The problem that you face (how to keep yourself (and perhaps others) safe) is very serious and calls for a kind of knowledge (i.e., of the resources available to you in your community) that philosophers don't have by training.

But certain constraints that you put on a solution to this problem (that no one get hurt, that no one else get involved) might rest on certain philosophical assumptions that I would like to challenge.

If we were assaulted and raped by a stranger, most of us would feel no moral confusion about what we are entitled to do. In such a situation, what the stranger did is very wrong and we have a right to protect ourselves (and others) against this harm, even if the consequences of this protection (e.g., getting the police involved) would be harm to the rapist (in the form of a jail sentence). But in cases in which we are victims of abuse at the hands of members of our own family, it can seem very difficult to figure out what is the right thing to do.

We feel that we have stronger obligations to members of our family than we have to mere strangers to protect them against harm. We also feel that we should not reveal to those outside of the family embarassing facts about other members of our family. And usually, these feelings are reliable.

Intimate relationships, like those between members of a family or those between close friends, are valuable precisely because they provide us with a source of protection that we could not expect from mere strangers. And they also provide us with a safe place to reveal to others aspects of ourselves that would be embarassing and perhaps dangerous to reveal to strangers. Yes, Uncle Bob drinks too much at Thanksgiving; yes, Dad had a tawdry affair last year; and yes, Mom has a weird poodle fetish. But we love them anyway. If we didn't have a place where we could reveal the less socially acceptable aspects of ourselves (and we all have many such aspects), with confidence that our foibles wouldn't be exposed to less sympathetic strangers, our lives would be much more lonely than they are.

Because of the significant value of intimate relations for all of us, we are right to be reluctant to reveal to strangers facts about family members that would be not only embarassing to them but could expose them to harm. The important thing to remember, though, is that these feelings of protectiveness and loyalty make sense only in the context in which the family is actually serving a valuable protective function for its members. When a family member is not serving this protective function, and especially when a family member is someone against whom one requires protection, then these feelings of protectiveness and loyalty are inappropriate (which is not to say that you won't continue to feel them even when they are no longer appropriate).

You have no more obligation to protect abusers who are members of your family from the embarassment and harm that might arise from your exposure of their abuse than you have to strangers. In other words, you have no obligation to the abuser, but you do have an obligation to yourself to protect yourself from being abused.

If you are of school age, I would suggest that you go to a trusted adult-- a teacher, a guidance counselor, a coach-- and seek his or her help to keep you safe. If you are older, call a local crisis hotline, where you can get information about how best to keep yourself safe in your community.

Nothing is easy in this subject!

I think most people find the promises inherent to monogamy to be moral ones--though some philosophers have questioned whether promising to another exclusive access to one's own body is one that actually can be morally made. The tricky part lies in finding (and then explaining the morality of) the correct position between extremes that do not look correct to most people. At one extreme, most of us do not think that even an uncoerced agreement to become another's personal possession (as a slave, for example) is acceptable. At the other extreme, we do think that refusing to agree to take part in a sexually exclusive relationship with another--monogamy, in other words--on the grounds that no one has a right to expect such exclusivity from us, is also inappropriate. So the general question goes something like this: How much limitation of personal autonomy are we morally prepared to sanction by the agent's own willing forfeit of that autonomy to another's exclusive use or control? This may seem to be a very stark way of putting the issue, but it seems to me to be also an accurate way to frame the problem.

If we do understand the problem this way, then it is not clear to me why someone's forfeit of their own sexual autonomy to another must be conditioned on the other providing sexual access. People in monogamous relationships frequently deny sexual access to each other temporarily ("not tonight, dear, I have a headache!") and no one seems to think this is a moral problem! Having sex when one is unwilling--even within a committed monogamous relationship--is certainly not something we would regard as a moral duty.

