If - apart from religious dictates - what is natural, specifically as the penis is for the vagina, or that sex is for procreation, is not to be the basis for moral sex, then what is?
a question for Epicurius…
-Imp
It would have to relate in some way to where all the rest of a person’s moral basis lies. I don’t think sexual ethics ought to be looked at as something with it’s own unique foundation.
Nothing is ‘natural’ anymore, ever since developing the ability for abstract thought… Once we become conscious of something, we add our own twist – it is in our nature to do so… Not that it /ought/ to be in our nature – it just /is/ in our nature… for some more or less so than for others, of course.
One’s considerations on the basis for moral sex should, I feel, atleast take that into account.
It would be counter-productive to make it immoral to add our own twist (depart from the natural), when it is something we do by nature. It’s like making it immoral to breathe, or to breathe (or anything else) by intention, rather than by instinct, more to the point…
I agree w/ Uccisore, and with Impenitent (…and I think Hume’s Law, not going from is, to ought… is being violated in your question, Chan, if it was rhetorical).
How about virtues as a basis for moral sexual behavior?
Honesty would clear up a lot of the confusion that people encounter when they add sexual intercourse to their relationship.
Fidelity, patience, respect, simplicity and integrity would provide a solid moral basis for human sexuality.
Nah, those would all depend to how we consider sex, the value we give to it.
There is no real reason for honesty, fidelity, simplicity and everything else if we give to sex the same importance/value that for example we give to a handshake.
chanbengchin, the problem here is evolution is possibly the most un- deterministic theory there is, full stop. There is no underpin, principle or method in cognition that can possibly show a correlational basis for this been so and will become so. There are simply too many variables in nature to say this is right, that wrong.
If we have sexual immorality, it becomes the “Law,” then everyone sues everyone else; what would happen to Germans?
Then when one little panda pulls on another little panda’s underwear, that’s sexual harassment? That would make me a sa-a-a-a-ad panda. And when one little panda puts his furry little willy in another panda’s ear, that makes me a very sad panda, because they’ll be sued.
That the participants are willing and able to give an informed consent to the act.
Maybe if our ancestors were closer to Bonobos then to chimpanzees, then sex would be no more important and no more problematic than a handshake.
Yeah I know bonobos…I was thinking about them too when I formulated my post 
still…with enough social engineering we can get to their level…
We do what we do, that is natural, right? And therefore any sex that we have - with the same, different sex or even different animals - is what we did and therefore ‘natural’ and ‘moral’? Is that what you are saying?
Implicit in the notion of immorality is the concept of a standard or measure, and to be immoral is to deviate or to go past this reference. What I am suggesting is that this reference can be found in ‘nature’, and you seem to define nature as what we do, and so it becomes a circular thing.
They are possibly two more profitable lines of thought, namely try to define what this standard or moral behaviour reference should be, eg the ‘greatest good’, or the ‘survival of the species’, or whatever, if nature does not work, or secondly, to move away from standards or reference altogether. The latter is rather difficult as I see it, but then that’s why we are here in the first place aren’t we? 
Nope. I’m saying that even if you could go from “this is natural” to “this is moral” (logically you can’t) – it would be anti-nature (anti-who-we-are) to start from a view of what is natural that does not take into account the creative/explorative/utilizational (assuming that’s a word) impulse that is in our nature. Might as well make flying ‘moral’ and sleeping ‘immoral’.
- I do not define ‘moral’ as ‘what we do’ or ‘nature’ (not that we don’t all ‘do morality’ in one form or another, by nature), 2) I think it would be sort of weird to call any deviation from a norm to be ‘supernatural’ or maybe even ‘hyponatural’ or ‘outside of nature’, 3) (I like numbering things, hehe) (where was I? oh yeah…) Deviations are still part of nature… whether we brand them as immoral (illogical codename: unnatural) has more to do with the strength of our attitudes against them, which are developed through life experience: interactions with others who performed the behavior and how we felt about them/their performance… interactions with others who explicitly/implicitly had a negative/positive prejudice for those who performed (or the performance of) the behavior… I could continue but I just looked at the time… hopefully you get the idea… hopefully you know something about conditioning and socialization, attitude development and so on…
G’night.
