This is a great post - thank you! However, I think there's an important point re: religion and anti-contraception views that you haven't addressed, and I'm curious what you think about it. When people object to, e.g., an argument against contraception as covertly religious, I don't think they just mean that there may be religious premises that aren't being mentioned.
The other thing I think is often meant here arises from two features of arguments made for conclusions that are part of a person's religion. First, it's often the case, if someone is making an argument for a view that's part of their religion, they're not really open to changing their mind even when a very strong argument against their view is presented. This is partly because they might think the view has been taught by an infallible authority, and also partly because religion is often central to a person's identity in a way that makes abandoning a view held on religious grounds very psychologically difficult. Second, the conclusion being argued for (like the immorality of using contraception) is often one that would require the person to whom the argument is being made to drastically change their life.
Putting these two features together, someone who makes an argument for a conclusion they hold on religious grounds is often (1) asking their interlocutors to drastically change their lives while (2) those interlocutors reasonably believe the person is not really open to efforts they might make to persuade him/her to change his/her life. I think the perception of inequality here is a big part of the reason why people distrust religious arguments. (I'm mostly basing this on impressions from public exchanges on this sort of topic I've read or observed and personal experience, but here's a small piece of evidence: https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2014/05/otagos-gregory-dawes-interviewed.html
Thanks! This is very helpful. Here's my attempt to address it:
Sometimes we have conversations where there's an asymmetry between how open the parties are to changing their beliefs. One party (or both!) might be relatively closed to changing their beliefs, either because their beliefs are tied to other more deeply held beliefs (e.g. belief in religious authority), or because changing their belief would require radical life changes (e.g. ceasing to contracept). I think this is okay, but it's good to be clear about what's going on, and both parties should have a reason for participating in the conversation.
Good reasons could include "you're my friend so I want to know what you think," or "I'm open to having my mind changed about this subject" or "I'm curious about how this person—or other people like this person—think about this thing." But it also could include things like "I want to share my perspective on this because I think it's right," or "I want to see whether these arguments which seem obvious-to-me actually hold up when I talk to other people about them; maybe they're not so strong."
I think the two factors you describe definitely do frustrate people but it's only an objectionable situation if the religious person is being cagey about their own willingness to change their beliefs. (For the record, I'm not particularly prepared to change my own beliefs on whether contraception is wrong, but I'm very prepared to change my beliefs about whether my non-religious arguments are any good.)
I also think that non-religious people sometimes get frustrated for an unjustified reason when they argue with religious people, namely that they view their own perspective as being "neutral" but treat their religious interlocutor's view as suspect because of the person's religious history/baggage. Whereas secular beliefs also have a history—a history that goes back in a particular person's life, and also a history that goes back within a particular cultural context/time period.
This doesn't mean that you should give every perspective a good hearing. We need to make judgment calls about whether a given argument is worth our time. (E.g. I don't usually engage with conspiracy theorists, and this isn't because I have a proof that they're wrong; it's just that I'm guessing—perhaps mistakenly—that it's not worth my time.) So I think it's logically coherent for someone who thinks the anti-contraception POV is wacky to just ignore it in the same way that I ignore some things that seem wacky to me. But what's not fair is for that person claim that they *know* the non-religious argument is bad/wrong/secretly-religious because the person presenting it is religious. A good test here is the abolitionism test, where most prominent abolitionists were clearly religiously motivated and unprepared to change their minds, but still presented arguments which were pretty good.
Does this seem like an adequate response, or do you think I missed something here? (Sorry to ramble; if I had more time I would have written a shorter comment...)
I'm thinking this through as I write this, but it seems to me that this style of argument implies that a great many things (that are not wrong) are wrong.
Take a martial art like Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (which I've done for many years).
Physical conflict is morally significant - it can only be done justifiably under certain circumstances, it matters a lot to people when they engage in physical conflict, many strong emotions are involved, non-consensual physical conflict is almost always wrong, and the stakes of physical conflict are often quite high.
In jiu-jitsu, we engage in consensual physical conflict until one person taps out, usually because they are in a choke or a joint lock. Between skilled practitioners this often happens before anyone is being strangled or the joint is in danger - we recognize that we've been 'check mated' and give up.
