Why would God make it feel good if it's wrong?

Question

The Catholic prohibitions on sex outside marriage, masturbation, contraception, and homosexual acts all run into the same wall: the activities in question are designed, by the same God who allegedly forbids them, to be intensely pleasurable. Either pleasure is a reliable signal that something is good — in which case the prohibitions are perverse — or pleasure is not a reliable signal, in which case God built a system designed to deceive us about our own good. Neither option flatters the believer.

Thomas Aquinas · Answer

Pleasure follows the good. It does not define it.

The objection assumes that pleasure is the criterion of goodness — that if an act is pleasurable, it must be good, and any prohibition must be arbitrary. This is precisely backwards. In the order of nature, pleasure is attached to goods to draw us toward them. Eating is pleasurable because eating sustains life; sex is pleasurable because it generates and binds life. The pleasure is the lure; the good is what it lures us toward.

What follows is that pleasure is reliable when ordered to its proper end and unreliable when severed from it. The glutton experiences real pleasure in eating beyond his need; the pleasure is genuine, but it is no longer doing the work it was designed for. The same applies to the sexual faculty. Detached from the goods it exists to serve — the union of spouses, the begetting of children — the pleasure remains, but it has been cut loose from what made it good in the first place.

To say "it feels good, therefore it is good" is to mistake the signpost for the destination. A counterfeit coin still feels like money in the hand. The question is whether it spends.

C.S. Lewis · Answer

God invented pleasure. The devil cannot make pleasures, only steal them.

I want to grant the objection more than the objector expects. Pleasure is good. Sexual pleasure is good. The Christian who pretends otherwise has already lost the argument, because he is contradicting Genesis, which calls the body very good, and the Song of Songs, which is in the canon for a reason. The enemy of Christianity here is not the hedonist but the Manichee, who thinks the flesh itself is the problem.

What Christianity teaches is not that pleasure is bad but that pleasure has a grain, like wood, and that working against the grain splinters the thing you are working on. The pleasure of food is good; the pleasure of food severed from nourishment produces the bulimic. The pleasure of drink is good; severed from its proper use it produces the alcoholic. Sexual pleasure is good; severed from the union it was made to seal, it produces — well, look around.

The screwtape question is not "does it feel good?" but "what does more of it look like, ten years on?" The pleasures that diminish you, that need ever-larger doses, that leave you lonelier than they found you — those are the pleasures the tradition has flagged. Not because they are pleasures, but because they are pleasures pointed at nothing.

The Catechism · Answer

The pleasure is good. The use is what the moral law addresses.

The Church does not teach, and has never taught, that sexual pleasure is evil. The acts in marriage by which the intimate and chaste union of the spouses takes place are noble and honorable; the truly human performance of these acts fosters the self-giving they signify and enriches the spouses in joy and gratitude. Pleasure within the integrity of the conjugal act is a good willed by God.

What the moral law addresses is not pleasure itself but the use of the sexual faculty apart from its meaning. The faculty has two ends inscribed in its very structure: the union of the spouses and the transmission of life. These are not arbitrary rules imposed from outside; they are what the act is. To take the pleasure while deliberately excluding the meaning — through masturbation, through contraception within the act, through acts of their nature closed to either union or life — is to use the faculty against itself.

This teaching is demanding, and the Church does not pretend otherwise. Many find it difficult; many fail; the confessional exists for this reason among others. But the demand is not arbitrary cruelty. It is the recognition that the body speaks a language, and that the moral life consists in not lying with the body about what one is doing.

G.K. Chesterton · Answer

The fence around the garden is the reason there is a garden.

The modern man looks at a fence and asks why it is there. If he is wise, he does not tear it down until he has found out. The Christian rules around sex look, from a sufficient distance, like fences around nothing — arbitrary lines drawn across an open field of pleasure. Walk closer and you find that the field is a garden, and the fence has been keeping the wolves out.

The argument from pleasure proves too much. If "it feels good, therefore it is good" were a moral principle, it would license every addiction and excuse every betrayal. The man cheating on his wife also reports that it feels good. The drunk reports the same. Of course it feels good. The question every grown person eventually has to answer is whether the things that feel good are also the things that build a life worth having ten years from now, and twenty, and at the deathbed.

Christianity's sexual ethic is unfashionable. It has always been unfashionable. It was unfashionable in pagan Rome, which is precisely why Christianity spread there — it offered, for the first time in that world, a vision in which women and slaves and unwanted children were not disposable. The hedonist objection sounds new. It is in fact the oldest objection there is, and the strangest fact in history is how many tired hedonists, having tried the alternative, have come back to the fence and looked again at the garden.

Why would God make it feel good if it's wrong?

The objection, in full

Pleasure follows the good. It does not define it.

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