Philip Larkin, in Annus Mirabilis, tells us that:
“Sexual intercourse began/In nineteen sixty-three/(which was rather late for me)/
Between the end of the ‘Chatterley; ban/And the Beatles’ first LP.”
Capturing the spirit of the times, the poet goes on to note the recession of sexual shame and the mores that went with it: “Then all at once the quarrel sank/Everyone felt the same,/And every life became/A brilliant breaking of the bank,/A quite unlosable game.”
But elsewhere, a quarrel was hotting up. In 1964, the Catholic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe engaged in a debate about the Church’s historic prohibition of contraception with the famous Thomist Dominican Herbert McCabe in the pages of the journal New Blackfriars.
McCabe, a great populariser of Aquinas’s thought and a Catholic of radical political views, argued that the Church’s traditional prohibition of contraception was not based on convincing philosophical arguments. His position centres on the idea that the natural moral law concerns the community that is the human race – a reality that exists before we do and of which we are fragments. He begins by mooting an argument against contraception based on the idea that because some human activities have built-in functions concerning the requirements of mankind as a whole, and because such functions have an importance greater than any purpose an individual may have, interference with such built-in functions (in this case, the procreation of children) in such a way as to frustrate the function is always morally wrong.
However, McCabe notes that sexual intercourse is only a part of sexual activity – by which he seems to mean something more like the activities of a marriage as a whole. For him, it seems possible that the complex nature of sexual or marital activity is such that if a ”part” of the activity in the form of sexual intercourse is interfered with and frustrated it does not necessarily follow that the built-in purpose of the whole is wrongly suppressed. He suggests that if “contraceptive intercourse came to be regarded as in some cases legitimate, there would be an equally clear, well-established and recognised distinction between the context which would make it a frustration of sexual activity and those in which it would not be so.” For McCabe, it is those with direct experience of the problems of married life who should decide what the right context would be.
What are we to make of this? Wrongdoing in general should not be too quickly equated with harm to the community. Aquinas objected to Aristotle’s thought that a “profligate” is not immoral because he does not harm others, stating that “we say here that evil in general, is all that is repugnant to right reason”. Likewise, the specific wrong involved in contraception cannot be located predominantly outside the couple – even if this and other sexual wrongdoing also harms society by harming attitudes to sex and children. Anscombe, a mother of a large family and well-acquainted with the practical pressures of parenthood, responded to McCabe insisting that the Church was right about sex. She argued that “It’s so important in marriage and quite generally, simply because there just is no such thing as a casual, non-significant sexual act. This in turn arises from the fact that sex concerns the transmission of human life…Virtue in connection with eating is basically only a matter of the pattern of one’s eating habits but Virtue in sex – chastity – is not only a matter of such a pattern, that is of its role in a pair of lives. A single sexual action can be bad even without regard to its context, its further intention and its motives.”
Sexual ethics is a special area of ethics: so profound, indeed, that a mistake here can transform one’s understanding of ethics more generally. Anscombe identified what the Church has always taught, namely that certain kinds of act are wrong intrinsically, regardless of the consequences.
McCabe and those who dissented from the Church’s traditional teaching on contraception (reaffirmed in 1968 in the famous Encyclical Humanae Vitae) opened the way for an approach to Catholic ethics which minimised the meaning of sex through downplaying its procreative significance. The appraisal of the contraceptive act as sometimes justified when taken in relation to an overall “good marriage”, where the spouses mutually act to acquire a good moral character, is a radically new way of (mis)understanding Catholic ethics. It is hard to see why occasional adultery could not be justified in the same way – indeed, those who make space for such activity in their own lives do sometimes argue with a straight face in terms of the overall good of the marriage.
Recognising the pervading significance of each individual sexual act means we must judge the act before we judge the character of those who engage in it. We understand what makes a virtuous character, marital or otherwise, through an understanding of which acts are virtuous. That a good person can commit a wrongful act and still be a good person, especially after repentance, is not in doubt, but he only ever gained his virtuous character by repeatedly engaging in virtuous acts, and were he to persistently engage in vicious acts – i.e. acts expressing vices – he would lose that moral character.
Once you treat as choice-worthy sexual acts lacking in procreative-unitive significance, you lose any strong argument against a whole host of sexual acts far removed from contraception. And with the generalised acceptance of contraception, we did get, in time, the generalised acceptance of hitherto taboo sexual activities such as homosexual sex. By denuding sexual acts of their procreative meaning and refusing to address them as particular acts which are intrinsically good or evil, you begin to lose the ability to understand our complementarity, the meaning of marriage and of our male and female bodies. Acts which are a parody of conjugal meaning are mistaken for the real thing and honoured accordingly. Such acts, far from being potentially good in terms of the human community are in fact radical denials of it.
There are lessons here for debates on gender. Respect for maleness and femaleness relates at once to respect for the meaning of our bodies’ very structure and for the meaning of the marital sexual act to which that structure is linked. Building a “sexual” morality based more on contingent desires than on the male and female meanings of our bodies is ultimately no more defensible than building a “gender” morality based not on these meanings but on how we see our bodies and want them to be.
Thus efforts to combat transactivism by making common cause with those in the LGB community who laud homosexual sex fail to address the roots of both the LGB and the T movement in the silencing of the true meaning of the body.
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