The sexual, the secret and the sacred

Some ethical truths are intuitively obvious but it is hard to understand the reasons for them. For instance, sexual behavior should be, at least other things being equal, kept private. But why? While I certainly have this intuition, I have always found it deeply puzzling, especially since privacy is opposed to the value of knowledge and hence always requires a special justification.

But here is a line of thought that makes sense to me now. There is a natural connection between the sacred and the ritually hidden recognized across many religions. Think, for instance, of how the holiest prayers of the Tridentine Mass are said inaudibly by the priest, or the veiling of the Holy of Holies in the Temple of Jerusalem, or the mystery religions. The sacred is a kind of mysterium tremendum et fascinans, and ritual hiddenness expresses the mysteriousness of the sacred particularly aptly.

If sexuality is sacred—say, because of its connection with the generation of life, and given the sacredness of human life—then it is unsurprising if it is particularly appropriately engaged in in a context that involves ritual hiddenness.

Note that this is actually more of a ritual hiddenness than an actual secrecy. The fact of sex is not a secret in the case of a married couple, just as the content of the inaudible prayers of the Tridentine Mass is printed publicly in missals, but it is ritually hidden.

I wonder, too, if reflection on ritual hiddenness might not potentially help with the “problem of hiddenness”.

Marriage in heaven

Question 1: Are there marriages in heaven?

Answer: No. Jesus explicitly says that there is no marrying or giving in marriage in heaven (Luke 20:27-38). So no new marriages are entered into in heaven. That might seem to leave open the question whether existing marriages might not continue. But the context of the discussion is of a woman who was married to a sequence of brothers and the paradoxical consequences of that if these marriages continue in the afterlife. Jesus' answer only solves the paradox if we accept the implicature that there is no marriage in heaven. Moreover, it would be an odd view if existing marriages persisted in heaven but new ones couldn't be entered into. If marriage in heaven would be a good thing for us, this kind of a setup just wouldn't be fair to a loving couple who was murdered minutes before their wedding was to take place.

Question 2: Why are there no marriage in heaven?

Answer: It's good that way. Well, that's true, but not informative: it applies to everything about heavenly life. But we can think a bit about why it's good for it to be so.

One thought is that only marriage for eternity would be fitting for heavenly life. Divorce just doesn't seem the sort of thing that is fitting for heavenly life. But I think it would be problematic for humans to bind themselves to one another for an eternal heavenly life. Heavenly life is unimaginable to us now, radically transcending our current knowledge. Because of this, it would not be appropriate for us to commit ourselves now to be bound to another person for an infinite length of time in that utterly different life. Now one might think that once in heaven the problem disappears. But I suspect it does not. I suspect that the heavenly life is a life of eternal and non-asymptotic growth (hence my recent swollen head argument against Christian physicalism). I don't know if the beatific vision itself increases eternally, but I suspect that at least the finite goods of heavenly life do. So some of the reasons why it would not be fitting for us to bind ourselves now to one another for eternity would apply in heaven: in year ten of heavenly life, perhaps, one cannot imagine what year one billion will be like; in year one billion, one cannot imagine what year 10¹⁰⁰ will be like; and so on. Eternity is long.

A second thought is that there is something about the exclusivity of marriage that is not fitted for heavenly life. The advocates of free love had something right: there is something limiting about exclusivity. This limitation is entirely fitting given the nature of marriage and its innate links to reproduction and sexual union as one body. But nonetheless it seems plausible to me that an innately exclusive form of love is not fitted to heaven.

A third and most speculative thought: There is a link--worth exploring in much greater depth than I am going to do here--between the exclusivity of marriage and the appropriateness of according privacy to sexual activity. But I suspect that there is a great transparency in heavenly life. What is hidden is revealed. It is a life of truth rather than of withholding of information. In regard to the emotional life, those in heaven will have highly developed faculties of empathy. After all, my model is one of continued growth. People can grow immensely in empathy in this life--how much more will they likely grow in heaven! These faculties of empathy would enable people to have great empathetic insight into the sexual lives of others, to a point where that insight could make them empathetic participants in that life, in a way incompatible with the exclusivity of marriage and the privacy of sexuality.

