Homosexuality and Natural Law -- A Concern

[Prodigal_Son]

Leibniz,

First, it’s pretty cool that you’re still writing, 400 or so years after your heyday. Welcome back!

Second, you address a whole lot of issues in your response. Since I want this thread to be focused on the narrow question about how to argue against the permissibility of homosexual acts, I will be glossing over some of what you said. But I assure you it might for interesting reading, nonetheless.

The argument against homosexuality you made in your original post does not seem to make any sense to me either, and so if that is the argument you are getting from people, then I can understand why you would disagree with them.

The argument I quoted is, in particular, the sort of argument secular Christian philosophers (like Robert George) make. What is a secular Christian philosopher? I don’t know, but I’m one.

If Paul tells us that it is better to remain a virgin that to get married (which I take to be something that is true in certain particular times and places, rather than for all persons everywhere), then that right there would seem to “thwart” the purpose of sexual organs from the start. It makes no sense to claim that homosexuality is worse than lifetime virginity because homosexuality thwarts the true purpose of the sex organs.

Yup.

The argument against homosexual activity is that it produces a disordered style of living. Although I think the term “disordered” by the Church often confuses the issue and hurts more than helps when trying to explain things, the main idea here is that homosexual activity has ill effects both on the individual and society is large. I have zero doubt that this is true.

This is roughly the idea of the argument I proposed as an alternative.

Human sexuality is a wonderful but dangerous thing, and outside of the sacramental marriage bond where two people are committed to raising children in the Church should God grant them the opportunity, sex always boils down to power and vanity, and always produces delusions and jealousies. This is why pornography is bad.

And when you write, “Some couples seriously intend to build unity through their sexual activity,” I find it hard to laugh out loud at the absurdity of that statement. It is completely at odds with human nature.

The curious thing is that these people are quite sincere. They think that their having sex promotes interpersonal unity. I haven’t had their experience, so it’s hard for me to say a priori that they’re completely wrong about this.

In a society where homosexuality is praised, however, there is a devaluation of male authority on a local and family level, and much more power is demanded to be exercised by the distant state.

It seems like the devaluation of masculinity came first, no?

 

[Prodigal_Son]

All the heterosexuals who do oral sex, far far more of them than gays, drive a coach and horses through your natural law argument yet they get away with it. That is what Romans 1 is all about, Paul isn’t condemning gays, his argument is that "you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgement on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things".

Of course, Paul isn’t condemning gay people. Paul isn’t God, and Paul opposes any human being condemning anyone else. I do to. I don’t think gay people are more guilty of sin than straight people. I just think sodomy – straight or gay – is a sin. (I could list off for you a number of my own sins that are just as bad as sodomy – heck, they’re listed in Romans 1. I’m certainly in no position to judge sinners, but I am in a position to judge sins).

You seem to want to accuse me of being a bigot or some such thing. I don’t understand why you want to do that.

There’s a mountain of evidence that unjust discrimination causes harm, for instance by men against women, by whites against blacks. I’m not aware of any evidence that homosexuality of itself is harmful, i.e. once discrimination is removed.

There is the curious fact that suicides among gay people haven’t decreased over the past 30-40 years, despite decreases in discrimination.

Nevertheless, I am open to being proven wrong about this. If homosexuality becomes entirely acceptable and the suicides go down significantly, I will reconsider my view.

No Paul doesn’t. Please throw away your preconceptions and read him slowly, line by line. Ignore the chapter divisions, Paul didn’t make them. Immediately after saying “these people were filled with every kind of wickedness” he writes “Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others” as quoted above. Paul is making an argument about the hypocrisy of condemning others for what we do ourselves. He doesn’t break off in the middle to blurt out an irrelevant aside about gays.

Sure, he’s making the point that we shouldn’t consider ourselves better than others. I agree with that point, 100%. I’m not out to judge people.

But suppose I were to say that being a slanderer or a murderer isn’t wrong. (These things were mentioned specifically in Romans 1!) Clearly they ARE wrong. When I say that they are wrong, I am not judging anyone – for all I know, the murderers are holier than I am, though they are very confused. But the action of murder is wrong. Just so, Paul is saying that the action of same-sex sex is wrong.

The obvious strategy for your opponent is to point out that in many places an individual, including LGBT, can adopt and there are far more heterosexual individuals than LGBT.

