Like my colleague, I agree that you've put your finger on a potential moral problem with necrophilia. However, I have a worry about the rest of his analysis. My colleague writes: "I think the more primordial objection to necrophilia is that most of us see the good of sexual intimacy as the loving union of two persons." I certainly don't disagree that this is a good of sexual intimacy, but aside from the question of whether it's the good, I have a different worry: even if the loving union of two people is the good of sexual intimacy, it wouldn't follow that other forms of sexual activity are morally suspect. The most obvious case is masturbation. I've never seen anything that struck me as a plausible argument that masturbation is wrong. A standard Catholic objection is that all sex acts should be "open to the possibility of procreation," as some Vatican documents put it. My own view is that this is bad as theology, and worse if one doesn't accept theological premises. Another objection is that it...

The physicist Wolfgang Pauli apparently didn't have much patience for what he saw as nonsense. More than once, it seems, he dismissed an idea by saying that it was "not even wrong." I'll have to admit: the idea that one sex is superior to the other in any all-things-considered way strikes me as a plausible candidate for "not even wrong" status. Men and women are different. On average—though only on average—women may have some advantages compared to men, and vice-versa. I'm skeptical that there's some way to accumulate these sorts of on-average facts into some meaningful sense in which women are overall superior to men, or the other way around. And even if there were, there's way too much variation for this to tell us much of anything person-by-person. In any case, the kind of superiority you're concerned about is, as you suggest, not a scientific notion. The kind of superiority you're worried about has to do with whether one sex is in general "better" or perhaps even "nobler" than the other. We...

You've asked an interesting question. I'm not going to say much directly about whether this person is doing wrong. I'm going to say some things more in line with a remark of John Austin's in a very different context: "If only we could forget for a while about the beautiful and get down instead to the dainty and the dumpy." (From Austin's "A Plea For Excuses.") What seems interesting here is more at the level of moral psychology than broad moral judgments. The counterpart for daintiness or dumpiness that came to mind was creepiness. I suspect I'm not the only panelist who found your first few sentences creepy. I'd stress that this isn't a way of saying that you are creepy, but let's try to bring the creepiness reaction into clearer focus. I don't know of any philosophical literature on creepiness, but this piece from a website called Family Share gets the basics right: https://familyshare.com/21482/7-signs-youre-a-creep (Thanks to Taimur Khan for that link.) What you describe triggers the...

Like you, my instinct is that this would be wrong. Your question is: assuming it harms a child to watch its parents have sex, what exactly is the harm? Of course, the assumption might be wrong. It's an empirical question. But if it's harmful, what's the nature of the harm? The obvious first point is that the harm would be psychological, not physical. The perhaps less obvious second point is that if it is harmful, this isn't inevitable, but has a great deal to do with context, expectations, cultural norms and the like. Imagine a society in which people live in close quarters and privacy is a luxury. It's nor hard to imagine that for purely practical reasons, people would end up being seen by others when they have sex, including by their own children. If the norm in the society was that this was not a big deal, and the normal pattern of behavior was simply to ignore the couple, it's easy to imagine that seeing one's parents have sex wouldn't make for any psychological trauma. Our society...

Someone might say that punishment should fit the crime and therefore that raping rapists is a just punishment. Someone might also say that torturing torturers is a just punishment. My reaction is that examples like this show the unacceptability of a strict "eye for an eye" notion of justice. Torturing someone as a form of punishment strikes me as depraved; so does raping a rapist. Torture and rape are crimes that show an utter and complete lack of respect for the victim's humanity. That's something that an acceptable judicial system should avoid, in my opinion. As for your hypothetical about rape in the case of near-extinction, I don't feel the force. Why is the continued existence of humanity so important that it would justify raping an unwilling woman and forcing her to carry a baby? Is the sort of "civilization" that would stoop to such things work preserving? What's so hot about humanity from the point of view of the cosmos? Are there any circumstances that would justify a different...

