Sexual symmetry and asymmetry

I want to think a bit about conservative Christian views of sex and gender, but before that I want to offer two stories to motivate a crucial distinction.

Electrons and Positrons

Electrons and positrons (a positron is a positively charged anti-particle to the electron) are very different in one way but not so much in another. If you take some system of electrons and positrons, and swap in a positron for an electron, the system will behave very differently—it will be attracted to the things that the electron was repelled by and vice versa. But if you replace all the electrons by positrons and all the positrons by electrons, it won’t make a significant difference (technically, there may be some difference due to the weak force, but that’s dominated by electromagnetic interaction). Similarly, a cloud of electrons behaves pretty much like a cloud of positrons, but a mixed cloud of electrons and positrons will behave very differently (electrons and positrons will collide releasing energy).

Electrons and positrons are significantly pairwise non-interchangeable, but globally approximately interchangeable.

We might conclude: electrons and positrons significantly differ relationally but do not differ much intrinsically.

On the other hand, if you have a system made of photons and electrons, and you swap out a photon and replace it by an electron, it will make a significant difference, but likewise typically if you swap out all the photons and electrons, it will also make a significant difference (unless the system was in a rare symmetric configuration). Thus, photons and electrons are significantly pairwise and globally interchangeable, and hence significantly differ both relationally and intrinsically.

Heterothallic Isogamous Organisms

Isogamous sexually-reproducing organisms have equally sized gametes among their sexes, and hence cannot be labeled as “female” and “male” (biologists define “female” and “male” in terms of larger and smaller gametes, respectively). Instead these sexes get arbitrarily labeled as plus and minus (I will assume there are only two mating types for simplicity). In heterothallic organisms, the sexes are located in different individuals, so two are needed for reproduction. Humans are heterothallic but not isogamous. But there are many species (mostly unicellular, I believe) that are heterothallic and isogamous.

We can now suppose a heterothallic and isogamous species with pretty symmetric mating roles. In such a species, again, we have significant individual non-interchangeability in a system. If Alice is a plus and Bob is a minus, they can reproduce, but if you swap out Bob for a plus, you get a non-reproductive pair. But if the mating roles are sufficiently similar, you can have global approximate interchangeability: if in some system you put pluses for the minuses and minuses for the pluses, things could go on much as before. A group of pluses may behave very much like a group of minuses (namely, over time the population will decrease to zero), but a mixed group of pluses and minuses is apt to behave very differently. We thus have pairwise non-interchangeability but approximate global interchangeability.

We might similarly say: pluses and minuses in our heterothallic and isogamous species significantly differ relationally but do not differ much intrinsically. On the other hand, cats and dogs significantly differ both relationally and intrinsically.

The Distinction

We thus have a distinction between two kinds of differences, which we can label as relational and intrinsic. I am not happy with the labels, but when I use them, please think of my two examples: particles and isogamous organisms. These two kinds of differences can be thought of as denying different symmetries: intrinsic differences are opposed to global interchange of the types of all individuals; relational differences are opposed to pairwise interchange of the types of a pair of individuals.

Conservative Christian Views of Sex and Gender

Conservative Christians tend to think that there are significant differences between men and women. In addition to cultural traits, there are two main theological reasons for thinking this:

1. Marriage asymmetry: Men and women can marry, but men cannot marry men and women cannot marry women.

2. Liturgical asymmetry: Only men can serve in certain liturgical “clerical” roles.

Of these, the marriage asymmetry is probably a bit more widely accepted than the liturgical asymmetry. (Some also think there is an authority asymmetry in the family where husbands have a special authority over wives. This is even more controversial among conservative Christians than the liturgical asymmetry, so I won’t say more about it.)

We could suppose an arbitrary divine rule behind both asymmetries. But this is theologically problematic: a really plausible way of reading the difference between the Law of Moses and the Law of the Gospel is at that in the Law of the Gospel, we no longer have arbitrary rules whose primary benefit is obedience, such as the prohibition on eating pork.

If we are to avoid supposing an arbitrary divine rule, we need to suppose differences between men and women to explain the theologically grounded asymmetries. And this is apt to lead conservative Christians to philosophical and theological theorizing about normative differences such as women being called more to “receptivity” and men more to “givingness”, or searching through sociological, psychological and biological data for relevant differences between the behavior and abilities of men and women. The empirical differences tend to lie on continua with wide areas of overlap between the sexes, however, and the normative differences are either implausible or likewise involve continua with wide areas of overlap (men, too, are called to receptivity).

But I think we are now in a position to see that there is a logical shortcoming behind the focus of this search. For differences between men and women can be relational or intrinsic, and the search has tended to focus on the intrinsic.

However, I submit, purely relational differences are sufficient to explain both the marriage and liturgical asymmetries. One way to see this is to pretend that we are a heterothallic isogamous species (rather than heterothallic anisogamous species that we actually are), consisting of pluses and minuses rather than females and males.

Then, if marriage has an ordering to procreation, that would neatly explain why pluses and minuses can marry each other, but pluses can’t marry pluses and minuses can’t marry minuses. No intrinsic difference between pluses and minuses is needed to explain this. Thus, as soon as we accept that marriage has an ordering to procreation, we have a way to explain the marriage asymmetry without any supposition of intrinsic differences.

Likewise, if there is going to be an incarnation, and only one, and the incarnate God is going to be incarnate as a typical organism of our species, then this incarnation must happen as a plus or a minus. And if married love is a deep and passionate love that is a wonderful symbol for the love between God and God’s people, then if the incarnation is as an individual of one of the sexes, God’s Church would then symbolically have the opposite sex. And then those whose liturgical role it is to stand in for the incarnate God in the marriage-like relationship to the Church would most fittingly have the sex opposite to that of the Church. Thus, if the incarnate God is incarnate as a plus, the Church would be figured as a minus, one can explain why it is fitting that the clergy in the relevant liturgical roles would be pluses; if the incarnate God is incarnate as a minus, we have an explanation of why the clergy in these roles would be minuses as well. (Interestingly, on this story, it’s not that the clergy are directly supposed to be like the incarnate God in respect of sex, but that their sex is supposed to be the opposite to that of the Church, and given that in the species there are only two sexes, this forces them to have the same sex as the incarnate God: the clergy need to have a sex opposed to the sex opposed to that of the incarnate God.)

