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Over 30 million people are currently living with AIDS or HIV.

The Catholic Church's opposition to condom use has cost countless lives.

Catholicism has a rich history of contributing to philosophical ideas, but according to Luke

Bovins of the London School of Economics, even if we reason within a Catholic framework,

the Church's opposition to condom use is philosophically incoherent.

This interview contains some sexually explicit language.

Luke Bovins, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thank you very much.

Today we're going to be talking about Catholicism and HIV.

Can you just set up for us what is the problem that you're interested in in this area?

Yeah. Well, I was really intrigued by the couple of statements that were made by the Pope over the last couple of years.

He made the statement on a trip to Cameroon where he said

condoms actually aggravates the AIDS crisis. Then last year in a book that was published,

he actually made this claim that when it comes to male

prostitutes that the usage of condoms would actually be sort of a first step in assuming

moral responsibility.

Now I thought it was very strange that he chose this example of male prostitutes

because it seemed to me that sort of the first thing that we should be thinking about is a relationship, a marriage

with two heterosexual partners in which condom usage becomes important because the partners are

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