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61 61 c h a p t e r 4 The Meaningfulness of Sexuality 1. Mattering They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse them. (Rom. 2:15) Some things matter: love, truth, beauty, courage, pain, crime, joy, life, death, and suffering are clear examples. These things do not matter merely because we or our tribe or even the whole human race values or disvalues them. Someone who felt that one of these things did not matter would be blind in a particularly tragic way. Of course the reader may disagree with me that all of these things matter in the final analysis. For instance, some readers may think that beauty is a cultural artifact. Of course, then one could not say that God is objectively beautiful. But let us suppose for the sake of the argument that beauty is a cultural artifact. It does not follow from this that beauty does not matter. For it may be objectively important for a one body 62 culture to develop a concept of beauty. Even if beauty is not something objective, it may be an essential part of human nature that humans , individually or socially, develop esthetic concepts. The question whether something matters objectively is, thus, different from the question of whether the thing might be socially constituted. Even if the reader does not accept that beauty matters, the reader should accept that figuring out what really matters is something that matters. If beauty does not really matter, then it matters to know this. It matters because human resources are limited and it is important for us not to spend an excess of resources dealing with things that do not really matter. Harry Frankfurt has argued that the only things that matter are ones we care about; nothing objectively matters, independently of what we care about.1 But in a revealing footnote he was forced to admit that either we all, deep down, really do care about caring, or else caring is an exception to his theory: something that is worthwhile and matters even when we do not care about it.2 For, plainly, someone who cares about nothing cannot flourish as much as someone who cares about some things can. The footnote is an implicit admission that there is something—namely, caring—that would be worthwhile even if we cared about nothing. Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living. While this is unduly dismissive of the value of the life of, say, a small child, we do need to figure out what really matters and to live our lives in reference to this understanding. It may, of course, be that everything matters—if all of creation comes from God, and if we are to love God with all of our heart, soul, might, and mind, then this is quite­ plausible—but even then we need to figure out what matters more and what matters less, in order to apportion our resources appropriately. Now suppose, though I am pretty sure this will not happen, that I found out that it is not an objective fact that beauty matters, so that beauty only mattered to me or to my tribe or maybe only happened to matter to all of humankind. (Maybe God would reveal it to me that this is so.) I could then abandon my commitment to the pursuit of beauty, and thereby show my concurrence in the judgment that it does not objectively matter. the meaningfulness of sexuality 63 But could I still rationally allow beauty to matter to me if I knew that it did not objectively matter at all? One might think the answer is positive. After all, stamp collecting can matter very much to a person who recognizes that it does not matter very much objectively.3 And even if some stamp collectors may be said to be “obsessed,” surely a rational person can collect stamps to a moderate degree while yet holding that stamps, although of little objective significance, matter to her. Consider, however, what such a person is likely to say when the resources she puts into stamp collecting are challenged. It will be quite unsatisfying both to her and her interlocutor if she says, “It matters to me.” Rather, our stamp collector is apt to say something like this: “It is important to have a hobby,” or “Stamps can be quite beautiful,” or “Stamps...

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