A Philosophical Argument Against Contraception

What’s special about sexual ethics?

“Sex. The physical act of love. Coitus.” -Maude Lebowski, The Big Lebowski

In the previous post I defined contraception as an act which intentionally interferes with the fertility of one or more sex acts.

My goal in that post was to show that my viewpoint is internally consistent, and to clarify what I mean when I say “I’m against contraception.” Specifically, I wanted to clear up some misconceptions that could easily arise. To give two examples: I’m not against science/technology/medicine and I think there are legitimate reasons, and legitimate ways, to avoid having children.

I wanted to defend my stance on contraception from two objections: one claims that my views are self-contradictory; the other claims that they rest on certain objectionable beliefs (which, as it happens, I don’t hold).

Still, if I managed to show that my stance on contraception is internally consistent and that it’s compatible with reasonable views about medicine and fertility, this doesn’t mean I did much to recommend my perspective. I still haven’t answered the objection “this seems crazy!” And there are clearly a number of reasons why people don’t find the anti-contraception worldview particularly compelling. It’s inconvenient and can demand abstinence; and worse, it can demand more abstinence from some people than from others, which isn’t particularly fair.

So to actually recommend an anti-contraception worldview, I need to say some things about why this perspective might be more attractive than other available perspectives. In this post, I’ll offer some philosophical arguments in favor of my views about what sex is and, consequently, in favor of my view that contraception is wrong.

These philosophical arguments won’t be proofs. (You won’t find the conclusions convincing if you don’t find the premises convincing.) However, unlike in the previous post, my goal here is to offer some actual reasons why someone might find my views convincing, rather than simply trying to show how they’re internally consistent or that they can’t be disproved.

My basic argument goes something like this: 1) sexual misdeeds are a specific kind of misdeed, which shows that sex is a particular kind of thing. 2) if we want to get sexual ethics right, we need to understand what kind of thing sex is. 3) there is no “neutral,” minimal, provable, or universally self-evident account of what sex is. 4) even though we can’t prove what the meaning of sex is, we still need to try (otherwise we’re likely to get sexual ethics badly wrong). 5) the strongest account of what sex is will take into account lived experience as well as more objective facts about what makes sex distinctive. 6) there are some good reasons for thinking sex essentially involves an erotic and procreative orientation. 7) there are further good reasons to think that it’s unethical to intentionally act against the procreative orientation of sex; in other words, contraceptive sex is essentially—and unethically—dishonest.

I’ll expand on some of these arguments and present different ones in future posts; in the meanwhile, feel free to weigh in or pose questions in the comments section.

A religious argument?

Before jumping into these arguments I want to address a concern about my trustworthiness. I’m Catholic, and I’m presenting a philosophical argument in favor of the stance that the Catholic Church teaches on this question. Isn’t that… a bit suspicious? Presumably I have other reasons, reasons that I’m not talking about here, for holding these views. In which case, isn’t it likely that I’m acting in bad faith, that I’m using non-religious language to argue in favor of religious ideas?

I hope to write more later about my own history with this question, as well as some arguments directed specifically at Christians, and further arguments directed at Catholics in particular. (I think there are religious arguments which Christians, and especially Catholics, should find convincing.) For now, I’d like to make a more basic point: I think contraception is essentially an ethical question, rather than a religious question. In other words, I think the claim “contraception is wrong” is like the claim “lying is wrong” or “recreational drug use is wrong” rather than like the claim “missing Church is wrong” or “eating during the day in Ramadan is wrong.”  It’s something which people from different religious or non-religious backgrounds can argue about productively, because the arguments aren’t based exclusively on the teachings or religious texts of a particular religion. Moreover, these are not claims about what practitioners of a certain religion should do, but claims about the right way for anybody to approach the question.

Of course, most people who are anti-contraception in the way I am are religious, and it may be that most of them are Catholics. But this doesn’t mean that they are wrong, nor does it mean that there are only religious arguments for this position.

