Without openness to the Absolute, the spiritual dimension of persons gradually withered until it began to seem an embarrassing relic of earlier times. Philosophical garage sales were frequent. Reducing the human person to nothing more than a body, these thinkers reduced the body to nothing more than an elaborate organic machine. Among the greatest purveyors of thus penurious picture of humanity were the modern utilitarians, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Since persons are simply bodies, they reasoned, the good for persons is the same as the good for animals in general, namely, pleasure and the avoidance of pain.
Good acts maximize pleasure and acts that fail to do so are bad.
Not much guidance can be given within this view as to which desires to promote first, but in practice the most noble tend to lose out to the most urgent. At the least, any attempt to place obstacles in the path to sensual self-fulfillment meets with alarmed outrage. It blatantly interferes with one's right, in fact one's duty , to satisfy one's felt urges. Some see Christian teaching on sexuality as just this sort of interference, and raise themselves to great heights of moral indignation over Church prohibitions against sexual activity outside of marriage. Celibacy is simply a cipher for those of this self-actualizing mentality.