Religion is the traditional source of sexual ethics, the rules meant to govern our sexual conduct. Its declining influence over our culture has left sexual ethics without a foundation, and yet the need for it clearly remains. Many people feel that an ethics based solely on consent cannot satisfy all the needs generated by our sexual nature. But is it possible to give secular reasons for sexual norms?

Roger Scruton thought so, and he made a compelling case for it in what is probably his best book, the unjustly neglected Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation (1986). Scruton’s views are worth revisiting in light of the sexual and romantic dysfunctions of our time. His perspective on sex may help people articulate their frustration and point us toward a better and more romantic ideal of what sex could be.

Scruton holds that the content of sexual morality “is determined… by the needs of love.” Our sexual norms should encourage the actions and dispositions of character that enable our capacity to love and discourage those that hinder it. To understand why this should be so, we need to grasp the nature of romantic love and sex, as well as the connection between them.

Scruton conceives of love as a union whose aim is the mutual pursuit of each other’s good. When we enter this union, the separateness between us melts away. Your interests and desires become my interests and desires, just as mine become yours.

Most people want to be in love, and love is a key component of our happiness. Cultivating the kind of character that is able to find (and to give) this love is an issue of the highest importance.

Love involves relating to someone’s entire being in the right kind of way. It requires us to attach ourselves both to someone’s body and to the person that is in some sense housed within that body. It is a physical as well as an interpersonal connection, a relationship between embodied selves.

But what exactly is a person? Scruton devotes a very technical chapter to this question. Roughly, a person is a point of view on the world, or a locus of consciousness. Concepts like “I” and “you” refer to persons, and pick out these loci of consciousness—respectively, the person who speaks and the person who is addressed. The concept of “I” refers to a particular perspective, one that consists of my thoughts, emotions, perceptions, intentions, desires, and the like. Similarly, when I address myself to you, I refer to you as a center of consciousness and try to communicate with the contents of your mind.

These are hard thoughts to wrap one’s mind around, but perhaps this helps. When we speak to another, what do we look at? In one sense, we look at the other’s face: at her eyes, say. But we also look at her, which is to say, at the unique perspective that somehow stands behind those eyes, and peers out into the world from them.

The concept of the person is essential to Scruton’s philosophy of sex. Sex is a physical phenomenon, and Scruton does not denigrate its bodily aspect. He just wants to say that it is also a relation between persons.

Scruton brings out the interpersonal elements of sex by closely examining how we experience it. On a naïve or simplistic view of sex, one might think that what we seek in desire is a certain kind of pleasure in our sexual organs. While that is surely a part of the story, it completely misses how our experience of desire is thoroughly saturated by thoughts about the other person.

Consider our enjoyment of sexual glances and caresses. A caress is arousing not merely because of the pleasant sensation it causes, but because of the intention that is communicated by it. Having a stranger inadvertently touch you when they walk past you might feel similar, in terms of physical sensations, as when your beloved purposely runs his fingers across your legs. The difference between the two, and the reason why only the latter is arousing, is because of the thoughts that accompany each sensation. In the latter case, Scruton writes, “The thought involves the following idea: It is he who is alertly touching me, intending my recognition of his act.” The same goes for the look of desire. In giving you that kind of glance, I express my desire to explore you, and my hope that you will reciprocate that desire, and wish to explore me as well.

Furthermore: when we desire someone, we desire that person in particular. As Scruton says, it’s not as if someone else would do just as well. If I want you, then I want you—the perspective that you and you alone embody.

That, at least, is how sex is meant to work. It is supposed to be mediated by thoughts about the other person. But of course, not all instances of sex function in this way. Some sexual practices are depersonalized and direct our attention primarily to bodies. Scruton calls such practices obscene. Pornography is perhaps the paradigmatic example: It is a display of bodies, lifted from the realm of interpersonal relations.

The connection between love and sex lies in the fact that our sexual habits can accustom us either to engage others in a way that focuses our attention primarily on their bodies, or in a way that calls our attention to their embodied self. Love requires us to attach ourselves to the embodied self of another, and insofar as we build sexual habits that direct our attention solely to the body, we undermine our capacity to love—and therefore our ability to find happiness.

Scruton’s approach has tremendous explanatory power. For instance, it explains the problem with lust. “Lust,” he writes, “may be defined as a genuine sexual desire, from which the goal of erotic love has been excluded, and in which whatever tends towards that goal—tenderness, intimacy, fidelity, dependence—is curtailed or obstructed.” Lustful activities depersonalize the targets of our desire and block all those soft emotions that are tied up with the bond of love.

