Here's a plausible principle: in general, we shouldn't do things that are likely to make people uncomfortable. This is particularly true if our only reason for doing whatever we're doing is that we get some sort of enjoyment out of it. And if we're in doubt about whether we're likely to make the person uncomfortable, better to err on the side of caution. The principle is actually a broad one, as we can see if we change the example a bit. Suppose the person sitting across the room from me has a very sweet face. There's nothing wrong with noticing, but staring is another matter; that's likely to make the person uncomfortable. This is true even if the s/he has made some effort to highlight facial features. Noticing, even appreciating is one thing; staring, let alone ogling, is another. That's the general advice. In real life, there are lots of subtleties. It's not unusual for one person to notice that another is "checking them out," as it's sometimes put, and to be flattered. That might be...

It's an interesting question and not easy to answer. Let's start with what may seem to be a minor point but actually isn't. It's not right that we should never be direct. The most obvious exception is when two people already have a sexual relationship and they're both comfortable about it. But even there, being blunt isn't always welcome. Sex isn't one-dimensional. There's lusty animal sex and there's also tender romantic sex. What works for one doesn't necessarily work for the other. If it's complicated even for people who are in a relationship, it's not hard to see why rude and crude doesn't tend to work when that's not so. Human relationships just are complicated; after all, there are completely non-sexual matters that most of us don't like having broached too directly. When we add sex to the mix, things certainly won't get simpler. Leave male vs. female aside for a moment. If someone hints to me that they're interested but the feeling isn't mutual, I can ignore the hint in ways...

Physical attraction is part of what makes a romantic relationship, and so if romance was what you wanted, not being attracted would matter. This also explains why it would be strange to say that a heterosexual is discriminating in an objectionable way against people of the same sex just because s/he doesn't have romantic relationships with them. (We can turn this around, of course. A gay man isn't discriminating against women in some untoward way just be cause he doesn't want to have romantic relationships with them.) That much is obvious. But there's still some subtlety in the background. You said you didn't pursue this possibility because the woman "wasn't attractive enough." That could mean a couple of things. One is that you didn't find her sexually attractive: for whatever reason, there was none of that sort of spark. More on that below, but so far, no foul. However, you might have meant that she didn't meet some conventional standard of attractiveness, quite apart from your own reaction....

Just one footnote to Sean. If homosexuality is a choice, it's not, as Richard Mohr once pointed out, like the choice of what sort of ice cream you're going to buy. Here's a thought experiment to try. Think of someone you find sexually attractive. Now try to choose not to have that response. Part two: think of someone you don't find sexually attractive. Now try to choose to be attracted to them. Step three: repeat steps one and two for broad categories of people where you find you have pretty stable patterns of attraction. If you are anything like me, you'll find that the attempt to choose doesn't get you anywhere. Just how we end up being sexually attracted to the people we're attracted to is not easy to say. What seems pretty clear is that it's not in any ordinary sense a choice, Of course, having predilections is one thing; that may not be a choice. Acting on them is another; that usually is a choice. If a case could be made that it's wrong for homosexual people to act on their...

Lack of consent isn't the only argument, but I doubt that anyone ever thought it was. Roughly, we think we need consent when we think the person might reasonably object if they only knew about or understood what was being done to them. In the case of pedophilia, there's plenty of reason to think that the child would object if s/he understood. As it happens, I know someone very well who was the victim of a pedophile. When it happened (and it happened more than once), she didn't understand; she was four years old. But if you asked her about it now, she would say that what this man did to her was very wrong and caused her a great deal of torment as she came to terms with it. Though it's hardly the whole story, the phrase "taking advantage of" is entirely apt here.. This man didn't have that young girl's good in mind. He was using her for his own disagreeable reasons. It's a straightforward case of what Kant would call using someone as a mere means. Offhand, I can't think of any cases where...

I'd suggest reflecting on a different question: is there any good argument to support the claim that it isn't? I ask this because for my own part, I can't think of one. Further, I don't think this is just a failure of imagination on my part. When I think about the same-sex couples I know, the fact that both partners are men or both are women fades into the background pretty quickly. I've known dysfunctional same-sex couples, and dysfunctional opposite-sex couples. I've seen loving, sustaining, healthy same-sex relationships, and loving, sustaining, healthy opposite-sex relationships. Some homosexual people are abusive; so are some heterosexual people. Some heterosexual people are just the sort of people you'd be glad to see your own child in a relationship with. And so are some homosexual people. Now it's true: homosexual sex isn't procreative. Neither is sex with birth control. Nor is celibacy. It's also true: if everyone were homosexual, the survival of the species would be a lot more...

"Fulfill" is a bit of a weasel word, isn't it? Suppose one partner would like to make love every night. The other, less libidinous spouse is more a two-or-three time a week type. We might say that the first spouse is "unfulfilled," but that sounds like a really poor excuse for adultery. If the lack of "fulfillment" amount to some deep incompatibility, a good question to ask first might be: have the partners in the marriage talked about what's not working? Can it be fixed? If the answer really seems to be no, then the next obvious question is whether the marriage is worth saving. Life is complicated, of course and blanket generalizations don't do justice to the complexity of people's relationships. But the old question: "How would I feel if the tables were turned?" is always a good one to ask when we're trying to decide if we're acting rightly. It's not just an old bromide; it gets at something pretty deep in our notions of right and wrong.

I'll leave it to Freudians and others to speculate on what part of some people's psyches makes virginity seem valuable. Suffice it to say that I share your bewilderment. Obvious caveats and qualifications assumed, there's no clear reason why staying a virgin should be considered virtuous. (Odd, by the way that there is a close conventional association between virtue and virginity.) That said, it's not really so strange that we might think about the first person we made love with -- or even kissed, for that matter -- with a certain wistfulness. But that's different from wishing that the person we eventually end up with should have been the first.

I'm having a bit of trouble finding the argument here. Let's take a "transaction" that most of us think is just fine: accepting a proposal of marriage. If Pat agrees to marry Robin and then gets cold feet, Robin can't force the issue. But what of it? Or take another example: I agree to buy your house. I sign the contract. And then I back out. In most jurisdictions, far as I know, you can't sue me for specific performance; you can't force me to buy the house, though there are various damages that you would be entitled to recover from me. As things stand in most places, a contract for an act of prostitution isn't enforceable, and so Travis has no legal claim against Elise -- particularly if she gives back the money. But suppose that these sorts contracts were legal, since your issue is presumably with people who think they should be. In that case, there's still no reason to think that Travis has some sort of right to rape Elise, though depending on the legal regime, he might have a civil...

I don't disagree with anything that my distinguished co-panelists have said, but I'm inclined to add a few rule-of-thumb suggestions for anyone for whom this isn't a merely theoretical question. You might ask yourself: when you do this, do you feel like you're cheating on your partner? Would you feel cheated on if you found out that your partner had been doing the same thing? If the answer to either question is yes, you might want to pause and think about what you're doing and why you're doing it. Answering "yes" to either question isn't conclusive; sometimes we have feelings that turn out on close scrutiny to come from nothing other than habit and prejudice. But this is an area where self-deception is particularly easy. If you think that the nature of your relationship would make it wrong to have an old-fashioned physical affair, then you might want to ask yourself how much weight you can really put on the fact that there's no skin-to-skin contact here. People sometimes use the phrase ...