You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
Sexual ethics is among the most sensitive and contested areas of applied ethics, precisely because it touches identity, intimacy, religious conviction and human rights all at once. It asks what makes sexual conduct morally acceptable and on what grounds — the purpose of sex, the meaning of marriage, the place of consent, and the authority (or otherwise) of religious tradition. The topic demands careful, respectful engagement with views that are deeply and sincerely held on every side.
Note on the specification: Like business ethics, sexual ethics is enrichment / wider reading for AQA A-Level Religious Studies 7062 rather than a discrete prescribed topic. AQA's Ethics component applies its named theories to issues of human and animal life and death; "sexual ethics" as a standalone applied unit belongs to other boards (notably OCR). It is included here because it is an outstanding arena for applying the AQA-named theories — natural moral law, situation ethics, Kant and utilitarianism — and because questions of marriage, the body and conscience connect to Component 2 (Christianity) material on gender and sexuality that AQA does examine. Treat it as practice in applying and evaluating the theories you already know.
Key term: Sexual ethics is the branch of applied ethics concerned with the moral evaluation of sexual behaviour, relationships and practices — asking which sexual conduct is morally acceptable, and on what basis (divine command, natural purpose, consequences, respect for persons, or love).
A general distinction frames every issue below: between approaches that locate sexual morality in objective rules or purposes (the act's conformity to natural ends, to divine command, or to the moral law) and approaches that locate it in the quality of the relationship and its consequences (love, consent, mutual flourishing, happiness). Religious traditions have historically leaned to the former, secular ethics to the latter — though, as we will see, the picture is more nuanced, since religious thinkers such as Fletcher push hard toward the relational pole.
Premarital sex has been condemned by most historic religious traditions yet is widely accepted across contemporary Western societies; the debate concerns consent, commitment, emotional maturity and what sex is for.
The traditional religious view confines sex to marriage, which is held to supply the commitment, stability and mutual responsibility that sexual intimacy properly requires. Catholic teaching grounds this in the claim that sex has two inseparable meanings — the unitive (bonding the couple) and the procreative (openness to new life) — both of which, it argues, belong within the lifelong covenant of marriage. Scripturally, the tradition appeals to the "one flesh" union of Genesis 2:24, read as making sexual union a sign of a permanent bond, and to the New Testament's warnings against porneia (sexual immorality). The liberal view holds premarital sex morally acceptable where there is mutual consent, maturity and respect, locating moral significance in the quality of the relationship rather than its legal status; it points out that the social conditions which once made the rule urgent — the link between sex and pregnancy, the social ruin of unmarried mothers — have been transformed by contraception and changed attitudes. A relational middle position stresses that the goods marriage protects — security, fidelity, the welfare of any children — can be weighed directly, rather than secured only by the marital institution; on this view what matters is not a wedding certificate but whether the relationship in fact embodies commitment and care. The sharpest evaluative question is therefore whether marriage is intrinsically the right context for sex (the traditional claim) or merely a useful instrument for securing goods that could in principle be secured otherwise (the liberal claim).
Homosexuality — sexual attraction between people of the same sex — has been among the most fiercely contested questions in both religious and secular ethics.