This seems a lot like your account of contraceptive sex - we are engaging in a facsimile of the real thing (fighting) but have agreements and methods in place to mitigate the consequences (death or injury). And I can't think of any reason why this is bad.
An important difference between fighting and sex is this: in fighting, non-consensual physical contact is *almost* always wrong, whereas in sex non-consensual sexual contact is *always* wrong. This suggests that sex is an ethically special category. My claim is that the specialness arises from 2 things: the erotic interpersonal communicative aspect of sex and the reproductive aspect (and, more specifically, by doing the latter as a way of doing the former). Maybe I get this wrong, but it seems to me much more parsimonious that the importance of sexual consent arises from something that has to do with what sex is, rather than just some mysterious property that emerges out of sex with no explanation.
In jiu-jitsu, and in lots of other legitimate activities that involve playing at something else (theater, football), the distinction is between what you're doing and the real thing *is* experienced. The feeling of being in a street fight where someone is really trying to hurt you is different from the feeling of doing a martial art where you know you're both constrained by the rules of fair conduct (including that they won't hurt you if you tap out).
Whereas the goal with contraceptive sex is for the experience to be identical. For an orgasm to feel the way it would, and to mean the same thing that it would, in unprotected sex and for the couple to experience and manifest the same kind of intimacy.
Hm, I don't think you adequately addressed the novel-reading analogy objection.
"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."
I don't see why orgasm is necessarily a response to another person. Orgasm simply is the response of the body to consistent genital stimulation. Sure, it may have evolved/been created for some other purpose, but orgasm itself just is the physical reaction. It's not common, but totally possible, for people to orgasm while thinking purely of the physical pleasure they are experiencing while masturbating, for instance. Compare, for instance, the bodily response of pain. The purpose of pain is to indicate bodily damage, that is clear. But we can experience pain just from nerve inflammation without any bodily harm. Yet I would say that experiencing pain due to nerve inflammation just is experiencing pain in a fully authentic and in now way illusory. Pain usually indicates bodily harm, but it mustn't always.
Joy isn't necessarily a direct response to another person, but the kind of joy experienced while reading a novel often is, and I don't see why it's not dishonest (under your framework) just because some other kind of joy is not a direct response to another person. Suppose I feel joy for two beloved characters in a novel getting married. Am I not deceiving myself? This is a joy I'm only supposed to feel when real friends are married.
Another objection to this point: if orgasm was necessarily a response to doing the babymaking act, how do you explain the fact that most women cannot orgasm during intercourse from intercourse alone? Sure, they can stimulate themselves during intercourse, but this is often cumbersome and not particularly natural from a physical perspective. If your argument only applies to male orgasms, than where does that leave female orgasms and masturbation?
"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."
Why? I sometimes play out detailed scenarios in my head about how a friend or relative might treat me, and I do feel something like the feelings I would in that situation, but it doesn't affect how I actually relate to them.
(BTW, this blog is fascinating and you're a very clear writer. I'm not religious and baseline unsympathetic to this view, I leave the train at premise #1, but debating my point of departure probably won't be productive, as you note! I find this very interesting nonetheless.)
Sorry for delayed reply! And sorry this is so verbose.
“I don't see why orgasm is necessarily a response to another person. Orgasm simply is the response of the body to consistent genital stimulation. Sure, it may have evolved/been created for some other purpose, but orgasm itself just is the physical reaction…. I would say that experiencing pain due to nerve inflammation just is experiencing pain in a fully authentic and in now way illusory. Pain usually indicates bodily harm, but it mustn't always.”
It’s certainly possible to have orgasms without interactive erotic love (either by fantasizing about something or just via physical stimulation). But the question is whether this is a good/acceptable thing to do. To use the pain analogy: there are obviously lots of ways that you can intentionally cause pain—some of which involve physical harm, and others of which involve nerve stimulation—but some of these ways-to-cause-pain are morally wrong (and not just because they cause suffering). Like, you could use electric shocks to train someone to have negative associations with something they *should* have positive or neutral associations with, and this would clearly be wrong.
