I’d like to start off my series of posts on political philosophy with an odd side-excursion to a topic that, on the surface, seems to be completely unrelated to politics. That topic is sex. Yes, there are sexual scandals that can bring down a politician, but I’m not referring to specific instances of sex. I’m referring instead to attitudes toward sex which underlie and inform political philosophies and positions.

Specifically, I’m concerned with how people answer the following question: What is sex for?

There are, of course, two answers to that question. And yet, in the attitudes and actions people display in their lives it is obvious that one of the answers for them is primary and the other secondary. But for other people, the one is merely secondary and the other is primary. And I’m sure that people have been coming down on both sides of the divide for as long as people have known where babies come from.

What is sex for? For procreation. This is the position of one side.
What is sex for? For pleasure. This is the position of the other side.

The procreation side believes that the purpose of sex is to make babies – to bring new life into the world. Sexual urges are there in order to encourage people to procreate, as is the pleasure one feels when having sex. They help us to want to procreate. These believers in the natural law view sex, then, as a grave responsibility which should be supported by cultural institutions in order to maximize the success of the getting and rearing of children. The primary institution for this is marriage. Governmental support for the married at the expense of single people (such as in the tax code) is for the benefit of the children.

The pleasure side holds that one has sex for the pleasure it gives. The begetting of children may or may not be a biological consequence of the action, but pleasure is the reason for it. What’s marriage for then? Well, obviously, it is an institutional means of having a regular sex partner.

In part two of the epistemology of sex, I will attempt to take a look at some of the implications of each of these two belief systems.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 at 7:43 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.