Now, we are not isogamous, and we have female and male, not plus and minus. But we can still give exactly the same explanations. Even though in an anisogamous species there are significant intrinsic biological differences between the sexes, we need not advert to any of them to explain either the marriage or the liturgical asymmetry. The marriage asymmetry is tied to the pairwise non-interchangeability of the sexes and explained by the procreative role of marriage. The liturgical asymemtry is tied to the marriage asymmetry together with the symmetry-breaking event of God becoming incarnate in one of the sexes.

As far as this story goes, there need not be any morally significant intrinsic differences between male and female to explain the marital and liturgical asymmetries. The relational difference, that you need male and female for a mating pair, is morally significant on this story, but in a way that is entirely symmetric between male and female. And then we have one symmetry-breaking event: God becomes incarnate as a male. We need not think that there is any special reason why God becomes incarnate as a male or a female—it could equally well have been as a female. The decision whether to become incarnate as a male or a female could be as arbitrary as the decision about the exact eye color of the incarnate God (though, of course, eye color does not ground either significant intrinsic or significant relational differences). But if it were an incarnation as a female, other changes would be fitting: the clergy who symbolize the nuptial role of the incarnate God would fitting be female, in the exodus story it would fitting be female lambs and goats that would be sacrificed, and it would be fitting that Sarah be asked to sacrifice her first-born daughter.

I am not saying that there are no morally significant intrinsic differences between male and female. There may be. We are, after all, not only heterothallic but also anisogamous, and so there could turn out to be such intrinsic differences. But we need not suppose any such to explain the two asymmetries, and it is safer to be agnostic on the existence of these intrinsic differences.

Nothing in this post is meant as an argument for either the marriage asymmetry and the liturgical asymmetry. I have argued for the marriage asymmetry elsewhere, but here I am just saying that it could be explained if we grant the procreative ordering of marriage. And my arguments for the liturgical asymmetry are based on fittingness. But fittingness considerations do not constrain God. While we can explain why the clergy are of the same sex as the incarnate God by the nuptial imagery story that I gave above, God could instead have chosen to make the clergy be of the opposite sex as the incarnate God, in order to nuptially signify the people with the clergy, or God could chosen to make the clergy be of both sexes, to emphasize the fact that salvation is tied to the humanity (see St. Athanasius on this) and not the sex of the incarnate God. But when many things are fitting, God can choose one, and we can then cite its fittingness as a non-deterministic explanation.

Though, I suppose, I have at least refuted this argument:

3. The only way to explain the marriage and liturgical asymmetries is by supposing morally significant intrinsic differences between female and male.

4. There are no such intrinsic differences.

5. So, probably, the asymmetries don’t exist either.

I have refuted it by showing that (3) is false.

More on Bostock

In Bostock, the Supreme Court held that a refusal to hire, say, a man who is attracted to men is discrimination on the basis of sex if one wouldn’t refuse to hire a woman who is attracted to men.

The idea is that a rule is discriminatory if it precludes a man from doing something that a woman is permitted to do or vice versa.

This would have the curious consequence that various laws that seem on their face to be non-discriminatory would nonetheless be discriminatory. Here are three examples:

• Laws against perjury and against lying to law enforcement prohibit, in certain circumstances, a man from saying “I am a woman”, but do not prohibit, in the same circumstances, a woman from saying the very same words.

• Laws against incitement of violence will often prohibit a male speaker from yelling to a crowd: “If I am a man, go riot!” but will not prohibit a female speaker from yelling the very same words to the same crowd.

• Libel laws make me liable for asserting “Either colleague x is a plagiarist or I am a woman”, when I know x to be innocent, but do not make my female colleagues liable for saying the very same words under the same circumstances.

These cases show that it is quite difficult to define discrimination.

Closeness and Double Effect

The Principle of Double Effect (PDE) is traditionally a defense against a charge of bringing about an effect that is absolutely wrong to intentionally bring about, a defense that holds that although one foresaw the effect, one did not intend it.

One of the main difficulties for PDE is the closeness problem. Typical examples of the closeness problem are things like dropping bombs on an enemy city in order to make the civilians look dead (Bennett), blowing up the fat man in the mouth of the cave when there is no other way out (Anscombe), etc.

If we think of intentions as arrows and the wrong-to-intend act as a target, one strategy for handling closeness problems is to “broaden intentions”, so that they hit the target more easily. Thus, if you intend something “close enough” to an effect you count as intending (or something similar to intending, say accomplishing) that effect. There are interesting general theories of this (e.g., O’Brien and Koons), but I do not think any of them cover all the cases well.

Another strategy, however, is to broaden the target. This strategy keeps intention very sharp and hyperintensional, but insists that what is forbidden to intend is broader. A number of people have done that (e.g., Quinn). What I want to do in this post is to offer a way of looking at a version of this strategy.

The PDE is correlative to absolute wrongs. There aren’t that many absolute wrongs. For instance, Judaism lists only three kinds of acts as absolute wrongs, things that may not be done no matter the benefits:

• idolatry

• murder

• certain sexual sins (e.g., adultery and incest).

Now, intention enters differently into the definitions of these acts. Arguably, idolatry is very much defined by intentions. The very same physical bending of one’s midriff in the very same physical circumstances (e.g., standing facing an idol) can very easily be an act of idolatry or a back exercise, precisely depending on what one is intending by this bow. Such pairs of cases can be manufactured in the case of murder, but they will involve very odd assumptions. We can imagine a surgeon or an assassin cutting someone’s chest with the same movement, but it is in fact very unlikely that the movement will be the same. In the case of idolatry, we might say that more work is being done by intention and in the case of murder more work is being done by the physical act. And sexual wrongdoing is a very complex topic, but it is likely that intention enters in yet different ways, and differently in the case of different sexual wrongs.

We can think of an absolute prohibition as having the following structure:

1. For all x₁, ..., x_n, when U(x₁, ..., x_n), it is absolutely wrong to intentionally bring it about that I(x₁, ..., x_n).

Here, U(x₁, ..., x_n) is a contextual description which needs to obtain but need not be intended to have a wrong of the given type, and I(x₁, ..., x_n) is a contextual description which needs to be intended. For instance, for murder, prima facie U(x₁, x₂) might specify that x₁ is an act whose patient is known to be a juridically innocent person x₂, while I(x₁, x₂) will specify that, say, x₁ is the killing of x₂. It’s enough that the murderer should know that the victim is an innocent person—the murderer does not need to intend to kill them qua innocent. But the murderer does need to intend something like the killing.

Note that in ordinary speech, when we give absolute prohibitions we speak with scope ambiguity. Thus, we are apt to say things like “It is wrong to intentionally kill an innocent person”, without making clear whether “intentionally” applies just to “kill” or also to “innocent person”, i.e., without making it clear what is in the U part of the prohibition and what is in the I part.