Now obviously pleasure is good in a way that pain is bad, but pleasure and pain can both be good/bad depending on whether they conform to reality. This is really obvious in the case of pain: If you're a person who experiences pain when you touch a hot stove, this capacity-to-feel-pain is actually a good thing because it helps you recognize quickly if your body is being damaged. Whereas if you have nerve damage that causes your hand to hurt all the time despite not having an injury, that's a pathology and it's something that you'll want to try to fix if possible. (And an analogy with orgasms would be: if you're a person who regularly has totally random, spontaneous orgasms while walking down the street, you'd probably want to change this if possible. It's not a moral problem—you're not doing something wrong; it's not even in your control—but I imagine this would be destabilizing in some way.) But I also think something like this is true for pleasure: if you feel really good all the time, even in situations that call for a negative response, that's a problem. (And by "feeling good" I don't mean something like feeling secure/loved, feeling hopeful, feeling peaceful in spite of various forms of suffering. but more like "feeling pleasure, not suffering, and being happy.") If someone you love is dying a slow death from a terrible disease you want to be able to respond appropriately to their suffering—for their sake and your own—which involves experiencing pain (rather than pleasure).
Obviously this doesn't amount to a proof that masturbation is wrong, but here are two further reasons for taking that possibility more seriously.
First, there are clearly *some things* analogous to masturbation which would be wrong (even if you don’t think that masturbation itself is wrong). One example is the "feeling-like-you've-been-forgiven-even-when-you-haven't" pill. If I've wronged someone in a serious way, I don't want to be able to pretend in a psychologically effective way that the relationship is undamaged. So I’d want to hear more from the "masturbation-is-okay" camp about *why it is* that masturbation isn’t like this.
Second, our intuitions about what’s wrong vs okay are significantly shaped by what we do and what the people around us do. So if masturbation is wrong, it’s possible that by habitually masturbating—and/or by growing up in a culture that says “there’s no problem with masturbating!”—you could incorrectly come to think there’s no problem.
(To be clear, this points cut both ways: if something is completely fine—say, something like eating enough to keep your body in a healthy weight—but you *incorrectly* believe it to be objectionable (e.g., in the case of someone with certain eating disorders), the way you approach the question can wrongly confirm your disordered view that the thing is bad. Like, an underweight person with an eating disorder might think “I feel better about myself when I only eat 1500 calories a day; I only eat 2000 calories a day when I’ve lost self-control and then I feel bad about it. My experience is consistent with the idea that 2000 calories a day is a Bad Idea.” But this person’s inference isn’t sound; they only feel bad about it because they’ve *misidentified* what they should be doing/avoiding. So if masturbation is healthy in the way that eating enough food is healthy, you might just think that people who try not to do it have messed themselves up psychologically.
But most people who try not to masturbate do so with specific reasons: in some cases its for context-specific personal reasons (like too much masturbation leading to sexual dysfunction) but in other cases it’s for philosophical reasons like “orgasms are a proper response to the interaction of my (actual) erotic love for another person with their (actual) erotic love for me” or religious reasons like “humans are made in the image and likeness of G-d; masturbation violates our human dignity and damages our relationship with G-d.”
And I’m not convinced that the pro-masturbation camp (or the “masturbation is fine” camp) has put forward a sufficiently convincing account of human sexuality for me to buy this.
Specifically, I think they haven’t answered in a satisfactory way questions about why human sexuality is different from other areas of human life—something which is very obviously true when we think about things like sexual violation, which are wrong over-and-above the extent to which they cause psychological suffering and/or go against a person’s stated wishes. Like, why is personal autonomy *so much more important* when it comes to sex than other areas of life? An answer like “sex is special: it’s the way we relate to one another erotically, and it’s the way we generate new life” can make sense of why sexual consent is so important—but its also a view that’s pretty consistent with the idea that masturbation & contraception are wrong.
So the other question I have for the masturbation-is-fine camp is: what’s your view of why sex is special (and why sexual consent is especially important) that’s consistent with the idea that masturbation is fine?