I don’t oppose gay couples adopting, though I do think that individual charities should be able to choose not to facilitate such adoptions. Ideally, single people would not be allowed to adopt except in special circumstances, but – given our current society – it’s far more merciful to children to allow them to be adopted into single/gay parent homes than to have them languish in foster care.

There are also far more heterosexual single-parent families anyway.

These situations are not planned that way, in most cases, and we don’t use a positive normative term like “marriage” to encourage such situations.

Yet, your opponent says, you never marched to stop that. For decades and decades you never marched to stop that, so are you really concerned about the children?

If I had been alive when no-fault divorce was put into law, I would have marched. And I have written a philosophical paper of some detail on the subject, which I have attempted to publish to no avail.

So please don’t make presumptions about me. Gay marriage is not my hobby horse. If there is anything I can do to stop divorce – which has done more harm than gay marriage could possibly do – I will do it.

 

[simpleas]

Would we be requiring them to do this by law? Then we would be establishing different standards for different kinds of marriage – a sort of a caste system. That would never fly.

Some people have been brought up as child prostitutes and never felt deprived. Feeling deprived is not the measure of justice.

No to your first question. I was addressing the fact that children can have relationships with other sexes that would balance out the experience of both sexes, its unlikely that being brought up by either two men or two women means that a child would never experience the difference between relations. (although I have no evidence of this)

I don’t understand your train of thought : Some people have been brought up as child prostitutes and never felt deprived

Do you mean if two men or two women adopt children they deprive them of the other gender? So they should never adopt children?

 

[Prodigal_Son]

No to your first question. I was addressing the fact that children can have relationships with other sexes that would balance out the experience of both sexes, its unlikely that being brought up by either two men or two women means that a child would never experience the difference between relations. (although I have no evidence of this)

I think you’re likely wrong. I grew up without a dad, and I always felt “on the outside” in guys’ settings. My mom tried to provide some older men for me to relate to, but it never “worked”. In the end, it would have taken FAR too much work for her to effectively set up a male father figure in my life without marrying one. (She couldn’t marry one, since my father was still alive, but incapacitated.)

I think gay couples might intend to provide “father figures” or “mother figures”, but I doubt they’ll have time for it. My mother didn’t.

I don’t understand your train of thought : Some people have been brought up as child prostitutes and never felt deprived

Do you mean if two men or two women adopt children they deprive them of the other gender? So they should never adopt children?

You really didn’t follow my train of thought.

You said people without mothers don’t always feel deprived. I agree. But I don’t think their not feeling deprived is an indication they weren’t missing something. A child who was never smiled at might not feel deprived, but they ARE being deprived.

If the alternative to a same-sex couple adopting a child is that the child end up in abusive temporary homes, by all means, I support adoption. But allowing same-sex **marriage **means setting up motherless or fatherless families as a normative option for childcare. I don’t support that, not at all.

 

[ynotzap]

I have sympathy with this train of thought. But is it always wrong to make pleasure an end in itself? That question gives me pause. It seems like sometimes pleasure IS an end in itself. (Eating an ice cream cone, for example). And if that’s right, then why is seeking pleasure for its own sake wrong in the case of sex but not in other cases?

Moreover, not all homosexual sex is casual sex, so far as I know. Some couples seriously intend to build unity through their sexual activity. For them, the pleasure isn’t an end in itself, but a side benefit.

It’s this “thwarting” business that always puzzles me. If I use my coaster as a frisbee when I’m not drinking anything, that doesn’t thwart the purpose of a coaster. It would only thwart the purpose if I never used my coaster for holding cups. So why does using one’s genitals for other pleasurable activities thwart the purpose of the genitals, if one can use the genitals for their proper purpose another time?

That’s why I think that this particular argument doesn’t work against homosexual activity. There are other arguments that work much better, in my opinion, and don’t require us to say something that just seems evidently false.

“It’s wrong to use instruments/organs for some purpose they weren’t intended for” is just obviously false.

