David Bather Woods. Forthcoming in Schopenhauer’s Moral Philosophy, Patrick Hassan (ed.

), Routledge

Schopenhauer’s Sexual Ethics

Abstract
This chapter examines the ethical matters that arise from Schopenhauer’s discussions of
sexual love and sexual practices. It presents Schopenhauer’s remarks on “pederasty”, among
other “unnatural lusts”, and attempts to disentangle Schopenhauer’s judgements on these
practices from the principles that guide them. It considers these practices in the light of
Schopenhauer’s ethics of asceticism and his ethics of compassion and concludes that
Schopenhauer’s objections to them are not always moral in nature, strictly speaking, and
where they are moral, they are not always based on the “unnaturalness” of the practices, but
rather the harm he supposed they may cause.

1. Introduction

Much of Schopenhauer’s thinking about sex is nonsense. Take for example his theory that the
will or character is inherited from the father and intellect from the mother (WWR 2 552). It
didn’t come from nowhere – dubious theories of hereditary intelligence, even specifically
matrilinear ones, were in the air in early evolutionary science – but it’s convenient for
Schopenhauer that his own father was an industrious businessman, and his mother a
celebrated writer in her day. Charitably, his willingness to associate mothers with intelligence
might look like a reversal of his infamous misogyny, but, as one critic exclaims, ‘no! The
intellect, remember, is secondary and subservient to the will’ (von Tevenar 2012: 153).
On the other hand, Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of sexual love has been justifiably
praised for its ‘stunning originality’, as ‘path-breaking’ and a ‘major moment’ (May 2011). It
came to the attention of Charles Darwin, who quotes Schopenhauer in the revised and
augmented edition of The Descent of Man (Darwin 1889: 586), and made an impression on
D. H. Lawrence, who in 1908 annotated a copy of Schopenhauer’s chapter Metaphysik der
Geschlechtsliebe translated by Mrs. Rudolf Dirck with an omission of the word ‘sexual’ from
the title as ‘The Metaphysics of Love’ (Brunsdale 1978: 120). The core of this metaphysics is
summarized in one line: ‘All instances of love … are rooted solely in the sex drive’ (WWR 2
549). It’s thoroughly unromantic, and yet it still explains the urgency and seriousness of all
romantic matters. No lesser task than the continuation of the species is at stake, and the full
force of this collective task is channelled through mere individuals. Schopenhauer
characterises it as ‘blunt realism’ (WWR 2 552). In fact, it offers two distinct but compatible
kinds of realism: realism as opposed to idealism (the ideals of love are a fiction, and indeed
are the subject matter of much fiction) and realism as opposed to anti-realism (love itself, as
the all-encompassing sex drive, is no fiction).

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Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of sexual love is given a chapter-length presentation in