But even so, the situation you may have in mind might be of at least two different sorts. In one case one might imagine, there might be a couple who negotiate their relationship in the terms you describe: A says to B, "Dear B, I will be in a monogamous relationship with you, but the conditions are these: (i) you have sex with no one else, and (ii) you also do not have sex with me." Can B not morally accept such terms? I don't see why not! Can A not morally offer such terms? Again, I don't see why not! There are even cases comparable to this that we generally regard as entirely morally acceptable--e.g. Catholic priests' vows of chastity. Why cannot a vow of chastity be a morally acceptable condition of a relationship?

It gets a bit trickier, however, if the rule of chastity is introduced subsequent to the original agreement of a relationship, and contrary to the understandings that grounded the relationship at its inception. In a case like this, we might imagine A and B becoming involved, committing to a monogamous relationship that is sexually active, and then A decides to renege--permanently. One can certainly see why B would feel a bit put out by A's decision. But, your question remains: Can A not morally make such a decision? I don't see why not. In effect, A is telling B that chastity is henceforth a condition of their relationship continuing. It seems to me that A has every right to insist on that condition as one that must be met for the relationship to continue. It also seems to me that B has every right to reject the condition, and hence, to elect not to continue the relationship on the terms now on offer. I don't see that A can demand that B accept the new terms, all other things equal. But as the old saw goes, relationships have to be renewed every day: If A now demands new terms for the relationship, B can take it or leave it!

But there is at least one further twist. Things can happen to people that change their lives drastically, and part of what wwe take ourselves to be doing, when we agree to monogamous relationships, is to be with the other "in sickness and in health" and all the rest. What if A now demands chastity from B because A is no longer sexually functional because of some accident or disability, but despite the loss of sexual function still expects B to remain faithful to the relationship A and B established and vowed to maintain? Infidelity can be very threatening to relationships, and A may reasonably not wish for B to put their relationship at risk. When B accepted the standard vows people make in entering the relationship, is it reasonable for B to suppose that loss of sexual access for any reason at all would nullify the vows B made? It doesn't seem obvious to me why that should be the case!

There is no question that people feel these issues very deeply, and so it seems to me that the best advice to give to people considering entering into a monogamous relationship is that they do some serious thinking and talking together about the degree to which they are--and the degree to which they would not be--willing to make adjustments to their expectations. But no matter how carefully any couple does this, the unpredictability of the future can produce unexpected and unanticipated problems. Having the sort of relationship in which demands are central features is probably already a bad start. Good communication and great flexibility are far more likely to yield sustainable results. In the end, these will be more reliable than knowing that one has the moral right to make some demand on one's partner.

Not having the details of Sullivan's view ready to hand, all I can offer are some general comments on homosexuality, Kant and utilitarianism. On Kant, you might want to have a look at the replies to question 1681, and if you can get a copy, at Alan Soble's paper "Kant and Sexual Perversion," cited in his answer to that question. Prof. Soble makes a strong case that Kant's views on homosexuality are little more than sophisticated gay-bashing.

The most relevant Kantian thought might seem to be that we should never treat anyone -- ourselves included -- merely as a means and not also as an end. In Kant's view, any sort of sex outside marriage falls short on this score, including masturbation. (Kant seems to have been particularly hung up about solitary sex.) This means that arguments against homosexuality based on Kant's views are likely to prove more than their proponent may have had in mind. In any case, it's hard to credit the view that non-marital sex always amounts to nothing more than using someone simply for one's own pleasure. For one thing, good sexual partners care about their partner's pleasure and not just their own. And even if Kant were right, it's hard to see how marriage would magically solve the problem. (As for masturbation, let's grant: it's most commonly done just because it feels good. But there are many things that we sometimes do exactly for that reason.)

Which brings us to utilitarianism. From that point of view, the fact that sex is a source of pleasure counts in its favor, and this applies no less to homosexual sex. Of course the utilitarian will call on us to ask broad questions about consequences. Does homosexuality lead to more unhappiness than happiness? It's hardly obvious that the answer is yes, though negative attitudes about gay people cause a lot of misery. If everyone were homosexual, then the species might cease, but if everyone were a philosopher, we'd all die of starvation. And on it goes.

