Claim. Ethics is fundamentally the norm for the order of love, which is inseparable from the order of sexual expression; the contemporary collapse of sexual order — illicit relations between men and women — is therefore the leading edge of the collapse of ethics itself.
Elaboration. Lee tightly couples ethical order to sexual order (Ethics and Order). Because ethics is established by position within the family four-position foundation and is motivated by love, and because love between adults is inseparable from sexual expression, ethics must include the norm for sexual relationships. There must be order not only between parents and children but between elder and younger siblings’ couples: a younger brother must not sexually love his elder brother’s wife, and vice versa.
The diagnosis is sharp: contemporary society has lost the ‘sacredness of sex’ and degraded it through an animal-like view of human beings and a media-driven ‘sensual culture of sex.’ Lee draws an explicit parallel to Eden: ‘this situation is not at all different from the situation in the Garden of Eden, where Eve, tempted by the Archangel, had an illicit sexual relationship with him, and as a result, the order of love and sex was shattered.’ This grounds the entire problem of sexual ethics in the fall narrative — the fall was a sexual order violation, so its remedy must restore sexual order.
This framing distinguishes UC sexual ethics from generic conservative sexual ethics. It is not merely that sexual restraint is virtuous; rather, the order of sexual expression is constitutive of cosmic and family order, because the original fall was a misordered sexual act. Critics (evangelical, secular) typically engage on either the exegesis of Genesis 3 or on the social-conservative prescriptions; Lee’s framework collapses the two by making sexual order load-bearing for ethics as such. Worth a thread once a counter atomic on the Genesis 3 reading exists.
See also. sexual-norm-as-supreme-and-perpetual-directive, ethics-versus-morality-objective-versus-subjective-norm, collapse-of-traditional-values-four-causes