The World as Will and Representation (Chapter 44). Ethical matters do bubble to the surface,
and certainly there is something instructive about Schopenhauer’s view. It explains, for
example, why otherwise unsuitable couples find themselves nevertheless pairing up: because
their suitability was decided at the level of species-interests, not their personal interests. This
is that blunt realism again, but here there may be something therapeutic about knowing it;
couples shouldn’t necessarily expect to get along with one another, and if they don’t get
along then they shouldn’t necessarily consider it their personal failure. And if they do want to
get along, they shouldn’t rely on romantic (that is, sexual) love alone. Instead, as
Schopenhauer points out, they should aim for a ‘friendship grounded in a harmony of
temperament’ (WWR 2 575). In ideal circumstances – and this is about as ideal
Schopenhauer gets on the matter – the foundation for this friendship will be the very same
combination of ‘mutually corresponding and complementing physical, moral and intellectual
qualities’ that makes their sexual union suitable in the eyes of the species.
Here there lies another, potentially more troubling, broadly ethical issue: throughout
Schopenhauer’s theory there is the assumption of an ideal for the human species, a ‘pure
presentation of the type’ (WWR 2 562), at which sexual partnerships unconsciously aim.
While he never spells it out in detail, the implication in some places is that this ideal is purely
to do with fitness for survival; he mentions, for instance, the risk that ‘the race would be too
weak to live long’ (WWR 2 563) were certain partnerships made or not made. But, as this
same language suggests, Schopenhauer’s ideal is also racialized. To our relief, his is not a
white supremacist racialization of the ideal human type; in fact, Schopenhauer considers
whiteness to be unnatural, claiming, strikingly, that ‘there is no white race’, that whiteness is
‘almost an abnormality’, and that in sexual love, ‘nature therefore is trying to revert to dark
hair and brown eyes, as the fundamental human type’ (WWR 2 564). Still, any notion of a
racial ideal for human beings calls for a cautious approach. I will not attempt to get to the
bottom of Schopenhauer’s views on race here.
Instead, I want to focus on the ethical issues raised in the appendix to Schopenhauer’s
chapter on the metaphysics of sexual love. In this appendix, Schopenhauer discusses at length
‘pederasty’ (Päderastie), that is, sexual intercourse of old men with young boys. It ends with
Schopenhauer claiming to have ‘defended and recommended pederasty’ (WWR 2 582), or to
be more precise – and this may be important – to have given his opponents ‘the opportunity
to slander me by saying’ (emphasis added) that he has done so. Before the appendix, in the
chapter itself, Schopenhauer mentions pederasty just once, as an example of how the
selection of an object of sexual satisfaction can be ‘misled’ by the sense of beauty, which
‘degenerates into a pederastic tendency’ (WWR 2 558). It is this remark that Schopenhauer
revisits and reviews in the appendix, which he added to the third and final edition of The
World as Will and Representation in 1859. He starts by partially reversing the judgment that
pederasty is ‘a misguided instinct’ (WWR 2 576) on the grounds that it is culturally and
historically ubiquitous: nothing that happens in every human society could be unnatural or a
mistake. Pederasty, Schopenhauer argues, must perform a natural function, and it is his aim in
the appendix to figure out what. Nevertheless, he is not prepared to admit that pederasty is
natural in every sense: it does not produce children, which, according to Schopenhauer, is the

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whole point of the sexual instinct. So, Schopenhauer settles for the following thesis:
pederasty is nature’s way of simultaneously satisfying the sex drive of those who are too
young to produce healthy offspring (boys) and those who are too old to do so (old men).
There is a lot here to unpack. Moreover, the appendix is not the only place where
Schopenhauer discusses pederasty in his published works. In On the Basis of Morals,
Schopenhauer brings up pederasty in conjunction with ‘onanism’ and ‘bestiality’, all of
which he classifies as instances of ‘unnatural lust’ (BM 132). We can take ‘unnatural’ here to
mean what it does in the appendix, that is, non-procreative, as it is a meaning that he assigns
to all three of these sexual acts. Schopenhauer does not doubt that they are rightly proscribed,
but he discusses whether the grounds on which they are proscribed are moral or merely
prudential in nature. He concludes that, of the three, only pederasty is a moral matter.
This leaves us with even more to unpack, but it also provides us with an opportunity.
In discussing the morals of what he calls unnatural lusts, Schopenhauer reveals something of
his stance on sexual ethics in general. In this chapter, I take the opportunity to disentangle
Schopenhauer’s sexual ethical principles from the conclusions he reaches by his application
of those principles to specific sexual acts. Although it still leaves a lot of nonsense in
Schopenhauer’s views on sex, I will conclude that, in the abstract, his general principles
regarding sexual conduct are defensible, and that, properly applied, they can even produce
defensible conclusions, though they are not conclusions that Schopenhauer himself drew.

2. Sex and Asceticism

Ultimately, none of us should be having any sex. To be more precise, each of us would be
better off (in some sense) were we to extinguish our sex drive and therefore not want to have
any sex. For it is a well-known part of Schopenhauer’s philosophy that all of us are creatures
driven by the will to life and that this is the source of our endless suffering. The sex drive is
exemplary in this respect: ‘sexual lust is the quintessence of the whole fraud of this noble
world … For it promises so unspeakably, infinitely and extravagantly much and then delivers
so pitifully little’ (PP 2 285). It is a chief source of ‘protracted suffering’ but only ‘brief joy’
(PP 2 266). Accordingly, just as the path to salvation is found through the elimination (in
some form) of the will to life, so the first step on that path is the elimination of the sex drive:
‘Voluntary, perfect chastity is the first step in asceticism or negation of the will to life’; the
acetic ‘does not will sexual satisfaction under any conditions’ (WWR 1 407). The body may
continue to manifest the sex drive in the form of genitalia, but the inner negation of the will
to life, starting with the sex drive, belies the body (WWR 1 407; WWR 1 430).
Ascetic chastity is not just a step towards personal salvation; it’s a step towards
human extinction, which in Schopenhauer’s view is not unwelcome. Without sexual need or
pleasure, according to Schopenhauer, it is hard to imagine why human beings would choose
to procreate at all. It would not appear to be a rational choice, assuming Schopenhauer’s
pessimism about the value of existence is true. ‘Would not everyone,’ he asks, ‘have so much

