Teleology and natural law: a secular argument against homosexual activity.

[Phil_Ratliff]

Mark pretty much owns this topic but I’ll ramble a bit on some of his lines. Vows of celibacy are harmful to the function of the apparent design by your logic. I’d argue that having sex when you know for a fact your wife isn’t fertile circumvents the apparent design. It’s a rather pointless game, this natural law tack. But more to my point, the term design is a loaded term. Not all adhere to the concept that we were designed to do anything in particular. Others adhere to the idea that we were designed to weild our sex organs to produce pleasure. They have a good case that sex organs are primarily designed to do that, the secondary function being the production of children. Looking at the law of averages, how often sex actually produces children – that dont spontaneously abort , I’d say their case is strong that we ought to make love with people we in fact love. We make allowances for those sorts of people in our society being secular and not imposing of our oughts on others. Ultimately, the moral law justification begs a question what’s so great about procreation. We’re one of several million species. If we left, maybe chimps or dogwood trees or cockroaches would do better. You’re ultimately left appealing to your god and we don’t all have the same concept of who that god is, what scripture is, what exegesis is correct, or even if there is a god. And we could show that homosexuality is found throughout nature, including the part of nature we humans occupy. And it seems ironic to try to construct moral arguments without an appeal to God; that’s what atheists do and it is frequently been pointed out that it’s impossible to have good without a source, a standard. But it’s nonsense to argue: SCOTUS has made its decision. The question is now for Catholics how will you respond when you meet same sex couples at parties, in church. Lots of air quotes when you talk about their marriage to them? Expect few invitations to their house for dinner. Here’s my question: I hear from some Catholics this fear the Church will be forced to perform gay marriages. What is the basis for that fear?

 

[Phil_Ratliff]

And I’ll add: if the function of the male sex organ is to achieve orgasm with the express purpose of producing children, then clearly polygamy is the best marriage option and polyamory is even better, as the arrangement slows your baby making down even less.

 

[Portofino]

As a strong believer in divine law, but a fairly strong disbeliever in so-called “natural law” (i.e., divine-law-for-agnostics), here are a few things one might say in response.

First, the fact that something evolved for a specific purpose, which is to say to fulfill a specific function in nature, simply has no bearing on whether it is appropriate to use it for other things. Even if I don’t say “evolved” but rather “was created” (though natural law properly ought not rely on any conception of God stronger than Deism) that fact holds. The chicken egg evolved (or was created) to allow birds to reproduce, but it does not follow that using it to make an omelet or a quiche is an immoral perversion of the natural order. The fight-or-flight response in man developed to protect us from danger; it does not seem immoral to trigger it deliberately for pleasure in a non-dangerous circumstance such as watching a horror movie or riding a roller coaster. Etc.

Second, a homosexual might say, even if you were right that the overriding purpose of their sex organs were for reproduction though opposite-sex intercourse, the plain fact is that they don’t want to have opposite-sex intercourse and are not going to do it. Since celibacy is not immoral, you can hardly object to that. But then it is better that the organs should be used to fulfill one or more of their evident secondary purposes – providing pleasure, strengthening interpersonal bonds – than not to be used at all.

Third, and I suppose this is really an abstraction of the first point, you are still left with the fundamental problem of getting from “is” to “ought.” The necessary assumption – which can roughly be said to be the proposition that it is immoral to use something other than for its telos – is highly non-obvious. What makes it immoral? If you posit God, then perhaps “God says so,” but now you have left natural law and arrived at a theory of divine command. If you bracket God, then you are left to grope around for arguments about utility or whatever else, but that project, getting from “is” to “ought” on purely naturalistic grounds, has always been doomed to failure.

I’ve enjoyed reading your arguments, Mark Thompson. I must confess genuine puzzlement over the Catholic notion of homosexuality being a violation of natural law, and as something that can be derived rationally and without recourse to faith or revelation; the reason is that it makes no sense to me that nature would be “normative” in that sense, and would impose any moral obligations (the only obligations which nature “imposes” on us has to do with what is possible and impossible, and even there – through “flying machines”, for example – we’ve been able to change the dynamic). There are no “oughts” in nature, except in a relative and conditional sense (for example, “if we want to survive as a species, then we ought to keep our water supply clean”).

For the majority of naturalists, nature is not conscious, and the particular configuration of nature is largely contingent, whereas nature would need to be a conscious entity in order for me to consider that it imposes moral obligations on human beings, with a conscious intention or “master plan” for humanity. In other words, nature herself would have to be a kind of God. Barring that, it is fair to say that nature likely “does not care” whether homosexual activity is occurring or not, just as nature “does not care” that some individuals choose lifelong celibacy. This is not to deny that, “if we want to survive as a species, then we *ought *to procreate” – but, if this ever becomes a problem, it will not be a problem merely on account of a sizable minority of homosexuals, nor a sizable minority who choose to remain “asexual” or to practice lifelong celibacy (nor, for that matter, a sizable minority of heterosexuals who are sterile or infertile). A celibate priest, monk, or nun poses no threat to the survival of the human species in terms of the “end of procreation”, and neither does a sizable minority of individuals who are homosexual and who engage in non-procreative sex. Homosexuality, as a natural occurrence, is no more of a moral issue to me than left-handedness.

 

[Matilda_Bennett]

This thread has been dormant for a considerable period. With rare exceptions, reviving threads after a protracted period of inactivity is discouraged because:

• the issues that spurred them are often no longer “hot” or current topics, explaining why thread activity ceased originally.
• posters originally involved in the discussion are sometimes no longer active on the forum and, therefore, unavailable to reply to comments added to the thread.

Our experience suggests that, when a topic merits revival, it is best accomplished by initiating a new thread that draws on recent events and can be posted to contemporaneously. This eliminates the baggage of folks being frustrated by asking and not receiving responses to issues raised in early posts (because the new poster didn’t notice that the post he was responding to was made a long time ago).

Posters are very welcome to open a new thread on the subject or any other topic, as well as to actively participate in the myriad active threads in the fora.
**
Thank you to all those who have participated in this discussion. This thread is now closed. **