Uses virtue ethics to offer a sexual ethics inclusive of LGBT and straight people, one that challenges the longstanding procreative patriarchal norm. Richard W. McCarty offers a compassionate and inclusive conception of sexual virtue, one that liberates Christians from traditional patriarchal requirements for heterosexuality, marriage, and procreation. Daring to depart from ongoing debates about what Aristotle or Aquinas had to say, this book sets a new course centered on virtue ethics. It employs new insights from the sciences, biblical scholarship, analyses of church traditions, and revisionist natural law thinking. Eschewing simple deconstruction of traditional Christian norms for sexual morality, McCarty offers constructive ideas about what might count as real human goods for people in a wide variety of sexual relationships. Recreation, relational intimacy, and selective acts of procreation are three ends of sexual virtue that promote human happiness and can be appreciated in a broad Christian framework. While primarily referencing the Roman Catholic intellectual tradition, McCarty’s work is also vital and accessible to those from Protestant backgrounds. Addressed to LGBT and straight readers, Sexual Virtue provides a compassionate sexual ethics for our time.

A 2006 study of Roman sexuality and sexual ethics focusing on the crucial and unsettled concept of pudicitia.

This collection features essays from top experts in ethics and philosophy of love that offer varying perspectives on the value of a contemporary secular virtue of chastity. The virtue of chastity has traditionally been portrayed as an excellent personal disposition concerning the ideal ordering of sexual desire such that the person desires that which is actually good for both the self and others affected by his or her sexual desires and actions. Yet, for roughly the past half century chastity has been increasingly portrayed as an unnecessary ideal with few secular benefits that could not be otherwise obtained. Instead, chastity is sometimes portrayed as an odd kind of religious asceticism with few secular benefits. The essays in this volume ask whether there may be advantages to reconsidering a contemporary virtue of chastity. A recovered and reconceptualized concept of chastity can offer partial solutions to problems associated with externalized sexual desire, including sweeping patterns of sexual harassment, the high divorce/relationship-failure rate, and widespread pornography use. Sexual Ethics in a Secular Age will appeal to researchers and advanced students interested in the philosophy of sex and love, virtue ethics, and philosophical accounts of secularity.

Author Raja Halwani discusses how virtue ethics illuminates the three central areas of our lives -- care, love, and sex -- which are often considered to be crucial to a well-lived life. Halwani concludes that virtue ethics allows for those sexual lifestyles that are deemed by traditional morality to be wrong -- promiscuity, open relationships, and sex work -- which boldly counters the conservative viewpoint of many virtue ethicists. This argument about the relationship between romantic love and virtue also examines the works of other philosophers.

Over the next decades more than twenty men were executed, though many were innocent of any serious crime." "As Jock McCulloch shows, the panics were complex events which encompassed such issues as miscegenation, prostitution, the management of venereal disease, the politics of concubinage, and the construction of whiteness."--BOOK JACKET.

Updated with a new introduction, this fifteenth anniversary edition of A Return to Modesty reignites Wendy Shalit’s controversial claim that we have lost our respect for an essential virtue: modesty. When A Return to Modesty was first published in 1999, its argument launched a worldwide discussion about the possibility of innocence and romantic idealism. Wendy Shalit was the first to systematically critique the "hook-up" scene and outline the harms of making sexuality so public. Today, with social media increasingly blurring the line between public and private life, and with child exploitation on the rise, the concept of modesty is more relevant than ever. Updated with a new preface that addresses the unique problems facing society now, A Return to Modesty shows why "the lost virtue" of modesty is not a hang-up that we should set out to cure, but rather a wonderful instinct to be celebrated. A Return to Modesty is a deeply personal account as well as a fascinating intellectual exploration into everything from seventeenth-century manners to the 1948 tune "Baby, It’s Cold Outside." Beholden neither to social conservatives nor to feminists, Shalit reminds us that modesty is not prudery, but a natural instinct—and one that may be able to save us from ourselves.

Though virtue ethics is enjoying a resurgence, the topic of virtue cultivation has been largely neglected by philosophers. This book features essays by philosophers, theologians, and psychologists at the forefront of research into virtue.--Publisher's description.