Morality vs. Sexual Morality

Both the Christian Right and the Republican Party talk a lot about morality: restoring morality to America, improving people's morality, etc. If you think about it, though, they aren't really talking about "morality" in general. They're talking about sex.

At Philosoraptor, Winston Smith writes about something undergraduate philosophy mentor once explained:

Suppose you turn on the television, and you come in on the middle of a program in which a tele-preacher denouncing the decline of morality in America. Now, even if you haven’t heard any specifics from him, you can be pretty sure what he’s talking about. Is he decrying the fact that many Americans are rich beyond the dreams of avarice, but give an absurdly small proportion of that wealth to the needy in this country or the starving abroad? No. Is he concerned about the astronomically high rate of murder or other violence? Not likely. Is he denouncing discrimination against women or racial minorities or homosexuals? Not a chance. Is he worried about the prevalence of lying and cheating in our schools and businesses? No, he isn’t.

Even though our hypothetical tele-preacher purports to be concerned about and discussing morality, he is, in fact, not at all concerned with any of the most important moral problems. He is, rather, concerned with a rather narrow and peripheral set of moral issues that no serious thinker has ever considered central to moral action or moral theorizing. He is concerned only with sexual morality.

Most people probably realize this intuitively — I mean, sexual morality is all they end up talking about — but I never thought about it in such explicit terms. Smith makes a very good and very interesting point here that we should all think very seriously about. The Right talks about "morality," which no one opposes, but they really mean certain principles of "sexual morality," which not every agrees with them about.

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