one may turn the question around. How can sexual mores be regarded as right unless the sense of rightness derives from ethical thought? In other words, is ethical thought properly to be defined by mores, or are mores properly to be defined by ethical thought? If the latter, as it is here supposed,then it makes sense to speak of a realm of ethical reflection, some of which may be poor and some of which may be well-developed and sound.
The term "ethical" poses a further problem of understanding. It is often contrasted with the term "moral," although the contrast typically depends upon the author. The most recent trend has been to relegate the term "moral" to traditional positions regarding sexual right and wrong and to appropriate the term "ethical" for alternative lovestyles that reject certain aspects of traditional morality, while striving for a new and supposedly more satisfactory idea of sexual right and wrong. Hence "lesbian ethics" and "polyamorous ethics."
In this book no contrast between "ethical" and "moral" is automatically implied. Sometimes contrasts will be employed, most usually the idea that morality is prescription of conduct that derives from ethical thought. Sometimes the terms will be treated as synonyms. The onus is upon me as the author to make clear my meaning in context. In any case, the history of sexual ethics, that is, the history of serious thought on sexual right and wrong, is considered to be inclusive of the history of contrasts between the "ethical" and the "moral," although discussion of such contrasts will be only incidental.
The scope of this book is limited to Western thought. Defining the scope this way is problematic in a couple of ways.
First, much of the Western reflection on sexual right and wrong is rooted in the Middle East. To have any hope of understanding the history of sexual ethics in the West, we must first understand the Israelite, early rabbinic, and early Christian ideas, which were all intimately tied to the land of Palestine. Since they are so integral to Western thought, these ideas find themselves not only securely within the scope of this book, but prominently so.
Second, to speak of the West is fundamentally nonsensical when east and west are completely relativized by a rotating globe. Paradoxically the idea of the West embodies both parochialism, that is, the failure of a global or cosmic perspective, as the case may be, and a sort of self-centrism, in this case the idea that other peoples are to be defined relative to one's own position. Since this paradox plays into the history of sexual ethics, as well as into the impact of Western mores around the globe, I thought it appropriate to retain the designation.
Any history that intends to be relevant will grapple with present concerns as they manifest themselves throughout the past. So it is that this history will give attention to three areas of special concern: having multiple partners, having partners of the same sex, and the effect of marriage upon the rightness or wrongness of sexual behavior.
Still it is vital to a proper historical understanding not to allow present concerns to distort the dimensions of the past. We must allow the natural contours of the data to shape our descriptions of and our theories about the past. We may give special attention to homosexuality, for instance, but we should not pretend that the ancient Israelites obsessed about it to the degree that North American culture does today.
As much as is practicable, the approach will be thinker by thinker. Transitional and background chapters will be necessary, but the point is to engage actual ideas much more than trends or schools of thought. In the current debates over sexuality, one of the strong tendencies is to attack straw horses. Hopefully the approach taken here will prompt others to tackle the truly challenging.
This book is not merely a summary, selective to be sure, of what is known about the history of sexual ethics. It presents a theory about the development of sexual ethics, undoubtedly a theory which will prove controversial -- in part because it controverts widely held beliefs, in part because the evidence that it must interpret is sometimes scanty, and in part because it reads the history of sexual ethics as being profoundly affected by misinterpretation and various cultural confluences.
It is my hope that, controversy or no, this book will provoke deeper reflection on the issues it addresses.
Begun July 14, 1998; posted, November 23, 1998; new url, January 28, 2004; last modified, February 2, 2007
Copyright ©1998-2007 by Norman E. Anderson
For sample passages, go to Chapters in the History of Sexual Ethics: Robert A. Heinlein
Your feedback is welcome! E-mail me at: walkswithastick@comcast.net.
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