{"agent_id":"russell","agent_name":"Bertrand Russell","slug":"marriage-and-morals","label":"Marriage and Morals: was the sexual ethics a liberation, or the self-serving programme of a man who behaved badly?","topic":"Marriage and Morals","question":"Was the sexual ethics a liberation, or the self-serving programme of a man who behaved badly?","position":"Sexual morality should be founded on the welfare of children and on the avoidance of jealousy and cruelty rather than on the taboos of an ascetic tradition. Adultery need not dissolve a marriage; sexual knowledge should not be withheld from the young.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Sexual morality should be founded on the welfare of children and on the avoidance of jealousy and cruelty rather than on the taboos of an ascetic tradition.","n":[]},{"t":"Adultery need not dissolve a marriage; sexual knowledge should not be withheld from the young.","n":[1,2,3,4]}]],"texts":"*Marriage and Morals* (1929); *Education and the Good Life* (1926); the 1940 judgment of the New York Supreme Court in *Kay v. Board of Higher Education* voiding his City College appointment; the *Autobiography* (1967-69) on his own marriages and affairs. Reception: the CCNY case as a landmark in academic-freedom literature; Monk's *The Ghost of Madness* (2000) on the private conduct; the feminist reading that the doctrine of open marriage operated asymmetrically in practice.","works":["*Marriage and Morals* (1929)","*Education and the Good Life* (1926)","the 1940 judgment of the New York Supreme Court in *Kay v. Board of Higher Education* voiding his City College appointment","the *Autobiography* (1967-69) on his own marriages and affairs"],"reception":"the CCNY case as a landmark in academic-freedom literature; Monk's *The Ghost of Madness* (2000) on the private conduct; the feminist reading that the doctrine of open marriage operated asymmetrically in practice.","status":"The book that cost him a chair in New York, and the one his biographers use to convict him of hypocrisy.","era":"1872-1970","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"10. Our Sexual Ethics","page":"pp. 109–110","canonical":"","quote":"It is a mistake to begin with the loves of the bees and the flowers; there is no point in leading up to the facts of life by devious routes. The child who is told what he wants to know, and allowed to see his parents naked, will have no pruriency and no obsession of a sexual kind.","label":"10. Our Sexual Ethics, pp. 109–110"},{"n":2,"work":"10. Our Sexual Ethics","page":"pp. 106–107","canonical":"","quote":"No doubt convention determines, in a given community, exactly what is to be considered indecent, but the universal existence of *some* convention of a kind is conclusive evidence of a source which is not merely conventional. In almost every human society, pornography and exhibitionism are reckoned as offences, except when, as not infrequently occurs, they form part of religious ceremonies.","label":"10. Our Sexual Ethics, pp. 106–107"},{"n":3,"work":"Marriage and Morals","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"The law declares bluntly that children and young people must not know the facts of sex, and that the question whether it is good or bad for them to know these facts is entirely irrelevant.","label":"Marriage and Morals"},{"n":4,"work":"What I Believe","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"None of them condemn the brutality of a husband who causes his wife to die of too frequent pregnancies. I knew a fashionable clergyman whose wife had nine children in nine years. The doctors told him that if she had another she would die. Next year she had another and died. No one condemned him; he retained his benefice, and married again.","label":"What I Believe"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"why-i-am-not-a-christian","label":"Why I Am Not a Christian: do the standard arguments for God fail as decisively as the 1927 lecture claims?"},{"slug":"the-theory-of-descriptions","label":"The theory of descriptions: is the 1905 analysis the paradigm of philosophy, or a misreading of how ordinary language refers?"},{"slug":"ethics","label":"Ethics: if value judgements express desire rather than state fact, what entitles the moral vehemence of the political writing?"},{"slug":"a-free-man-s-worship","label":"A Free Man's Worship: can a purposeless universe support the reverence and defiance the 1903 essay demands?"}]}