Delete comment from: Edward Feser
If it would be OK to produce male gametes for purposes of medical research, why is it then intrinsically not OK to produce them for pleasure, if this doesn’t interfere with the realisation of other goods over the span of one’s lifetime?
On a natural law reading, it's not OK to pervert any faculty, sexual or not - ie by using it contrary to its natural end. Now the primary natural end of the sexual faculty is the production of children. So the faculty cannot be used in any way contrary to this, masturbation being an obvious example. Children do not even possibly result from it. Your question is answered, easily because it doesn't even escape the conditional.
One should speak also about the hierarchy of goods. Some goods are more important than others, as life is more important than pleasure.
"Just because something has a primary natural purpose doesn’t mean it must be expressed in just that way to count as human flourishing.
On an essentialist-teleological account, where the ends of a thing are normatively fixed by its essence (ie what it is), it does. Which you beg the question against in merely asserting the contrary.
Nov 22, 2018, 1:09:00 AM
Posted to Byrne on why sex is binary