I can’t imagine anything that gives pleasure that is not associated with purpose. Even eating an ice cream cone, for what is the purpose of eating, and could you have the pleasure without eating the cone? Eating is for the continual well-being of the body, to supply good health which is objectively conducive to the physical well of the person. If one indulges in taste pleasure this could lead to intemperance and this could lead to the ill health of the body ( which we are presently suffering in our overweight society) So pleasure for its own sake is never disassociated from purpose, ice cream appeals to the taste buds (purpose of eating it) but taste buds are for eating food

The improper use of pleasure separated from its ultimate end is definitely not conducive to the objective well being of the individual, or the collection of individuals, society, because we share a common humanity, In the case of homosexuality the purpose is frustrated, the natural law is violated, the nature of man, a rational creature is violated, and the spiritual well being is also violated (I speak not of guilt, for knowledge must be had)

We have already witnessed what disease from these acts can do,also from other liberal sexual acts. Some tend to trivialise this fact. The African nation has suffered greatly from these diseases. I had a friend who suffered greatly and finally died from HIV. the social way to handle such a situation is to find a cure with drugs, but did it stop people from committing the same homosexual acts. This only points that there is something spiritually wrong with human nature, the tendency to violate the moral order, and laws that apply to human conduct whether one is conscious of the laws or not, I don’t speak of guilt, but I do speak of spiritual truth, and the purpose of a moral life that is objectively conducive to the spiritual and physical well being of man.

 

[simpleas]

I think you’re likely wrong. I grew up without a dad, and I always felt “on the outside” in guys’ settings. My mom tried to provide some older men for me to relate to, but it never “worked”. In the end, it would have taken FAR too much work for her to effectively set up a male father figure in my life without marrying one. (She couldn’t marry one, since my father was still alive, but incapacitated.)

I think gay couples might intend to provide “father figures” or “mother figures”, but I doubt they’ll have time for it. My mother didn’t.

You really didn’t follow my train of thought.

You said people without mothers don’t always feel deprived. I agree. But I don’t think their not feeling deprived is an indication they weren’t missing something. A child who was never smiled at might not feel deprived, but they ARE being deprived.

If the alternative to a same-sex couple adopting a child is that the child end up in abusive temporary homes, by all means, I support adoption. But allowing same-sex **marriage **means setting up motherless or fatherless families as a normative option for childcare. I don’t support that, not at all.

I wasn’t thinking of marriage, I was just thinking of couples.

 

[JapaneseKappa]

The standard natural law argument against homosexual activity runs something like this:

1. The purpose of the sexual organs is procreation.
2. It is wrong to use an organ in a way that thwarts its purpose.
3. Homosexual acts use the sexual organs in ways that thwart procreation.
4. Therefore, homosexual acts are wrong.

Objection: Premise 1 is false.

When sexual reproduction evolved, reproduction was a solved problem biologically. Cells could, and indeed some animals still can, reproduce asexually. Sexual reproduction evolved for some other reason (e.g. avoidance of parasites or a modulation of the rate of evolution.) So while it is true that we rely on our sex organs for reproduction, that is not why we have sex organs in the first place.

 

[JapaneseKappa]

1. Human beings have a distinctive telos, or purpose.
2. Any type of action that tends toward the thwarting of one’s telos (or other people’s telos) is wrong.
3. The telos of a human being is happiness.
4. Homosexual actions tend to lead to unhappiness in oneself or others.
5. Therefore, homosexual actions are wrong.

Objection: your argument is based on a testable claim, specifically that homosexual actions lead to unhappiness. Have you tested this claim? Have any religious organizations with sufficient resources to test this claim tested it in a scientifically rigorous manner?

Without actually testing the claim, if you actually conclude #5 you are guilty of asserting the truth of something without actually knowing if it is true.

 

[Linusthe2nd]

Objection: your argument is based on a testable claim, specifically that homosexual actions lead to unhappiness. Have you tested this claim? Have any religious organizations with sufficient resources to test this claim tested it in a scientifically rigorous manner?

Without actually testing the claim, if you actually conclude #5 you are guilty of asserting the truth of something without actually knowing if it is true.

Of course if you don’t believe in God, there are no moral barriers, right. I don’t think we need a scientific study to prove the validity of the claim made. Catholic counselors verify the claim.

It is pretty plain that man and woman are complimentary. That is nature. You cannot violate nature and be happy. Our society is a mess because nature is being violated massively. Over 50 % divorce rate, massive acceptance of contraception and abortion, euphanasia increasing, you call that happy?.

