Is Sex Amoral?

Suppose—as best you can—that you join an online group organized around a pagan fertility festival and privately message a fellow member to invite her to an unrelated social gathering. You are promptly removed. Right before your removal, the moderators introduce a new rule: no direct messages to other members without first soliciting consent in the public chat. Although this situation may seem absurd to some, this is roughly what happened to philosopher Georgi Gardiner. And her experience, however mundane on its face, illuminates something philosophically curious about the way contemporary culture treats sex. The social event Gardiner had been inviting someone to had nothing to do with sex, but a community organized around a fertility festival had come to treat all private communication between members as falling within its regulatory purview.

Gardiner argues that this kind of creep is not accidental. Communities organized around sex, whether polyamorous Facebook groups, kink meetup spaces, or online forums for countercultural relationships, have, as she sees it, reliably developed heavily codified governance structures, complete with moderators who wield significant authority and use it freely. She finds the philosophical character of this governance worth naming: she calls it “divine command theory,” borrowing from ethics. In divine command frameworks, something is right or wrong not because it follows from principle or because all parties have rationally endorsed it, but simply because a designated authority has declared it so. The dungeon master at a kink pickup party, she suggests, embodies this structure almost perfectly. His authority derives not from consent or from an independently grounded moral standard, but from the fact that this is his event. Within his domain, what he says goes.

What Gardiner finds philosophically strange about this is the mismatch between the values these communities typically profess and the authority structures they spontaneously produce. Communities committed to dismantling conventional hierarchies, to experimenting freely with intimacy and identity, have arrived at a mode of organization that is arguably more autocratic than the institutions most of them left. The irony, she suggests, is worth taking seriously. It may tell us something about how deeply people associate sex with governance, and how readily the impulse to regulate it reasserts itself even in settings explicitly designed to resist it.

Gardiner’s preferred alternative is drawn from virtue ethics. Rather than a system of explicit rules administered by a designated authority, she argues that a virtue-based approach would ask participants to exercise good judgment, to act with care, honesty, and mutual consideration. The norms this produces would be implicit and relational rather than codified and administrative. Gardiner notes that this is, in fact, how most people already navigate their friendships. We do not typically have written bylaws governing what constitutes a betrayal. We understand that friends should be honest and forgiving; that they will sometimes fall short; and that the appropriate response to a stumble is usually grace rather than exclusion. It takes quite a lot to dissolve a friendship. She contends that this attitude is, at least in many cases, the wiser one to bring to sexual life as well.

This raises the question of why sex seems to attract such distinctive moral pressure. One possibility, Gardiner suggests, is a kind of collective fear of missing out. People who feel constrained or uneasy about their own sexual lives may find it difficult to hear about others’ without that discomfort converting into judgment. But whatever the psychological mechanism, she argues that the consequences are serious. There is a powerful feedback loop between stigma and ignorance: when a subject is stigmatized, it is not discussed; when it is not discussed, misinformation and fear fill the gap; and when misinformation proliferates, the harms that follow tend to reinforce the stigma that produced them. Sexual health is, she claims, a clear casualty of this dynamic.

This brings us to what Gardiner identifies as the central failure of fear-forward sexual culture: the systematic miscalibration of risk. We dramatically overestimate some dangers while failing to register others at all. A woman routinely warned about the risk of walking home alone at night may not know that men are statistically more likely to be attacked by strangers, or that the majority of sexual violence is perpetrated by acquaintances rather than strangers. The precaution she takes in response to her perceived risk, accepting an escort home from someone she has just met, may by most measures be the riskier choice. She is not safer because she is more cautious. She is simply operating with a badly miscalibrated picture.

Gardiner argues that sexual health is distorted by the same dynamic. PrEP, a daily pill that reduces an individual’s risk of contracting HIV to below one percent, functions for most practical purposes as an AIDS vaccine, yet it remains astonishingly underknown beyond gay male communities. DoxyPEP, a post-exposure antibiotic, reduces transmission of gonorrhea, chlamydia, and syphilis by between sixty and ninety percent. The people whose sexual risk assessments most urgently need to incorporate these developments are, in many cases, precisely the people who never hear about them, because stigma and inadequate education create the conditions under which they remain obscure. Gardiner traces this not only to abstinence-centric schooling but to a broader cultural assumption that education is something that happens in youth and then ends, rather than a lifelong practice of intentional learning.

There is a further concern worth raising here, implied by Gardiner’s argument. Our moral and regulatory attention to sexual risk has been concentrated almost entirely on what might go wrong. Very little of it attends to what is lost when sex does not happen. If sex is treated as value-neutral, as something that presents only costs and no genuine goods, then precaution about it looks sensible by default. But Gardiner contends that sex is not value-neutral. It is, she suggests, a genuine human good, in the same category as artistic practice or sport: a source of intimacy and meaning whose absence from a life represents a real and serious loss. If this is right, then the fear-forward approach to sex does not merely leave us badly informed. It may leave us significantly impoverished.

Gardiner is careful, however, not to convert this into an argument for promiscuity or to suggest that more sex is always better. The opposite of sexual constriction, she argues, is not a particular quantity of partners or encounters but something more fundamental: freedom. The freedom to determine, without shame or preemptive judgment, how much sex one wants, under what conditions, and at what points in one’s life. Sexual freedom thus understood is entirely consistent with infrequency, with long periods of celibacy, with very few partners. What it is inconsistent with is the fear and stigma that make it impossible to choose clearly in the first place. What Gardiner ultimately recommends is neither a revised rulebook nor a new authority structure. She recommends conversation: open, sustained, and honest. The capacity to understand one’s own desires and articulate them to others is, she argues, a skill. It can be cultivated. It is, she thinks, among the more valuable things a person can learn about herself, and it requires, above all, a culture willing to take the subject seriously enough to discuss it.