As Eliezer Yudkowsky has pointed out, the fact that we have good reasons to be suspicious of a particular group of people—perhaps they hold bad beliefs, or they use unsound reasoning—doesn’t mean that they always believe the wrong thing. To always believe the wrong thing, they’d need to be better at distinguishing the right thing from the wrong thing than most people are! As an example, he considers flying saucer cults. It’s likely that the people in them are crazy, and they presumably don’t have a good reason for believing in UFOs. But the fact that there are flying saucer cults doesn’t make it any less likely that flying saucers actually exist; therefore, knowing that these cults exist shouldn’t affect whether we think UFOs exist one way or the other.

In other words, the fact that a given group of people holds a particular point of view isn’t, by itself, evidence that the view is wrong. This applies to groups of people who we find objectionable. And it also applies to our own social group. If someone says “you only believe that because of your race/class/gender/etc.,” you should maybe have a think about whether you only hold those beliefs because it’s socially convenient. But the mere fact that, in general, people who share a particular identity with you are more likely to hold a particular belief, isn’t by itself evidence that the belief is wrong.

A more vivid historical example than UFOs is the sociology of abolitionism. In the lead up to the Civil War, my impression is (and I’m not a historian!) that most of the prominent abolitionists practiced a specific type of zealous 19th century American Christianity. There were presumably religious and sociological reasons for their opposition to slavery. But those of us who disagree with aspects of this religious movement or are skeptical of aspects of the sociological context should still be able to see that this group of people were obviously right that slavery is gravely unjust. And they had some good arguments, too! When they argued in public against slavery, they weren’t trying to “trick” people into taking the 19th-century-zealous-Christian approach to the slavery question; they were presenting legitimate arguments which should have appealed to people who didn’t share their particular religious/cultural background.

I’m not trying to say that contraception is like slavery; my point is just that I’m presenting non-religious arguments and that religious people can do this in an unproblematic way, even when they’re arguing about an ethical claim where their religion informs their beliefs. Even if some of their religious beliefs are wrong, some of their conclusions might be right, and they can have strong non-religious arguments in favor of these conclusions.

Of course, whether my arguments are worth engaging with is another question altogether. Sometimes people are wacko conspiracy theorists, or they think themselves into weird, internally consistent, and totally worthless world views. There’s no way to prove upfront (or really, ever!) that I’m not one of those people. This post will only be worth reading if you want to give the question a good hearing, though I’d note that this is just one perspective from one person. If you want to take the question up in a more serious way you should probably find the strongest/most compelling way of defending that view, and I’m guessing it isn’t this blogpost....

And so, on to the arguments.

Sex has a specific ethical significance

My first claim is that sex has a particular ethical significance, a significance that we can identify by thinking about the wrongness of rape. Obviously rape is wrong for a variety of reasons: it involves harming someone, and doing things to their body without their consent. However, the wrongness of rape can’t just be reduced to the wrongs involved in “inflicting physical/psychological harm” and “doing something to someone’s body without their consent.”

For one thing, rape and other sexual violations don’t necessarily involve causing physical or psychological harm. If I do something sexual to an unconscious stranger which he’ll never know about, which isn’t going to cause pregnancy or transmit disease, and which (for some reason or another) isn’t going to increase the risk that I’ll harm someone in the future, it is still wrong. And this isn’t just because the stranger would have vehemently disagreed if he’d been asked. (Imagine that he’s unusually indifferent to having strangers use his body to gratify themselves sexually, and he wouldn’t care much one way or another.)

Moreover, the wrongness of touching him sexually without his permission isn’t just the result of a more general principle about physical touch like the “it’s wrong to touch a person’s body without their permission.” It isn’t always wrong to touch someone’s body without their permission. EMTs, for instance, routinely do this to unconscious people, and this isn’t a problem.

We can also see that the wrongness of rape doesn’t just come down to an obligation to respect people’s strongly held preferences about touch (combined with the fact that most people have strongly held preferences about sexual touch). If I have a colleague who has an extremely strong aversion to being touched in any way (including being bumped into) but there’s some sort of emergency that requires people to race out of a building, I can rush past him, even though I know that doing so will involve bumping into him, which he really won’t like. There’s obviously no analogue for using someone’s body to sexually gratify yourself without their consent.

