Let's see if I'm understanding. You hook up with someone whom you really like and who really likes you. There's a considerable sexual attraction. The hormones are more than buzzing and you are of an age when it is only too natural to want to start a sex life (and you are old enough for it to be legal). She is more than willing and is sending all the right signals. You fancy her like mad. And wow, it happens!

Erm, well excuse me if I don't see your problem! Rash? Well, what is life without a few rash adventures along the way?

But actually this wasn't particularly rash (unless zero contraceptive precautions were in use)! Just unplanned, but still mutually wanted and enjoyed. But that makes it sound to me a pretty good way to get things started, compared with the usual alternatives. Not weeks/months of old-style (or not so old-style) stressed fumblings towards "going all the way". Not some regrettable anonymous shag with a half-willing very drunk girl at a party. Just a happy experience with someone you instantly felt a real connection with. Sounds to me that you should be grateful for that, not anxious or conflicted.

Though you can learn a useful lesson along the way. Sexual attractions have their own dynamics that aren't so easily corralled by thoughtful plans or shaped by philosophical principles. But, hey, that's life!

Isn't this far too like e.g. the question "Is enjoying pornography immoral?" In that case it all depends what exactly is in question: a bald yes/no answer would be hopelessly insensitive to the great variety of materials that fall under the very sweeping term "pornography".

My impression -- and I hasten to cheerfully admit to lack of expertise! -- is that "BDSM" is similarly used as a pretty sweeping term that also can be, and has been, applied to a pretty wide variety of activities. So here too, a bald yes/no answer is surely likely to be inappropriate. Moral philosophers will need to know quite a bit more about just which sorts of activities in what sorts of contexts are up for evaluation before they can proceed to say anything sensible.

From what I recall (and I'm recalling going to a US highschool way back in the 20th century), there's quite a bit to the semiotics of hickeys. The bruise says something--to you personally, but also to the world (if you hair is mobile). It broadcasts "I have a boyfriend and we're intimate," but it also hints at sex to the point of hurting. Maybe your parents have concerns about the broadcasting, or about "to the point of hurting." Maybe they're wondering "what next?" Maybe... Well, you could speculate endlessly. There's no way to know without asking them. You might discover that they're worried not so much about morality but about your emotional and physical health.

Greetings, My Daring Friend!

I wonder if the word 'wrong' is what is tripping everyone up. There are of course several nuances to wrong. It's wrong to text while driving (wrong = dangerous as well as illegal); it is wrong to end a long-time friendship for frivolous reasons (wrong = rash and inconsiderate and foolish); it's wrong to wear "mom jeans" (wrong = embarrassingly out of style).

When it comes to sporting love bites, I am not convinced the wrong committed by you rises to the level of a full-fledged moral wrong. It certainly is wrong in the sense that it violates a social norm of appropriateness, the norm being that evidence of sexual satisfaction should only be flaunted by rockstars.

But social norms about what is appropriate are deeply important and they can't be dismissed too quickly or cavalierly. They are the expectations of behavior, and each of us must make an account of ourselves. When someone flaunts such a norm - particularly one to do with sex - there will be a price to pay. The parental flack you are currently receiving is that price. If challenging this norm is important to you, then carry on. Besides, vampires are in vogue.

Yes, especially if it involves the actual infliction of pain on someone else, not just getting pleasure from watching real or fake depictions of people in pain. On every theory of morality, gratuitous or unnecessary pain is wrong and should be avoided. Some theories try to ground that moral claim in more fundamental moral claims, while others, such as utilitarianism, treat "pain is bad" as a fundamental fact from which to derive moral conclusions. If you believe there are no moral truths, then sadism is not immoral because nothing is, but in that case, there's nothing special about sadism except that, like rape or murder, it is a particularly counterintuitive case for people who think there are no moral truths.

A more interesting question is whether masochism is immoral (i.e., deriving pleasure from the experience of pain, though this definition itself is philosophically perplexing if one defines pain and pleasure as opposites!). Or what to think about a sadist and a masochist getting together--a case that is sometimes used to suggest utilitarianism is counterintuitive, since one can stipulate that getting these two people together is, according to some forms of utilitarianism, a good thing since it maximizes pleasure. I think there are probably ways to argue that sado-masochism is also immoral, but such arguments will be more complicated than the ones that conclude sadism is immoral.

Your question raises a number of really interesting issues.

