At this time of the A2 course our study turns to sexual ethics, pre-marital sex and adultery being two of the issues specified on th OCR syllabus (with contraception and homosexuality).

Mimi Alford was an intern in the White House in the summer of 1962. In the swimming pool she met the glamorous, WWII hero and newly elected President JF Kennedy. He showed her round the White House and then, arriving in the bedroom, pushed her on to the bed and undressed her.

“I wouldn’t describe what happened that night as making love. But I wouldn’t call it consensual either”.

So she writes in a newly published memoir Once Upon a Secret. So began an affair which continued two or three times a week from June 1962 until just before the President’s assassination in November 1963, an affair which included trips overseas, overnights in the White House and which coincided with the death of Kennedy’s infant son, “the only time I ever saw him cry”.

According to the philosopher J.S. Mill, what happens between consenting adults, done in private, with no harm to anyone else, is their business and their’s alone. But one cannot help feeling with sexual ethics that there are more than two people involved.

What of Jackie Kennedy, away for periods from her husband? What of the children’s welfare? What of the lies the secret service agents had to tell, or the housekeeper cleaning up the next day. Immorality arguably includes more than just two people in the sphere of concern. It has a wider, social dimension.

And what about the formation of character? Virtue ethics teaches us that self-discipline and prudent judgment are keys to the ethical life, that excess, including excess of sexual activity in the wrong place, with the wrong person, in the wrong way is a vice. And central to this idea must be sexual integrity – the idea that we need to be comfortable with our own sexual identity, be it homosexual or heterosexual, but also that our sexuality is integrated into our whole personality, and not a sign of a fragmented psyche. But what of the sexual addict? Is that also an identity we should be happy with?

Sexual addiction, the inability to stop pursuing casual sex irrespective of the potential harm to  self and family, is now recognised as a psychological condition just like alcoholism. Although treatable, it involves the person taking a long hard look at what is driving the compulsive behaviour. Before we rise to condemn JFK’s sexual antics, we need perhaps to examine our own private code of sexual ethics. What are we ruling “in”? Pornography, secret affairs, trips to places of dubious sexual health and wisdom?  Are we, in the words of Kant, treating our fellow human beings as just a means to an end (pleasure, status, pain relief), or as an end in themselves?

Ethics is ultimately a the search for what it is to be human – and if we cannot talk and reason over these things we risk the sort of pathology so well illustrated by the strange story of the 19 year old intern and the world’s most powerful man.

For those struggling with issues of sexual addiction go to:

http://psychcentral.com/lib/2006/what-is-sexual-addiction/