In other words, the wrongness of rape and other forms of sexual violation has a specifically sexual component.[1]

What’s special about sex?

To do sexual ethics well, we need to understand what sex is, and consequently why the various forms of bad sex are bad. Does sex have a special status because it’s a very personal thing, because it can lead to pregnancy, because it’s a form of self-expression where agency is particularly important? Perhaps some combination of the three?

It’s not obvious, self evident, or uncontroversial what sex is. People in various cultures have answered this question in different ways. In some cultures, sex has been viewed as a legitimate form of domination, at least, if you’re dominating the right people (like women in a town that you’ve just sacked). In other cultures, sex has been viewed as a legitimate use of your property (where your wife or a person you’ve enslaved is your “property”). In other cultures, sex is used as a form of hazing, and initiation into adult society through pederasty. Some cultures have said that sex should just be between married people–though different cultures take different stances on questions of divorce and plural marriage–while other cultures officially or unofficially allow various forms of non-marital sex. In other words, a community’s intuitions about what sex is can vary widely, including in ways that are seriously wrong.

Our own culture frequently takes the view that sex is about what the people having it want it to be about, though sometimes this is restricted to a certain range of meanings. (For instance, many people would say that there are certain forms of sex you should avoid, like sex with the goal of humiliating someone, or sex where you are tricking the other person into thinking you find them attractive whereas you actually just want access to their bank account.)

The approach “sex is what you choose it to be” squares with the intuition that sex isn’t always the same, that sometimes it can feel more profound and at other times more superficial. But I don’t think this view is particularly compelling or stable.

If sex is about whatever the people having it want it to be about, this doesn’t tell us much about why consent is so extremely important when it comes to sex. In other words, it doesn’t explain why there are ethical principles specific to sex. If sex is just a collaborative activity that involves two people creating something together and jointly contributing to its meaning, why are sexual ethics different from, say, the ethics of improv theater? And it’s clear that sexual ethics are different: while consent matters for improv, it matters a lot more when it comes to sex.

I’m also somewhat skeptical about how the “sex is what we decide it is” approach is supposed to work, given the reality of power dynamics, and given the realities of sexual desire. When “we” decide what sex is, do we really mean “we” or do we mean the more powerful person? And when we agree that sex has a particular meaning—for instance, that it is casual in one context and serious in another—are we bound by that agreement? Sex is an activity which people usually engage in because of certain desires, but having sex can also shape our desires. This is one reason that a casual sexual relationship can sometimes turn into a more serious romantic relationship over time. When this happens, are the people involved being betraying the meaning that they assigned to their casual sex? Or is there “infidelity to the agreement” only in situations where one person gets emotionally attached? Of course, casual sex doesn’t always lead to attachments. (Sometimes it leads to aversions!) But having sex tends to affect people in certain ways, and it seems a bit unreasonable to agree up-front to not have your sexual or romantic feelings stirred by doing something that has a tendency to stir sexual and romantic feelings. My point here isn’t that casual sex is bad (though I do think this, for reasons that are related to my opposition to contraception). Instead, my point is that we don’t have an unlimited ability to assign a different meaning to an act or relationship which has a pretty strong natural tendency to be or to become something different from what we’re choosing to call it.[2]

It may also be tempting tempting to think that evolutionary biology can tell us how to approach sexual ethics, either by showing us that our sexual psychology is morally irrelevant (because it’s “merely” the product of what was evolutionarily advantageous) or that our sexual psychology is deeply ingrained, and therefore normative. The trouble is that evolutionary biology can’t tell us whether a given evolutionarily advantageous aspect of humanity is good or bad. For instance, it’s presumably evolutionarily advantageous to want to feed your children rather than letting them starve to death, and it’s probably also evolutionarily advantageous to want to dominate and mistreat people who are weaker than you within your social group. But the human desire to feed our children is good (and our society rightly encourages it) whereas the desire to mistreat the weak is bad (and a good society will discourage it). In other words, an evolutionary explanation won’t necessarily tell us how to approach sexual ethics.