Observe also that in the case of idolatry, more work is being done by I than by U, while in the case of murder, the work done by the two parts of the structure is the same.

So, now, here is a general strategy for handling closeness. We keep intention sharp, but we broaden (i.e., logically weaken) I by shifting some things that we might have thought are in I into U, perhaps introducing “known” or “believed” operators. For instance, in the case of murder, we might say something like this:

2. When x₁ is known to be the imposition of an arrangement x₂ on the parts or aspects of an innocent person that normally and in this particular case precludes life, it is absolutely wrong to bring about x₁ with the intention that it be an imposition of arrangement x₂ on parts or aspects of reality.

And in the case of idolatry, perhaps we keep more in I, only moving the difference between God and the false god to the nonintentional portion of the prohibition:

3. When x is known to be a god other than God, it is absolutely wrong to intentionally bring it about that one worships x.

And here is an important point. How we do this—how we shuffle requirements between I and U—will differ from absolute prohibition to absolute prohibition. What we are doing is not a refinement of Double Effect, but a refinement of the (hopefully small) number of absolute prohibitions in our deontological theory. We do not need to have any general things to say across absolute prohibitions how we do this broadening of the intentional target.

There might even be further complexities. It could, for instance, be that we have role-specific absolute prohibitions, coming with other ways for aspects of the action to be apportioned between U and I.

Bostock v. Clayton County

In Bostock, the Supreme Court ruled that hiring discrimination against a gay person is discrimination on the basis of sex, and hence forbidden, because one wouldn’t refuse to, say, hire a woman who is attracted to men, and hence to refuse to hire a man who has the same “trait”, namely being attracted to men, is discrimination on the grounds of his sex.

Here is a clear counterexample to this line of reasoning. Consider an employer who refuses to hire a man who claims in a job application to be a woman on the grounds that this man is a liar. (Suppose this is a man in every socially accepted sense of the word: he is biologically male, he socially identifies as a man in every context other than this interview, etc.) Such an employer would not refuse to hire a woman with the same “trait”, namely claiming to be a woman. Hence by the Bostock reasoning, the employer discriminates on the basis of sex. But this is absurd: the basis for the discrimination is not the sex of the prospective employee, but lying about one’s sex. Similarly, discrimination against a white person who claims to be African American on the grounds of a mismatch between their claims and reality is not discrimination against white people.

In other words, the basis for the discrimination is not the sex of the candidate but the relationships between the candidate’s actual sex and the candidate’s claimed sex.

And logically speaking, this is all very much like the gay case, where the basis for the discrimination is not the sex of the candidate but the relationship between the candidate’s sex and the sex of the persons the candidate is attracted to.

I am not claiming that it is morally wrong to be attracted to persons of the same sex in the way in which it is wrong to lie (or in any any other way, for that matter). Nor am I claiming that it is reasonable or legal for an employer to discriminate on the basis of such attraction. All I am claiming is that such discrimination is not discrimination on the basis of the candidate’s sex.

Objection: There is an important difference between the trait of being attracted to men and the trait of claiming to be a man. Being attracted to men is essentially the same trait whether it is found in a man or a woman, while claiming to be a man is radically different when it is found in a man and in a woman, since it is truth-telling in the one case and lying in the other.

Response: This response would require the court to settle the question whether indeed the trait of being attracted to men is basically the same trait when found in men and when found in women, in a way in which the trait of claiming to be a man is not the same trait when found in men and when found in women. That is perhaps the real philosophical question here, and it is presumably precisely what the employer in question would dispute. The court cites the example of how discriminating on the grounds of interracial marriage is racial discrimination. Now, here I would say that the trait of marrying a person of race R is the same trait whether found in a person of race R or not. But clarifying exactly what it means to be basically the same trait is very difficult.

Disclaimer: I am no lawyer or legal scholar, just a philosopher with an eye for counterexamples.

Sex as an iconic partially self-representing gesture

“Iconic representational gestures” are like a gestural onomatopoeia: their physical reality resembles in some way what they signify. For instance, blowing a kiss signifies a kiss, running a finger across a throat signifies a killing, and a baptism signifies cleansing from sin.

An interesting special case of iconic representational gestures is one where the physical reality of the gesture itself itself accomplishes a part of what it represents. A slap in the face is an iconic gesture that represents the punishment that the other party deserves for bad behavior and is itself physically a part of the punishment. Intercourse is an iconic gesture that signifies a union of persons and its physical reality constitutes the physical part of that union. And, on views on which Christ’s body is present in the Eucharist, the reception of the Eucharist is also such an iconic gesture representing union with Christ and physically effecting an aspect of that union. We can call such gestures partially self-representing.

Now, normally meaning gets attached to symbolic acts like words and gestures through other symbolic acts (you point to a “zebra” and say “Let’s call that ‘zebra’”). This threatens to lead to a regress of symbolic acts. The regress can only be arrested by symbolic acts that have an innate meaning. Now, while there is often an element of conventionality even in iconic representational gestures, just as there is in onomatopoeia, nonetheless I think our best candidate for symbolic acts that have an innate meaning is iconic representational gestures. Moreover, if the gesture has an innate meaning, it is plausible that it was used at least as long as humankind has been around.

If we think about the best candidates for such gestures, we can speculate that perhaps pointing or punching has been around as long as humans have been around. But that’s speculation. But it’s not speculation that sex has been around as long as humans have been around. Thus, sex is an excellent candidate for a gesture that has the following features:

• iconic representational

• partially self-representing

• innate meaning.

Moreover, given that the physical aspect of sex is a thorough biological union, it is very reasonable to think that this innate meaning is a thorough personal union. But, as Vincent Punzo has noted in his work on sex, a thorough personal union needs to include a normative commitment for life. And that is marriage. Thus, sex signifies marriage.

The sexual, the secret and the sacred

Some ethical truths are intuitively obvious but it is hard to understand the reasons for them. For instance, sexual behavior should be, at least other things being equal, kept private. But why? While I certainly have this intuition, I have always found it deeply puzzling, especially since privacy is opposed to the value of knowledge and hence always requires a special justification.

But here is a line of thought that makes sense to me now. There is a natural connection between the sacred and the ritually hidden recognized across many religions. Think, for instance, of how the holiest prayers of the Tridentine Mass are said inaudibly by the priest, or the veiling of the Holy of Holies in the Temple of Jerusalem, or the mystery religions. The sacred is a kind of mysterium tremendum et fascinans, and ritual hiddenness expresses the mysteriousness of the sacred particularly aptly.