One of these is how to distinguish ethical questions from non-ethics ones. Could it be the case that your question about toplessness does not raise any moral issues at all and so isn't the sort of question that can be answered by appeal to ethics? You are right, of course, that questions of nudity strike an emotionally-charged nerve in our culture. But does this necessarily mean that these responses are best understood or assessed as ethical responses? For example, people in our culture feel strongly about table manners but these seem to be culturally relative and more a matter of etiquette than morality. Are peoples' positions about toplessness akin to those non-moral questions of etiquette? If so, maybe it is wrong to seek a specifically ethical assessment of the norms and conventions you wish to understand.

Another important ethical issue arises no matter how you address the issue I just described: The ethical significance of the norms and conventions surrounding nudity, regardless of whether those norms have an ethical basis or are non-ethical along the lines of merely conventional judgments about etiquette. What are the significance of those norms and conventions on individuals' lives? How do they relate to significant issues of gender and equality? Do they reinforce or are they reinforced by an unethical cultural system of patriarchy or misogyny? I suspect that your question engages many significant issues related to feminist philosophy and so could be used to explore those issues.

So, those are two wider sets of issues that your question raises in my mind. With respect to narrow answers, different ethical traditions will try to answer your question in different ways. For example, today I was reading a wonderful book on ethics, Jesse Prinz's The Emotional Construction of Morals (Oxford, 2007). Prinz argues that, on the one hand, morality is subjective, not objective, but, on the other, moral facts are real. He writes, "Moral facts are like money. They are social facts that obtain in virtue of our current dispositions and practices. They are as real as monetary values and even more important, perhaps, in guiding our lives" (p. 167). So, Prinz would answer your question by saying that the moral fact of the matter about toplessness is to be interpreted and assessed by looking at "dispositions and practices" embedded in our culture and might say that widespread dispositions opposing public toplessness by women is a moral fact about our culture. Prinz wouldn't say that moral judgments are objective in the sense of universally valid, but he would say that they nonetheless really exist in our culture -- just like money. Other ethical traditions will provide different answers, and adjudicating between those competing answers raises another huge question: the comparative strengths and weaknesses of the various approaches to understanding morality and theorizing about ethics.

Let me ask a view questions.

Is it clear that viewing child pornography is always wrong? Consider a detective who is viewing it in an attempt to establish the identities of the participants.

Is it clear that any photograph of children being sexually exploited by adults is ipso facto wrong? Consider a reporter who takes pictures of some politician in bed with a pre-pubescent boy.

What is distinctive of the case in which we would intuitively regard the viewing as wrong? What attitude towards the participants does such viewing involve? In particular, what attitude towards the children does it involve? Does viewing child pornography as a way of achieving sexual gratification seem compatible with a compassionate attitude towards children and a proper respect for their interests and their autonomy? Does it seem compatible with a proper appreciation of their suffering? The wrong might lie less in the viewing than it what one's viewing such things as a means of sexual gratification says about the person doing the viewing.

That said, these are questions about morals, and some of the questions raised strike me more as questions about law. And it's a different question whether possession of child pornography should have the sorts of legal consequences it does. Here, it seems to me that the legal justification has to be that possession of such material involves supporting the market for such material and thereby contributing to the exploitation of children. But one could agree with that and yet wonder whether some of the laws concerning child pornography are not overly broad. Not many years ago, a woman was arrested in Cambridge Massachusetts when she went to pick up some photographs that showed her husband playing with their naked toddler on the beach. The person who developed the photographs had notified the Cambridge Police Department and called them when she arrived.

I couldn't agree more with what Miriam says here. But let me add a bit. First, the common talk one hears about the "definition of marriage" seems to me to be confused. One might reasonably speak of a definition of the word "marriage", but marriage, the civil or cultural or religious institution, is not something that is "defined" in the way a word is defined. For this reason, among many others, the common refrain one hears, that we can look in a dictionary to find out what marriage is, and in particular to find out whether two men can marry, is just silly. (And, if it weren't silly enough, of course dictionaries change.)

That said, one might seek something like a characterization of the institution of marriage, as it has existed in (say) American society over the last few hundred years. One might want to know what marriage is, as one might want to know what goldenrods are. As Miriam says, such an investigation would likely find that there was a good deal of variation, across religious groups to be sure, and across many other divisions, as well. And marriage, as a civil institution, is pretty clearly whatever the law says it is. And those laws, as I'm about to emphasize, both vary and change.