The most intriguing thing about this issue is that it somehow remains an issue. This tells us something about the charge around sexual matters, but not much else. It's hard to come up with serious, plausible arguments to show that there is something morally wrong with homosexuality.

This is, I think, an utterly fascinating area of philosophical inquiry, and some new work is tackling this very issue. (David Velleman, for example, has a paper draft on virtual agency that considers what it means for an avatar to do things we ordinarily ascribe to real people, like "have sex" or "be attracted.")

I think a virtual relationship (or a real relationship in the virtual world, which may not be equivalent) needs to be understood in the context in which that relationship exists...as you say, "at face value." But as a matter of actual fact, the reason and will behind the avatars belong to someone else, who then have a kind of derivative relationship. So we can understand what's going on in three ways: what are the avatars doing; what are the real people doing; what are the real people directing the avatars to do?

The relation of these two relationships -- virtual and actual -- to each other is something that needs exploration, and this exploration may well alter our more general understanding of such concepts as gender, identity and action.

Perhaps the first question worth answering would be what one means here by "natural". What is "natural" can be opposed to many different things: "artificial" might be one, for example, but that doesn't seem to be quite what one has in mind when one asks whether homosexuality is "natural". Indeed, I'm inclined to think you don't know very well yourself what you mean by the word: hence all the "scare quotes".

Another question is why it should matter. If homosexuality is not "natural", does that mean it must be wrong? One might well suggest, and it has indeed been suggested, that sex with birth control is not "natural" either, but, despite the wel-known views of some, many of us wouldn't infer anything about the moral status of such expressions of sexuality from the fact, even if it is one, that it is not "natural". And sure, there are plenty of senses in which men and women are "complementary". Among them, the obvious one is that it takes a man and a woman to make a child. But it's hard to see what's supposed to follow from this.

The predicate "morally wrong" seems to require a victim: someone who is morally wronged. This could by an animal or members of future generations. But, in your case, there's no one to whom a wrong is being done.

The same seems true for any and all feelings we might have: Our feelings do not harm others, hence it cannot be morally wrong to feel this or that.

To be sure, it can be wrong in certain circumstances to act on one's feelings, to lie about one's feelings, to conceal or to express one's feelings. But merely having them cannot be morally wrong.

Another argument to the same conclusion would appeal to the premise that we do not choose our feelings, that you cannot avoid feeling flattered at the moment you have this feeling. While this may typically be true, it is also true that we do have the capacity to modify over time the way we feel. Someone who feels hostility toward members of a certain race or religion can make an effort to get to know good people from that race or religion and thereby gradually overcome her feelings. And you could over time -- perhaps by mixing more with people who respect you for your intellect, personality, friendship, sense of humor, or other character traits -- become someone who cares less about being appreciated for her looks.

Would you be a better person -- in a larger sense that goes beyond the moral -- if you had so transformed yourself, if you had reduced that feeling of being flattered by attention to your looks? Probably not. If you derived nearly all of your self-esteem from how others respond to your looks, then there would be room for improvement. But if you like to stay in shape and to dress smartly, and enjoy the reaction of others to your hot looks, I cannot see this as a defect so long as you also like and enjoy many other things besides.

There are lots of complex issues here (as in the previous question r#1796 referred to).

In response to the earlier question, I focued on rights and obligations because those were the terms in which the question was asked. Prof. Soble emphasized there that many other moral considerations are relevant in intimate human relations, e.g., what would be virtuous, nice, religiously required, what one should do out of a sense of duty, justice, or reciprocity, etc. I was not answering a question about what would be virtuous or just, but what is obligatory. I took obligations to be closely tied to rights. So I was not asserting that there are no other moral considerations in matters of sex as he seemed to read me, but only that there are some important rights and obligations that are relevant to whether one has an obligation to have sex in marriage.

