Delete comment from: Edward Feser
@Anon 1:44 PM,
Quote: "The assertion that masturbation is intrinsically wrong is precisely what I’m challenging. The idea that medical research on male ejaculate (even if we qualify this by specifying “for purposes other than fertility studies”) is wrong because it’s instrinsically wrong to masturbate seems to me to be a bizarre outcome of the theory..."
It's not that the medical research itself is wrong here per se, it's that the means whereby the medical research got it's sperm is wrong. The distinction is important.
If the medical research got it's sperm from masturbation, then it would have gotten it through illicit acts. But if the medical research got it's sperm from acts that were not intrinsically wrong, then the sperm was taken from acts that were morally unproblematic.
In both cases the end, which is studying sperm, is not intrinsically wrong. It's just a matter of the means one uses to get the sperm one wants to study.
I suppose one could say that medical research that obtained it's sperm via masturbation is morally wrong in the sense medical research on what happens to humans under torture is morally wrong if the torture was actually done to humans directly in order to procure the necessary information.
But if one isn't aware the sperm was acquired via masturbation, or one is aware of it but wasn't able to define the conditions on how the donor ought to acquire his own sperm, or simply had to accept sperm without regard of how people obtained their own sperm because the conditions of research simply didn't care what method people used to obtain it themselves, then it seems to me at least that wouldn't necessarily be morally problematic on the part of the researcher.
Nov 23, 2018, 4:17:41 AM
Posted to Byrne on why sex is binary