Article: In defence of Lust, newstatesman.co m
Related: Philosophy of Love (IEP) and Ruling Passions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning, Simon Blackburn

Simon Blackburn: "...it might seem quixotic or paradoxical, or even indecent, to try and speak up for lust. The philosopher David Hume wrote that a virtue was any quality of mind "useful or agreeable to the person himself or to others". Lust has a good claim to qualify. Indeed, that understates it because lust is not merely useful but essential. We would none of us be here without it. So the task I set myself is to clean off some of the mud, to rescue it from the echoing denunciations of old men of the deserts, to deliver it from the pallid and envious confessors of Rome and the disgust of the Renaissance, to destroy the stocks and pillories of the Puritans, to separate it from other things that we know drag it down (for there are worse things than lust, things that make pure lust itself impure), and so to lift it from the category of sin to that of virtue. Do I really want to draw aside the curtains and let light disperse the decent night that thankfully veils our embarrassments? Am I to stand alongside the philosopher Crates the Cynic, who, believing that nothing is shameful, copulated openly in public with his wife Hipparchia? Certainly not, but part of the task is to know why not." more