Ethics Bites: Track 1

In response to the possibility of teaching somebody to be a fully sexual being Scruton says that

“Well, it has been done. And if you look at the past of mankind it was done regularly. And it’s one reason why we’re all here. Because without that ability to commit through the sexual act there is no real shelter provided for children of the next generation and society won’t survive that for very long.”

But wait a minute. The whole existence of the question of being fully sexual is down to the fact that humanity has realised that so far it’s got it wrong. It’s only in the last few decades people have started speaking in terms of being fully sexual, and woken to the realisation that sexual being has been anything but full so far.

It therefore seems a bit of a cheek to claim that because humanity has so far perpetuated itself this shows that full sexual being is possible, or that the attainment of sexual fullness was “done regularly”! Speak to most old timers (pre-1960/70s) about sex, assuming that you can get them to speak openly about it, and you’ll soon learn that many of them, particularly women, hardly experienced it in the full sense Scruton implies. What Scruton identifies as being “fully sexual” in the past, has been nothing more than the continuation of the species, usually by allowing people to feel kind-of OK about sex within the sanctioned bounds of marriage. That is how people found the “ability to commit through the sexual act”. And even then not without hang ups. Outside of marriage people had in fact been made to feel sexually deviant (and also within it), which is unlikely to lead to them thinking of themselves as fully sexual.

Whatever being fully sexual is, it isn’t what Scruton harks back to. It’s more like what we are going through now and moving towards. The open and non-judgmental attitude of parents is a positive shift, and allows people to develop their own models through being able to have a “sexual dialogue” with parents, through which they can tap into their parents’ experiences and ideals rather than be preached at and coerced. Probably few if any modern parents teach their children “how” as Scruton puts it, but many do engage in a dialogue and let their children feel that they can engage in a dialogue.

Scruton’s take on sexual fullness has the feel of a thinly veiled advocacy of conservative family values, especially with talk of idealised models of the other sex. Hard to think how one can idealise sexual identity when it can take on many forms and combinations – heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual or celibate; monogamous or polygamous; adventurous or conventional and so on. None of these are ideals. They are all preferences, and some are to a great extent determined by biology.

Miranda Fricker’s final paragraph (in PDF) seems to undermine her argument: that a retrospective moral judgment, in absolute terms, can be made only if blame can be attached to agents whose practices are later condemned as wrong. She clearly defines blame as hinging on the fact of whether the “agent in question is in a position to have thought differently, to have known better”.

If that’s the case, then Fricker’s continued non-vegetarianism is inexcusable. By her own admission, she is clearly in a position to know better, since she speculates that very likely future generations will condemn our carnivorous society, albeit with a "moral disappointment".

But Fricker doesn’t in fact need to speculate that future generations will judge non-vegetarians as blame worthy, because there are people in our own generation who already do that, using arguments that are morally, and as a utilitarian bonus, ecologically sound. She in fact admits that she is surrounded by “vegetarians who have indeed made that sort of exceptional moral move in their ethical thinking”. She therefore has the benefit, in realtime, of moral peers who have made the discovery that meat eating is ethically and ecologically indefensible. So to claim she is in a morally grey area sounds a bit weak, particularly since she let's herself off lightly with "moral disappointment". It would only be morally grey if she and others aware of the ethics of meat eating weren’t in fact aware of the ethics of meat eating. It’s also no defence to cite that meat eating is the norm at present, as this will not negate the fact that she is aware of a moral contradiction in the present time. Fricker’s own moral self perception sounds more like convenience (though who can blame her) than a real concern for moral integrity.

Comment by non- vegetarian btw.