Re: your comments on the fiction example (rejoicing in the character's happiness) and the example involved in thinking about your family/friends: I think there's a real difference between fiction and fantasy (by "fantasy" I mean something like "sentimental fantasy" rather than "fiction with magic and wizards and things"). Our reactions to fiction can be connected to the reality, even when the story is made up. We recognize that the story is beautiful, that the happy ending is something that we want to befall people like those in the story. (I do think it's possible to have an unhealthy relationship with fiction, most often in the form of television, where we feel a deeper sense of friendship with the cast of a sitcom than with our own friends in real life.) Whereas in sentimental fantasy we distance ourselves from reality: revenge fantasies can be like this (including ones of our invention). The same is true for sexual fantasy. Maybe a good test is something like "after reading this or thinking about it, do I see and understand the people in my life more/less clearly? Do I recognize the reality that they have dignity and a unique experience which needs to be respected?"
I've read that some women report that the men they're having casual sex with are increasingly likely to try to choke them without asking first; whoever wrote the article (maybe it was in the Atlantic?) seemed to think that the use of increasingly extreme pornography had a role in leading men to think "women like to be choked without being asked." I don't know whether there's really an epidemic of this or if the author found one person who this had happened to, but it's at least extremely plausible that certain kinds of sexual fantasy, totally divorced from reality, can lead people to be less attentive to the *actual desires* of the person they're sleeping with.
So in the example of the family/friends I think the same kind of tests would apply. Maybe you have a friend who is really uptight and you spend time imagining what life would be like if they could be more relaxed. It seems like you could do this in a way that doesn't do violence to their personality (like, if they're really problematically uptight and they'd be better off if they could relax a bit more). This is really just like thinking about what it would be like for them to be more healthy, more truly themselves (even if they're not likely to get there), which seems fine. And maybe by thinking about it in this way you can understand them better; like "the reason my problem doesn't want to do these fun trips with me isn't that she dislikes me or hates fun, but they have an anxiety problem which makes it difficult to enjoy this kind of thing."
So a question here would be: if I think that fiction can be fine, do I think there are cases where masturbation is okay, provided that it's ordered to a healthy interpersonal sexual interaction? And my answer to this is "no" because I think doing-things-that-cause-orgasms (whether to yourself or to another person) has an *objective* quality. It isn't just about conditioning ourselves appropriately psychologically. (The psychological experience points to the more objective reality.) So for the same reason that I don't think it's right to, say, spice up your marriage by committing adultery—and maybe you're doing it with a good long-term goal, like trying to get your spouse to notice you and value the marriage in a more intentional way—you're doing something that violates the sexual integrity of the relationship.
Finally, I'm glad you brought up female orgasms! My view is that sex should always involve seeking both kinds of orgasms. Female orgasm isn’t just an “extra”—something that’s kind of ethically irrelevant—but something that needs to be sought *as part of the act of coitus*. This can involve seeking female orgasm(s) some combination of before, during, and after male orgasm. I don't think it's ethically relevant which happens first or whether they happen simultaneously, but I think people should only seek to cause orgasms in a situation which involves intercourse or attempted intercourse (again, before/during/after).
(The language of “seeking to cause orgasms” is obviously incomplete; it’s not like when people are having sex they’re merely “seeking orgasms” in the way that a person going to a job they dislike is merely “seeking a paycheck”. I just mean that they’re doing orgasm-causing things together—and that they’re doing them in a way that’s oriented towards orgasms: if you have an orgasm during sex or sexual stimulation, that’s *intentional* in a way that an orgasm during a wet dream or a random/surprising source of sexual stimulation isn’t.)
Now obviously some women have a very difficult time having orgasms. The possibility that a woman won’t have an orgasm doesn’t mean that it’s wrong for a couple to have sex (or to try to have sex), but this is *also true* for male orgasms. Men can also find orgasms unattainable and I don’t think a couple has done something wrong if they try to have sex, the woman has an orgasm, and then the man is unable to. (I also don’t think they’ve done anything wrong if one of them has an orgasm and then they're interrupted by something like the doorbell ringing and so they don't complete the act.) My point is that they should each be seeking to complete the act, which includes seeking to give the other person (an) orgasm(s).
Thanks for this! Working on a reply, though it may take me a little while because I want to give a proper response to the many important issues you raise. (Warning: may be a long reply!)