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compassion for the coming generation that he would rather spare it the burden of existence’?
(PP 2 270). To say the same thing from a different starting point, those who do indulge their
sex drive in a way that does lead to successful procreation condemn a new generation to the
same life of inevitable suffering and misery. As Jorge Luis Borges writes: ‘mirrors and
copulation are abominable, because they increase the number of men’.
One would assume, therefore, that procreation is the worst sexual offence in
Schopenhauer’s book, but no. Quite the opposite. Worse than procreative sex, for him, are
non-procreative sexual practices. This may be a bit surprising, given that procreation is the
necessary and sufficient condition for producing the next generation of sufferers, while non-
procreative sexual acts avert that catastrophe. But it isn’t so surprising, or at least nothing
rare: think of the difference in certain religious attitudes towards masturbation versus sex (or
gay sex versus straight sex, or simply attitudes towards contraception). Schopenhauer even
affirms the view that satisfying the sexual impulse is worse outside of wedlock (MN 1 276).
Schopenhauer is disappointingly unoriginal and conventional on issues like these, in fact –
except, perhaps, that he tries to put his own philosophical system behind these old views.
Take onanism for example. Schopenhauer couldn’t be clearer about what’s worse:
‘Onanism is far more blameworthy than natural sexual gratification’ (MN 1 309). The reason
he gives is that while (procreative) sexual gratification is ‘the most vehement affirmation of
life’, onanism is ‘merely the most vehement affirmation of the body’ (MN 1 309). In the case
of (procreative) sexual gratification, that is, something is affirmed that goes beyond
pleasuring oneself, namely future human existence. In the case of onanism, by contrast,
nothing but the self is affirmed. It is all stimulus and no motive (so the argument goes) and
therefore unbecoming of human life: ‘Man here behaves like a mere plant’ (MN 1 309).
These are admittedly early thoughts of Schopenhauer’s (manuscript notes from 1815),
but something similar is going on when he turns to pederasty – another form of non-
procreative sex – in the late works. In the appendix on pederasty to the chapter on the
metaphysics of sexual love, Schopenhauer’s penultimate remark is as follows: ‘The true,
final, and profound metaphysical reason why pederasty is reprehensible is that while the will
to life affirms itself in it, the result of this affirmation, which is to say the renewal of life, is
completely omitted, and it is this result that opens the path to redemption’ (WWR 2 582). In
Parerga and Paralipomena, Schopenhauer states the same argument in a general form before
applying it to the case of pederasty. He has just explained that procreation for its own sake –
that is, not for sexual pleasure but for producing offspring – would be ‘be a very dubious act,
morally speaking,’ precisely because it results in beings who are condemned to suffer and is
therefore ‘an act someone might even say relates to conception from mere sexual drive as
cold blooded premeditated murder relates to a death blow from rage’. He continues:

The damnability of all unnatural [i.e. non-procreative] sexual gratification is actually

based on the opposite ground, because through it the drive is gratified, hence the will
to life affirmed, but propagation is missing, which alone keeps open the possibility of
negation of the will. This explains why it is only with the onset of Christianity, whose
tendency is ascetic, that pederasty was recognized as a grave sin. (PP 2 286)