Linus2nd

 

[Prodigal_Son]

Objection: your argument is based on a testable claim, specifically that homosexual actions lead to unhappiness. Have you tested this claim? Have any religious organizations with sufficient resources to test this claim tested it in a scientifically rigorous manner?

Without actually testing the claim, if you actually conclude #5 you are guilty of asserting the truth of something without actually knowing if it is true.

Arguments are like toys. We put them together, play with them, see if they work, and then take them apart if they don’t. I am not dogmatically asserting that homosexual actions lead to unhappiness. I am doing two things:

(1) Considering the logical consequences of the view that homosexual actions lead to unhappiness.

(2) Putting the premise “out there”, in order to evaluate its truth or falsity.

You claim that it is testable. How would you propose that we test it?

 

[Prodigal_Son]

My point was that, insofar as scientists are speaking of science, no prescriptions are made within biology. Biology doesn’t side with certain lifeforms like humans side with sports teams. If a new species eventually emerged which supplanted humans, biology would be indifferent.

In fact, biology really doesn’t make the claim that life is good. It asserts that biodiversity contributes to the stability of life on Earth, but it doesn’t state that life should exist on Earth. That’s what humans do.

I agree with all this. But biologists do determine values relative to the outcomes: this event is good for maintaining the rainforest, that event is good for avoiding global warming, etc. Other people – ethicists, for example – work on what ends should be achieved. But I don’t think the notion that all ends are subjective is compatible with any system of ethics, including (as I’ve said) preference utilitarianism.

For example, you say that it leads to wishy-washy conclusions since very few actions are ever definitively ruled out. Firstly, I think this is actually an advantage of utilitarianism. If the court systems have taught us anything, it’s that having several rules leads to endless contradictions, and ad hoc means have to used to circumvent every conflict of the rules. Having one very flexible rule is quite powerful in comparison.

In practice, most utilitarians are rule utilitarians. Rule utilitarianism advocates the following: 1) Observe how various behaviors affect happiness. 2) Prescribe rules that, if followed, would maximize happiness in most cases. 3) When the rules do not tend to maximize happiness, tweak them. In other words, you use rules, but the rules are not absolute. They are held accountable to the greatest happiness principle and must be adjusted as new data about happiness emerges. (I am also what is called a “preference utilitarian”; that is, I define happiness as preference satisfaction.)

Ah, yes, rule utilitarianism. May I ask you two questions:

(1) Is “stealing is wrong” one of the rules you recommend?
(2) Is it permissible to steal in order to stop a terrorist threat?

Correlations are flimsy things. For all we know, they may be more suicidal because of the stigma placed on them, for example. As for promiscuity, that isn’t necessarily wrong in itself by my reckoning. In fact, there is a lot of evidence that humans aren’t naturally monogamous.

I agree that humans aren’t naturally monogamous. What does that have to do with morality, though?

As a rule, I never use statistical correlation alone to infer causation. If it doesn’t make sense on an a priori basis that A would cause B, and A and B are correlated, that is a sign that something deeper is going on–a lurking variable perhaps. It’s possible that the reality of the situation is highly counterintuitive, but it’s unlikely. And frankly it doesn’t make any sense that gay sex would cause misery but homosexuality by itself wouldn’t.

I didn’t say gay sex caused misery. I said that it had certain statistical correlations that need to be explained. (I don’t see heterosexual “bug-chasers”, for instance). I think you’re right that some of the self-destructive behavior of gay people is caused by social/familial rejection. But I’m interested to see how much this behavior declines as the stigma is lifting.

And here’s the way science works. We test hypotheses. We can never prove any hypothesis 100% certain, but we do what we can. If the social stigma hypothesis proves to be an incomplete explanation, by all means, offer another hypothesis. And we’ll test it. And if we want to prove Christians wrong, put together a set of experiments comparing the self-destructive behaviors of gay people who are chaste next to gay people who are sexually active. Get me that study, and have it prove your point, and I will shut up. You will convince me.

And of course I’m open to saying that gay sex alone may be the culprit somehow, but it seems staggeringly unlikely to me.

And this is what I like about you, Oreo. You’re stubborn and tenacious, but you’re open to following where the evidence leads.