This is a great post - thank you! However, I think there's an important point re: religion and anti-contraception views that you haven't addressed, and I'm curious what you think about it. When people object to, e.g., an argument against contraception as covertly religious, I don't think they just mean that there may be religious premises that aren't being mentioned.
The other thing I think is often meant here arises from two features of arguments made for conclusions that are part of a person's religion. First, it's often the case, if someone is making an argument for a view that's part of their religion, they're not really open to changing their mind even when a very strong argument against their view is presented. This is partly because they might think the view has been taught by an infallible authority, and also partly because religion is often central to a person's identity in a way that makes abandoning a view held on religious grounds very psychologically difficult. Second, the conclusion being argued for (like the immorality of using contraception) is often one that would require the person to whom the argument is being made to drastically change their life.
Putting these two features together, someone who makes an argument for a conclusion they hold on religious grounds is often (1) asking their interlocutors to drastically change their lives while (2) those interlocutors reasonably believe the person is not really open to efforts they might make to persuade him/her to change his/her life. I think the perception of inequality here is a big part of the reason why people distrust religious arguments. (I'm mostly basing this on impressions from public exchanges on this sort of topic I've read or observed and personal experience, but here's a small piece of evidence: https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2014/05/otagos-gregory-dawes-interviewed.html
Thanks! This is very helpful. Here's my attempt to address it:
Sometimes we have conversations where there's an asymmetry between how open the parties are to changing their beliefs. One party (or both!) might be relatively closed to changing their beliefs, either because their beliefs are tied to other more deeply held beliefs (e.g. belief in religious authority), or because changing their belief would require radical life changes (e.g. ceasing to contracept). I think this is okay, but it's good to be clear about what's going on, and both parties should have a reason for participating in the conversation.
Good reasons could include "you're my friend so I want to know what you think," or "I'm open to having my mind changed about this subject" or "I'm curious about how this person—or other people like this person—think about this thing." But it also could include things like "I want to share my perspective on this because I think it's right," or "I want to see whether these arguments which seem obvious-to-me actually hold up when I talk to other people about them; maybe they're not so strong."
I think the two factors you describe definitely do frustrate people but it's only an objectionable situation if the religious person is being cagey about their own willingness to change their beliefs. (For the record, I'm not particularly prepared to change my own beliefs on whether contraception is wrong, but I'm very prepared to change my beliefs about whether my non-religious arguments are any good.)
I also think that non-religious people sometimes get frustrated for an unjustified reason when they argue with religious people, namely that they view their own perspective as being "neutral" but treat their religious interlocutor's view as suspect because of the person's religious history/baggage. Whereas secular beliefs also have a history—a history that goes back in a particular person's life, and also a history that goes back within a particular cultural context/time period.
This doesn't mean that you should give every perspective a good hearing. We need to make judgment calls about whether a given argument is worth our time. (E.g. I don't usually engage with conspiracy theorists, and this isn't because I have a proof that they're wrong; it's just that I'm guessing—perhaps mistakenly—that it's not worth my time.) So I think it's logically coherent for someone who thinks the anti-contraception POV is wacky to just ignore it in the same way that I ignore some things that seem wacky to me. But what's not fair is for that person claim that they *know* the non-religious argument is bad/wrong/secretly-religious because the person presenting it is religious. A good test here is the abolitionism test, where most prominent abolitionists were clearly religiously motivated and unprepared to change their minds, but still presented arguments which were pretty good.
Does this seem like an adequate response, or do you think I missed something here? (Sorry to ramble; if I had more time I would have written a shorter comment...)
I'm thinking this through as I write this, but it seems to me that this style of argument implies that a great many things (that are not wrong) are wrong.
Take a martial art like Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (which I've done for many years).
Physical conflict is morally significant - it can only be done justifiably under certain circumstances, it matters a lot to people when they engage in physical conflict, many strong emotions are involved, non-consensual physical conflict is almost always wrong, and the stakes of physical conflict are often quite high.
In jiu-jitsu, we engage in consensual physical conflict until one person taps out, usually because they are in a choke or a joint lock. Between skilled practitioners this often happens before anyone is being strangled or the joint is in danger - we recognize that we've been 'check mated' and give up.