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In other words, while procreative sex without the sex drive is morally dubious (because once
the sex drive is out of the picture, we are left with what can only look like a malicious
motive), non-procreative sexual practices affirm the sex drive but without any procreation.
Each has given up on something – sex drive or procreation – but neither are asceticism,
which would give up on both. However, since extinguishing the sex drive is the first step
towards asceticism, procreation without the sex drive is at least closer to asceticism, while
non-procreative sexual practices, so long as they are indeed merely affirmations of the sex
drive, are further off, and here lies the argument for the latter being the worse of the two.
The early and the late versions of the argument are not exactly the same. In the early
version, procreative sexual gratification is given the relative distinction that unlike in non-
human lifeforms, the will is at least ‘excited through an external motive’ (MR 1 309). In the
late version, the fact of an external motive does not stop Schopenhauer from casting
aspersions on procreative sex – it almost makes it worse for being in some way calculated.
They share a stance, however, on what makes non-procreative sexual practices bad: such
practices, on Schopenhauer’s view, affirm the embodiment of the sex drive for its own sake.
And since the sex drive is the epitome of the will to life, these acts affirm the will to life for
its own sake, which is the exact opposite of the direction of travel towards salvation.
What about procreative sex that is done for the sake of sex and not procreation?
Surely, one might think, if affirming the sex drive for its own sake is bad, and procreating is
also bad (but maybe not as bad), then doing both is doubly bad, the worst of both worlds.
Schopenhauer even suggests that self-affirmation of the body is an element in all sexual
enjoyment, not just non-procreative sexual practices: ‘I have often said that sexual enjoyment
is the complete affirmation of life (in other words, agreement and harmony of the will with its
phenomenon, the body)’ (MN 1 315). He says, furthermore, that ‘satisfaction of the sexual
impulse is in itself obviously reprehensible since it is the strongest affirmation of life’ (MN 1
276). This would seem to cover any and all sexual satisfaction. But, in his metaphysics of
sexual love, Schopenhauer is clear that, unlike non-procreative sexual practices, procreative
sex never really happens just for the sake of sex. It may appear that way to the individual;
indeed, it must appear that way, since the individual would be unable to recognize the true
goal of procreative sex, namely the continued existence of the species in general, as their own
motive (unless the individual in question were morally dubious). The sexual instinct,
according to Schopenhauer, just is the presentation of the species’ goal as if it were the
individual’s own goal of pleasure and happiness (WWR 2 554–54). Though they are
unaware, what the individual affirms in themselves in procreative sex goes far beyond
themselves and far beyond sex.

3. Sex and Compassion

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There is another branch of Schopenhauer’s ethics in which sexual ethics also briefly appears:
his other-regarding ethics of compassion.
Compassion, for Schopenhauer, is ‘the sole genuine moral incentive’ (BM 197). All
and only actions moved by compassion are truly moral. To be moved by compassion is to be
moved by the incentive of improving another person’s wellbeing, as distinct from being
incentivized by one’s own wellbeing, on the one hand, which is egoism, or by worsening
another’s wellbeing, on the other, which is malice, both of which Schopenhauer classifies as
‘anti-moral powers’ (BM 204). Although genuine moral worth does not originate in
following maxims for Schopenhauer (BM 205), compassionate actions are accurately
described by the maxim: ‘Harm no one; rather help everyone to the extent that you can’ (BM
203). The two parts of this maxim correspond to the two compassionate virtues Schopenhauer
distinguishes: justice (Gerechtigkeit) and loving kindness (Menschenliebe, literally love of
humans, although famously Schopenhauer’s ethics of compassion extends to non-human
animals). Justice is compassion in the negative form of refraining from harming others,
whereas loving kindness is its positive form of helping others.
The kinds of harms listed by Schopenhauer from which the just person refrains are
various. They include not only physical pain but also theft, and mental injury ‘through
offence, worry, annoyance or slander’ (BM 205). They extend, furthermore, to ‘seeking the
satisfaction of my lusts at the cost of female individuals’ happiness in life, or from seducing
the wife of another, or from corrupting youngsters morally and physically by enticing them
into pederasty’ (BM 205). The latter set of example harms are notably sexual in nature. The
first two may be more connected than they appear at first. The idea of satisfying one’s lust at
the cost of someone else’s happiness might suggest, for example, some form of sexual
assault. However, consider Schopenhauer’s argument that sex outside of wedlock is ‘doubly
reprehensible because it is in addition the denial of another’s will, for the girl either directly
or indirectly is heading for disaster, and the man therefore satisfies his passion at the expense
of another’s happiness’ (MN 1 277). The wording is similar, and the thought may be the
same: what Schopenhauer may have in mind in the first example is the potentially harmful
consequences of sex from which women specifically may be protected by marriage to their
sexual partners. At Schopenhauer’s time of writing (and in some contexts to this day), these
consequences might include childrearing without additional parental support, and reputational
damage. The first two examples may be connected, then, by the issue of marriage.
The third example brings us back, once again, to the case of pederasty. This time
Schopenhauer specifies what he thinks is morally wrong with it, namely moral and physical
corruption. This is distinct from what he called the metaphysical reason why pederasty is
reprehensible, as found in the appendix to the metaphysics of sexual love, namely that in it
the will to life affirms itself in a non-procreative way.
But, as with his metaphysical view on pederasty, Schopenhauer’s moral view on
pederasty is the reversal of an earlier judgement. In the first, 1841 edition of The Two
Fundamental Problems of Ethics, the list of sexual harms given above does not include the
line about pederasty, but only the two not obviously connected remarks about the ethics of
marriage. The moral judgement of pederasty only appears in the second, 1860 edition. There