But it is difficult to articulate what rights and obligations there are, and this current question rightly demands clarification. First, we might want to look at the analogy between (allegedly) obligatory sex and obligatory work. it seems to me that "the right to one's body" is best thought of as a cluster of rights. One of these rights is concerned with the body's physical integrity. Torture, assault, medical testing without informed consent, rape, all plausibly violate one's rights to a kind of physical integrity; but this isn't simple, for in cases of fatal epidemics, it is permissible, I think, to coerce me to be immunized or quarantined if I carry the deady disease and am likely to infect others. Some would argue that such a right to bodily integrity is basic; others would ground it in more basic moral considerations (self-ownership perhaps, autonomy, etc).

Depending on how one understands this right to bodily integrity, it may be possible to draw a line between sex and work. Forcing someone to work (not in a chain gang, but through threat of fines, say) isn't a violation of the body in a way that the torture, rape, etc. are. So it seems that unwanted sex is more a violation of bodily integrity than unwanted work; a lot will depend on a consideration of particular cases, though. If the underlying moral value is autonomy, however, then it might be that coerced work does violate the self in a way comparable to coerced sex or torture. One potential difference even here, though, is that in coerced sex and torture one is typically not acting autonomously, but in work, even work one is forced to perform, one is autonomous (?!). So even those who take autonomy to the basic moral good may have reason to distinguish the cases.

But second, we might want to ask what sorts of rights are relevant to work and the property which accrues from work. Here again, I'm inclined to say that there is a cluster of relevant rights. Some have argued that ownership rights include a right to "use, abuse, exclude, alienate, benefit" (Josh Cohen). To say that I own my labor is to say that I have a right to control it (use, abuse, exclude, alienate) and benefit from it. There are also degrees of benefit, so to fully own my labor might be to have the full set of control rights, plus the right to maximal benefit from my labor. But it isn't clear that one has full ownership in one's labor. For example, those who believe that one cannot sell oneself into slavery restrict the set of control rights; those who believe in taxation restrict the benefit rights.

There seem to be a variety of rationales for alimony laws, but the question posed seems to be concerned with whether it is legitimate to "force people to do work they don't want to do". If individuals continue to work in the jobs they had while married and are simply "taxed" some percentage for alimony, this would seem to require only a limitation on maximal benefit, for which there is only a weak case anyway (or so I think, not being a Libertarian). But this doesn't seem to be the scenario envisioned. Rather, the case under consideration seems to be one in which the wealthier party wants to live a simpler life and is prevented from doing so because of the need to cover alimony. I do think this would potentially be problematic (depending on the details of the case), because of the control rights that come with ownership of one's labor. But it is also my understanding that this is exactly the sort of thing that is negotiated in an ongoing way in divorce court.

What the question suggests, however, is that there may be a better way to think about rights to one's body in terms of a cluster of ownership rights like the rights to one's labor and one's property. But then I think the case of obligatory sex and obligatory work may compromise different elements of the cluster, so may have different moral implications.

For more on ownership rights, see Josh Cohen's lectures on Nozick/Libertarianism through MIT's Open Courseware:
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Political-Science/17-01JSpring-2006/LectureNotes/index.htm

Part of what you're asking is a social science question: taboos against public nudity are pretty common (though not universal). How come? What's the best psychological or anthropological or perhaps even evolutionary explanation? Not being a social scientist, all I could do is speculate. The blindingly obvious thought it that it has something to do with sex, which is what I take you to be suggesting, though exactly what it has to do with sex is harder to say.

If I were going to try to sort this out, I would probably turn to anthropology. Different cultures seem to have different attitudes toward nudity, and perhaps the anthropologists have some light to shed on all this. It's clear that societies with more relaxed attitudes toward nudity aren't morally defective on that account, but it would take some arguing to show that societies with a more modest outlook (ours, for example) are morally better for that reason.