So, what is sex?

We can’t prove what sex is, and what it’s for—at least not in a way that every logically consistent person would find compelling. But we can try to come up with some standards for a good-enough account. Specifically, I’m going to claim that a good account will square with lived experience, and it will take into account the things that are distinctive about sex.

Sex is a manifestation of erotic desire and it’s the act that makes babies. So here’s what I’m going to propose as a definition of sex: sex is two people expressing their reciprocal erotic desire by doing the act by which babies are made.

The attractive aspect of this account is that it makes sense of, and integrates, the two salient aspects of sex: the erotic aspect and the fertility aspect.

If sex involves expressing erotic desire by doing the babymaking act, this provides a pretty natural link between the intensity of sex/sexual desire and the riskiness involved in doing something that might involve one person impregnating the other. Sexual desire isn’t the sort of thing that usually puts people in a “risk calculating” mode; instead, when we express erotic desire we usually want to express some openness to danger. (Incidentally, I think this is one reason that people find S&M attractive. But the danger is illusory! Perhaps such people could try unprotected sex instead?)

Another attractive aspect of this definition is that it preserves the idea that people who are infertile are not thereby made less capable of having sex. Intercourse is still the act by which babies are made, and a person who happens to be infertile (whether temporarily or permanently, whether they know it, or not) is still engaged in the same act as someone who is fertile.

Incidentally, it would be really weird if this weren’t true! It would mean that if I get pregnant unexpectedly I can look back and say ‘wow, I thought I was doing one thing but actually I was doing babymaking!’ and it also means that if I’m trying to get pregnant—perhaps I’m expecting to get pregnant—but then it turns out I didn’t get pregnant I can say ‘wow, I thought I was babymaking but actually I was doing something else altogether!’

Ethical implications of this view of sex

But why would I object to forms of sex other than unprotected intercourse? Sure, we could define sex the way I want to, but why would that mean that other sex acts–things like masturbation and contraceptive intercourse–are objectionable? Couldn’t they just be a different thing with a different meaning?

What’s wrong with masturbation?

Intercourse isn’t the only act where “the meaning of sex” is a relevant consideration. For one thing, sexual violations which don’t involve intercourse are still really bad, and bad in a way that’s specifically sexual. I’ve presented some arguments in favor of the view that the meaning of sex isn’t infinitely flexibly, and these same arguments apply to the claim that the meaning of any sex act isn’t infinitely flexible.

More specifically, what “meaning” could contraceptive sex, masturbation, or non-intercourse forms of sex express, which isn’t related to the meaning of non-contraceptive intercourse? Sex acts other than coitus clearly involve trying to express the erotic meaning of sex, but they do so in an illusory way because the people involved aren’t actually doing the act.

Orgasms feel good, as though you’ve consummated erotic desire. But when you masturbate, you haven’t consummated an erotic desire, because erotic desire can only be consummated reciprocally. When you desire someone, you don’t just want to be sexually stimulated by their body; you want them to desire you. Actually consummating sexual desire involves desiring another person and seeking and responding to their sexual desires. Solitary masturbation can’t involve this reciprocity; you can pretend that your erotic desires are interacting with another person and their erotic desires, but this is a fantasy.

It’s tempting to think there’s nothing wrong with sexual fantasy. After all, sometimes when we’re sad we decide to watch a happy movie to cheer ourselves up, or we might enjoy crying over a good book. This is also unconnected to reality, in a way. So why not think that masturbation is just a form of storytelling, and that an orgasm is a response like crying at the end of a book? Sometimes we’re in the mood for this sort of thing, and we seek it out the way we decide to enjoy fiction; is this a problem?