This seems a lot like your account of contraceptive sex - we are engaging in a facsimile of the real thing (fighting) but have agreements and methods in place to mitigate the consequences (death or injury). And I can't think of any reason why this is bad.
An important difference between fighting and sex is this: in fighting, non-consensual physical contact is *almost* always wrong, whereas in sex non-consensual sexual contact is *always* wrong. This suggests that sex is an ethically special category. My claim is that the specialness arises from 2 things: the erotic interpersonal communicative aspect of sex and the reproductive aspect (and, more specifically, by doing the latter as a way of doing the former). Maybe I get this wrong, but it seems to me much more parsimonious that the importance of sexual consent arises from something that has to do with what sex is, rather than just some mysterious property that emerges out of sex with no explanation.
In jiu-jitsu, and in lots of other legitimate activities that involve playing at something else (theater, football), the distinction is between what you're doing and the real thing *is* experienced. The feeling of being in a street fight where someone is really trying to hurt you is different from the feeling of doing a martial art where you know you're both constrained by the rules of fair conduct (including that they won't hurt you if you tap out).
Whereas the goal with contraceptive sex is for the experience to be identical. For an orgasm to feel the way it would, and to mean the same thing that it would, in unprotected sex and for the couple to experience and manifest the same kind of intimacy.
Hm, I don't think you adequately addressed the novel-reading analogy objection.
"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."
I don't see why orgasm is necessarily a response to another person. Orgasm simply is the response of the body to consistent genital stimulation. Sure, it may have evolved/been created for some other purpose, but orgasm itself just is the physical reaction. It's not common, but totally possible, for people to orgasm while thinking purely of the physical pleasure they are experiencing while masturbating, for instance. Compare, for instance, the bodily response of pain. The purpose of pain is to indicate bodily damage, that is clear. But we can experience pain just from nerve inflammation without any bodily harm. Yet I would say that experiencing pain due to nerve inflammation just is experiencing pain in a fully authentic and in now way illusory. Pain usually indicates bodily harm, but it mustn't always.
Joy isn't necessarily a direct response to another person, but the kind of joy experienced while reading a novel often is, and I don't see why it's not dishonest (under your framework) just because some other kind of joy is not a direct response to another person. Suppose I feel joy for two beloved characters in a novel getting married. Am I not deceiving myself? This is a joy I'm only supposed to feel when real friends are married.
Another objection to this point: if orgasm was necessarily a response to doing the babymaking act, how do you explain the fact that most women cannot orgasm during intercourse from intercourse alone? Sure, they can stimulate themselves during intercourse, but this is often cumbersome and not particularly natural from a physical perspective. If your argument only applies to male orgasms, than where does that leave female orgasms and masturbation?
"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."
Why? I sometimes play out detailed scenarios in my head about how a friend or relative might treat me, and I do feel something like the feelings I would in that situation, but it doesn't affect how I actually relate to them.
(BTW, this blog is fascinating and you're a very clear writer. I'm not religious and baseline unsympathetic to this view, I leave the train at premise #1, but debating my point of departure probably won't be productive, as you note! I find this very interesting nonetheless.)
and is in no way illusory*
Sorry for delayed reply! And sorry this is so verbose.
“I don't see why orgasm is necessarily a response to another person. Orgasm simply is the response of the body to consistent genital stimulation. Sure, it may have evolved/been created for some other purpose, but orgasm itself just is the physical reaction…. I would say that experiencing pain due to nerve inflammation just is experiencing pain in a fully authentic and in now way illusory. Pain usually indicates bodily harm, but it mustn't always.”
It’s certainly possible to have orgasms without interactive erotic love (either by fantasizing about something or just via physical stimulation). But the question is whether this is a good/acceptable thing to do. To use the pain analogy: there are obviously lots of ways that you can intentionally cause pain—some of which involve physical harm, and others of which involve nerve stimulation—but some of these ways-to-cause-pain are morally wrong (and not just because they cause suffering). Like, you could use electric shocks to train someone to have negative associations with something they *should* have positive or neutral associations with, and this would clearly be wrong.
