Lust

(0. Discuss utilitarianism and justice. Even if it damages people's trust in the healthcare system to kill a patient to use her organs, such long term effects are not what makes the action wrong. What makes it wrong is that it's murder.)

1. “Neither shall you covet your neighbor’s wife.” While previous commandments have been primarily about what one does, this one is about attitudes. It can be read in parallel with Jesus’s line: “But I say to you that every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:28). Sins of thought.. What I’d particularly like to look at in this connection is lust, which is most likely the form that coveting one’s neighbor’s wife would take.

2. John Paul II bases his theology of the body on creation—the idea that God has created our bodies. Our very existence is a gift of God to us. At the same time, we are in the image of God. Thus, just as God has given us a gift, so, too, we must give. John Paul II is in a way a natural law theorist, but he conceived our nature as gift, so that should give ourselves to others, and of course to God. Interpersonal relationships (whether romantic or not) are central to human life. We do not exist for ourselves, but for others.

When John Paul talks about the “nuptial” or the “matrimonial” dimension of the human being, he typically means the idea of us as a gift, which becomes particularly clear in marriage where each party gives himself or herself to the other in a communion of persons.
Lust, then, is defined as an opposite to this nuptial dimension of human beings: “the separation from the matrimonial significance of the body felt by a human being … when concupiscence of the flesh is coupled with the inner act of lust.” (Concupiscence is a self-seeking desire. Theologically, it’s a result of original sin.)
Lust is different from sexual attraction. Sexual attraction is an attraction and invitation to a communion with another person—to becoming one in mind and body—while lust is self-seeking. “[L]ust represents a reduction. … almost a restriction or closing down of the horizon of mind and heart.” It is one thing to be conscious “that the value of sex is a part of all the rich storehouse of values with which the female appears to the man. It is another to ‘reduce’ all the personal riches of meninity to that single value, that is, of sex, as a suitable object for the gratification of sexuality itself.” Thus, the pope sees lust not just as sexual desire, but as an axiological attitude, i.e., an attitude having to do with the values that are assigned to things—the value of the woman is seen as consisting in sexuality and nothing more. As a result, the woman becomes “only an object of carnal concupiscence”, and the matrimonial meaning of the body, i.e., the meaning of the body as an interpersonal gift, becomes separated. And this belies our nature as men and women, because it is the nature of man to be for woman and of woman to be for man. (This raises the question of whether celibacy is acceptable. The answer will be yes, because the attraction to the other sex and the desire to give oneself to them is only a pale shadow of one’s attraction to God and a desire to give oneself to God.)
Dworkin’s discussion of pornography provides us with examples of lust. The women in pornography certainly are not treated as gifts to be gratefully received by someone who is at the same time giving himself as a person to them.
Dworkin and John Paul agree on the perniciousness of objectifying lust. They are both Kantians in more than one way.
While this is not discussed here in these two short texts, in the pope’s philosophy and theology of sexual love, all of this has very concrete consequences. For instance, it means that direct contraception is wrong, because through contraception the couple is pretending to engage in the sexual act of self-giving while one or both parties are actively trying to hold something back, namely their fertility. (This is quite evident in the case of condoms which clearly hold something back—that’s their point—but is also true for other means of contraception.) It implies that masturbation is wrong, because sexuality is supposed to involve communion with other people, it’s supposed to be a self-giving, while masturbation treats sexuality as self-pleasuring. And it implies that sex outside of marriage is wrong, because it is only in marriage that one is giving oneself as a whole, both body and mind.

In her impassioned speech, Andrea Dworkin talks about the objectification of women, through pornography and other means.
To objectify someone is to treat her as if she were an object rather than a human being. Dworkin insists that this is not something abstract. “It happens in real life; it happens to stigmatized people. It has happened to us, to women.”
“[T]he pornographic object is a particular kind of object. It is a target. You are turned into a target. And red or purple marks the spot where he’s supposed to get you.”
Moreover, the woman is treated as a unique kind of object, one that is portrayed in pornography as wanting to be objectified.
But what exactly does this objectification mean? There are all kinds of things a man might want to do with a woman. He might want a conversation. He might want to get help with calculus. He might want to play chess. Or he might want to have sex. Objectification seems most closely tied to the last one of these. Perhaps the reason for this is that when you have a real conversation with someone, you cannot but treat that person as a person. But you can actually objectify someone as a machine for doing calculus problems or a chess playing machine, too, perhaps.
Finally, we get an argument against the legality of pornography. The context for this is “the Ordinance”, an anti-pornography law that she and Catharine MacKinnon had drafted. This law said that pornography “a systematic practice of exploitation and subordination based on sex that differentially harms and disadvantages women.” The law defined pornography in terms of dehumanizing portrayals of women (as well as of men, children or transsexuals). Quickly enough, the courts struck it down on the grounds that pornography was a form of free speech to be protected. A crucial legal question here is whether pornography expresses ideas. If it does, it is constitutionally protected. Unfortunately, the MacKinnon and Dworkin idea that pornography portrays women as objects implies that pornography does express ideas: it expresses the idea that women are objects. And hateful as that idea is, the very fact that it is an idea has helped to keep pornography legal. Here’s the three point argument:

Pornographers’ self-expression uses women’s bodies as a language.
Therefore, the constitutional protection of pornography implies that women’s bodies are chattel, property.
In doing this, the constitution continues discrimination against those who originally lacked constitutional rights.

Of course a part of the argument against pornography and the objectification of women is that it leads to violence against women. However, here Dworkin is not just making the argument that pornography and objectification lead to bad things happening for women. Rather, they are bad in and of themselves, because they treat women’s bodies as property. Not just the bodies of the models—though also these bodies—but the bodies of all women, since pornography is a dehumanizing portrayal of woman in general. The model stands for all women.
It is simply immoral to treat women as if they were objects. And it is particularly bad to treat them as if they were objects that want to be treated as objects. Perhaps this last is particularly bad because it not only reduces women to objects but co-opts what remains of their personhood and channels it into this reduction.
But none of this tells us exactly what objectification is. In her influential book Pornography, Dworkin moves between three forms of objectification, however. (1) You might make someone an object of your thoughts. (2) Or you might have a sexual desire for someone on the basis of general characteristics such as breasts or legs that are not the whole person and that other people share, people for whom one also has a sexual desire. (3) Or you might treat someone as a tool for your own benefit. (Like a sexual blow up doll.) To make someone an object of your thoughts does not seem immoral, but the other two become more problematic.
The last, treating someone as a tool, seems to be the main one operative. Women as portrayed in pornography are just machines for pleasing men, though paradoxically they are machines that are personlike, that have consented to being machines.
The moral question, of course, is whether such treatment is wrong or not. Here we can bring in Kant. Such treatment treats women as things that have market value, as mere means, and not as ends. Dworkin says: “I am talking about the cruelty of dehumanizing someone who has a right to more.” We might understand this in Kantian ways—the more that the woman has a right to is that of being treated as an end, a being which has autonomous goals of her own.
Note that if Dworkin is right that such objectification is wrong, then this puts utilitarianism into question. For presumably a man might objectify women without actually causing unhappiness to any woman. He could be a complete loner who lives alone in the woods and draws pornographic pictures for his own benefit and masturbates to them, treating the imaginary women—who do, after all, represent real women—that he draws and imagines as tools for his self-pleasuring. Andrea Dworkin, it seems, would insist that in doing this he is really doing something to women—he is objectifying them. But on utilitarian grounds, if he is making himself happier and not making anyone else unhappy, and if there is no other way he could be a more productive member of society (maybe there isn’t), then he is doing the right thing.