If sexuality is sacred—say, because of its connection with the generation of life, and given the sacredness of human life—then it is unsurprising if it is particularly appropriately engaged in in a context that involves ritual hiddenness.

Note that this is actually more of a ritual hiddenness than an actual secrecy. The fact of sex is not a secret in the case of a married couple, just as the content of the inaudible prayers of the Tridentine Mass is printed publicly in missals, but it is ritually hidden.

I wonder, too, if reflection on ritual hiddenness might not potentially help with the “problem of hiddenness”.

The Trinity, sexual ethics and liberal Christianity

Many Christians deny traditional Christian doctrines regarding sexual ethics while accepting traditional Christian Trinitarian doctrine. This seems to me to be a rationally suspect combination because:

1. The arguments against traditional Christian sexual ethics are weaker than the arguments against the doctrine of the Trinity.

2. A number of the controversial parts of traditional Christian sexual ethics are grounded
   at least as well in Tradition and Scripture as the doctrine of the Trinity is.

Let me offer some backing for claims 1 and 2.

The strongest arguments against traditional Christian sexual ethics are primarily critiques of the arguments for traditional Christian sexual ethics (such as the arguments from the natural law tradition). As such, these arguments do not establish the falsity of traditional Christian sexual ethics, but at best show that it has a weak philosophical foundation. On the other hand, the best arguments against the doctrine of the Trinity come very close to showing that the doctrine of the Trinity taken on its own terms is logically contradictory. The typical Christian theologian is the one who is on the defensive here, offering ways to resolve the apparent contradiction rather than giving rational arguments for the truth of the doctrine.

There are, admittedly, some arguments against traditional Christian sexual ethics on the basis of intuitions widely shared in our society. But we know that these intuitions are very much shaped by a changing culture, insofar as prior to the 20th century, one could run intuition-based arguments for opposite conclusions. Hence, we should not consider the arguments based on current social intuitions to be particularly strong.
But the intuition that there is something contradictory about the doctrine of the Trinity does not seem to be as dependent on changing social intuitions. The merely socially counterintuitive is rationally preferable to the apparently contradictory.

Neither the whole of the doctrine of the Trinity nor the whole of traditional Christian sexual ethics is explicit in Scripture. But particularly controversial portions of each are explicit in Scripture: the Prologue of John tells us that Christ is God, while both Mark and Luke tell us that remarriage after divorce is a form of adultery, and Paul is clear on the wrongfulness of same-sex sexual activity. And the early Christian tradition is at least as clear, and probably more so, sexual ethics as on the doctrine of the Trinity.

I am not saying, of course, that it is not rational accept the doctrine of the Trinity. I think the arguments against the doctrine have successful responses. All I am saying is that traditional Christian sexual ethics fares (even) better.

One Body book at 45% off with free shipping

Notre Dame University Press has a 45% off sale today (Cyber Monday) on all print books, with free shipping. This includes my One Body: An Essay in Christian Sexual Ethics, which should be down to $24.75. You need to use the promo code 14CYBER.

Evan Rosa's interview with me

I just happened to come across an interview that Evan Rosa did with me about half a decade ago, when my One Body book came out. As far as I can tell, the interview was only posted last month.

Abortifacient effects of contraception and the Principle of Double Effect

Suppose that a contraceptive has the following properties:

• Fewer than 1% of users have a pregnancy annually.

• At least 5% of users annually experience a cycle where the contraceptive fails to prevent fertilization but does prevent implantation.

I think there is good empirical reason to think there are such contraceptives on the market. But that’s a matter for another post. Here I want to look at just the ethics question. So let’s suppose that the above stipulated properties obtain, and in fact that they are known to obtain.

The cases where the contraceptive prevents implantation are cases where the contraceptive kills an early embryo: in short, they are cases where the contraceptive is being abortifacient. The question I want to address in this post is this: Could someone who thinks early embryos have whatever property (personhood, membership in the human race, the imago dei, the possession of the soul, etc.) that makes it paradigmatically wrong to kill adult human beings nonetheless defend the contraceptive on the grounds that the deaths due to implantation-prevention are just an unintended and unfortunate side-effect?

Basically, the defense being envisioned would invoke some version of the Principle of Double Effect, which allows for some actions that have a bad side-effect that isn’t intended as a means or as an end. Of course, Double Effect requires that there not be other reasons why the action is wrong. But let’s bracket the question—which I address at length in my One Body book—whether there are other reasons the contraceptive could be wrong to use, and just focus on the abortifacient effect.

We can ask the question from two points of view:

1. Can the manufacturer justify the production of the contraceptive on the grounds that failures of implantation are just an unfortunate side-effect?

2. Can the user justify the use on those grounds?

Regarding 1, here’s a thought. For the contraceptive to be competitive, it has to be highly effective. If one does not count the 5% of annual cases where fertilization occurs but implantation is prevented as part of the contraceptive’s effectiveness, then one can at most claim 95% effectiveness for the contraceptive. And that effectiveness would put the contraceptive significantly behind the most effective formulations of the pill. In fact, it will put it somewhat behind the results that can be achieved by Natural Family Planning by a well-prepared and well-motivated couple. So for commercial purposes, the manufacturer will have to be advertising 99% effectiveness. But one cannot with moral consistency claim 99% effectiveness while holding that 5% of that is an unfortunate side-effect. By claiming 99% effectiveness, one is putting oneself behind the mechanisms that one knows are being used to achieve that effectiveness.

Suppose that a manufacturer advertises an analgesic that is guaranteed to be 99% effective at pain relief. But suppose that 5% of the time, the analgesic kills the patient and 94% of the time it relieves pain non-fatally. Then indeed the analgesic relieves pain 99% of the time, since killing the patient stops the pain. But by holding out 99% effectiveness, the manufacturer is showing that that it is really intending this to be a pain-relief-cum-euthanasia drug rather than a mere pain-relief drug.

What about 2? As we saw from the case of the manufacturer, the user cannot intend 99% effectiveness while saying that the deaths of early embryos are unfortunate side-effects. But the user, unlike the manufacturer, can say: “From my point of view, this is about 94% effective, with a 5% likelihood of a fatal side-effect, which side-effect I don’t intend.”

There are two points I want to make here. First, Double Effect requires there to be no reasonable alternatives to the course of action. But there are methods of fertility control that do not cause implantation-failure, for instance Natural Family Planning, and some of these methods are not less effective when compared against the 94% figure. And one cannot with moral consistency compare these method against the 99% effectivness figure while holding out that 5% of that is an unfortunate side-effect one would like to avoid.

