Zoophilia Is Morally Permissible

Introduction

Sex with animals is a powerful social taboo that exposes its practitioners to utmost indignation and stigma. Zoophilia is one of the few sexual orientations (along with e.g. necrophilia or pedophilia) that remain off-limits and have been left aside from the sexual liberation movement in the past fifty years.1 I would like to argue that this is a mistake. There is in fact nothing wrong with having sex with animals: it is not an inherently problematic sexual practice.

Given the sheer outrage that the mere mention of zoophilia triggers in many people, we might expect the case for its permissibility to be a hard sell and my claims to be modest and tentative. This is not so: not only do I think that zoophilia is morally permissible, but I also think that the case in its favor is rather straightforward, so that it should be the default position within many philosophical quarters. This makes it all the more surprising that no ambitious and explicit defense of it has been published so far.