ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests a way of looking at issues of human sexual rights. It focuses on how human beings are symbol manipulating creatures living their lives embodied and embedded in different kinds of historical and social situation. Human life unfolds precariously in a heaving universe of contingency and change. At its heart there is an ontology of the human being as a bundle of potentials and capabilities that need appropriate social conditions in order to flourish. Without the right social conditions, human life becomes flawed and damaged and prone to too much suffering: lives become ‘wasted.’ In the important work of Amartya Sen (1999) and Martha Nussbaum (1999), there is a listing of what these human capabilities could be for all human beings. They include: life; health; bodily integrity; senses, imagination and thought; emotions; practical reason; affiliation and recognition; the ability to play; some control over one’s environment; and, finally, an ability to live with other species expressed in a concern for and in relation to animals, plants and the world of nature. Such a list offers a good starting point for thinking about what a human life needs to develop if it is to flourish. My critical focus in this humanist task is through one focused route into this position: namely, the century-old stance of symbolic interaction.
