Introduction and Summary

The purpose of his project is to confront an important deficiency in sexual education for the youth. It expects to confront the fact that ethics has to a large extent been left aside or not given proper attention for the design of guidelines for sexual education, nor have values been given due priority.

The central objective of this project is, in effect, to educe and cultivate ethics for sexual education, and its redesign from an integrated, not fragmented perspective.

Values are necessary for adolescents to develop a healthy sexuality, for them to be able to establish healthier and wholesome relationships with their peers and with themselves, and for them to achieve a healthy and joyful sexual maturity. The lack of such perspective has created problems for sexual education as now imparted, and created difficulties and contradictions.

Often parents resent and resist sexual education to be imparted to their children for they fear it might actually increase premature sexual activity, fearing that the open information given, related to contraceptives in particular, or those related to the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases, may actually prematurely stimulate rather than postpone the sexual initiation of their children. And they might be right. There is also opposition from the Catholic Church and other religious denominations due to fears of inflicting moral damage to youngsters, though sometimes the church may actually exaggerate its own fear of sexuality itself.

I am certainly concerned about whether it is really possible or not to open a space for ethical sexual education in schools. It is not an easy matter. The educators in charge are people that, themselves, come from homes where the complex paths of psycho affective behaviour were often dysfunctional, thus it may well happen that they themselves are sexually wounded persons (apart from the many other wounds that they may have suffered in their life’s). Thus they may have developed their values seriously affected by their primary vacuums and affective confusions, plus several cognitive mistakes about what it involves a fulfilling sexuality. They could feel very confused when confronting the contradictions among their personal universe and the restrictive preaching of “good” sexual behaviour that they themselves find difficult to uphold in practice. This contradiction is familiar to us all, to a major or lesser degree, for we have all repeatedly heard such preaching as litanies, generation after generation, perhaps making some progress, but in an equally fragmented way. There is a danger of transmitting anti-values to children when educating them, as a consequence of the traumas and the insults suffered by their mentors. That is why I propose that when training the trainers, the educators, and in particular the educators of the educators, we must provide the healing and repairing experiences that may at least provide tools and energies for a healthy containment of their sexuality, even if not solving the real problems of these people to whom we entrust our children’s education. Without such precondition, sexual education itself wouldn’t be ethical.

I have designed this project in order to address this subject of ethical sexual education. After a brief definition of the subject (Section 2), and after an explicit description of its objectives (Section 3), I began a broad justification of the project examining the present problems of sexual education (Section 4). Then, I make a more or less detailed description of the theoretical foundations of my proposals, for the novelty of the approach demands a particularly rigorous and well explained support (Section 5).

I begin with a definition of ethics which in fact gets clarified as the theoretical discussion unfolds. What characterizes this effort is that I try to examine the issue of ethical sexual education following the same path I would pursue in dealing in any other space: from an essentially integrative, non fragmented, ethical perspective. I put special emphasis in the recognition of a biological foundation of ethics, and, in particular, of its emergence as part of the evolutionary process of life, because such perspective has been neglected.

The point of view that I endorse does not reduce ethics to its “natural” expression, but forces me to acknowledge a natural foundation for ethics. If ethics emerged simply from the rational domain, excluding the biological processes, it would beg the question as to where does rationality stems from if not from a living sentient being capable of having emotions, of thinking, as the product of an evolving “natural” biology. We cannot separate nature from the rational realm. There are some people that would prefer to consider ethics as a divine revelation, yet, if there is not an intelligent and sentient nature to receive such revelation that would not be possible either. Such is the integrative position I hold, a not fragmented vision of life and of ourselves.

The ancient separation between mind and body as separate “substances” finds its opposite view, as with Spinoza in the XVIIth Century, in the integrated, non fragmented concept, dualist only in terms of “aspects” but not as fundamentally separate “substances”.

Concepts, theory of knowledge, logic itself, and obviously ethics, must derivate from the development of natural and spiritual life, and must not stand only in terms of self coherence, of the coherence of a concept with itself or with another concept.