Prostitution and sex only for pleasure

Suppose Sid is the beneficiary of a trust fund which yields just enough money to live, but not to have much pleasure in life. Sid works as a prostitute solely in order to get more money in order to buy pleasures like fine dining. Thus, Sid has sex for the sake of pleasure. Compare this to Flynn who has sex solely for the sake of pleasure in the more ordinary way--it's the sex that he enjoys. Is there any interesting moral difference between Sid and Flynn? Both Sid and Flynn are having sex solely for the sake of pleasure: they are both ultimately being paid with pleasure. (The intermediate presence of money in the case of Sid may be a red herring. We might suppose Sid is having sex with a great chef and he doesn't enjoy the sex, but she is going to give him great culinary pleasures in exchange.)

I think a case can be made that Sid and Flynn are close to morally on par. (And clearly Sid is morally in a less good position than the more typical prostitute who has sex to provide for the necessities of life.) This would suggest that:

• If sex solely for money is always wrong, then sex solely for pleasure is always wrong.

When I think of ways of challenging the above argument, I think about how there is something interpersonally significant about the pleasure of sex, and so I think that maybe there is something less perverse about Flynn's case than Sid's. But on the other hand, I've described Flynn as just pursuing the pleasure, not any interpersonal significance of the pleasure.

Adultery, fornication and marital relations

Start with this intuition: all adulterous actions are intrinsically wrong. Therefore, any action that is intrinsically just like an adulterous action is also wrong. Now the intrinsic character of a successful action is defined by the intentions or action plan—by what the end is and how it is intended to be achieved. Many cases of adultery do not, however, involve an intention to commit adultery. Sam knows that sex with Suzy would be adulterous, but he need not intend the sex qua adulterous. He might intend it qua pleasant or qua unitive-with-Suzy. The distinction is important. There are cases of adultery where there is an intention to commit adultery as such, as when Sam intends to make Suzy's husband a cuckold or make his own wife jealous. Such malicious cases are, ceteris paribus, morally worse than run-of-the-mill adultery done for the sake of pleasure or union.

Thus the intentions in run-of-the-mill adultery are the same as those in typical cases of fornication—to share pleasure with this person, to unite with this person, etc. If adultery is intrinsically wrong, so will these typical cases of fornication be. (And I don't think there are any atypical permissible cases of fornication, either.)

Moreover, so will cases of sexual activity within marriage when the intentions are the same kinds of intentions that typical adulterers and fornicators have. Thus, if Sam's intention is simply to share pleasure with Tamara, he is doing intrinsically the same thing as when he commits adultery with Suzy, even if Tamara happens to be his wife and Suzy doesn't. Thus, if there is to be an intrinsic difference between marital activity and adultery, the marital activity must involve intentions that adulterers cannot have, properly marital intentions such as to unite maritally with Tamara or at least to share pleasure with his own wife, Tamara. It is clear, thus, that it is possible to do something that is relevantly like adultery with one's spouse. Is this why, perhaps, when Jesus said that the man who looks lustfully at a woman has committed adultery with her in heart, he did not limit his remarks to the case of the married man or the married woman? Taking his remarks literally, to look lustfully at one's spouse is to commit adultery with her in the heart. Lust is an essentially non-marital attitude.

Now, for every possible kind of action, there are negative conditions that the intentions have to satisfy. For instance, so that a financial transaction, a hammering of a nail, a drinking of a cup of coffee, a sexual act or an act of teaching be permissible, it must not be done for a malicious ulterior end. However, sexual relations, unlike the hammering of a nail, must satisfy a positive condition on their intentions to be permissible. The intentions must be marital—of a sort that could not be satisfied outside of a marriage.

It is sometimes said that there is something wrong with a couple that stays together only because of their marriage vows rather than because they like each other. Be that as it may, if my above are right, there is something wrong with a couple that stays sexually together only because they like each other. The fact of being married needs to enter into their reasons.

An argument against many cases of non-marital sex

Consider the traditional argument against non-marital sex: pregnancy. I submit that while this argument doesn't apply in all cases (e.g., when the woman is already pregnant, or when she's 70 years old), there is a lot to this argument in typical cases:

1. It is wrong to take on, without sufficient reason, a risk of being unable to fulfill one's responsibilities. (Premise)
2. Non-marital intercourse typically involves the risk of acquiring parental responsibilities that one is unable to fulfill. (Premise)
3. Therefore, it is at least typically wrong to engage, without sufficient reason, in non-marital intercourse.

Claim (2) is particularly clear in the case of the man, who in typical cases will be unable to fulfill his day-to-day relational parental responsibilities without being married to the mother of the child (cohabitations tend to break up). But it is also true in the case of the woman, both due to financial and time constraints and because one of one's parental responsibilities is to cooperate in the co-parent's fulfillment of parental responsibilities.

How restrictive the conclusions of the argument are will depend on one's weighing of the reasons. In (1), "sufficient" has to be measured relative to (a) the probability of the risk, and (b) the expected moral weight of the responsibilities one would be unable to fulfill. Now, the moral weight of parental responsibilities is very high. The probability of the risk depends on whether we are evaluating a single act by a person committed to that being the only act of non-marital intercourse (e.g., during a year) or a habit (or policy) of non-marital sexual activity. While the probability of conception from a single sexual act where the woman is using hormonal birth control[note 1] may be rather low, the probability of conception from a habit of non-marital sexual activity is far from negligible. The Alan Guttmacher Institute says typical use effectiveness for oral contraceptives is 92.5% and for the male condom is 86.3%, i.e., 7.5% of female users of oral contraception and 13.7% of women whose partner uses condoms will get pregnant each year. Perfect use effectiveness is higher (99.5-99.9% for oral contraceptives and 97% for the male condom), but it does not seem one can count on one's partner's perfect use. I suppose combining the male condom and oral contraception would result in yet higher effectiveness (and significant protection from disease), but still the effectiveness would fall short of 100%, to a degree such that significant numbers of women would be getting pregnant each year.

However exactly one evaluates which reasons are sufficient, I think it is plausible that when one considers the moral weight of parental responsibilities, pleasure is unlikely to constitute a sufficient reason. Moreover, relational reasons for pre-marital sex are not likely to carry that much weight in light of the fact that if one simply is patient and waits, one is likely (in a monogamous society with a roughly equal sex ratio) to find someone to marry, and then have all the relational goods that one would get from pre-marital sex (if there are any such) to an ampler degree.

This argument is not sufficient to show that all non-marital sex is wrong. But it does apply in many cases. I do actually think all non-marital sex is wrong, but that will have to be established by other arguments.