[marginalium]

On zoophilia

12 Jun 2025

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“only in very recent years that some people have begun to undermine the absolute prohibition on zoosexuality. Are their arguments dangerous, perverted, or simply wrongheaded? … Do they have a ‘paraphilia’ … Or are they just normal people who happen to have a minority sexual orientation? Given the fraught debates about consent in human-on-human sexual encounters, it is worth asking whether nonhuman animals can ever consent to libidinal relations with humans”

Interesting, but more interesting is Bourke’s comments about the strangeness of our moral opposition to this. Sex with animals is very untrendy, we’re happy in the main to tacitly endorse factory farming and the conditions that come with it. You could rationalise this by saying some variation of “we need to eat, we don’t need to have sex with animals”. But I think this is a moral dumbfounding thing.

Anthologies: Gratification, Betterment, Thought Architecture, On Thinking and Reasoning, Moral Terrain

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