But there’s an important difference between masturbation and reading novels: responses like joy, laughter, or sorrow aren’t necessarily a direct response to another person. Whereas an orgasm in the context of sex is a response to another person, to their desire for us, and to the way they provoke and fulfill our own desires. If there was a distinct and intense reaction—something analogous to an orgasm—which we only had when, for instance, we experience being forgiven, or when we realize that we’re loved by a person who we love, we wouldn’t have this response to reading a novel or watching a movie, because novels and movies don’t (usually) involve another person interacting with us.[3] 

Moreover, if we had a distinctive realizing-we’re-loved or realizing-we’re-forgiven response, it would be wrong to trick ourselves into responding that way in other contexts; the response would have a particular meaning. If we found a way to artificially create that response—for instance, by taking a drug which gives us the feeling of having been forgiven even if we haven’t been forgiven—this would be a bad thing to do because it would involve intentionally deceiving ourselves. We can’t simulate the experience of being treated a certain way by others without damaging our ability to sincerely interact with them, our ability to receive actual expressions of forgiveness, love, etc. If I told a friend that I forgave him for something that he did and then he replied “wow, this is such a relief, even better than the time I took the forgiveness-experience drug,” I would worry that he wasn’t properly appreciating my forgiveness. My forgiveness is real in a way that his experience-on-the-drug is not.

An orgasm can be a response to another person, to being regarded a certain way by that person, to an interaction with them that expresses reciprocal desire. Orgasms subjectively feel like a manifestation of desire and a response to another person’s desire. When people have good orgasms, they don’t just feel like an “extra,” in the sense of “this chocolate cake is orgasmically good.” Instead, it seems that something real is being expressed and experienced, that something significant has happened. But if this is what these orgasms actually mean, it’s hard to see how we can stimulate the experience of interacting with another person’s desire without damaging our capacity to appreciate the real version of this interaction. We can’t have it both ways.

And as it happens, there is pretty strong empirical evidence that giving ourselves orgasms in a fantasy context really can damage our capacity to relate to others sexually. Various studies (along with the experience of many people in recent decades) suggest that sexually fantasizing to pornography can lead to sexual dysfunction in interactions with other people.

Mutual Masturbation

The same problem exists for sex acts that occur between two people. These acts often involve mutual desire, but like solitary masturbation they involve an illusion. If orgasms have a meaning, if they feel the way they do because they mean something in particular, that meaning is presumably connected to the the meaning of sex. Contraceptive sex is in a way more deceptive than solitary masturbation because it simulates more closely the experience of actually doing the babymaking act, of actually consummating sexual desire. But when we have contraceptive sex we aren’t actually doing the babymaking act because we’re intentionally changing the act to prevent a baby from being made. Instead of engaging in the babymaking act, we’re doing something that looks like it, but is actually mutual masturbation.

“Lying with the Body”

Every sex act other than unprotected intercourse has this quality. It either involves two people trying to express erotic desire by pretending to do the act that actually expresses reciprocal erotic desire, or it involves denying (as masturbation does) the reality that erotic desire can only be consummated with the participation of two people.

These acts are dishonest and not just illusory. The danger isn’t just that we’ll habituate ourselves badly, that we’re not “optimizing” our sex lives, but that we’re actually engaged in insincere sexual communication when we engage in sex acts other than unprotected intercourse. Because non-contraceptive sex is the physical language for consummating erotic desire, doing things which are designed to give ourselves (or someone else) an orgasm outside of this context involves an illusion. To the extent that this illusion is successful, it is dishonest.

The Best Defense is A Good Offense

To be clear, I haven’t proved that this is the only way to approach sex/contraception. Maybe there is another, more compelling account of sex, one which successfully makes sense of why distinctive principles about consent apply to sexual contact and which makes sense of the relationship between sex and reproduction. For instance, you might take a view like this:

Sexual ethics is a special ethical category, and this specialness is probably related to the fact that sexuality is tied to reproduction; however, since most acts of intercourse don’t have a reproductive outcome, it would be crazy to think that it’s unethical to interfere with the reproductive nature of sex acts. Instead, the (potentially) reproductive aspect of sex means that sex is an area where we should be extra careful—careful to exercise agency, careful to respect other people’s wishes, etc.

Or you might take a similar line of reasoning but instead conclude that

You should only have sex with your spouse, that is, within the context of a a committed relationship, the kind of relationship where you’d be willing to raise a child together, at least in the right circumstances.