Privacy and knowledge

Our privacy is violated when people improperly come to know private things about us. Note, however, that all the harms that violation of privacy causes can be equally had without a violation of privacy. For instance, suppose that Sally the clever hacker breaks into my computer and figures out my credit card number while Jim the inept hacker tries to break into my computer and extract a credit card number, but due to a bug in his hacking script he never gets into my computer, but his hacking software reports a random number to him as my credit card numbers. If the random number happens by chance to match my credit card number, I am equally exposed to harms from Jim as from Sally. Yet only Sally has actually violated my privacy.

So I am not harmed by Sally's knowing my credit card number as such. Rather, I am harmed by Sally's (and Jim's) having a correct belief as to my credit card number.

In fact, in the case of some violations of privacy, it's the belief, not even the correctness of the belief, that harms me. If someone I thought to be a friend has communicated to people that I confessed to an embarrassing moral failure, my reputation is equally harmed just as much when the supposed friend is lying and I never committed the failure as when my supposed friend has violated my privacy. Typically it is easier to remove the harm when the belief about one is false, namely by presenting evidence as to its falsity, but even that is only typically true.

And in the credit card case, while correctness matters, the belief does not. If Jim orders expensive goods with a number that he does not believe to be a credit card number, simply on the off-chance that it might be one, and that number happens to be a valid credit card number, I am equally inconvenienced when that number is mine as in the case where he believed it to be my number.

All this suggests that a violation of privacy—people's coming to know private information about us—is not as such harmful. But the above cases neglect intrinsic harms. Take the case of the moral failure. While a false belief about my secret moral failures seems no less harmful to my reputation than a true belief, people's having true beliefs, and especially their having knowledge (if they just suspect and don't know, then that's a comfort), of my secret moral failures would be much more mortifying. Likewise, it seems one is intrinsically harmed if a voyeur installs a camera which transmits pictures of one getting dressed, but one does not suffer similar harm if the camera is defective and sends back random pixels which by chance look just like the real pictures would have.

So there can be a harm from loss of privacy as such. But it depends on the case. In the credit card number case, there is no intrinsic harm in the loss of privacy. Were there no chance of there being thieves, one could emblazon one's credit card numbers on one's T-shirt. In those cases, the violator's gaining knowledge is no worse than the violator's gaining a true belief. In the cases of shameful misdeeds there is typically an intrinsic harm and an instrumental harm from the violation of privacy. For the instrumental harm, it doesn't matter that the violator knows, or even that the violator's belief is true. But for the intrinsic harm, it does matter. In the case of bodily privacy, there is an intrinsic harm but there need not be any instrumental harm.

The case of instrumental harm is very puzzling. After all, isn't knowledge a good? How could someone's knowing something about me not be intrinsically good? But of course we need to distinguish subjects of goods. It is perhaps intrinsically good for the knower to know this thing about me (though perhaps instrumentally bad, say if it harms relationships). But perhaps it is not intrinsically good for me to have it known about me.

Even so, it's puzzling how knowledge can intrinsically harm the person known.

Perhaps our emotions and intuitions are misleading. I am more mortified if some embarrassing moral failure is known of me than if it is falsely believed of me. But perhaps I am simply confusing the fact that typically false beliefs are easier to refute than knowledge. So maybe it really is just harm to my reputation that is at issue?

Here is a hypothesis. Knowledge of people's past moral failures tends to be misleading information as it tends to lead people to think that the person lacks the dignity of someone in the image and likeness of God. Maybe it's worse when knowledge of one misleads people into seeing one as lacking dignity, just as it's worse when one's sins cause a harm to another than when the harm happens for some unrelated cause.

On the other hand, in heaven perhaps all secrets will be known, but moral failures will no longer mislead the knower into thinking that one lacks dignity. On the contrary, moral failures will be connected with the glory of God who gives the grace to overcome the moral failures and the failures will themselves be evidence of the person's dignity (since only a being with this kind of dignity is capable of sin). If people saw our failures in the perfectly right light, there would be no harm from loss of privacy. If this hypothesis is right, then the loss of privacy with respect to moral failures is not intrinsically harmful.