Personally, I do not make teleological assumptions for objects I don’t know to have been created for a purpose. If someone discovers a random widget in the woods and two different people find uses for it, I don’t consider it important to decide which use is the “correct” one. The potential uses can be judged on their own merits, no teleology needed.

I’m not worried about cases like this, honestly, because I don’t think that all objects have a telos. But human beings do.

I assert that this is true of all moral codes. Everyone has their axioms. For example, in divine command theory, it is axiomatic that whatever God dictates is good. There is no defense of that position. You either buy into it or you don’t. There are various ways of rephrasing the assumption. You could avoid stating it as an axiom and simply define God to be good, but that amounts to the same thing.

Now I do have a rationale for my position, though I don’t consider it a proof. You could keep asking “well why does that matter?” until I eventually can’t answer a question, just as I could do if I questioned your morality.

Good, we’re on the same page here.

Now, though it may not be possible to defend a basic moral view, it is possible to criticize one. The Euthyphro problem, for example, completely destroys Divine Command Theory as a system of ethics. And I think that the view that “preference satisfaction is good” really isn’t a strong axiom. It’s obvious to me that I often get what I want, and am miserable because of it. Why should other people satisfy my preferences, in such a case?

 

[Leibniz]

“It seems like the devaluation of masculinity came first, no?”

I would argue that each tends to increase the other–the more homosexual relationships are viewed as normal and non-sinful, the more traditional masculinity is devalued, and vice-versa. (I think a similar argument could be made regarding traditional femininity, but I don’t feel qualified to make it.) The gist of the social argument is that as men become more feminine, docile, and compliant to the law of whatever the current social zeitgeist happens to be, the more people will tend to see men willing to stand up against the tyranny of mob morality as antiquated dinosaurs. In sexually permissive environments, you get top-heavy socio-political structures that retard freedom and progress–or as we say in the heterosexual world, 90% of the girls hook up with 10% of the guys, and you get the ugly effects of hypergamy in the hookup culture. This is the very opposite of distributism.

(Ironically, you also get this in very sexually restrictive environments where polygamy is practiced by the rich, but the end result of men accepting their fate of being submissive to other men is the same.)

Now, don’t get me wrong. I think a homosexual man who lives a celibate life and is obedient to the law is a wonderful thing, and no problem at all. But as soon as he starts advocating inappropriately submissive relationships of men to other men, then he begins to create a social nuisance. Men should respect authority and not cause trouble by rebelling against it without just cause, but at the same time, men should not be submissive to other men in such a way that they try to win special rewards and special relationships from the most powerful or attractive men in the group. It violates a basic honor system of having all men being regarded as equals, despite obviously necessary hierarchies and inequalities of social rank, duty, and position.

“The curious thing is that these people are quite sincere. They think that their having sex promotes interpersonal unity.”

Romantic love, and the sex that goes with it, always seeks to promote interpersonal unity between the two persons having sex with each other, but this is at the expense of everyone else. Just think of teenage couples giggling to each other while holding hands, and seeking to runaway from the rest of the group to be alone with each other. When you are the grips of a romantic relationship, you have the feeling of someone who has just “won” special access to a whole other person, and you jealously guard your special relationship and keep everyone else shut out of the pleasures derived from it.

Theoretically, this can work well for a community if everyone gets a suitable match that they are happy with, but we all know that’s never going to work out perfectly in the real world, and weird cults that stress free love to everyone only result in even worse moral disasters.

I think it’s the very reason why Christianity tends to take such a dim view on sex (even romantically committed sex that seeks permanence) outside of marriage–because by its very nature it seeks exclusivity and promotes barriers and jealousies. None of this is unique to homosexual sex, but I don’t see any reason why homosexual sex would be an exception to the rule here.

 

[Peter_Plato]

In fact, biology really doesn’t make the claim that life is good. It asserts that biodiversity contributes to the stability of life on Earth, but it doesn’t state that life should exist on Earth. That’s what humans do.

Yes, but is it ONLY humans who do?

As a utilitarian myself, I think you’ve oversimplified it quite a bit here. Utilitarians are well aware of the arguments used against them, and variations of the philosophy have formed to address them.

For example, you say that it leads to wishy-washy conclusions since very few actions are ever definitively ruled out. Firstly, I think this is actually an advantage of utilitarianism. If the court systems have taught us anything, it’s that having several rules leads to endless contradictions, and ad hoc means have to used to circumvent every conflict of the rules. Having one very flexible rule is quite powerful in comparison.