Finally, imagine a hypothetical male contraceptive pill that works by releasing genetically engineered sperm-eating viruses that has the following annual properties:

• Fewer than 1% of female partners get pregnant.

• But 5% of female partners get a fatal viral infection from it.

• No men die.

Clearly, nobody would tolerate such a product. Both the manufacturer and the men using it would be accused of murder. Technically, it might not be murder if the deaths of the women were not intended, but the act would be closely akin to vehicular homicide through criminal negligence. Any Double Effect justification would have no hope of succeeding, because Double Effect requires that the unintended bads not be disproportionate to the intended goods. But a 5% annual chance of death is just not worth the contraceptive effect, especially when there are alternatives present. Indeed, even if the only alternative to using this nasty contraceptive were abstinence, which isn’t the case, surely total abstinence would typically be preferable to inducing a 5% annual chance of death (unless perhaps the woman were already suffering from a terminal disease).

Of course, my arguments are predicated on the assumption that killing an early embryo is morally on par with killing an adult. That's another argument.

Three levels of sex/gender

The biological understanding of male and female is something like this. Some species reproduce sexually. Some species that reproduce sexually exhibit a consistent difference in size between the two gametes that come together in sexual reproduction. In those species, the producer of the larger gamete is called “female” and the producer of the smaller gamete is called “male”. We can thus draw a distinction between a species having sexes, namely having respective producers of two different kinds of gametes, each of which is needed for sexual reproduction, and the species having male and female sexes.

Let me speak vaguely but heuristically. Human reproduction has a deep ethical and theological significance because it produces persons. Moreover, humans normally reproduce sexually (the exception of course being twinning). So it’s unsurprising if the existence of two sexes among humans has intrinsic ethical and theological significance. But the difference between male and female seems to have no intrinsic ethical or theological significance. It matters that there are two reproductive kinds, but that one of the two kinds produces a larger gamete than the other has no intrinsic ethical or theological significance.

But of course even though what defines the difference between male and female humans is the difference in gamete size, the actual differences between male and female humans are not in fact limited to differences of gamete size. Those humans that produce smaller gametes produce more of them, while those humans that produce larger gametes produce fewer of them and gestate offspring. Humans have “primary sex characteristics” that support differing ways of reproductive functioning.

Here is a thought experiment. Imagine earth* where there are humans*. To a cursory external examination, humans* live, look and behave just like humans, and have the same kind of sexual differentiation. One sex produces lots of gametes and the other relatively few. The sex that produces fewer gametes gestates offspring for nine months, has mammary-type glands that nourish offspring after gestation, is a little smaller on average, etc. But on earth*, it also turns out that the the sex that produces relatively few gametes produces the smaller gametes. (There may be evolutionary reasons why this is unlikely. But unlikely is not impossible.) Thus, on earth* male humans* fill the same biological roles as female humans do on earth, except at a near-microscopic level where the sizes of gametes become visible.

Now overlay on this the social level. This could go in multiple ways. It is easiest to imagine that on earth*, male humans* have the same social positions, and suffer from the same sorts of discrimination, as female humans do on earth. But it could in principle be reversed: it could be that the social position of male and female humans* is like that of male and female humans, respectively. Or it could be nullified: there could be no significant differences in social position.

This suggests that there are three levels to sex/gender:

• The definitionally fundamental distinction between male and female in terms of gamete size.

• Other biological differences—particularly with respect to reproductive functioning.

• The social distinctions.

The first two tend to be lumped together as “sex” or “biological sex”, while the last gets called “gender”. But there really are three distinct levels. We might roughly call them: “biological gametic sex”, “biological functional sex” and “social gender”. Thus, among humans*, the connection between biological functional sex and biological gametic sex is the reverse of how it is among humans. So we now have three different senses of terms like “man”, “woman”, “male” and “female”.

Contraception, liturgy and self-giving

Alice has a paper due the day after Thanksgiving. She’s already gotten all the extensions she can, and she can’t get it done except by working through Thanksgiving. She is thinking of not going to the big Thanksgiving dinner that her grandfather organizes every year, even though it brings together relatives she hasn’t heard from for a long time, has much warm family fellowship, and great food. But then she has an idea: “It’s better to attend distractedly than not at all. The table is big and my laptop is small, so I can easily put my laptop beside a plate, and then I can write all the way through dinner and finish my paper. And I’m good at multitasking, so I can still have an ear out for interesting bits of conversation, and occasionally I can put a forkful of food in my mouth or make a friendly remark to someone. It would be permissible for me to skip the dinner completely, and this is better than skipping it.”

Bob has a major exam on Wednesday. It is his habit to attend Mass daily, both for the spiritual benefits and because there is an incredible organist. He could skip Tuesday Mass, but reasons much as Alice does: “If I skip Mass, I get none of the spiritual and musical benefits. I’ll just bring my tablet, sit in the back pew so the bright screen doesn’t disturb anybody, study hard and I’ll at least get some of the benefits of Mass. After all, there is nothing wrong with my skipping Tuesday Mass, and this is better.”

Alice is being obtuse about human relationships and Bob doesn’t understand the kind of participation the Mass requires. There are some activities that one should give oneself pretty completely to—or not do them at all.

What if Bob says something like this? “But I go to Mass on many days when I’ve already spent hours working hard, and I’m really exhausted, and barely able to pay any attention to what the priest says. There is nothing morally wrong with attending Mass on days like that. But today I’m still fresh, and multitasking today I can participate at least as well as singletasking on a bad day.” And Alice can say something very similar—after all, very tired people can go to Thanksgiving dinner, too.

But that’s still not an excuse. For when one goes to Thanksgiving dinner or Mass, one should give oneself to it as much as one can (within some reasonable limit of what counts as “enough”). Both Alice and Bob are going to be deliberately withholding themselves from participation. But on the days when they attended while really tired, they weren’t doing that—they were giving what they could (it would be different if Bob ran a marathon in order to be too tired to follow the Gospel reading!).

Now, consider a common response to John Paul II’s argument that contraception is wrong because it deliberately blocks the total self-giving in sex. “Granted, contraception blocks an aspect of the union as one body. But a partial union is better than no union at all, and a couple is morally permitted to refrain from union for good reasons.” But that’s like Alice’s and Bob’s initial argument. And there is a case that can be made that sex is a liturgical kind of act, akin to Thanksgiving dinner or the Mass, and that in these kinds of liturgical acts one can’t participate while blocking an aspect of one’s participation—one needs to give one’s all, or not at all. It is better not to have sex at all than to have it while blocking one’s participation.

