Ethical Sex: Sexual Choices and Their Nature and Meaning by Anthony McCarthy (review)

A dominant contemporary attitude toward the human body might be said to be totalitarian in nature. This attitude not only embraces the physical members of the human body but extends its reach even to the natural inclinations. It treats human bodily reality "as a raw datum" that is "devoid of any meaning and moral values until freedom has shaped it in accordance with its design" (John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor §48). According to this view, the human body is external to the human person and, as such, simply furnishes the material condition for the exercise of free choice. The anthropology in question is dualistic in that it divorces human personhood from human embodiment. Reason is thus left free to manipulate the bodily conditions of human being, all too often in ways contrary to the indications inscribed within those very conditions themselves.

The recent significant trend in Western countries to legislate for homosexual "marriage"—or even, in the case of Ireland, to enshrine this "right" within the constitution—renders even more important the intellectual engagement with the inclination to the procreation and education of offspring, as St. Thomas puts it (Summa theologiae [ST] I-II, q. 94, a. 2), that is to say, the intellectual engagement in sexual ethics. One reason for a rational defense of Catholic sexual ethics is precisely the fact that recent developments are the political expression of a dualistic anthropology and are, as such, as I have intimated, totalitarian in character.

Anthony McCarthy's book, which offers such a defense, engages with a wide array of authors philosophical, theological, and literary. Included in this array are figures such as Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Immanuel Kant, John Paul II, Aurel Kolnai, Dietrich von Hildrebrand, Josef Pieper, Roger Scruton, Janet Smith, Bernard Williams, William Shakespeare, Robert Sokolowski, Michel Foucault, and Peter Singer, to mention just a selection. Manifold arguments are adduced in support of what ultimately constitutes a Catholic sexual ethic, and countervailing arguments are rebutted in analytic style.

The first chapter of the book offers a sustained critique of the contention on the part of New Natural Law theorists that contraception is contra-life. The author then proceeds in the next chapter to look at natural law, functions, and teleology. Arguments are adduced in defense of teleology and of the idea that any particular organism has a function. This chapter proceeds to sustain the intimate link between the functioning proper to human beings and human flourishing. In this regard, the author remains alert to the demands that attend the hylomorphic structure of human being, albeit with an exception noted below. The importance of embodiment and teleology carry over into McCarthy's discussion of marriage and meaning. The notions of embodiment and teleology ground the objective reality of the conjugal act. Indeed, for McCarthy, "it is marriage which is that standard with respect to which sexual activity is judged to be good or not" (107). I would have to disagree with this formulation, however. Heterosexual marriage, rather, is a necessary but not sufficient condition for sexual activity to be good, a point the author would no doubt accept.

Teleological considerations flow over into the discussion of sexual desire. In this regard, McCarthy offers some useful reflections concerning pornography and fantasy. Thus, for example, with regard to the latter, he observes that "the moral demands of the real world are not being adequately met when an effect is deliberately produced which properly belongs to a different cause" (160). Teleological considerations also enter into the final chapter on love, virtue, and vice, as also does the notion of embodiment. McCarthy builds on Karol Wojtyła/John Paul II's observation that the human body in itself is not shameful and that neither are sensual reactions and sensuality in general. Thus, writes McCarthy, "it cannot be objectifying simply to appreciate or be aroused by the bodily features of (in particular) one's spouse, which surely constitute the valuable sexual...