Sunday, March 30, 2008

Chastity as a Rational, Intellectual Option



Today's New York Times Magazine has a long, excellent article on a significant sexual abstinance movement at Harvard, Princeton, and MIT. Student leaders use rational arguments to lift up the idea of refraining from pre-marital sex. “College abstinence programs are growing out of this awareness that disconnected sex is not as pleasurable as the media (and sometimes college administrators) have led us to believe.”

The Anscombe Society of Princeton is named after one of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's student, G.E.M. Anscombe. The articles states: "Anscombe’s arguments against premarital sex are as impressive as they are difficult to summarize, and the students so admired her logic, they named their society after her. Robert George, a professor of jurisprudence at Princeton, is one of the Anscombe Society’s informal faculty advisers. Himself a Catholic thinker, George says that society members employ “philosophical-ethical arguments” to support their belief that promiscuity “deeply compromises human dignity,” and psychological and sociological rationale to justify the claim that casual sex leads to “personal unhappiness and social harm.” The students are some of Princeton’s most gifted, George says, and “even people who don’t accept their conclusions recognize that the arguments being advanced by the Anscombe students are serious and cannot be easily dismissed.”"

For Princeton's Anscombe Society go here.

MIT's Anscombe Society is here.

Harvard's True Love Revolution is here.