And then there is the riposte: “But the Catholic Church says it’s permissible to have sex while infertile. And contracepted sex has in it everything that infertile sex does.” But that riposte is just like Bob’s suggestion that studying at Mass with his tablet still leaves him as much (or more!) function as attending Mass on the days when he is really tired. Yes, that’s true, but it misses the liturgical meaning of deliberately distracting oneself with the tablet.

If it is objected that sex isn’t analogous to Thanksgiving dinner or the Mass (though I think it is), we could think about the case of Carl who is a professional movie reviewer. His wife would like to have sex with him, but he needs to watch and review a boring movie by tomorrow. So he sets up a laptop by the bed, and unites with his wife while watching the movie. Ugh! It would be better not to have sex at all.

The consent norm for sexual activity is insufficient

Consider the thesis that consent is the only norm of sexual activity. Of course, this does not imply the crazy claim that every consensual sexual act is permissible. Some consensual sexual acts violate promises, or constitute the neglect of some non-sexual responsibility (e.g., sex while driving), or just have sufficiently bad consequences for one or more people. Rather, the thesis can be taken to say that consent is the only norm of sexual activity as sexual, that it is the only distinctively sexual norm.

The thesis is still false. To see this, we will need a distinction between things that are very wrong and things that are wrong but not very wrong. Then:

1. Every case of coitus without consent is a case of rape.
2. Every case of rape is gravely wrong as a sexual act.
3. There is a case of coitus which is wrong as sexual but not gravely wrong.
4. So, there is a case of coitus which is not rape but is wrong as sexual. (2 and 3)
5. So, there is a case of coitus which is wrong as sexual even though there is consent. (1 and 4)

(When I say that a case of coitus is wrong, I mean that at least one party responsible for the coitus is in the wrong. That party could be one of the participants in coitus, but need not be: a rapist does not actually have to participate in the act of coitus, but could instead force two other people to engage in coitus with themselves.)

I think premise 3 is very plausible. It would be quite surprising if sexual wrongness of coitus only came in grave and not-at-all varieties, with nothing in between. But I can also offer an argument for premise 3 (I’ve used this argument in a previous post which gave a similar but perhaps less clear argument) assuming that consent is the only norm of sexual activity—the target of my argument obviously can’t dispute that.

We imagine a continuum of cases of coitus, where at one extreme there clearly is no consent and at the other extreme there clearly is consent.

(For instance, it could be a set of cases where a party threatens an adverse consequence if coitus is not engaged in: at one end, the consequence is torture and at the other end it’s a minor expression of minor displeasure. Accepting coitus as an alternative to torture is not consent. Accepting coitus as an alternative to witnessing a minor expression of minor displeasure can be consent (assuming that minor displeasure is all there is; obviously, minor displeasure from a tyrant could have further adverse consequences—including torture and death).)

Assuming consent is the only norm of sexual activity, there is no sexual wrong at the consent end of the continuum and there is grave sexual wrong by (1) and (2) at the no-consent end of the continuum. Given continuous variation in cases, we would expect continuous variation in wrongdoing. So if at one end we have grave sexual wrong and at the other end no sexual sexual wrong, somewhere in the middle there should be a case of non-grave sexual wrong, which is what premise (3) says.

Note how the enthusiastic consent alternative to the consent norm nicely escapes the argument. For the proponent of the enthusiastic consent norm case can agree to (2) but say that there are some non-grave sexual wrongs. These non-grave sexual wrongs could, for instance, include some of the cases where there is consent but the consent is insufficiently enthusiastic.

Pragmatically speaking, this is a risky argument to use in teaching. The problem is that a student might try to get out of the argument by denying premise (2) which, given the rape problem on many campuses, would be very bad. On the other hand, if students have a sufficiently strong commitment to (2), this argument could have positive consequences for campus sexual culture by getting them to realize that minimally-valid consent is not enough for permissibility (even if by definition it is enough to make the act not be a case of rape).

Philosophically, there is a technical weakness in that the notion of a sexually wrong act is a bit foggy. I think one can reformulate the argument by dropping the “sexual” qualifier in the argument but specializing to cases where there is no promise breaking, there are no bad non-sexual consequences, etc. But it’s hard to explicate the “etc.”

A puzzle about medicine and war

The following seem to be true:

1. It is never permissible for the state to force on a non-consenting innocent patient medical procedures very likely to cause death.
2. It is sometimes permissible for the state to force a non-consenting drafted soldier to go to near certain death in a just war.

In regard to (1), the state can legitimately force patients to undergo medical operations involving minimal risk and invasiveness, at least as long as the patients have no conscientious objection to them (a restriction that has an obvious military analogue): vaccinations are the standard example. This is very puzzling: Why the distinction?

Here is a suggestive hint. We can imagine circumstances where a war against a vicious enemy could only be won by an attack by non-consenting draftees even though it was morally certain that most of the draftees would be captured and horrendous medical experiments would be done on them by the enemy. Such an attack could well be permissible, even though much less extreme medical experiments could not be intentionally imposed on non-consenting patients even for an equal good (say, to defeat some awful disease). This suggests a difference between directly imposing harms and acting in a way that is morally certain to lead to the self-same harms. This is exactly the sort of difference that the Principle of Double Effect is sensitive to. Someone who thinks that foreseeing/intending differences do not matter is probably not going to be able to make the distinction between enforced medical procedures and the draft.

At the same time, the Principle of Double Effect does not seem sufficient to remove the puzzle concerning (1) and (2), since it doesn't really get at what it is that is so special about medical procedures likely to cause death as opposed to military operations likely to cause death. Probably another part of the puzzle has to do with the integrity of the body. But it's tricky: the importance of bodily integrity is not enough to make all enforced medicine wrong. It seems that the state can legitimately require procedures that are minimally invasive and minimally risky, but cannot legitimately require procedures that are minimally invasive but highly risky (think of injecting someone with a vaccine versus injecting someone with a fully functional virus).

Maybe it's like this: the fact that an intentional procedure directly transgresses bodily integrity typically calls for consent. But in at least some cases where someone's lack of consent is strongly irrational, that lack of consent can be overridden for a sufficiently good cause. But where the lack of consent is at least somewhat rational, the lack of consent cannot be overridden. When the risks are minimal, the lack of consent is strongly irrational, barring conscientious objection. But when the risks are high, lack of consent is at least somewhat rational. Medical procedures always transgress bodily integrity, so we get (1). On the other hand, commanding an attack likely to lead to death (or torture or being the victim of vicious medical experiments) does not transgress bodily integrity, and so a completely different set of standards for consent and authorization is in place. This is a mere sketch. I am not sure the details can be worked out.

