Sexual Immorality

Sexual immorality runs rampant in today’s society. The rising rates of rape, child abuse, sexual violence are indicative of a moral decline in every society. We are living in a society where everyone is exposed to one or other kind of sexual immorality be its through pornography, movies or music. Nudity has become a fashion and more the less clothes, the bolder the artist is. Vulgarity is now being promoted as a trend. The utmost shamelessness, indecency and obscenity is depicted as sexual freedom. Sexual freedom has much been used to justify the weird sexual practices and sexual life-styles. Acting on sexual fantasies is also becoming a new norm. The “Hot-Wife” culture and “Swinger” lifestyle are not just being practiced rather are being streamlined and promoted through media. The idea behind promoting all this is hidden under the umbrella of tolerance towards others. The famous John Stuart’s harm principle has provided a good excuse for the immorality. No other idea has been used to justify immorality to this extent as harm principle.

The harm principle states that the only actions that can be prevented are ones that create harm. In other words, a person can do whatever he wants as long as his actions do not harm others. If a person’s actions only affect himself, then society, which includes the government, should not be able to stop a person from doing what he wants. This even includes actions that a person may do that would harm the person himself.

The idea at first seems fascinating as it seems to maximize the individual freedom with minimal interference from the state or government but has deep flaws. Government not interfering whenever someone harms oneself, the government fails to serve its primary role of safety and security of its people. If government fails to ensure the safety of its people at individual level, what role it then has to play? Another major issue with harm principle is that it fails to recognize the impact of one’s behavior over others. We humans are social animals and are affected by each other’s action. Haven’t we seen fans following ideal celebrities to the crazy extent? The idea is fundamentally based on a generalization that private actions does not have any impact on society whatsoever which is definitely not the case. The fundamental flaw with this notion is that we don’t recognize moral harm as harm and therefore think of harm as being physical harm only. There has been an on-going debate about pornographic content as the adverse impacts of pornography are becoming more and more evident. It’s no surprise that pornographic content shapes the behavior of porn addicts in certain ways. Another idea that has been catalyst for sexual immorality is making morality mere subjective. It’s a popular notion that people have differing opinions regarding what is good and what is bad. This way we should be more tolerant of other’s perception of right and wrong and thus not imposing our views on others. Such is the case of moral policing. Many leftists adhere to the idea of no need for moral policing and they assert people can decide better for themselves. This idea has been very well used to justify the LGBTQ practices, Abortion rights and pre-marital or extra marital sexual relations right. Western democracies has established that sex is the fundamental human right and that people should not be refrained from having sex. Therefore, as far as two individuals are consenting, there is nothing wrong in any sort of sexual relationship. Again, this idea of sexual freedom fails to recognize the moral harm and the potential impacts of a practice on society.