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is reason to think that this is because at the time of the 1841 edition, Schopenhauer did not
yet consider pederasty to be a moral matter at all. For in the 1860 edition, Schopenhauer
revises a whole passage from the 1841 edition on ‘the prohibition of unnatural lust’, which
includes ‘onanism’, ‘bestiality’, ‘sodomy’, and ‘pederasty’ (BM 132): in the 1841 edition, he
regards none of them as moral matters strictly speaking, but by the 1860 edition, he has
changed his mind and regards pederasty alone as a moral matter.
The context for this discussion of ‘unnatural’ (read: non-procreative) lusts is the
negative side of Schopenhauer’s moral philosophy (as distinct from the positive case he
makes for compassion as the basis of morality) in which he extensively criticizes Kant’s
legislative-imperatival form of ethics (BM 123–80). As part of this critique, Schopenhauer
dismisses the general idea of a duty to ourselves. He begins by distinguishing between two
kinds of duty to ourselves: duties of right, which we can understand as a duty not to harm
ourselves, and duties of love, which we can understand as a duty to help ourselves. He
dismisses duties of right to ourselves on the grounds that, on the one hand, what one does to
oneself is what one will, and, on the other, one is not harmed by what one wills (since to be
harmed just is for one’s will to be obstructed). He then dismisses duties of love to ourselves
on the grounds that we are already naturally inclined to help ourselves, so it cannot be the
object of a duty (BM 131–32). Schopenhauer proceeds to give examples of purported duties
to ourselves in order to demonstrate that they are not, in fact, moral duties, though he thinks
they might be rightly proscribed and prohibited on purely prudential grounds. One example is
suicide, which, he argues, there are no genuine moral motives against (except, perhaps, from
a standpoint higher than ‘the usual ethics’; see BM 132). The other examples of purported
duties to ourselves are the prohibitions against so-called unnatural lusts.
In the 1841 version, he follows through the line of argument he has set up so far: any
prohibition against these acts is not based on any moral duty to ourselves (nor to others). In
order for these to be considered moral matters on Schopenhauer’s own account of ethics,
‘which treats of the relationships between human beings,’ they must be traceable ‘in an
unforced manner to the concepts of justice and loving kindness together with their opposite’
(BM 132n.). But non-procreative sexual practices, according to the Schopenhauer of 1841,
neither violate justice nor, in themselves, are they malicious: that is, they do no harm to other
people. Schopenhauer extends this to pederasty, at this point, by appeal to a rule he has
already invoked in order to undermine the idea of duties of right to ourselves: no injury is
done to him who wills it. In other words, no harm is done by pederasty so long as it is done
by the will of both parties (so the argument of 1841 goes).
In the 1860 version, Schopenhauer backtracks. He continues to insist that there is no
well-founded moral prohibition against onanism, which is ‘chiefly a vice of childhood, and
combating it is much more a matter of dietetics than of ethics’ (BM 132). He insists that
bestiality, too, is not a moral matter: while it is ‘a wholly abnormal offence’, it is indeed so
abnormal that it is contrary to human nature, and so ‘speaks against itself and deters more
than any grounds of reason would be able to’ (BM 132). The argument here seems to be that
bestiality is so contrary to the human will that it is rarely willed, and therefore rarely a moral
matter, or when it is willed the reasons against it go deeper than mere morality. For instance,