Notice, also, that the account in the preceding paragraph does not apply to sexual cases. Even if someone's lack of consent to sex is strongly irrational (imagine a contrived case where a married person for completely irrational or even malicious reasons refuses to have sex with a spouse, despite the fact that great benefits would come to society from their having sex--perhaps a killer robot has been programmed by a mad scientist to stop its rampage only if they have sex), it is wrong for the state to force the person to have sex. Once again, sex is morally exceptional.

Consent and sex

Here are some facts about sex and consent.

1. Without valid consent, sex is always seriously wrong.
2. Merely proxy consent for sex (say, by parents on behalf of a child) is never valid.
3. Child consent for sex is never valid.
4. Consent may be withdrawn at any time when discontinuation is still possible.

And yet:

5. Sometimes sex is permissible (with consent, of course).

There aren't many cases other than sex where the analogues of 1-5 apply. Here's one potential such case. The Nuremberg code forbids medical experiments that involve a significant risk of serious injury or death to a healthy subject, except in the case of self-experimentation, assuming the other conditions of the code are met. But if such self-experimentation is permissible, it seems likely that it would be morally permissible (though we may have good reasons to rule it out in professional medical ethics codes) to hire someone to perform such experiments on one. To do such experiments without valid consent from the employer/subject would be seriously wrong, neither proxy nor child consent would be sufficient for validity, and one would have to stop whenever consent was withdrawn.

But notice an important feature of the medical experiment case: the reason these strong consent restrictions are in play is because of the significant risk of serious injury or death. If one modifies the experiment to make the risk insignificant, weaker consent standards come into play. In particular, parents will then be validly able to consent.

But in the case of sex, the reason for the strong consent standards does not come from risks of injury or death, whether physical or psychological. For we can suppose a case where the person is unconscious, where 100% effective prophylactics are used and where the person will never be informed of the event, and hence there is no danger of physical or psychological injury. Even so, the strong consent standards for sex apply. For instance, merely proxy consent is still not sufficient.

Notice, too, another interesting feature of the medical experiment case. Even when the experiments are done in a moral good way, it is regrettable that there was no other way of getting the benefits. But sex isn't like that: when it is engaged in in a morally good way, typically there is nothing regrettable about it--quite the opposite.

So there seems to be something exceptional about sex and consent. The other cases where such strong requirements of consent need to be in place are look to be cases where one needs permission to impose something very bad on someone. That's not what's going on in sex. What is going on? My view is that sex is tied very closely to love, and love requires freedom... But filling out detail isn't easy.

Consent is not sufficient for permissibility of sex

Rape isn't just wrong, but it is historically among the handful of the very worst types of crimes, sharing that unhappy position with murder, torture and treason. I take it that every instance of rape is very seriously wrong.

But now consider a spectrum of sexual acts: on one of the spectrum is a sexual act motivated by the man threatening the woman with death; on the other end of the spectrum is a sexual act motivated by the man threatening the woman that if she doesn't have sex with him, he won't take her out to the movie that they planned to go to. In the death case, the sex is non-consensual and hence rape. In the no-movie case, the sex is consensual and hence not rape: the threat is way too mild to invalidate consent.

Somewhere in that spectrum is a transition--be it vague or not--between non-consent and consent and hence between rape and non-rape. But every instance of rape is very seriously wrong. When we have continuously transitioned away from a very serious wrong, we shouldn't expect to immediately land in the territory of moral innocence. Rather, we should expect to land either in the territory of another wrong, either another very serious wrong or a "merely" serious wrong. If we start with an act of torture and continuously reduce the degree of pain, eventually we will get an act that isn't torture--but an act that falls somewhat short of the amount of pain needed for it to count as torture is still a serious battery.

Thus we should expect there to be sexual acts that are consensual, but seriously wrong because they are neighbors to rape. Moreover, we should expect that these acts will still wrong for reasons connected to their sexual nature, just as rape is very seriously wrong for reasons connected to its sexual nature. Consent, thus, is necessary but not sufficient for sexual integrity.

Here's a different way to put the argument. If one thinks that consent is the only condition needed for the permissibility of sex (with respect to sexual integrity--of course, there are other conditions, such as whether promises are broken, etc., but they aren't properly sexual), then one has to think either that (a) we have a transition from a very seriously wrong act to a completely innocent act in the above spectrum without any intermediate cases that are wrong but not seriously so, or (b) there are cases of rape that are non-seriously wrong. I think (a) is implausible and (b) is clearly false.

The spectrum I generated above was based on a spectrum of threats. But one can also generate a spectrum based on degrees of sobriety, degrees of understanding, clarity of expression (consent is a speech act), etc.

This has an important consequence particularly relevant to college judicial policies: If acts that aren't rape but are close to rape are seriously wrong, then in cases where it cannot be shown that a rape occurred, but it can be shown that either a rape occurred or a serious wrong close to rape occurred, it can still be just to levy serious punishment. Of course, this would require due process, and hence a way to operationalize the notion of such acts close to rape.

Note 1: None of my argument is meant to give aid or comfort to those who want to narrow the definition of rape. Rather the point is to widen the scope of wrong acts, for instance in the way that the "enthusiastic consent" movement does.

Note 2: The argument I am giving is not a sorites. Vagueness complicates the argument, but does not, I think, destroy it.

Procreation and love

Start with this consequence of the essentiality of origins:

1. The identity of an individual depends on the exact time of her coming-into-existence.

(It's very plausible that it depends on coarse-grained time of coming-into-existence: I couldn't have come into existence a hundred years earlier. But there is also a well-known argument from that for the claim that it depends on the exact time.) Now, it seems that no action people can take prior to the origination of an individual determines the exact time of her coming-into-existence. There isn't any true counterfactual of the form of the form: "If we were to do A, then an individual would come into existence exactly at t." In fact, for any action we can take, quantum indeterminism will ensure a cluster of infinitely (if time is continuous) many or at least very many close-together possible resulting conception times. Moreover, each exact time will have a very tiny, perhaps infinitesimal or zero, probability of being the actual time of origination. Hence it seems:

2. There is no true probabilistic counterfactual of the form: "If we were to do A, then an individual would be not unlikely to come into existence exactly at t."

