 This independence lends support to pessimist views of sexual desire. Although pessimism and optimism have moral implications – some of which are addressed below – they are based in the nature of sexual desire. Pessimism considers sexual desire morally dangerous and threatening to our rationality (including Christian philosophers such as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, Plato, Kant, and Schopenhauer [1859: ch. 44], and, among contemporary philosophers of sex Alan Soble, whose views in “Sexual Use” [2013b; 2017b] imply with some certainty that he is also a pessimist). Pessimism is opposed by optimism, which views sexual desire as generally benign and as bringing people together (it commands a large majority of the philosophers of sex, including Bertrand Russell 1929: passim; Irving Singer 2001: passim; and Martha Nussbaum 1995, 1998), though it recognizes that it can be morally problematic (Morgan 2003a). The issue, then, between the pessimists and the optimists concerns not whether sexual desire can be morally problematic, but whether it is so by its nature (Soble, with Halwani 2017: 5–8).