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in the original 1841 version of the argument, Schopenhauer mentions that all these lusts, by
virtue of being ‘unnatural’, that is, non-procreative, are ‘offences against the species as such
the species through which and in which we have our being’ (BM 132n.) rather than offences
against other members of our species. (It’s mysterious, however, why Schopenhauer doesn’t
see bestiality as a genuinely moral offence against the non-human animal involved, given that
he extends his ethics of compassion to non-human animals.)
Pederasty, by contrast, is treated differently in the 1860 version. Contrary to his 1841
presentation of the argument, Schopenhauer states that pederasty does fall within ethics for
the following reason: ‘it infringes against justice, and the “no injury is done to him who wills
it” cannot be made to count against this – for the injustice lies in the seduction of the younger
and inexperienced party, who is physically and morally corrupted by it’ (BM 132). By 1860,
then, Schopenhauer no longer believes that willingness can cancel out the harm done by
pederasty. One of the harms he states here is the one also stated in a different part of the 1860
edition, as mentioned above: physical and moral corruption. However, here he pinpoints the
injustice more specifically to the seduction of young and inexperienced people into this state
of corruption. Bearing in mind the wider context of this argument – that is, Schopenhauer’s
rejection of moral duties to ourselves – his strategy seems to be to agree that pederasty is
morally wrong after all, but not because of any duty to ourselves, rather because it is an
other-regarding matter (unlike, say, onanism) and the other party is harmed by it.

4. Sexual Ethical Principles

From Schopenhauer’s moral judgements about sexual practices, we can extract some
principles for sexual ethics. The first and primary one is a good start: sexual practices that
harm others are morally prohibited. The second is quite good as far as it goes: sexual
practices that do not harm others are not morally prohibited.
There is an argument to be had over whether and to what extent the second principle
admits exceptions or requires qualifications. The possible exceptions that troubled
Schopenhauer – the ‘unnatural lusts’ that do not harm others but may seem morally
prohibited – may not be the same as the ones that might trouble us. Schopenhauer’s way of
denying these exceptions is to argue that any repulsion people might feel towards sexual
practices that do not harm others – either self-regarding sexual practices or other-regarding
practices where the other party is willing – is not based on anything moral, but either
prudential reasons or supposedly deeper metaphysical reasons to do with the interests of the
species. We today, however, may be less concerned about, say, onanism, and have no strong
moral feelings about it to explain away. Whereas, we may be more concerned about
genuinely self-destructive sexual practices – practices, for example, which may involve or
result in inflicting significant bodily or psychological harm upon oneself. Instead of
explaining these away by reference to prudential reasons (including medical reasons) or
metaphysical reasons, some may want to review Schopenhauer’s arguments against duties to

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ourselves; they may want to argue that we do have a moral duty to not harm ourselves and/or
a duty to love ourselves, and these duties prohibit those practices. Others may want to follow
Schopenhauer’s lead in arguing that even here the will has the final word: if someone has
acted this way, then they have willed this way, and they cannot be harmed by achieving
whatever they have willed (even if they can be damaged or destroyed by it). One side of the
argument validates our feelings of apparently moral concern for people who perform self-
destructive acts, while the other respects that what someone capable of deciding for
themselves chooses to do is none of our business, morally speaking, so long as they aren’t
hurting anyone else.
There is, then, a third principle to consider: willingness is sufficient to neutralize the
harm in any sexual practice. In other words, voluntary sexual practices are harmless.
Depending on whether we accept this third principle or not, the second one is more or less
defeasible. If we do accept it, then mere volition can render any sexual practice harmless and
therefore permissible. If we do not accept it, then volition alone is not enough. Schopenhauer
does accept the principle, but to understand the complexity of the issue better, it’s worth
returning to Schopenhauer’s reversal of his judgement on pederasty.
For it may appear that Schopenhauer does not accept the principle in the end. He may
appear to realize that in the case of pederasty, the willingness of both parties is not sufficient
to neutralize the harm. He says, after all, that ‘the “no injury is done to him who wills it”
cannot be made to count against’ the injustice of pederasty. This is precisely the point he
changed his mind about between 1841 and 1860. But it would be incorrect to read
Schopenhauer as claiming that willingness is insufficient to neutralize harm in this (or any)
case. Within Schopenhauer’s philosophy, willingness should always be sufficient; ‘no injury
is done to him who wills it’ is always true. Since being harmed or injured just is the denial of
one’s will for Schopenhauer, one cannot be harmed or injured by achieving what one wills.
One may be physically or psychologically damaged by what one wills, of course, but the
point is that this damage would not be unjust. In other words, then, if something done to
someone is willed by them, there is no injustice in the first place for their will to count
against. Therefore, when Schopenhauer says pederasty is an injustice and willingness cannot
be made to count against it, he must mean that, in fact, the harmed party does not will it.
Why is this so? Once again it is important to consider Schopenhauer’s wording: ‘for
the injustice lies in the seduction of the younger and inexperienced party, who is physically
and morally corrupted by it.’ Youth and inexperience seem to play an important role.
Certainly, the harmed party is the younger and inexperienced one, and it is they who cannot
will it. Is the point that the young cannot will any sexual practices involving other parties? On
some definition of willing and the young (e.g. consent and being below the legal age of
consent, respectively), this would be a good principle. Unfortunately, we cannot simply
assume that Schopenhauer has something like this in mind. Instead, I want to draw attention
to the role that ‘seduction’ (Verführung) might play in his claim.
An interesting feature of Schopenhauer’s moral theory is that ‘cunning’ (List) is as
much as form of compulsion as ‘force’ (Gewalt). The difference between them – that one
exploits the law of motivation while the other the law of physical causality – does not make a