It is debatable whether the rule you propose is “powerful” or merely useless.

One means of testing ethical systems is to propose a moral problem and allow the candidate ethical system the opportunity to effectively handle the issue. If the system deals with the problem in such a way that weird or absurd consequences come about, then the proposed system is, to that extent, found wanting or ineffectual.

Assuming that “preference utilitarianism” has as its “powerful” and flexible rule something like act to satisfy the preferences of moral agents. The greater the satisfaction of preferences as a consequence of choices and actions, the more determinably “moral” are those choices and actions.

The difficulty with preference utilitarianism is that there is no resort to other criteria by which to independently evaluate the morality or even a hierarchy of preferences, since it is merely in having and meeting preferences, whatever they may be, that determines moral content. The more effectively and completely that preferences are satisfied, the more moral the choices and actions.

The following illustration will demonstrate the inherent issue.

The most effective way to deal with dissatisfaction - the normative “evil” in preference utilitarianism - is to simply identify those individuals whose dissatisfaction outweighs their satisfaction.

Since the moral system has no other principle by which to determine “good” ends other than by whether they “satisfy” whatever desires the agents in the system decide they want satisfied, there can be no ‘in principle’ objection to the manipulation of desires. There would be nothing wrong, according to this system, with changing the desires of moral agents in order to more easily satisfy them and thereby raise the overall level of satisfaction in the moral landscape.

The following proposal would not only meet the objective of preference utility but could also supplant the “flexible principle” that you claim is the strength of the system.

It would be politically feasible and eminently moral, according to preference utilitarianism to simply round up all the dissatisfied individuals who burden the moral good by their dissatisfaction, surreptitiously tranquilize them, then continually pump these individuals with hallucinogenic drugs to keep them perpetually high. By doing so, the overall level of satisfaction will be raised incredibly by eradicating dissatisfaction and replacing the unmet desires of dissatisfied agents with easily and cheaply fulfilled new ones.

Since your ethical system has no qualitative way of distinguishing worthy desires from unworthy ones and relies simply on desire or “preference” satisfaction to determine moral utility and thus the nature of the “good,” satisfaction becomes the de facto standard to measure moral good.

Since human psychology is the basis for preferences, and human preferences can be rather fluid - human agents can be easily persuaded by drugs and psychological trickery into thinking any delicious preference (desire) that presents itself is far and away more preferable than the mountain of possibilities that remain hidden.

So a political system that is adept at making an innocuous and easily met desire the most preferable and sustainable for the largest number of citizens, that political system will be honored as the most determinably moral one.

Preference utilitarianism can muster no other principle by which to contest whether any one preference is more moral than another. Therefore, the absurd notion follows that a state that can pander to innocuous preferences most successfully and sustainably will be the most moral according to this brand of utilitarianism. An absurd consequence. Which means there is something seriously wrong with your “powerful” principle.

 

[edwest2]

Pope Benedict:

"We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires. The church must defend itself against threats such as “radical individualism” and “vague religious mysticism”. [emphasis added]

When there are no standards then pleasure and getting whatever “I” want are the only goals. The massive misuse of the human sexual faculty is leading to really bad consequences for gays and straights. Just check with the CDC.

Who decides when anybody has sex of any kind? The Church? The State? No - the individual. This is just another social engineering project with little kids in school having picture books forced on them in public schools and “it’s not a parental notification issue.” So little boys, who lack any real understanding, both intellectually and emotionally, about sex, are going to read gay propaganda in public school and mom and dad do not have to know? Who put those books out? Who approved them? How did they get into the schools?

That is wrong.

Peace,
Ed

 

[JapaneseKappa]

You claim that it is testable. How would you propose that we test it?

Take random surveys about life satisfaction for people who

-Are gay
-Are not gay and have no contact with gay people
-Are not gay and have contact with gay people

Determine if there is any meaningful difference between the groups. If there is no difference, your conclusion will be false.

 

[Peter_Plato]

All the heterosexuals who do oral sex, far far more of them than gays, drive a coach and horses through your natural law argument yet they get away with it. That is what Romans 1 is all about, Paul isn’t condemning gays, his argument is that "you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgement on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things".

