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Instructor Resource Manual – Ethics: Theory and Contemporary Issues, 9e – MacKinnon & Fiala
Chapter 12: Sexual Morality
Learning Outcomes
• Summarize disputes about same-sex marriage and other topics in sexual morality.
• Explain key cases and examples, including recent developments.
• Explain the importance of autonomy and consent in thinking about sexual morality.
• Evaluate moral arguments about sexual ethics including both consequentialist and non-
consequentialist arguments.
• Understand and criticize natural law approaches to sexual morality.
• Defend your own ideas about sexual ethics.
Associated Readings
1. United States Supreme Court, Obergefell v. Hodges.
2. Finnis, “Law, Morality, and Sexual Morality” (1994).
3. Corvino, “It’s Not Natural” from What’s Wrong with Homosexuality?
Getting Started
This may be another delicate topic for some. However, you might begin by asking the students to
tell you why sexuality is an important moral issue (rather than presuming to instruct them on why
this is so). This may raise a question of ethical relativism (“to each their own” when it comes to
sexual gratification). Similarly, students may want to say that sexuality is not a moral issue
simply because it is a personal matter. This allows the class to discuss whether personal matters
generally have no moral significance.
Another way to begin is to have students consider, as is done in the text, how to define sexual
behavior or sexual desire. Perhaps ask whether they would be sexual beings if they did not have
bodies. Or, consider the relationship between sex, love, and friendship. How might these
relationships bear on the rights of all people, irrespective of differences of sexual preference?
Key Terms
LGBT: acronym standing for “lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered” (can be extended to
include other sexual identities, sometimes abbreviated as LGBT+.
