C
Casey1981
Guest
Hello, I created an account here specially to ask this question, as I have been having some trouble finding an answer to it in books and the like.
I am a Catholic and I believe and live as though premarital sex is wrong. However, there is something specific about this belief that I have been having trouble justifying conceptually. Recently a friend, newly converted to Christianity, told me he does not see why those who engage in premarital sex must be possessed of a selfish mindset that contributes to their activity being sinful. Now, I have read John Paul II’s Love and Responsibility. In that book he emphasizes that it is morally wrong to use a person for any reason, insisting that persons are to be treated as ends in themselves. He calls this idea the personalistic norm. If I remember correctly, the Pope’s point is that sex outside the context of marriage will always involve some element of use – the participants will be using one another (for pleasure in the case of sex), and this violation of the personalistic norm is what makes their action wrong.
I am struggling with understanding, or finding, the argument for why this is so. To help you understand my thinking on this, here is something I recently wrote in an email to someone about the matter: “I don’t need to have committed myself to someone else for life in order to be able to develop as much intimacy with them as I can as long as it’s non-sexual, such as telling them personal things about myself. I can develop that intimacy even with the knowledge that our relationship may end before one of us is dead – that we may lose touch, for example, and that I may indeed subsequently develop similarly intimate relationships with other people before either of us dies – and despite all this, we need not have the mindset that we are using one another.”
Something in me tells me that there is something wrong with saying that two unmarried people could have sex and it be entirely devoid of selfish feelings, so that there would be nothing wrong with their act insofar as that aspect is concerned (even if there would be something wrong with it from the point of view of sexuality’s reproductive aspect). But I am trying to justify this intuition of mine with reasons. At the risk of going on too long, here is a quote from the Pope’s Love and Responsibility that I have been thinking about in connection with this: “How is it possible to ensure that one person does not then become for the other – the woman for the man, or the man for the woman – nothing more than the means to an end – i.e. an object used exclusively for the attainment of a selfish end? To exclude this possibility they must share the same end. Such an end, where marriage is concerned, is procreation, the future generation, a family, and, at the same time, the continual ripening of the relationship between two people, in all the areas of activity which conjugal life includes” (30). Given the context in which this passage appears, I take the Pope to be saying that our actions must be directed to some further good beyond the immediate activity, be it sexual or otherwise (he mentions the relationship between the employer and employee and between the commander and soldier), if we are to avoid using others in our actions.
But just as the married couple have in mind the good of their union when they have sex (leaving the reproductive aim of sex aside for the moment), can an unmarried couple not have in mind the same end – the good of their union – and so engage in sex unselfishly? What I am having trouble seeing is how a proof could be offered one way or the other in answer to this question. Even if I understand why marriage would make it less likely that “use of the other” would occur in sexual relations, I am not seeing why “use of the other” absolutely must occur in sexual relations outside marriage.
Thank you in advance for whatever help you can offer me with this question.
I am a Catholic and I believe and live as though premarital sex is wrong. However, there is something specific about this belief that I have been having trouble justifying conceptually. Recently a friend, newly converted to Christianity, told me he does not see why those who engage in premarital sex must be possessed of a selfish mindset that contributes to their activity being sinful. Now, I have read John Paul II’s Love and Responsibility. In that book he emphasizes that it is morally wrong to use a person for any reason, insisting that persons are to be treated as ends in themselves. He calls this idea the personalistic norm. If I remember correctly, the Pope’s point is that sex outside the context of marriage will always involve some element of use – the participants will be using one another (for pleasure in the case of sex), and this violation of the personalistic norm is what makes their action wrong.
I am struggling with understanding, or finding, the argument for why this is so. To help you understand my thinking on this, here is something I recently wrote in an email to someone about the matter: “I don’t need to have committed myself to someone else for life in order to be able to develop as much intimacy with them as I can as long as it’s non-sexual, such as telling them personal things about myself. I can develop that intimacy even with the knowledge that our relationship may end before one of us is dead – that we may lose touch, for example, and that I may indeed subsequently develop similarly intimate relationships with other people before either of us dies – and despite all this, we need not have the mindset that we are using one another.”
Something in me tells me that there is something wrong with saying that two unmarried people could have sex and it be entirely devoid of selfish feelings, so that there would be nothing wrong with their act insofar as that aspect is concerned (even if there would be something wrong with it from the point of view of sexuality’s reproductive aspect). But I am trying to justify this intuition of mine with reasons. At the risk of going on too long, here is a quote from the Pope’s Love and Responsibility that I have been thinking about in connection with this: “How is it possible to ensure that one person does not then become for the other – the woman for the man, or the man for the woman – nothing more than the means to an end – i.e. an object used exclusively for the attainment of a selfish end? To exclude this possibility they must share the same end. Such an end, where marriage is concerned, is procreation, the future generation, a family, and, at the same time, the continual ripening of the relationship between two people, in all the areas of activity which conjugal life includes” (30). Given the context in which this passage appears, I take the Pope to be saying that our actions must be directed to some further good beyond the immediate activity, be it sexual or otherwise (he mentions the relationship between the employer and employee and between the commander and soldier), if we are to avoid using others in our actions.
But just as the married couple have in mind the good of their union when they have sex (leaving the reproductive aim of sex aside for the moment), can an unmarried couple not have in mind the same end – the good of their union – and so engage in sex unselfishly? What I am having trouble seeing is how a proof could be offered one way or the other in answer to this question. Even if I understand why marriage would make it less likely that “use of the other” would occur in sexual relations, I am not seeing why “use of the other” absolutely must occur in sexual relations outside marriage.
Thank you in advance for whatever help you can offer me with this question.