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moral difference in Schopenhauer’s eyes (BM 212). Cunning works by presenting false
motives to the intellect, which could include all kinds of subterfuge, including tricks, half-
truths and omission of information, although Schopenhauer focuses on a paradigm case: lies.
One usually has an unjust motive for lying, according to Schopenhauer: one doesn’t just want
to disinform someone for the sake of disinforming them (why bother?) but for that
disinformation to motivate them to act in a way that is favourable to you but not to them
(otherwise, why lie?). In other words, in practice, lying always go against someone’s will,
and usually unjustly so. He deduces that a coerced promise is not binding, which, given that
cunning itself is a form of coercion, would include promises made under false pretences as
much as promises made under force.
Applying this thinking to Schopenhauer’s judgement on pederasty, the reason why the
younger and inexperienced party cannot will pederasty in a way that would neutralize any
harm, even in circumstances where they appear to will it (e.g. expressing verbal consent),
may be that their willing would be under false pretences. This may be what Schopenhauer has
in mind when he says specifically that the injustice lies in their seduction. It would explain
why Schopenhauer adds that the younger and inexperienced party is ‘physically and morally
corrupted’ by it without at that point saying that the injustice lies in the physical and moral
corruption itself: it may well be that the physical and moral corruption is a harm inflicted on
the younger and inexperienced party by the older and experienced party, but there is another
harm prior to that harm, namely the cunning used to compel the younger and inexperienced
party into that corruption. The fact that cunning is involved may not be unrelated to the fact
that it is used against a younger and inexperienced party: by virtue of being younger and
inexperienced, they are not in a position to understand what they are getting into, and more
specifically that what they are getting into may go against their will.
This might be a completely wrong way to take Schopenhauer’s point. Nevertheless,
there’s a lesson to be learned about how willingness to a sexual practice is achieved and,
importantly, how it is not. On pain of committing an injustice that is morally equivalent to
physical coercion into a sexual practice, the will must not be disinformed. I have proposed
that Schopenhauer eventually passes judgement on pederasty on the grounds that the younger
and inexperienced party does not really will the practice (rather than willing it but this not
being sufficient) because their will is disinformed. But willingness could fail in this way in
contexts other than youth and inexperience. We have here the foundation for a general ethics
of seduction based on the insight that just because seduction goes through the law of
motivation rather than that of physical causality, it is no less possible for it to be misused as a
form of coercion. To return to a remark quoted earlier, Schopenhauer may have cunning in
mind when he refers to the harm of ‘seducing [verführen] the wife of another’ (although
given the depth of Schopenhauer’s misogyny, one fears he has in mind offences against
another man’s property). To take a fictional example that fits this harm, in some versions of
the story of Don Juan, he succeeds by impersonating the lover of the woman he is seducing.
With this seduction technique – if you can call it that – the Don uses cunning in a way that
everyone should agree is coercive and wrong. This example is extreme, but we should be
vigilant for subtler ways in which the will is misled by various forms of seductive cunning.