Sexual ethics has an emormous potential for bias- a great many people have practices we find odious that we’re looking for an excuse to condemn, or practices we enjoy that we’re looking to permit. That’s part of the reason I said sexual ethics must flow from our ethics for everything else. We need some independent standard to go by.
I think this rules out nature as the source of sexual ethics. It may be tempting, depending on what you want to prove, to use nature as the guide for sexual behavior, but if you try to use it as a guide for other sorts of behavior, it falls apart- nearly every horrible thing that humans can possibly do is simply instinctive nature for at least one species out there.
What’s more, it’s quite likely that humans are the only creatures that do moralising, so the idea that we should take cues from animals seems groundless right from the start. I think most attempts to use nature as a grounding for sexual ethics come from a previously held desire to condemn/endorse some particular behavior, and nature seems to offer some hope in being able to do so.
I agree with Iroel that values have to be the basis of sexual, and I would say all, ethics. The value, though, has to be intrinsic or objective, or else there are no real moral facts.
But still the basic idea is that you compare it to something else - you call it ethics or values or human rights or whatever. What are these things? and upon what are they themselves founded?
Let takes values for an instance. And let say this value as suggested by the sexually harassed panda as one of pleasure or happiness, ie that which is pleasurable for me or that which makes me happy is what I do and is not immoral. Perhaps we can further conditioned it with not making someone else unhappy too, but that we can never really know. For example a man and a woman may me mutually happy to have sex, but it makes the estranged husband of the woman unhappy, which the man did not know. But the question begging thing is why should this be the value or the reference by the which sexual immorality or otherwise is judged?
What does it mean to be moral at all? The definition of moral from dictionary.com is “Of or concerned with the judgment of the goodness or badness of human action and character”. In other words we must introduce the notion of “goodness” or “badness” into the judgement too. And if this forum is anything to go by it is almost impossible to get people to agree on what is good or evil.
The use of nature as the judgment standard is justified by what happened and natural in the animal world is what is meant to be (by Nature) and therefore allowable and not to be impeded. However if we bring in the notion of good and evil, then it is arguable that there is evil in nature, and thus not all that is natural is necessarily not immoral.
Is the lion raising it's cubs allowable by nature and not to be impeded? Certainly not from the perspective of the hyena. What ever occurs in nature that is not constantly at risk of being thwarted by some other force or interest? The idea of there being a 'natural order' we can appeal to is false.
To what then will you appeal?
attitudes
experience, conditioning, socialization, etc.
other attitudes – Does how I feel about doing this (loving my husband) conflict with how I feel about doing that (loving my boyfriend-on-the-side)? Does how I feel about myself doing this (loving my boyfriend-on-the-side) conflict with how I feel about someone else doing this (loving their boyfriend-on-the-side)? Am I fine with these conflicts, or do they bother me? etc. Would I feel guilty (that I had done something very wrong), or would I feel neutral (morality would never occur to me), or would I feel like I had done something very good (clean conscience)?
Other questions might be: how would Mom/Dad/brother/sister/pastor/boss/best friend/God, etc., feel… what would they think about me, how would it effect our relationship… if I was okay with this – if I sought out and did the right thing, or the wrong thing? How would they feel if I wasn’t okay with this – if I avoided doing the right thing, or avoided doing the wrong thing?
I don’t think ethics are a foundational question- there’s nothing I can point to and say “Ethics must be based on this” that will convince anybody that doesn’t already share a lot of other beliefs in common with me. I personally appeal to the inherent value of human life and institutions, which is ultimately dependant on my being a theist.
Anything done by consenting adults, which harms no third party, is moral IMO.
Now I’m confused. Your original post appeared to challenge the morality of the act of sexual intercourse:
…yet what you describe here is the immorality of infidelity, not the act itself. The two are not equivalent. Having coffee with a married woman may cause unhappiness in the ‘estranged’ husband for much the same reason as having sex with her would. Apples and oranges here.