In what follows, I ignore "flirting," perhaps merely arbitrarily, because flirting is ubiquitous and seems too innocuous for a serious moral investigation; others might well disagree, and I ask them kindly to fill in the lacuna(e) in my reply. (Perhaps this question and its replies can be added to the "Sex" category of the web site.) I don't know what you mean by "cheated slightly ." We could have (there have been) many arguments, philosophical, theological, and polemical, over what counts as "cheating" and what doesn't, and what moral significance cheating of various types or degrees has. If only we could establish a continuum from tiny cheating to huge cheating.... To my ear, "I cheated [but only] slightly" sounds like an excuse someone might use to get off the moral hook (Clinton), hoping for a generous and sympathetic reply from the other person (he in effect got one from Hilary). As an older sister once said to her just-starting-college female sibling (in a full-page advertisement for a...

You might be interested in reading Innocent Blood by P.D. James. Some conservative sexual theorists would agree with your reasoning and use it as the reductio of the view that homosexuality is permissible (indeed, they might use it to criticize liberal sexual ethics altogether). A libertarian, and some liberals, would also agree with your reasoning, and accept the conclusion that incest, under certain conditions, would be permissible. Your point (3), by the way, is largely irrelevant, if you continue to frame it in terms of "love." Homosexual acts need not be justified in terms of their coming from or expressing love. Moral rights to self-determination (e.g., making decisions about how to conduct a satisfying sex life) seem enough. You could try to block the move from homosexuality to incest by invoking possible harms, but that might not be strong enough, especially because the harms would presumably be "self-regarding" (and few liberals accept moral paternalism). You raise a good question, and...

Is it true that all states in which prostutition is illegal also legally permit the making of hard-core pornography in which performers are paid to engage in sex with each other? Surely there are some states that prohibit prostitution but do not ban (or at least do not prosecute) the making of pornography (California). But there also might well be states that prohibit both prostitution and the making of pornography, and prohibit the latter using the laws against the former. We need to do some legal research. I know that one feminist legal argument that tried to bring legal pressure to bear on pornography, without going the controversial route of the MacKinnon-Dworkin Ordinance back in the 1980s and 1990s, emphasized that the making of much pornography involved prostitution and hence could already be prosecuted under existing state laws. I do not know whether any jurisdictions capitalized on this argument in fighting pornography (either from a feminist or socially conservative perspective)....

One thing you can do is to scroll down the list of panelists, and when you come to a dude named "Alan Soble," click on the arrow to the left of his name (not on the name itself, since all hell will break loose if you do that). Almost all the questions answered by this panelist have to do with sex, many with sexual ethics. If you are slightly more ambitious, you might go to his encyclopedia entry at http://www.iep.utm.edu/s/sexualit.htm or, if you are more than slightly ambitious, you might read his essay "The Fundamentals of the Philosophy of Sex," which is in his book The Philosophy of Sex , 4th edition only (Rowman, 2002), or even the entirety of his reader-friendly book, The Philosophy of Sex and Love: An Introduction (Paragon House, 1998). Your question admits of such a long answer that it is impossible to answer it here without a panelist's other obligations (moral, political, sexual, occupational) suffering a great deal. And, after all, sex is not all that important. As Marcus Aurelius...

See Friedrich Engels (philosophical collaborator of Marx): In capitalism, marriage degenerates "often enough into the crassest prostitution"; the married woman "only differs from the ordinary courtesan in that she does not let out her body on piece-work as a wage earner, but sells it once and for all into slavery" (p. 82). This is from his 1884 book, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State . New York: International Publishers, 1942. Peking, China: Foreign Languages Press, 1978. The other locus classicus is this 1917 essay by Emma Goldman: "The Traffic in Women," in the collection Anarchism and Other Essays . New York: Dover, 1969, pp. 177-94. An nice overview of the issue is provided in Alison Jaggar's "Prostitution," in Alan Soble, ed., The Philosophy of Sex: Contemporary Readings , 1st edition. Totowa, N.J.: Littlefield, Adams, 1980, pp. 348-68. Not only Marxists and Feminists have made the point (or drawn the comparison); sociobiologists and evolutionary...