(Molinists will, of course, disagree. But Molinism is false, I take it.) Thus:

3. People cannot procreate out of love for the particular individual who would likely come into existence from the procreation.

For there is no particular individual such that she would likely come into existence from the procreation.

Now, notice that God in creating an individual--either ex nihilo or in cooperating with the joining of an egg and sperm--is under no such constraints. Thus it is possible for God to act in such a way that were he to act so, an individual would come into existence at a precise time. And the same is true for other features of the origination of the individual besides the time of its occurrence. So God could create out of love for the particular individual who would come into existence from the creation.

This fact suggests a weakness in premise (2) of my above argument. It could be that God has already decided what individual would result if a couple chose to procreate, and has resolved in particular that sperm and egg would meet at a particular time, as long as the couple chooses the procreate. God, thus, is resolved to control all the quantum phenomena to ensure a particular circumstance of origination. Thus it's up to the couple whether someone comes into existence, but there is a particular someone who would exist if the couple procreated. It would not be surprising if this were to happen in special cases, and it would be possible for it to happen in all cases. I don't know if it does, though.

The upshot of the above argument, thus, is that unless special theological assumptions hold, it is not possible for a couple to decide whether to procreate out of love for the particular child that would result.

The needs of the human community

Andrea Dworkin argued that sexual intercourse between a man and a woman is always wrong because it involves a violation of the woman's bodily integrity. She concluded that until recent advances in medical technology, it was impossible for humans to permissibly reproduce. The antinatalists, on the other hand, continue to hold that it is impossible for humans to permissible reproduce. Such views lead to an incredulous stare. It is very tempting to levy against them an argument like this:

1. Coital reproduction is necessary for the minimal flourishing of the human community under normal conditions.
2. Whatever is necessary for the minimal flourishing of the human community under normal conditions is sometimes permissible.
3. Coital reproduction is sometimes permissible.

The condition "under normal conditions" is needed for (2) to be plausible. We can, after all, easily imagine science-fictional scenarios where something immoral would need to be done to ensure the minimal flourishing of the human community.

Reproduction is not the only case where issues like this come up. For instance, the destruction of non-human organisms, say plants, seems necessary for our flourishing. And I suspect that under normal conditions the killing of non-human animals is necessary, too (if only as a side-effect of plowing fields, say). Taxation may be another interesting example.

I have heard it argued that (2) is in itself a basic moral principle, so that killing non-human animals as a side-effect of vegan farming is permissible because it is permissible to ensure minimal human flourishing. But that seems mistaken. Rather, while (2) is true, it is not a moral principle, but a consequence of a correlation between (a) fundamental facts about what moral duties there are actually are and (b) facts about what is actually needed for minimal human flourishing under normal conditions.

This leads to an interesting and I think somewhat underexplored question: Why are the moral facts and the facts about actual human needs so correlated as to make (2) true?

Theists have an elegant answer to this question: God had very strong moral reason to make humans in such a way that, at least normally, minimal flourishing of the community doesn't require wrong action. Non-theists have other stories to tell. These stories, however, are likely to be piecemeal. For instance, one will give one evolutionary story about why we and our ecosystem evolved in such a way that eating persons wasn't needed for our species' survival, and another about why we evolved in such a way that morally non-degrading sex sufficed for reproduction. But a unified answer is to be preferred over piecemeal answers, especially when the unified answer is compatible with the piecemeal ones and capable of integrating them into a single story. We do, thus, get some evidence for theism here.

Marriage in heaven

Question 1: Are there marriages in heaven?

Answer: No. Jesus explicitly says that there is no marrying or giving in marriage in heaven (Luke 20:27-38). So no new marriages are entered into in heaven. That might seem to leave open the question whether existing marriages might not continue. But the context of the discussion is of a woman who was married to a sequence of brothers and the paradoxical consequences of that if these marriages continue in the afterlife. Jesus' answer only solves the paradox if we accept the implicature that there is no marriage in heaven. Moreover, it would be an odd view if existing marriages persisted in heaven but new ones couldn't be entered into. If marriage in heaven would be a good thing for us, this kind of a setup just wouldn't be fair to a loving couple who was murdered minutes before their wedding was to take place.

Question 2: Why are there no marriage in heaven?

Answer: It's good that way. Well, that's true, but not informative: it applies to everything about heavenly life. But we can think a bit about why it's good for it to be so.

One thought is that only marriage for eternity would be fitting for heavenly life. Divorce just doesn't seem the sort of thing that is fitting for heavenly life. But I think it would be problematic for humans to bind themselves to one another for an eternal heavenly life. Heavenly life is unimaginable to us now, radically transcending our current knowledge. Because of this, it would not be appropriate for us to commit ourselves now to be bound to another person for an infinite length of time in that utterly different life. Now one might think that once in heaven the problem disappears. But I suspect it does not. I suspect that the heavenly life is a life of eternal and non-asymptotic growth (hence my recent swollen head argument against Christian physicalism). I don't know if the beatific vision itself increases eternally, but I suspect that at least the finite goods of heavenly life do. So some of the reasons why it would not be fitting for us to bind ourselves now to one another for eternity would apply in heaven: in year ten of heavenly life, perhaps, one cannot imagine what year one billion will be like; in year one billion, one cannot imagine what year 10¹⁰⁰ will be like; and so on. Eternity is long.

A second thought is that there is something about the exclusivity of marriage that is not fitted for heavenly life. The advocates of free love had something right: there is something limiting about exclusivity. This limitation is entirely fitting given the nature of marriage and its innate links to reproduction and sexual union as one body. But nonetheless it seems plausible to me that an innately exclusive form of love is not fitted to heaven.

A third and most speculative thought: There is a link--worth exploring in much greater depth than I am going to do here--between the exclusivity of marriage and the appropriateness of according privacy to sexual activity. But I suspect that there is a great transparency in heavenly life. What is hidden is revealed. It is a life of truth rather than of withholding of information. In regard to the emotional life, those in heaven will have highly developed faculties of empathy. After all, my model is one of continued growth. People can grow immensely in empathy in this life--how much more will they likely grow in heaven! These faculties of empathy would enable people to have great empathetic insight into the sexual lives of others, to a point where that insight could make them empathetic participants in that life, in a way incompatible with the exclusivity of marriage and the privacy of sexuality.

The greatest discovery in the history of human biology

If one searches for "the greatest discovery in the history of biology", the top hits indicate that it was the discovery of DNA. Maybe, though I'm not sure. But least in the history of human biology, the greatest discovery surely was the discovery that pregnancy is caused by coitus. (A discovery presumably made independently in multiple cultures.)