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Journal Article
Moral Dilemmas—An Introduction
2020
Overview
We should be struck by the title of our panel, \"moral dilemmas.\" At first sight it should seem odd that discussion of a particular disease lends itself to worry about moral dilemmas. After all, we usually expect that the only issue about a disease is medical: how to treat it. But as we know all too keenly, AIDS is no ordinary disease; it is not even an ordinary fatal disease. It is, rather, a disease that is contracted because of two kinds of intense pleasure: sex and drugs. This fact, by itself, would guarantee that society would take either a puritanical or a prurient interest in the disease and thus infect discussion of it with all sorts of nonmedical considerations. Whenever pleasures figure, one can also be sure that religious ideologists will take their pleasure in denouncing pleasure, and find an even greater pleasure in the fact that pleasures of a certain sort can lead to premature death. The height of religious inanity was reached by a Catholic spokesman, who said (as quoted by Robert Suro in the New York Times), that the church could not condone the public provision of condoms because the greatest physical harm is less important than the smallest moral harm. (This inanity, by the way, has its sources in the past, and can count Cardinal Newman as one of its authorities.) Not all the religions reach this height, but many climb quite far. The subject of AIDS, if it does nothing else, exposes the intimate connection between religion and sex (to leave aside drugs). There is something almost uncanny in the devious ways by which religion despises sex, guards it, inflames it, contorts it, sullies it, and sanctifies it. In some moods one may think that sex is all that religion is about.
Publisher
Johns Hopkins University Press
Subject