Let's stipulate: adultery isn't always immoral. You're pitching the idea that it's usually not immoral ("mostly moral," as you put it.) Your argument, however, doesn't seem to me to be strong enough for that conclusion. Start with something obvious: when people get married, they make promises to one another. Typically, one of those promises is a promise of faithfulness. Not all promises are binding in all circumstances, but in general promise-breaking isn't morally trivial. And encouraging people to break promises isn't trivial either. But set that aside. Let's suppose that adultery is the result of a biological urge, as you say. Since morality often calls for us not to act on our urges, that doesn't tell us much. Your legal/sociological analysis strikes me as a bit thin, but I'm more worried about this: "Making it with a married woman can be very thrilling and the same woman would not be equally exciting if she were single; the supposedly unavailable is always more desirable than the easily...

I don't know how much older you are than the women you watch with, and I don't know anything about the larger situation. I don't know why you aren't picking companions closer to your own age, and I don't know anything about the young women and your relationship with them. What I'd think in detail would depend on all that. But generalizations about "society" are typically pretty vapid. Does "society" mean "most people?" How do you know? Do you have any real evidence as opposed to impressions, anecdotes and a look at website comments by high-schoolers? And most important, what does this have to do with whether you should be doing what you're doing ? We can agree that the high-schoolers should have kept their comments to themselves. We can also agree, at least for argument's sake, that a 19-year-old could make a clear-eyed, responsible decision to make a porn. But that's not the issue. The issue is how you should be dealing with the particular young women you're talking about, in the particular...

I'm not sure I have your question clearly in my sights, but I think it's something like this: As it stands the only kind of marriage many countries recognize is between one man and one woman. Advocates of same-sex marriage argue that for a variety of reasons, not least the fact that sexual orientation isn't simply a choice, we ought to recognize same-sex marriages as well. Otherwise, there's a serious issue of fairness and justice. Your suggestion is that this leaves a particular injustice unaddressed: bisexual people who are in relationships with men and women at the same time. If same-sex marriage is the cure for discrimination against homosexual relationships, then, so the thought goes, polygamous marriage is the cure for the parallel injustice against bisexuals. Here's why I'm not persuaded. Leave hetero- vs. homo- vs. bisexuality aside. Some people are in love with more than one person. Call people capable of such attachments polyamorous. In some cases, all concerned parties would be more...

I have a somewhat different take than my co-panelist. Yes: we can tag the sorts of reasons you're offering as Utilitarian, though I'm not sure that adds a lot. I'd ask a different question: are they the sorts of considerations a morally conscientious person might care about? Seems to me they are, and that seems even clearer when we put them in a plain-spoken way: you're worried that you'll hurt someone else. And you're not sure that whatever pleasure you get out of the arrangement makes up for the hurt. Whether that settles the matter or not, if your friends don't think that's relevant than maybe you do need better friends! We could ask whether you have an obligation to the woman's partner, but I worry that the retreat to polysyllaby hides the more basic point: how your behavior affects this man is morally relevant. The old-fashioned question "How would you feel if you were in his shoes?" is a perfectly good way to see that. I'm not about to offer concrete advice about this case; there's way too...

Saying that something is perverse often means that it diverts some appetite in a direction that not only defeats its "natural" function, but does so in a way that's harmful or unhealthy or bad. Pedophilia is a plausible case, but what makes pedophilia bad is not that it diverts sexual attraction from reproduction (I'm talking about cases where the pedophile is attracted to prepubescent children) but that acting on the desire is not a good thing for the child. We can judge pedophilia to be bad whether or not we call it a perversion, though most people would likely use that word. What about a foot fetish? So long as the fetishist isn't violating anyone's consent, it's hard to see that there's anything morally wrong with indulging the fetish. Might there be anything else wrong? There might, but actual cases can't be evaluated apart from the details. Suppose that the person's fetish interferes with the sort of emotional intimacy that often goes with more familiar sexual relationships. That might be...