It also explains why consent is a necessary but insufficient guide to sexual ethics. A depersonalized sexual encounter may be consensual—two people can agree to use each other’s body for pleasure, without much regard for the perspective standing behind the body. But that lack of personal concern may leave us unfulfilled, because unacknowledged and unrecognized as a unique self.

Most importantly, Scruton’s view helps explain how sex can be conducive to and constitutive of love. Part of what he wants to draw our attention to is that our sexual actions mean something. They carry our intentions and convey our emotions. Again, we are indeed capable of engaging in depersonalized sexual activities, where the main thing we convey is an interest in the other’s body. But we can also sexually interact in such a way as to tell the other that they matter to us.

Scruton’s core suggestion is simple. He wants us to romanticize sex, which means thinking of it as a form of love, and giving it the kind of place in our lives that will help us find romantic fulfillment. And his reasons for this aren’t that sexual vice makes you an evil person who deserves moral blame, but rather that sexual vice will not promote your own flourishing.

If we take a romantic conception of sex as the proper standard of our sexual conduct, many of our cultural practices will immediately seem suspect. Although our culture is in many ways obsessed with sex (for one thing, just look at advertising) it strikes me that sex is rarely represented as a form of love. Many representations of sex are obscene in Scruton’s sense—they are depersonalized. But even when things aren’t so bad, sex is often represented as just another fun activity that couples do together, like watching a movie or taking a hike. The sex is placed over here and the love is placed over there, as if there were some impassable chasm between the two. By severing the tie between love and sex, our culture prevents us from seeing how our sexual emotions—softness, vulnerability, affection—are caught up in the whole drama of human romance.

Scruton’s book came out in the 1980s, so he was familiar with the hookup culture that was unleashed by the sexual revolution of the 1960s. He rightly noted its harmful consequences, and in particular the way it damaged our ability to form loving bonds. And while he didn’t live to see the rise of dating apps, he probably would have leveled a similar criticism at them. Among the many problems with those apps, here is one: they present us with (largely) depersonalized photos and encourage us to obsess over other people’s appearance. They shift our attention away from the interpersonal elements of love and desire.

Men are usually the initiators of depersonalized sexual encounters, since they find it easier to decouple the person from the body, and to enjoy encounters that aren’t much troubled by thoughts about the former. Some women respond to this decoupling by developing a suspicion of male desire as such, since a great proportion of the desire directed at them is depersonalized and transactional. Once they develop this suspicion, they start wanting a kind of love that’s completely disembodied, saying, for example, that they want to be loved for who they are and not for what they look like. We thus arrive at a situation where everyone has destroyed the link between sex and love: men, by wrongly pursuing the former while excluding the possibility of the latter; women, by falsely supposing that the latter is something quite separate from the former. But if Scruton is right that love and sex ought to be inseparable, then this state of affairs will leave everyone unhappy.

A romantic understanding of sex will go some way toward rehabilitating traditional sexual ethics, but not all the way. Such a view recommends that we engage in sex only when we have a personal connection with the other. For a sexual encounter to be good and healthy, love should at least be a long-term possibility. Scruton’s approach also vindicates the norms of courtship and self-restraint, since they are helpful aids to love. But his arguments do not rule out homosexuality or premarital sex, nor do they justify shaming and stigmatizing people whose sexual encounters are detached from romance. I find these consequences salutary, but those with more traditional views may disagree.

Part of the appeal of this account of sexual ethics is that it can be justified on secular terms, so that people can accept it regardless of their religious background. Everyone wants to be happy, and for most of us, happiness will require romantic fulfillment. Romantic fulfillment will in turn demand a certain manner of sexual comportment.

The most appealing feature of this romantic conception of sex, however, is its beauty. Thinking of sex as a part of love, and as mediated by thoughts about the other person, is much more moving than conceiving of it as a mere transaction of bodily pleasure. When we think about the good life, it’s always hard to know how we might encourage people to be virtuous. In this instance, virtue happens to be beautiful and therefore motivating.

Part of the task of our cultural productions (in film, literature, music, philosophy, etc.) is to shine a light on the meanings in the human world, that is, to help us see the intentions, desires, and emotions behind people’s actions. A more romantic culture might help us all see the meanings sex could have. Sex is valuable partly because it can be pleasant and fun, and we shouldn’t ignore or downplay those aspects of it. But a sexual act can also express to the other that we need to be with them, that they are significant in our eyes, and that our happiness depends (among other things) on receiving their touch.

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The featured image is “The Crown of Love” (1875), by John Everett Millais, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.