Yes, it's a joke, and in various versions a good one. (We could, in the manner of the Aristocrats , tell it a hundred different ways. Let me know if you want to hear the version that involves President Coolidge -- or go to http://fs.uno.edu/asoble/pages/bermant.htm .) But even though a joke, it contains much truth; and jokes can be turned into philosophical arguments or positions. (See, for example, how the content or point of jokes about masturbation have been taken damn seriously by philosophers and theologians: "Masturbation," an entry in my encyclopedia Sex from Plato to Paglia .) As a matter of fact, at least one philosopher of sex [moi] has argued (or only asserted, perhaps) that gays are foolish to press for the right to marry -- they are full of romantic notions about marriage, are not sensitive enough to what a killer institution it is. ( Sexual Investigations , near the end of Chapter 2.) You make your bed hastily, and then suffocate in it.

Yes and no. Although, mostly yes. For the most comprehensive treatment of the issue (Kant and/on sex) that I know, see my essay "Sexual Use and What to Do about It: Internalist and Externalist Sexual Ethics," Essays in Philosophy 2:2 (June, 2001) [online journal, at Humboldt State] or, better, the longer versions reprinted in my Philosophy of Sex , 4th ed., and posted on my website, at http://fs.uno.edu/asoble/pages/sexuse.htm (yet more of the territory is covered in detail in my "Kant and Sexual Perversion," The Monist 86:1 (2003), pp. 57-92; also found on my web site. Insert, at the end of the URL, the file name kmonist.htm instead). Plenty of references to other essays on Kant and/on sex are provided. You'll have to consult the Vorlesung ( Lectures on Ethics ; Heath's edition) and the Metaphysics of Morals (Gregor) to make up your own mind.

So many interesting questions, so little time. . . . For now, only a few brief comments. (1) See the US Supreme Court case ROSE v. LOCKE, 423 U.S. 48 (1975). A man compelled a woman at knifepoint to submit to cunnilingus; he was convicted of violating Tennessee's "sexual crimes against nature" law; he appealed, arguing that the law was unconstitutionally vague and did not explicitly prohibit male-to-female oral sex; the Court ruled against him; Justice Stewart dissented, agreeing that the law was unbearably vague, but added that the man should have been prosecuted for assault and battery (not "rape"). (2) Debates about the "mens rea" of rape heated up after the 1976 British House of Lords case, Regina v. Morgan. That case is notorious for concluding that an honest even if unreasonable belief in the consent of the raped person exculpates. For more recent thinking on this issue, see Stephen Schulhofer's 1998 book Unwanted Sex . (3) I suggest that a more careful survey of contemporary rape statutes will...

You might want to consult question #341 on this web site. There I wrote, in response to the obverse question, "Why monogamy?", the following wiseacre answer that, nevertheless, contains some truth [which answer I have mildly revised, since it was first written on November 3, 2005]: Here are some standard replies to the question "Why monogamy?" (some worse than others): (1) Why not? [Vy a duck?] (2) Monogamy reduces your chances of contracting an STD; polygamy implies that you must trust more than one spouse or mate to be sexually faithful and to practice safe sex effectively if not faithful. (3) Monogamy is better than polygamy because you barely have enough time and energy and money for one relationship, let alone two. [Woody Allen: You want an orgy ? We can barely get 4 people together for bridge or bowling.] But: it is not necessarily true that it is more difficult to get along with 2 or 3 or 4 spouses in one dwelling than with only 1. The presence of the other spouse(s) may very well...

This is not exactly a "sex" question. I think it belongs under "law": what are the proper limits of the law in prohibiting behavior; what is the relationship between law and morality (bad taste, indecency); what are the various senses of "privacy" and how should the law handle violations of privacy? There are indeed many entires in the "law" area of this web site that speak to these questions. One problem I have with the question is that it does not state the law (statute) under which the man was prosecuted. Does Sydney have an explicit law that prohibits the use of photographic equipment on beaches where there is nude sunbathing? If so, why? Or was some other law invoked to prosecute this fellow? (Public nuisance? Environmental hazard?) I once lived, many years ago, in Austin, Texas; in the town there was [still is?] a large pool, Barton Springs, at which women were permitted to be topless. Men would gather around or outside the pool and watch/look/leer and take pictures. No one, as far as I know, was...