The Ability to Choose: Fidelity and Double Standards

          While I agree to Scruton’s more traditional view on sexual morality, it fails to thoroughly explain to what degree fidelity is important to the double standard that exists in many cultures between females and males concerning the ability to choose sexual partners. According to Scruton,

“The personal and the sexual can become divorced in many ways. The task of sexual morality is to unite them, to sustain thereby the intentionality of desire, and to prepare the individual for exotic love. Sexual morality is the morality of embodiment…”  -Scruton

        This tells me that there are divides that sexual morality helps bring together by means of intentional desire which prepares the individual for exotic love; all of which is meant to morally unite the individual and their body. This seems to assume that every person is able to choose their desired partner freely without stigmatization. If one can not choose a desired partner and is with one whom is undesirable how can that person fulfill this moral embodiment? Many cultures tend to have arranged marriages, polygamy, and divorcing stigmas in which this double standard and the idea of fidelity come into play. There are arranged marriages, for example, where the couple is forced into wedlock and sometimes they are lucky and the arrangement turns out well where both parties desire each other. However is it morally permissible to still have sex in a case where only one feels desire or neither desire one another? Does their sex then become immoral if they are having sex without the desire for one another thus unable to obtain the ability to unite with their own bodies, or is it more immoral to choose against fidelity and seek other partners?   Other situations include polygamy where males are more popularly known to be the partner that has many wives. Additionally, males are often seen with the power to pick and choose whom they desire. Here stands the double standard between males and females where the woman is unable to decide to increase and /or choose her desired partners without being stigmatized for it. Examples of this can occur if the man who was arranged to be married to the woman whom he has no desire for, decides later to get a divorce. In many cultures this is not looked down upon, but as soon as a female chooses to do this, she is scrutinized for her actions and her inability to make it work.            

     Because Scruton barely touched on this subject and the relationship between fidelity and the double standard among males and females, I cannot predict his argument for this. He may argue against and say that virtue is a matter of degree and a virtuous person must find to what degree their action is virtuous. In which case I would argue back that this makes the double standard morally permissible in itself where the degree of which one is virtuous is different for a female than for a male. Or he could argue for the female and say that there should be no reason to look down upon her if “the prime focus of sexual morality is not the attitude of others but the attitude to one’s own body and its uses”- Scruton.   In which case I would agree but, overall his more traditional view on sexual morality fails to thoroughly explain to what degree fidelity is important to the double standard that exists in many cultures between females and males concerning the ability to choose sexual partners.