In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

c h a p t e r 9 Same-Sex Attraction 1. Orientation While a majority of people seem to be sexually attracted primarily to members of the opposite sex, some are attracted primarily to people of the same sex and some are roughly equally attracted to people of both sexes. I will use “heterosexual,” “homosexual,” and “bisexual” to refer, respectively, to these three groups of people. The terms are not meant to be exhaustive and, as I will use them, carry no implication as to sexual behavior or relationships. For instance, one can be a heterosexual and have no sexual relationships, or sexual relationships only with people of the same sex, or sexual relationships only with people of the opposite sex, or, finally, sexual relationships both with people of the same and of the opposite sex. The three terms are fuzzy. After all, it may be that with physical stimulation and carefully chosen context, any person can be brought to find almost any other person sexually attractive. Or what would we say about the at least logically possible case of a man for whom almost every woman is very attractive, and for whom no man is attractive except for one, but that one man is felt to be more attractive than any 359 one body 360 woman? Such a person is mainly attracted to women, yet his primary attraction is to a man. Or what would we say of the typical person in a culture where there is a phase in which initial sexual relationships are of the same-sex sort, and are then replaced by opposite-sex relationships ? And what does it mean to be “sexually attracted” to someone? Does it mean to have a tendency to be aroused in their presence? But surely it is possible to find someone sexually attractive without actually being aroused. Does it mean to form the belief that the person is sexually attractive to one? Surely not, since a belief about who is sexually attractive to one may be wrong—for instance, one might confuse admiration of form with sexual attraction. Does it mean to have a noninstrumental desire for a sexual or romantic relationship with the person? Probably not: we can imagine a person who has no sexual attraction to anybody, but who has a noninstrumental desire for a romantic relationship because of a belief, based on the testimony of others, that romantic relationships have noninstrumental value. These and similar questions suggest that there is a cluster of related concepts under the head of “sexual attraction,” and any precise definition is likely to be an undesirable shoehorning. But if the concept of sexual attraction is a cluster of concepts, neither are there simply univocal concepts of heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality. Fortunately, in the end, little of moral significance will turn on the precise meaning of these terms. Indeed, the main purpose of these brief considerations should, in fact, be a caution not to take the terms very seriously. Nonetheless, for convenience, we will use the terms. But what sexual acts, and with whom, are permissible to one will not in the end depend on whether one is homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual , and so forth, in orientation. 2. Eros and Homosexuality Homosexuals sometimes experience erotic love for persons of the same sex.The “sometimes” here is not a put-down: we should likewise same-sex attraction 361 say that heterosexuals sometimes experience erotic love for persons of the opposite sex.Presumably, just as some heterosexuals have never, in fact, experienced erotic love, some homosexuals have also never experienced it. And since we have seen that sexual activity should be understood as the consummation of erotic love, we need not focus on same-sex attraction apart from erotic love, since it is the love that gives meaning to the attraction. But on our analysis of erotic love as partly defined by a tendency to sexual union, and of sexual union as partly defined by a biological union of reproductive type as a single organism, the idea of erotic love for persons of the same sex is conceptually problematic. How can there be a tendency to sexual union in the case of a couple who cannot engage in a sexual union, since they are incapable of a reproductive type of act? And how could persons of the same sex, who know how human reproduction works, be desiring a reproductive type of union? It thus seems that I should have begun this section with the claim...

Share