Now obviously pleasure is good in a way that pain is bad, but pleasure and pain can both be good/bad depending on whether they conform to reality. This is really obvious in the case of pain: If you're a person who experiences pain when you touch a hot stove, this capacity-to-feel-pain is actually a good thing because it helps you recognize quickly if your body is being damaged. Whereas if you have nerve damage that causes your hand to hurt all the time despite not having an injury, that's a pathology and it's something that you'll want to try to fix if possible. (And an analogy with orgasms would be: if you're a person who regularly has totally random, spontaneous orgasms while walking down the street, you'd probably want to change this if possible. It's not a moral problem—you're not doing something wrong; it's not even in your control—but I imagine this would be destabilizing in some way.) But I also think something like this is true for pleasure: if you feel really good all the time, even in situations that call for a negative response, that's a problem. (And by "feeling good" I don't mean something like feeling secure/loved, feeling hopeful, feeling peaceful in spite of various forms of suffering. but more like "feeling pleasure, not suffering, and being happy.") If someone you love is dying a slow death from a terrible disease you want to be able to respond appropriately to their suffering—for their sake and your own—which involves experiencing pain (rather than pleasure).
Obviously this doesn't amount to a proof that masturbation is wrong, but here are two further reasons for taking that possibility more seriously.
First, there are clearly *some things* analogous to masturbation which would be wrong (even if you don’t think that masturbation itself is wrong). One example is the "feeling-like-you've-been-forgiven-even-when-you-haven't" pill. If I've wronged someone in a serious way, I don't want to be able to pretend in a psychologically effective way that the relationship is undamaged. So I’d want to hear more from the "masturbation-is-okay" camp about *why it is* that masturbation isn’t like this.
Second, our intuitions about what’s wrong vs okay are significantly shaped by what we do and what the people around us do. So if masturbation is wrong, it’s possible that by habitually masturbating—and/or by growing up in a culture that says “there’s no problem with masturbating!”—you could incorrectly come to think there’s no problem.
(To be clear, this points cut both ways: if something is completely fine—say, something like eating enough to keep your body in a healthy weight—but you *incorrectly* believe it to be objectionable (e.g., in the case of someone with certain eating disorders), the way you approach the question can wrongly confirm your disordered view that the thing is bad. Like, an underweight person with an eating disorder might think “I feel better about myself when I only eat 1500 calories a day; I only eat 2000 calories a day when I’ve lost self-control and then I feel bad about it. My experience is consistent with the idea that 2000 calories a day is a Bad Idea.” But this person’s inference isn’t sound; they only feel bad about it because they’ve *misidentified* what they should be doing/avoiding. So if masturbation is healthy in the way that eating enough food is healthy, you might just think that people who try not to do it have messed themselves up psychologically.
But most people who try not to masturbate do so with specific reasons: in some cases its for context-specific personal reasons (like too much masturbation leading to sexual dysfunction) but in other cases it’s for philosophical reasons like “orgasms are a proper response to the interaction of my (actual) erotic love for another person with their (actual) erotic love for me” or religious reasons like “humans are made in the image and likeness of G-d; masturbation violates our human dignity and damages our relationship with G-d.”
And I’m not convinced that the pro-masturbation camp (or the “masturbation is fine” camp) has put forward a sufficiently convincing account of human sexuality for me to buy this.
Specifically, I think they haven’t answered in a satisfactory way questions about why human sexuality is different from other areas of human life—something which is very obviously true when we think about things like sexual violation, which are wrong over-and-above the extent to which they cause psychological suffering and/or go against a person’s stated wishes. Like, why is personal autonomy *so much more important* when it comes to sex than other areas of life? An answer like “sex is special: it’s the way we relate to one another erotically, and it’s the way we generate new life” can make sense of why sexual consent is so important—but its also a view that’s pretty consistent with the idea that masturbation & contraception are wrong.
So the other question I have for the masturbation-is-fine camp is: what’s your view of why sex is special (and why sexual consent is especially important) that’s consistent with the idea that masturbation is fine?