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5. Conclusion

Schopenhauer often condemns sexual practices he calls ‘unnatural’, but I have argued that he
does not always condemn them for their unnaturalness. Some of them, for example onanism,
he does not condemn as morally wrong at all, although they might still be condemned for
non-moral reasons. Others, for example pederasty, he does condemn as morally wrong, but
not because it he thinks it’s unnatural, rather because he thinks it causes harm. I have read
Schopenhauer’s use of ‘unnatural’ as meaning non-procreative, which in the light of his
views about the value of existence might have appeared to Schopenhauer as a virtue not a
vice. But here lies the only broadly ethical reason why Schopenhauer opposes ‘unnatural’
sexual practices which is genuinely related to their unnaturalness: engaging in sexual
practices independently of the instinct to procreate is, according to Schopenhauer, a pure
affirmation of the sex drive, which is itself the quintessence of the will to life.
Writing about Schopenhauer’s views on these matters is made difficult by his use of
language that to us is archaic – onanism, sodomy, pederasty. It’s hard to decipher exactly
what he means by these terms not just because of their connotations but also their ambiguity.
For example, by onanism he might have meant masturbation or coitus interruptus (I’ve
assumed he meant masturbation). By sodomy he might have meant anal sex or gay sex. By
bestiality he might have meant sex between humans and animals, or just any sexual practice
that is deemed to be depraved (in the 1841 version of the passage on the ‘unnatural lusts’,
Schopenhauer lists onanism, sodomy and pederasty, but in the 1860 version he lists onanism,
bestiality and pederasty). He conflates pederasty with simply being gay. For the most part he
uses the word Päderastie but in the same breath he speaks of ‘male homosexuality’ (WWR 2
577) or male love (Männerliebschaft). One commentator wrongly takes the entire appendix
on pederasty simply to be ‘about male homosexuality’ (Magee 1997: 347).
It will be good to be clear: pederasty and gayness are not to be confused. Moreover,
whether he intended it or not, the reasons for Schopenhauer’s moral judgement on pederasty
do not extend to gay relationships. Schopenhauer’s judgement on pederasty crucially depends
on a younger (much younger) and inexperienced party who is thereby not in a position to give
informed voluntary consent; this is not a feature of gay relationships. There is no reason why
gay relationships cannot be perfectly in keeping with the principles of sexual ethics that I
have disentangled from Schopenhauer’s judgments on specific sexual practices.
This represents a larger missed opportunity on Schopenhauer’s part. The only risk he
expresses a willingness to take is giving his opponents the opportunity to slander him for
finding some grounds for defending pederasty (while at the same time judging it immoral
anyway). But given his basic principles – that all and only sexual practices that cause harm to
others are morally prohibited, and that informed voluntary consent is sufficient to neutralize

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any harm – Schopenhauer has the makings of a case to resist over-moralizing about sexual
practices where no one gets hurt, a wholly unpuritanical sexual ethics.*

References

Works by Schopenhauer
Sämtliche Werke, 4th ed., 7 vols., ed. Arthur Hübscher. Mannheim: F. A. Brockhaus, 1988.
Prize Essay on the Basis of Morals [BM], in The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics,
trans. Christopher Janaway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Parerga and Paralipomena vol. 2 [PP 2], trans. Adrian Del Caro and Christopher Janaway.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
The World as Will and Representation [WWR], 2 vols., trans. Judith Norman, Alistair
Welchman, and Christopher Janaway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2010/2018.

Other works
Brunsdale, Mitzi M. (1978). ‘The Effect of Mrs. Rudolf Dircks' Translation of
Schopenhauer’s “The Metaphysics of Love” on D. H. Lawrence's Early Fiction’. Rocky
Mountain Review of Language and Literature, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Spring, 1978): 120–129.
Darwin, Charles (1879). The Descent of Man, and Selections in Relation to Sex. New York:
D. Appleton and Company.
Magee, Bryan (1997). The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, Revised Edition. Oxford: Oxford
University press.
May, Simon (2011). Love: A History. London: Yale University Press.
Tevenar, Gudrun von (2012). ‘Schopenhauer on Sex, Love and Emotions’. In B.
Vandenabeele (ed.), A Companion to Schopenhauer. Chicester: Wiley-Blackwell.

* My thanks to Patrick Hassan for several helpful suggestions.

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