There’s a mountain of evidence that unjust discrimination causes harm, for instance by men against women, by whites against blacks. I’m not aware of any evidence that homosexuality of itself is harmful, i.e. once discrimination is removed.

No Paul doesn’t. Please throw away your preconceptions and read him slowly, line by line. Ignore the chapter divisions, Paul didn’t make them. Immediately after saying “these people were filled with every kind of wickedness” he writes “Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others” as quoted above. Paul is making an argument about the hypocrisy of condemning others for what we do ourselves. He doesn’t break off in the middle to blurt out an irrelevant aside about gays.

So your understanding is that Paul is claiming that “every kind of wickedness” is fine to commit as long as you don’t go about condemning others for doing these things? Go ahead and sin - no problem there - just don’t condemn others. That is what he considers unpardonable?

Wouldn’t Paul be guilty precisely of condemning others for condemning others and, thereby, himself being hypocritical? Shouldn’t he just keep quiet about all sin since he is, ironically, guilty of hypocritically condemning others for hypocrisy?

A more consistent reading of the text and one far more sympathetic to Paul is that he acknowledges that sin lives in him - which he does in several places - and it is that acknowledgement that allows him to recognize sin and condemn sin or evil itself, while showing empathy for those entrapped by it. What he is doing is treating sin as the enemy, while speaking about are those who commit sin but don’t acknowledge that they do as being hypocritical but all the while being empathetic to those who commit sin but don’t realize the gravity of their state and the eternal jeopardy they have put themselves in.

He is by no means NOT condemning sinful behaviour but he is speaking against an attitude that hypocritically condemns persons rather than evil acts.

That in no way excuses sinful behaviour nor should his words be taken to mean he is proposing that it is fine to go on sinning provided you don’t condemn others for the same sin. Clearly, his intention is to place the onus on each moral agent to clean up their own house BEFORE condemning others for keeping a filthy one. That, surely, does not entail being blind to grit and grime but rather means having a discerning eye and vigilant concern for eradicating it, first in one’s own house and then helping others do so in their houses out of concern for their eternal good.

Merely condemning others for sinful behaviour is not showing concern for their ultimate good, which is what Paul is very much on about.

 

[opusAquinas]

Yes, but is it ONLY humans who do?

It is debatable whether the rule you propose is “powerful” or merely useless.

One means of testing ethical systems is to propose a moral problem and allow the candidate ethical system the opportunity to effectively handle the issue. If the system deals with the problem in such a way that weird or absurd consequences come about, then the proposed system is, to that extent, found wanting or ineffectual.

Assuming that “preference utilitarianism” has as its “powerful” and flexible rule something like act to satisfy the preferences of moral agents. The greater the satisfaction of preferences as a consequence of choices and actions, the more determinably “moral” are those choices and actions.

The difficulty with preference utilitarianism is that there is no resort to other criteria by which to independently evaluate the morality or even a hierarchy of preferences, since it is merely in having and meeting preferences, whatever they may be, that determines moral content. The more effectively and completely that preferences are satisfied, the more moral the choices and actions.

The following illustration will demonstrate the inherent issue.

The most effective way to deal with dissatisfaction - the normative “evil” in preference utilitarianism - is to simply identify those individuals whose dissatisfaction outweighs their satisfaction.

Since the moral system has no other principle by which to determine “good” ends other than by whether they “satisfy” whatever desires the agents in the system decide they want satisfied, there can be no ‘in principle’ objection to the manipulation of desires. There would be nothing wrong, according to this system, with changing the desires of moral agents in order to more easily satisfy them and thereby raise the overall level of satisfaction in the moral landscape.

The following proposal would not only meet the objective of preference utility but could also supplant the “flexible principle” that you claim is the strength of the system.

It would be politically feasible and eminently moral, according to preference utilitarianism to simply round up all the dissatisfied individuals who burden the moral good by their dissatisfaction, surreptitiously tranquilize them, then continually pump these individuals with hallucinogenic drugs to keep them perpetually high. By doing so, the overall level of satisfaction will be raised incredibly by eradicating dissatisfaction and replacing the unmet desires of dissatisfied agents with easily and cheaply fulfilled new ones.

Since your ethical system has no qualitative way of distinguishing worthy desires from unworthy ones and relies simply on desire or “preference” satisfaction to determine moral utility and thus the nature of the “good,” satisfaction becomes the de facto standard to measure moral good.

