Zoophilia Is Morally Permissible

Bensto, F. Zoophilia Is Morally Permissible. Journal of Controversial Ideas (PDF)

As one of our most deeply entrenched social taboos, zoophilia is widely considered to be wrong and having sex with animals is illegal in many countries. In this article, I would like to go against this de facto consensus and argue that zoophilia is morally permissible. This would have major implications for how we legally and socially deal with zoophilia.

The introduction below is copied from the source article to describe the scope and nature of the research. The full PDF document is available at right.

Introduction

Sex with animals is a powerful social taboo that exposes its practitioners to utmost indignation and stigma. Zoophilia is one of the few sexual orientations (along with, for example, necrophilia or pedophilia) that remain off-limits and have been left aside from the sexual liberation movement in the past fifty years. I would like to argue that this is a mistake. There is in fact nothing wrong with having sex with animals: it is not an inherently problematic sexual practice. Given the sheer outrage that the mere mention of zoophilia triggers in many people, we might expect the case for its permissibility to be a hard sell and my claims to be modest and tentative. This is not so: not only do I think that zoophilia is morally permissible, but I also think that the case in its favor is rather straightforward, so that it should be the default position within many philosophical quarters. This makes it all the more surprising that no ambitious and explicit defense of it has been published so far.

I start in Section 1 by clarifying what is meant by zoophilia. In Section 2, I introduce the debate over the permissibility of zoophilia. In Sections 3 and 4, I address the questions of whether zoophilia is harmful and whether animals can consent to sex with humans. In Section 5, I tease out some important implications.

Metadata

• Submitted: March 23, 2023
• Accepted: September 24, 2023
• Published: October 31, 2023