I’ve heard it often said by Catholic experts that homosexual acts are wrong because they are unnatural or go against God’s design. However, if going against God’s design always resulted in some objectively sinful act then it would be wrong to ride a bicycle; for God designed our bodies to walk.
To understand what we mean by unnatural in the moral sense, we need to understand what the aim of morality is: we need to discuss the nature of true human happiness/flourishing.
Our first conceptions of human happiness are things like pleasure, freedom from depression, health, freedom, and getting what we want.
But after a little experience and reflection, we come to find that simply doing whatever we want with as little restraints as possible doesn’t make us truly happy.
Within our interior life, we end up unable to resist our inclinations, we find our varies emotions and will are often in conflict with each other, we lose the motivation, the energy, to partake in the more noble things in life, and we just end up feeling unsatisfied and unfulfilled.
In our exterior life, we become more distant from people: we begin to see them merely as a means to an end, and instrument of our desire.
This is not because happiness isn’t found in a interior life that is free, whole, and fulfilled, because happiness truly is freely doing whatever we want, as a whole, being fulfilled in the actions. Our initial idea is correct!
However, the problem is is that our emotions, our passions, that thing that St. Paul calls “the flesh,” are normally disordered, they work against our will and reason, the “spirit,” and each other, they enslave us, make it difficult to control them, and they are not aimed towards their proper objects, in the correct degrees of “energy,” for the circumstances. In other words, they are inclined towards sin.
And so, human flourishing is found in
self-mastery. To be a master of one’s own self, one must integrate all aspects of himself into one whole will, without conflict, working together as one direction and one energy, take control of the inclinations rather than letting them control you, and aim our emotional inclinations towards their proper object, in fitting degrees for the situation. Self-mastery is achieved through kinds of habit that we have traditionally called
virtues.
Through virtue, what our emotions perceive to be good will then through the cultivation of the virtues be synthesized with what is actually good for us, and so we can freely and as a complete person pursue what will actually fulfill our desires, their proper objects, instead of seeking improper objects to fulfil the tendency, which at best give a short satisfaction.
It is also important to note that our will doesn’t simply will our emotions, rather, our emotions are ordered in such a way by good habits, virtues, which we control directly though our will. The will is like the couch, and the passions like the hockey team: the couch doesn’t play for them, but trains the players so that they can play correctly by themselves for the most part.
Hopefully I will at least provide some food for thought for others who read the thread.