Since human psychology is the basis for preferences, and human preferences can be rather fluid - human agents can be easily persuaded by drugs and psychological trickery into thinking any delicious preference (desire) that presents itself is far and away more preferable than the mountain of possibilities that remain hidden.

So a political system that is adept at making an innocuous and easily met desire the most preferable and sustainable for the largest number of citizens, that political system will be honored as the most determinably moral one.

Preference utilitarianism can muster no other principle by which to contest whether any one preference is more moral than another. Therefore, the absurd notion follows that a state that can pander to innocuous preferences most successfully and sustainably will be the most moral according to this brand of utilitarianism. An absurd consequence. Which means there is something seriously wrong with your “powerful” principle.

I don’t think utilitarianism is happiness no matter what - a person’s happiness can be based on how they want to be happy and the presumption might be that one’s happiness is not manipulated or forced upon by others.

 

[Peter_Plato]

I don’t think utilitarianism is happiness no matter what - a person’s happiness can be based on how they want to be happy and the presumption might be that one’s happiness is not manipulated or forced upon by others.

Even worse because that presumption entails that the individual ought to pursue their own preferences because no one else, not even the state, (or God) can force the compliance of an individual where their “happiness” conflicts with others.

If, for example, a sadistic person has a preference or proclivity towards harming others and they cannot be forced or manipulated to stop, there is no means in “preference utilitarianism” by which conflicting desires are reconciled. His desires will be thwarted by the desires of others for a painless existence. There will be a net sum “satisfaction” gain of zero. Since the desire for a pain free existence by others would cancel the desire satisfaction to inflict pain on the part of a sadistic person.

Certainly, in most typical societies sadistic individuals are relatively rare, but the point is that there is nothing in preference utilitarianism that would declare a large population oriented towards sadism as inherently inferior to a more “normal” population. What counts is desire satisfaction - there is no independent moral determiner that makes one desire or type preferable to others.

Ideally, sadomasochism would be the perfect psychological state for preference utilitarianism since even pain inflicted on others would result in some desire satisfaction for both parties. Still an absurd consequence.

 

[JapaneseKappa]

Of course if you don’t believe in God, there are no moral barriers, right. I don’t think we need a scientific study to prove the validity of the claim made. Catholic counselors verify the claim.

The plural of anecdote is not data. I have always found it curious that, despite their enthusiasm to predict doom and gloom, religious people and organizations seem very reluctant to actually try and test their predictions.

 

[Linusthe2nd]

Sodomy includes oral, so heterosexuals account for far more sodomy than the tiny percentage of homosexuals.

Thank goodness the scriptures spare us the explicitness of modern insenstivity and poor judgment. But scriptures certainly regards unnatural sex acts as something particularly abhorrent. And that between same sex persons seems to be particularly abhorrent. The point is that any sex in which the production of children would not be the expected or desired outcome is to be condemned.

People look at verses out of context. If you carefully parse all of Romans sentence by sentence and think about what each sentence means, and how it relates to those around it then it’s hard to see how Paul can possibly be talking of homosexuals in general, if he is talking of homosexuals at all.

Surely you aren’t saying the scriptures condon sex which intends to avoid the production of children, or in which that result would be impossible? That certainly is not something with which the Catholic Church would agee. Thank goodness Catholics have the Church to make those interpretations for us.

Certainly it’s bizarre to let the 15-year old lesbian girl in the pew next to you think for even one moment that Paul is telling her she is “filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious towards parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless”.

We wouldn’t know whether the child sitting next to us was a lesbian or not. But whether or not she was, she would hear the same scripture. And her catechism instruction would have informed her about the evil of such acts - in an age appropriate manner. Whoever she was, she would have learned that the object in life is love God and to do what is pleasing to him and certain things are displeasing to him and harmful to us.

Sin of any type leads to unhappiness and the more prevalent it is in our lives and the more egregeous it is the more unhappy we will be.

So yes, homosexual acts are against the natural law. So is any sex outside that between a validly married man and woman and/or which excludes the possibility of conception. The only exceptions would be the use of natural family planning for serious reasons or that between a validly married man and woman who are sterile for one reason or another or who are simply too old.

Linus2nd