Abstract
This is a wide-ranging and deeply interesting book. The commendations on the cover include a comment on its ‘attractively direct, careful, energetic’ argumentation, and much of the pleasure in reading it lies here. It is a philosopher’s work of moral philosophy and theology. Occasional hints and indications at pastoral policy do not make it a work of pastoral theology and it should not, I think, be approached as such. It has a core thesis, the principal concern of which is to advance a conception of marital union; it then discusses the implications of that thesis for a variety of questions in sexual ethics. Given the variety of debates about marriage currently under way in many cultures, the topic is obviously a significant one. The answers given here are broadly ‘conservative’, the arguments for the conclusions demanding serious engagement.
That core thesis is based upon a form of teleological biology. The functional biology of human genitalia is oriented towards reproduction. This is not to say that the reproductive function exhausts the functions of these organs, of course, nor that other functions may not in due course be discovered, but any question as to what these human organs are for will include their reproductive capacity. But what follows from this? Even if one accepted the assertion about functional biology, more would be needed to ground judgements of action, such as appeal to disclosure of divine creative intention (which Pruss clearly endorses) or a romantic or pragmatic sense of the ‘givenness’ of nature. We will return to some issues relating to the core thesis below.
The first sixty pages are occupied by discussion of the variety of forms of love, and (more briefly) an account of desire, ‘just the amount required for my analysis of the morality of sexuality’ (p. 49). The former of these serves to ground the claim that love admits of species appropriate to the (form of) relationship envisaged, and that sexual love is one particular embodied form of human loving. Pruss suggests that we can recognise love in a wide variety of relationships (parental, friendship, benefactor and beneficiary, and so forth). In each the same thing is present, but this is recognised in a form appropriate to the relationship, though in all we may see ‘goodwill, appreciation and a striving for union’ (p. 28). Some of these forms of relationship will strike us more obviously than others as candidates for, as it were, ‘natural kinds’.
A notable feature of Pruss’s analysis in this first chapter is his endorsement of a form of the principle ‘ought implies can’: ‘A genuine form of love needs to call forth a union that is in an appropriate sense attainable, if it is something that the lover is to try to achieve’ (p. 33). This is qualified by the next sentence: ‘Granted, perhaps love may impel one toward an asymptotic approach to some unattainable state, but then it is the approach rather than the state that love calls on one to achieve.’ The point of the introduction of the principle is to bolster the claim that a form of union in love – a ‘real union’ – is in fact possible. And though it may be true that the fulfilment of union for some forms of love is impossible before death, for marriage this cannot be so, for the horizon of marriage belongs to this world, and to ‘this-wordly, fleshly union’ (p. 33).
A key element of Pruss’s account of desire is given at the outset of his discussion. ‘I am going to argue that it is possible not to understand one’s own desires – not to know what it is that one desires’ (p. 49). This may raise concerns that he undercuts actual experienced desires altogether. In fact, the principle is made use of to the extent that it permits a claim about our biological nature as human animals from which we may be alienated in consciousness but which it is, on Pruss’s view, inappropriate to ignore in any holistic claim about our nature as desiring creatures. Questions here will relate not merely to the presence of unknown desires (suppressed or unknowable?), versus what we might call the ‘transparency’ of desire to consciousness, but to an equivalent of what in moral theory has become known as the issue of self-effacingness. Is a conscious desire all it seems, or does it serve as a substitute in consciousness for a different but still genuine desire completely unknown to consciousness? Those worried that Pruss will use the hidden-desire theory to tell his readers what they really want, whatever they think they want, may find their worries in small measure confirmed, but that does not make Pruss wrong to take the stand that he does. Biologists and anthropologists who confidently assert the real reason for some piece of biological or social behaviour, where that behaviour is explained by the agent or society in quite different terms, are hardly working on different assumptions.
Pruss is interested, then, in two questions: the question of the kind of union which sexual love constitutes, and how the episodic sexual intercourse of a couple constitutes or contributes to that union. In common with Christian Scripture and tradition he affirms, as we have noted, the this-worldly, until-death horizon of marriage, but within that horizon anticipates as full a reality as may be possible for two individuals of their union as ‘one body’. (The Genesis language of ‘one flesh’ is replaced by Paul’s use of ‘one body’, but the preference bears no significance for the argument.) We may, of course, think of many ways in which people might be held to be ‘as one’ – the sports players who seem almost telepathically to know each other’s movements; the friends who seem to be able to think our thoughts with us. These are not, Pruss rightly thinks, especially characteristic of sexual love. It is biological union in sexual intercourse that constitutes sexual love. He canvasses three accounts of how this effects union, rejecting the first two (see pp. 114–137): mutual pleasure; a higher-level good to be attained through the means of sexual intercourse, such as ‘spiritual or psychological unity’; and ‘reproductive striving’.