Here's another thought. Fantasies about others' bodies are exciting for some people. But if all our fantasies were routinely fulfilled, they would cease to be exciting. Whether they're arbitrary or not, taboos can actually be a source of pleasure. Someone who wishes for widespread public nudity might not be so happy if they actually got their wish.

In any case, I'll have to confess that I'm an exception to your "deep down" speculation. I haven't the slightest desire to belong to a society where nudity is the norm. There are plenty of bodies I have no interest in seeing, plenty of furniture I'd prefer not to sit on bare-bottomed, and plenty of insects, pointy objects and ultra-violet photons I'd like to avoid.

It's hard to believe that prostitution, as such, is wrong. There would seem to be cases in which this could be an unobjectionable voluntary exchange of services in which both parties are free to make the exchange. In such cases, it's not clear why engaging (or serving as) a prostitute would be any more objectionable than engaging (or serving as) a massage therapist. If so, there could be morally permissible cases of prostitution.

But, of course, many cases are not like this. In many places in the world, many prostitutes are forced into sexual slavery, against their will, at a young age. Even where prostitutes were not forced by others into prostitution, many choose prostitution out of economic necessity, as someone might choose to sell a kidney out of economic necessity. Many who choose prostitution find themslves working for pimps that are abusive and don't allow easy exit from the profession. In conditions such as these, the sellers of sex may not be acting freely or, if freely, with a fair opportunity to do otherwise. If so, there may be reasons not to purchase sex from such sellers. And, of course, there are often moral problems on the buyer's side too. Many consumers of prostitution are, like Eliot Spitzer, married or in otherwise monogamous relationships. In such cases, prostitution contributes to infidelity, which, I assume, is a morally bad thing.

So even if prostitution can be morally okay, it often isn't. This could be relevant to the policy question, which you do not ask, about whether prostitution should be legal and, if so, under what conditions. Of course, the fact that something can be done badly doesn't always mean that it should be forbidden. So the fact that sometimes prostitution is morally problematic doesn't mean that it should always be criminalized. Regulation is always an alternative to prohibition. But if moral problems attending an otherwise innocent transaction are common or systematic enough, this could be a reason for forbidding some or all sex trade, even if such a prohibition would capture some innocent transactions within its net. But that's a big and difficult policy debate.

Whether an act is moral or immoral will vary depending on the moral system that's assumed. For example, some people think morality is matter of doing one's duty, while others think it is a matter of the best overall consequences, or of building a virtuous character, and so on. I'm not suggesting that all of these moral systems are equal, but they do lead to different answers, and which system is better is a different question (a meta-ethical question) than whether a given act is moral or immoral.

That being said, most moral systems would recommend the husband in this scenario not tell his wife. Confession may be good for the soul, but it's not an end in itself. It's a means to something else of moral worth: duty to God, perhaps, or character-building, or good consequences. In the absence of these ends, confession seems to be a rather selfish act.

One consideration in assessing the morality of this confession would surely be whether the wife ought to know: does she have a right to this information? Is it a right she would waive, given the chance? Is she more wronged by the act itself, by having to face the act, or by not having the information she needs to make a decision about continuing the marriage -- or about her own health-care needs, given the prevalance of HIV and other disease?

Another consideration suggests itself from the scenario you draw, in which the husband's act seems not to have been a fully autonomous one. Most moral systems don't ascribe full responsibility (and therefore shame) unless the act is done deliberately and with full awareness. He may be responsible (and therefore shamed) for getting himself drunk in a vulnerable situation, but not necessarily for the act that followed.

As a married woman with a particular view of marriage (who happens to make a living teaching ethics), I personally would want to be told. I would be devastated, yes, but I would be more devastated to have my marriage supported by a false understanding. We'd work through it.

I can well imagine someone else might disagree.