Sex: A Philosophical Primer

This book explores elemental principles in the study of sex while addressing readers who are not trained philosophers as well as those who are. Singer locates sex within a spectrum that also includes love and compassion. He claims that fundamental mistakes have persistently occurred because numerous theorists relegate sex, love, and compassion to separate and distinct compartments. His emphasis upon the internal linkage between sexuality and the varieties of love is further elaborated in later portions of the book: in relation to a distinction that Singer makes between 'the sensuous' and 'the passionate,' followed by consecutive ideas about the nature and valuation of sex. Discussing sex as both an appetite and an interpersonal drive, Singer argues that much philosophical confusion has resulted from the doctrines of those who constrain sexuality within either of these to the detriment of the other. What is sexual for human beings is normally, and perhaps always in some degree, a composite of the appetitive and the interpersonal. In us sex is generically a function of each. This conception of appetitive and interpersonal strands as unified in our sexuality then becomes the basis for his remarks about the relative value of individual sex acts as well as their place within the aesthetic and moral dimension of human nature.