Re: your comments on the fiction example (rejoicing in the character's happiness) and the example involved in thinking about your family/friends: I think there's a real difference between fiction and fantasy (by "fantasy" I mean something like "sentimental fantasy" rather than "fiction with magic and wizards and things"). Our reactions to fiction can be connected to the reality, even when the story is made up. We recognize that the story is beautiful, that the happy ending is something that we want to befall people like those in the story. (I do think it's possible to have an unhealthy relationship with fiction, most often in the form of television, where we feel a deeper sense of friendship with the cast of a sitcom than with our own friends in real life.) Whereas in sentimental fantasy we distance ourselves from reality: revenge fantasies can be like this (including ones of our invention). The same is true for sexual fantasy. Maybe a good test is something like "after reading this or thinking about it, do I see and understand the people in my life more/less clearly? Do I recognize the reality that they have dignity and a unique experience which needs to be respected?"
I've read that some women report that the men they're having casual sex with are increasingly likely to try to choke them without asking first; whoever wrote the article (maybe it was in the Atlantic?) seemed to think that the use of increasingly extreme pornography had a role in leading men to think "women like to be choked without being asked." I don't know whether there's really an epidemic of this or if the author found one person who this had happened to, but it's at least extremely plausible that certain kinds of sexual fantasy, totally divorced from reality, can lead people to be less attentive to the *actual desires* of the person they're sleeping with.
So in the example of the family/friends I think the same kind of tests would apply. Maybe you have a friend who is really uptight and you spend time imagining what life would be like if they could be more relaxed. It seems like you could do this in a way that doesn't do violence to their personality (like, if they're really problematically uptight and they'd be better off if they could relax a bit more). This is really just like thinking about what it would be like for them to be more healthy, more truly themselves (even if they're not likely to get there), which seems fine. And maybe by thinking about it in this way you can understand them better; like "the reason my problem doesn't want to do these fun trips with me isn't that she dislikes me or hates fun, but they have an anxiety problem which makes it difficult to enjoy this kind of thing."
So a question here would be: if I think that fiction can be fine, do I think there are cases where masturbation is okay, provided that it's ordered to a healthy interpersonal sexual interaction? And my answer to this is "no" because I think doing-things-that-cause-orgasms (whether to yourself or to another person) has an *objective* quality. It isn't just about conditioning ourselves appropriately psychologically. (The psychological experience points to the more objective reality.) So for the same reason that I don't think it's right to, say, spice up your marriage by committing adultery—and maybe you're doing it with a good long-term goal, like trying to get your spouse to notice you and value the marriage in a more intentional way—you're doing something that violates the sexual integrity of the relationship.
Finally, I'm glad you brought up female orgasms! My view is that sex should always involve seeking both kinds of orgasms. Female orgasm isn’t just an “extra”—something that’s kind of ethically irrelevant—but something that needs to be sought *as part of the act of coitus*. This can involve seeking female orgasm(s) some combination of before, during, and after male orgasm. I don't think it's ethically relevant which happens first or whether they happen simultaneously, but I think people should only seek to cause orgasms in a situation which involves intercourse or attempted intercourse (again, before/during/after).
(The language of “seeking to cause orgasms” is obviously incomplete; it’s not like when people are having sex they’re merely “seeking orgasms” in the way that a person going to a job they dislike is merely “seeking a paycheck”. I just mean that they’re doing orgasm-causing things together—and that they’re doing them in a way that’s oriented towards orgasms: if you have an orgasm during sex or sexual stimulation, that’s *intentional* in a way that an orgasm during a wet dream or a random/surprising source of sexual stimulation isn’t.)
Now obviously some women have a very difficult time having orgasms. The possibility that a woman won’t have an orgasm doesn’t mean that it’s wrong for a couple to have sex (or to try to have sex), but this is *also true* for male orgasms. Men can also find orgasms unattainable and I don’t think a couple has done something wrong if they try to have sex, the woman has an orgasm, and then the man is unable to. (I also don’t think they’ve done anything wrong if one of them has an orgasm and then they're interrupted by something like the doorbell ringing and so they don't complete the act.) My point is that they should each be seeking to complete the act, which includes seeking to give the other person (an) orgasm(s).
Thanks for this! Working on a reply, though it may take me a little while because I want to give a proper response to the many important issues you raise. (Warning: may be a long reply!)