Pruss then uses this account first to develop a theory of marriage as lifelong mutual commitment, offering along the way some reflections on the legal and ecclesial context of marriage and of the possibility of divorce. His handling of scriptural texts is fresh, although given the positive endorsement of the development of church tradition where it conforms to the argument (such as in his rejection of ‘positive’ contraception), it seems odd that celibacy is not more prominent in the work. There are three pages in a final chapter, and their presence is of course welcome. But to cite marriage as ‘normal’, not merely in the sense of being the usual mode of life for Christians as others, but also one to which we ought to aspire, is to fail to account for the concessive role which marriage has in Paul’s thought in 1 Corinthians 7. Many of the arguments Pruss sets against himself, and then seeks to answer, in each chapter are modern ones, those of contemporary individualism, for example. He does so delightfully. Many of his thought experiments will prove to be useful tools in teaching. Some of the concerns he discusses, such as the question of same-sex relationships, are obviously placed in a contemporary context. Yet there is a worry in the background: how far is the tradition accurately represented, with its recognition that we ourselves are sons and daughters through adoption, and its prioritising of celibacy?
One further worry about the project relates to its concern for human biological reality, and in two ways. The first is the account Pruss would give of the observed decline in natural fertility of a woman from her twenties to the point where she is no longer fertile. In a number of places implicitly, and occasionally explicitly, it is suggested that taking steps which lead to a decline in fertility, albeit ones not motivated by this as an aim, are to be regretted, because declining fertility is to be regretted. But is declining fertility merely a postlapsarian phenomenon, and not an authentic element of humanness? Embracing the biological reality in which (without medical intervention) women in their sixties do not become pregnant might be thought to be to recognise that the meaning of sexual union changes through life, especially perhaps but not only from the perspective of women. To insist that it is common reproductive striving which unites a couple post-menopause requires a fuller account than Pruss offers.
The second reality of biology is that of female sexual response. The role of orgasm is of course central both to the pleasure of sexual intercourse and to the likely effectiveness of the transmission of ejaculate. Where orgasm is mentioned in the book it is typically in the context of ejaculation of semen, and is therefore a male experience and pleasure. One reference to a possible reproductive function of female orgasm as assisting the transmission of semen towards fertilisation does not help a reader to see the role of female sexual experience in the picture being presented. It may be that its reproductive near-irrelevance makes it not central to the sexual union of the couple, and therefore of little significance for the book. By narrowing the focus to intercourse, and to reproductive striving, one does in fact place such issues to one side. It is not clear what Pruss would say, for example, about a couple (who may have many children, but for whom intercourse has become impossible, say by a physical accident) whose only currently available experience of sexual intimacy includes female orgasm enabled in other ways. Pruss does deal – I should say largely successfully – with some imagined objections about the male-centredness of his account. I suspect there is rather more to do on that front, though.
One further general concern. The book advances a case for the kind of union marriage is as centred in a form of cooperative reproductive striving. There is, here, no need to have an eye on the wider politico-social landscape; the book is not about that. Pruss makes a good case that ‘family planning’ can be achieved as well through attention to the signals of fertility as through the introduction of what he terms ‘positive contraception’. Yet it seems reasonable to worry about population levels, and also to be concerned for the social health of our children. Again we hit a question, a rather different one this time, of biological limit. Mass species extinctions as a result of human population growth do not look like an obviously successful fulfilment of the command to our first human ancestors to tend and steward. If it is ‘normal’ to marry, and ‘normal’ to reproduce both in the sense that most do and more importantly that one ought to, two issues arise. One relates directly to human population already being at levels which might give cause for concern. The other is that a reduction in those levels is achievable by couples each having a single child, but that this may not be optimally conducive to these children’s growth and flourishing; they might – and here one seeks guidance from others – develop better in the context of larger families. It may be better, say, for every other couple to have two children than for each to have one.
So we reach a curious position. David Jenkins once paraphrased Augustine’s reaction to the thought that the human race might die out through a spontaneous outbreak of enthusiasm for celibacy for the sake of the Kingdom of God as ‘what a glorious way to go’ (cf. De Bono Coniugali, 10). Augustine is not, of course, under any illusion that, even if Christians were to develop such an enthusiasm, marrying and having children would cease elsewhere. Pruss’s preference for marriage is entirely compatible with responsible population reduction, but his examples of cases where one might responsibly refrain from procreating at a given time do not explicitly include this, and (as perhaps he would agree) sometimes at least they threaten to endorse attitudes having to do more with selfishness and familial tribalism than with a love continuous with and open to love for God. Christians reproduce by conversion anyway. Are the biologically sustainable limits of the planet an aspect of the biological realities to which we are called, in love, to respond?