The institution of marriage has undergone tremendous change over the last few decades. Not very long ago, a woman who married was all but selling herself into slavery. So much so, that a century or so ago it was not at all uncommon for progressive thinkers to condemn the institution of marriage as fundamentally unjust. And since this is askphilosophers.org, I should mention that one of the most famous such condemnations was by Bertrand Russell, in his book Marriage and Morals. This aspect of marriage has profoundly changed, at least in most of the industrial western democracies, in ways I would hope we could all applaud. Once, marriage was essentially a form of ownership and control, so much so that it was legally impossible in many jurisdictions for a man to rape his wife. (You may recall that this sort of issue arose recently in Afghanistan.) Now we prefer to think of marriage as a partnership of equals, and the law has changed to reflect that conception.

It seems to me that the change I have just described is, in a way, at the root of the in-progress change to which Miriam referred. It was essential to marriage as it was known to Russell that it be between a man and a woman. Otherwise, how would one know who owned whom? But once we have abandoned that conception of what marriage is, and once it is seen as a partnership of equals, then one might naturally be led to ask whether there really is any substantial reason that it must be restricted to "one man and one woman". This is the central question that the Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts discusses in its opinion in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, the decision that legalized `gay marriage' in Massachusetts. The Court observed that there simply wasn't anything about the laws governing marriage in Massachusetts that actually required the parties to be of different sexes, other than that the law said that they did. The fact that the parties were of different sexes was, in effect, a completely isolated and inert aspect of the existing laws, a vestige of the sexism that was, not so very long ago, inherent in the institution of marriage. And so, the Court held, it had no legal basis and so was ipso facto discriminatory.

The court was quickly proved right, at least as far as their claim about the nature of the law was concerned. To open the institution of marriage to same-sex couples, no more was required than that the restriction to different-sex couples should be removed. The laws governing divorce, for example, did not need to be re-written. The laws governing divorce, as they existed in 2004, did not treat the male and female partners differently simply on the ground of their sex. Such differential treatment would nowadays be regarded as plainly sexist, and as plainly unjust. But that is itself an example of the kind of earlier change that made same-sex marriage possible: A century ago, divorce law most certainly did treat men and women differently, just on that ground.

Let me make one final remark. One often hears it said that, if marriage is opened to same-sex couples, then why not to polygamous triads? I won't try to answer this question, but will instead ask my own question. Suppose we did decide to open marriage to polygamous triads. Would it also be the case that the only thing we would have to do, legally, was say, "Well, OK, then"? Or would there be other legal issues, concerning divorce law, or inheritance, or something else connected with the "rights and responsibilities or marriage", that would also have to be addressed and resolved? If the answer to this latter question is "yes", then the kind of argument the Supreme Judicial Court gave in favor of permitting same-sex couples to marry simply cannot be made in favor of allowing polygamous triads to marry.

There never was a "definition of marriage." Marriage is an ancient human institution that occurs in multiple forms (temporary, permanent, monogamous or open, polygamous or polyandrous) with several possible functions (parenting, property rights, companionship, politics, possession). I don't think that even in our (pluralistic) society, at this time, it has a single meaning, function or definition. One of the things about marriage that does seem to be changing right now is the idea that it has to be between a woman and a man (this idea has been stable in Western society for some time, although it is probably not a human universal). One of the benefits of this wide range of possibilities is that individuals have some freedom to create their own meanings of marriage (whether or not they marry).

I'd suggest reflecting on a different question: is there any good argument to support the claim that it isn't? I ask this because for my own part, I can't think of one. Further, I don't think this is just a failure of imagination on my part.

When I think about the same-sex couples I know, the fact that both partners are men or both are women fades into the background pretty quickly. I've known dysfunctional same-sex couples, and dysfunctional opposite-sex couples. I've seen loving, sustaining, healthy same-sex relationships, and loving, sustaining, healthy opposite-sex relationships. Some homosexual people are abusive; so are some heterosexual people. Some heterosexual people are just the sort of people you'd be glad to see your own child in a relationship with. And so are some homosexual people.

Now it's true: homosexual sex isn't procreative. Neither is sex with birth control. Nor is celibacy. It's also true: if everyone were homosexual, the survival of the species would be a lot more complicated. But that's also true if everyone were celibate. Or used birth control consistently. Homosexuality is not "contagious." Even if there is some sense in which homosexuality is unnatural, there's also a sense in which celibacy is unnatural -- or for that matter, in which thinking philosophically is unnatural. And on it goes.

So it seems to me that the burden of proof is on the other side. What serious reason is there to think that there's something wrong with homosexual relationships? For the life of me, I can't think of any.