Bodily privacy is, perhaps, a similar matter. Rather than being evidence of the dignity of a child of God, in our fallen condition one can be led by the sight of a person's body to objectify or otherwise dehumanize the person. And maybe it is worse when one's body, rather than random pixels, is the cause of this unfortunate state of affairs.

I don't really know. All this is puzzling.

Reasons for non-disclosure

Until today I thought that non-disclosure was only justified in reference to our sinful condition. The psychologist doesn't disclose her patients' problems because sinful humans are likely to treat her patients wrongly if they know about the problems. And so on.

But I was mistaken. First, there are cases not referring to our present sinful condition but a potential future sinful condition. For instance, even an unfallen human can be swayed by temptation, as the story of the tree of knowledge of good and evil shows, and a person can be tempted by the disclosure of benefits.

Second, there are cases where it is good to fail to disclose information either because the order of disclosure is important or because because it is better that the information be discovered by someone on her own. This is an important part of sound pedagogy, and this does not seem to be an aspect of the Fall. God did not, as far as we know, disclose Pythagorean Theorem to Adam and Eve before the Fall, and it was better that humans discover it on their own.

Voyeurism and lustful fantasies

Consider the following three activities, all done for a sexual end and without the consent of the other parties:

1. Wearing special "x-ray" goggles that show one what other people look like under their clothes
2. Wearing special computerized goggles that quite accurately extrapolate from the visible features of other people and from visual data about how their clothes lie on them, using a large database of body types, and show what other people very likely look like under their clothes
3. Walking around and using the visible features of other people and visual data about how their clothes lie on them to imagine what other people look like under their clothes.

Now, (1) is a clear case of voyeurism, a violation of sexual privacy, and hence wrong. But is (2) really significantly morally different from (1)? We can imagine a continuum of more and more accurate portrayals. But (3) is basically (2), as done with an inferior instrument. Hence, it is wrong as well.

The argument doesn't apply to every case of lustful fantasy—I think there are other arguments, like this one—but I think it captures some of why many cases of sexual fantasies are wrong and creepy, indeed are a kind of non-consensual sexual relation.

Conversations, anonymity and pseudonymity

A central feature of normal human conversations is the re-identification of individuals. It would not be a normal human conversation if a bunch of blindfolded people sat around wearing headphones and microphones, with the speech from the microphones being fed into a voice disguiser which reduced all the voices to one, and with no one identifying herself. A normal conversation requires constancy of interlocutors. The re-identification of individuals is what makes dialectical accountability possible. Moreover, through conversation, one ideally becomes friends. But friendship requires individuation.

Consequently, I am disallowing anonymous comments on this blog as of immediately. I might reconsider given good reason.

I should note that I have benefited significantly in the past from anonymous comments, and I hoping that persons now commenting anonymously will post under their real names or, at least, under a nom de plume.

I do, in fact, also believe pseudonymity is something unfortunate. Our actions and words express us: it is unfortunate if we do not openly stand behind them. I think there is a strong presumption against pseudonymity (cf. this post of mine). If you feel that the alternative to participating pseudonymously is not participating at all, I ask that you examine carefully why it is that you are unwilling to stand publicly behind one's views. This examination might yield one of three conclusions: (a) one should speak publicly in one's own name; (b) one should be silent; or (c) genuine prudence forces one into psuedonymity. I fully understand that, for instance, persons living in totalitarian regimes, graduate students and untenured faculty, etc. can have very good prudential reasons for participating only pseudonymously in discussion, and so I am not banning pseudonymous participation.

In fact, I strongly advise graduate students and untenured faculty to post only pseudonymously, unless they have good reason to believe the prudential concerns do not apply to them. (I should also note that if one is in a category where one's life or liberty depends on not being identified, it might be wiser not to post even pseudonymously unless you use appropriate independent encryption-based services to access the Internet, since there may still be ways of being tracked down.)

Whether one falls in a category where pseudonymity is justified is a judgment one must leave to the individual prudence of the phronimos.

Nonetheless, I do ask that if you use a pseudonym, you try to stick to one pseudonym. This will make possible the re-identification of conversation partners. I can, however, understand that you might on rare occasions switch to a new pseudonym (e.g., if one's cover has been blown, or one has lost access to an account).