For me to really defend my account, I need to actively critique accounts like these. (And if you have such an account, please let me know in the comments section!)

So in future posts, I’ll go “on the offensive.” I’ll also expand some of the arguments I’ve made in this post and present some new ones. Among other things, I’ll address some problems that inevitably arise when you accept the use of contraception, and I’ll discuss some beautiful (and perhaps unexpected) aspects of life without contraception. However, before I do that, there are other subjects which are a bit more pressing.

Up Next

Obviously what I’ve said creates a variety of difficulties for a variety of people, including people who aren’t in relationships, straight couples who don’t want to conceive, and LGBTQ folks. I’ll discuss this topic in the next post. 

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Footnotes:

*An autobiographical reading recommendation: if you’d like to read a philosophy paper about this argument, I recommend the paper “Not out of Lust but in Accordance with the Truth” by Alexander Pruss). This is the paper which convinced me of the positions I now hold. Though NB: skimming through it now, I see I have a quibble with—or at least want to clarify what he means by—his use of the word eros; I may also address this in the next post.)

[1] An additional piece of evidence that the ethics of sexual touch are governed by specifically sexual ethics is that while parents can authorize other adults to touch their children, they may not authorize them to touch them with the aim of sexual gratification—or even authorize them to look at the child with the aim of sexual gratification, even if doing so would benefit the child and wouldn’t cause psychological or physical harm. For instance, imagine your ten-year-old is in a coma and someone approaches you and says “I’m a rich pervert; I can pay for your child’s prohibitively expensive and possibly life-saving medical procedure if you let me look at their genitals for a few minutes before the procedure.” In the unlikely event that someone said this to you, and that you could trust them to pay for the procedure, it would be morally wrong—a violation—to authorize this person to look voyeuristically at your child’s genitals. And to be clear, this isn’t part of some broader principle like “it’s wrong to let someone derive pleasure from looking at your kid without their consent” because you could allow, say, the child’s grandfather to come in and take pleasure at seeing the child, even if the child isn’t awake to agree to this.

One friend raised an alternative theory for the wrongness of rape (a Kantian objection): perhaps the key moral principle is that you’re not using the person in a way that doesn’t also benefit them. But the example of the pervert and the child shows that they could perhaps benefit from being used in this way. (If anyone wants to talk more about the Kantian objection, let me know in the comments section! I don’t understand Kant that well, but I think that if you want to go the Kantian route—which I may have misunderstood—there may be a way of addressing contraception specifically from within that framework.)

[2] To give a more extreme example: imagine I’m working as a prostitute in Nevada. One of my clients wants to become a dad, and he asks if I’d be a surrogate mother for him; he likes the idea of his child being conceived and gestated by someone he knows. I agree, and we travel to Wisconsin, which allows traditional surrogacy, that is, surrogacy where the same woman provides the ova and the uterus. I’m artificially inseminated there with his sperm and have the baby, and—per the terms of our contract—he pays me to give him full custody of the child. What’s more, he wants the child to have a strong relationship with the birth mother, so when we go back to Nevada he hires me to be the live-in nanny and wet-nurse, and has the child call me “mommy.” When the child is nine, we have a falling out and so he fires me and I never see the child again. In this case has he simply fired the nanny, or has he separated a child from her mother? This seems to me much more like the second thing, even though, per our agreement, and per the legal situation I’m not the child’s mother. My point here isn’t that surrogacy is wrong, but that we don’t have the unlimited ability to redefine the meaning of our actions and relationships.

[3] Unless, of course, the novel or movie is a communication from someone that they love/forgive us, in which case we’re responding to that person’s love/forgiveness, rather than using the movie to stimulate these feelings. I’m thinking of a scenario where someone gives you a movie and says “this is how I feel about what happened.” The movie turns out to be a movie about forgiveness and so in watching it you realize that your friend has given you the movie to say “I forgive you.” If you have the being-forgiven reaction, you’re responding to your friend’s action, and you’re only reacting to the fictional aspect of the film because it’s expressing the non-fictional fact that your friend forgives you.