The conservative religious view judges homosexual acts wrong because they fall outside the procreative purpose of sex and, it holds, contradict scripture; the texts usually cited (with their references) are the Levitical prohibition (Leviticus 18:22) and Paul's words in Romans 1:26–27. Roman Catholic teaching draws a careful distinction between orientation — not in itself sinful, and to be met with respect and compassion — and acts, which it regards as wrong because not open to procreation; this is the basis of the much-discussed pastoral formula of welcoming the person while not endorsing the conduct. The liberal religious view responds that these texts are time-bound or have been misread: that Leviticus belongs to a holiness code also containing rules no one now keeps, that Paul is addressing exploitative or idolatrous practices remote from faithful modern partnerships, and that the overriding command to love means a committed same-sex relationship can express agape as fully as a heterosexual one. Many liberal Christians, Quakers and Reform Jews affirm same-sex relationships and, in some traditions, marriage; major denominations remain deeply and publicly divided on the question, which is itself worth noting as evidence of how contested the scriptural reading is. The secular view treats homosexuality as a natural variation in human sexuality and insists that what matters morally is consent, respect and mutuality, not the partners' gender — so that discrimination against gay people is itself the moral wrong, and the burden of justification falls on those who would restrict rather than on those who would affirm. A subtle point worth raising is that appeals to "nature" cut both ways in this debate: natural law calls homosexual acts "unnatural" because non-procreative, yet same-sex behaviour is widely documented across the animal kingdom and same-sex orientation appears to be, for those who have it, simply their given nature — so the very naturalness natural law prizes can be turned to defend homosexuality. The conservative replies that "natural" in natural law means ordered to a rational end, not statistically common; the liberal rejoins that this merely relocates the disputed claim about what the proper "end" of sex is — which returns us, once again, to the question of what sex is for.
Contraception — the deliberate prevention of conception — raises questions about the purpose of sex and the scope of personal autonomy.
| Position | Core argument |
|---|---|
| Roman Catholic teaching | Artificial contraception is wrong because it severs the unitive from the procreative meaning of sex; only natural family planning is permitted (Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI, 1968). |
| Most Protestant churches | Contraception is acceptable as a responsible exercise of stewardship over family planning. |
| Secular view | Contraception is a matter of autonomy, central to women's reproductive freedom, public health and population management. |
The Catholic position is widely contested — including by very many Catholics in practice, surveys consistently showing that most Catholic women in developed countries use artificial methods — and critics charge that the line between "natural" and "artificial" methods is arbitrary, since both intend to prevent conception and differ only in technique. Defenders reply that natural methods respect the God-given structure of the act, working with the body's fertile and infertile phases rather than deliberately frustrating them, in a way artificial barriers do not. The debate also has a powerful consequentialist wing: a utilitarian will weigh the immense benefits of contraception — fewer unwanted pregnancies, lower maternal and infant mortality, the empowerment of women, slower population growth in resource-stressed regions, and reduced transmission of disease — against any harms, and conclude decisively in its favour, regarding the prohibition as causing avoidable suffering. Liberal religious thinkers add that responsible family planning can itself be an expression of stewardship and love, enabling couples to raise the children they can actually care for. The contraception question thus neatly divides act-focused theories (which ask about the kind of act) from consequence-focused ones (which ask about outcomes).
Adultery — sex between a married person and someone other than their spouse — is condemned across virtually all religious and ethical traditions, and it is instructive precisely because the theories converge on it where they diverge elsewhere. Religiously, it breaches the Seventh Commandment (Exodus 20:14), and Jesus radicalises the prohibition to include lustful intent (Matthew 5:27–28). Ethically, it characteristically involves deception, betrayal of trust and the breaking of solemn promises, with serious emotional harm to the betrayed spouse and to children. Each theory condemns it for its own reason: natural law by the precept of an ordered society and the integrity of the family; Kant because the maxim cannot be universalised and because it treats the spouse merely as a means, denying them the truth about their own marriage; utilitarianism because of the suffering it typically causes; even situation ethics generally, since betrayal is rarely the loving course. The convergence matters evaluatively: it suggests the wrong of adultery lies not in the sex as such but in the broken vow and the deception — which is why theories that liberalise premarital and homosexual conduct still condemn it, and why the rare hard cases (Fletcher's wartime examples, or a marriage already dead in all but name) are exactly where the consequentialist and the absolutist part company. It is also why some argue that openness and honesty are doing the moral work: a deception-free arrangement is, on consequentialist and even some Kantian readings, a different case from clandestine betrayal — a distinction the absolutist rules-based traditions reject as sophistry.
Almost every disagreement above traces back to a deeper one: what is the purpose and meaning of sex? Different answers generate different verdicts, and naming the underlying view sharpens any answer enormously.
Three broad accounts compete. On a procreative account (natural law, traditional Catholic teaching), the defining purpose of sex is the generation of new life, and the unitive bonding of the couple, though real, is inseparable from that openness to procreation; this is why contraceptive, homosexual and extramarital acts are judged disordered. On a relational/unitive account (much liberal religious thought, and Fletcher), the central meaning of sex is the expression and deepening of love and commitment between persons; procreation is one good among several, not the master-purpose, so a sexual act can be fully meaningful and moral without being procreative, provided it genuinely serves the relationship. On a recreational/individualist account (some secular thought), sex is, among other things, a legitimate source of pleasure and connection whose morality is settled by consent and the absence of harm, without any prior "purpose" it must serve.
Key term: The dispute over the purpose of sex — procreative, unitive/relational, or recreational — underlies most sexual-ethics disagreements: the more weight an account gives to procreation, the more restrictive its conclusions; the more it emphasises relationship or consent, the more permissive.
Marriage stands in a parallel dispute. Is it a sacred, lifelong covenant with a God-given structure (the traditional view), a valuable social institution protecting commitment and children (a more functional view), or one freely-chosen relationship form among others with no special moral monopoly on sex (a liberal/secular view)? How one answers largely fixes one's verdict on premarital sex and on whether the marital context is morally essential or merely useful. A strong essay surfaces these underlying commitments rather than arguing only at the level of particular acts.
Natural moral law gives the most systematically conservative framework. Reasoning from the primary precept of reproduction, Aquinas concludes that the telos (natural purpose) of the sexual faculty is procreation, so that sexual acts closed to procreation are disordered — which on this view condemns homosexual acts, contraception and (arguably) non-marital sex. The precept of an ordered society supports stable, marriage-based family structures and condemns adultery and promiscuity as corrosive of them; the precept of educating the young adds that children flourish best within committed, stable unions. The real vs apparent goods distinction casts sexual pleasure sought outside its natural context as an apparent good that leads away from genuine flourishing.
Key term: In natural moral law, the telos of sex is identified with procreation, so a sexual act's morality is judged by whether it is ordered to that natural end — the root of the traditional condemnation of contraceptive, homosexual and extramarital acts.
The approach's strength is its clarity, consistency and grounding in a definite account of human goods. Its weaknesses are much pressed: it presupposes a fixed, heteronormative account of human nature that many reject; it arguably reduces the meanings of sex to procreation, neglecting the bonding, emotional and communicative goods that even Catholic teaching elsewhere affirms (the unitive meaning); and it is vulnerable to the naturalistic fallacy — the charge that one cannot validly move from what is "natural" to what is morally required, since much that is natural is bad and much that is "unnatural" (medicine, clothing) is plainly good. A defender replies that natural law is about rational reflection on genuine human goods, not a crude appeal to statistical normality — but the objection that it freezes a contestable picture of "nature" into moral law retains real force.
Joseph Fletcher's situation ethics dissolves every fixed sexual rule into the single demand of agape: "what is the most loving thing to do?" Fletcher was explicitly anti-legalistic, and his stance on sex was correspondingly permissive of much that traditional morality forbids. Premarital sex may be right where it genuinely expresses love and causes no harm — Fletcher rejected the legalistic insistence that sex must always wait for a wedding. Homosexuality is to be judged not by the partners' gender but by whether the relationship embodies agape; a loving, faithful same-sex relationship is, on this view, morally good. Contraception can be a loving and responsible act, sparing couples and children the harm of unwanted pregnancy. Adultery is generally wrong because it betrays and harms — yet, consistent with his refusal of absolutes, Fletcher allows that in some extreme situation even this could be the loving course (his notorious hard cases were designed precisely to show that a rigid rule can produce an unloving result).
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 10 lessons in this course.