Chapter 19: Real Moral Issues
I. Contemporary Moral Problems
One of the classes that I regularly taught as a graduate student was Philosophy 121: Contemporary Moral Problems. It concerned issues such as abortion, adultery, product testing on animals, the environment, and corporate responsibility — the issues of the day.
I started my class with a two-day lecture on the informal fallacies. I went through approximately thirty poor argument structures that people often use to defend their moral conclusions, but which could not support anything. The fact that a person used one of these arguments did not prove that his conclusion was to be rejected, but it proved that he was not, in fact, basing his belief on the evidence. These were arguments used by those more concerned with rationalizing a prejudice than actually trying to find out what was right and what was wrong.
I then went briefly through the major ethical theories — divine command, utilitarianism, contractarianism, impartial observer, natural law, and the like. I showed how each was used, and the weaknesses with each.
Then, we got down to the issues. To determine which issues to discuss, I allowed students to nominate the issues that concerned them. I put these issues on a ballot, distributed them to the class, and took a vote. What’s the use of forcing students to sit in a class where the teacher drones on about things they don’t care about? The issues with the highest votes went first.
With each topic that the class accepted, I would write an argument on the board defending a relevant conclusion. For example, in the case of abortion, I would write:
- A fetus is an innocent person.
- It is wrong to kill an innocent person.
- Therefore, it is wrong to kill a fetus.
- To abort a fetus is to kill a fetus.
- Therefore, it is wrong to abort a fetus.
If the topic of the day was homosexuality, I would use:
- Homosexuality is unnatural.
- Whatever is unnatural is wrong.
- Therefore, homosexuality is wrong.
I would then challenge the class to examine the soundness of each of these arguments. If they questioned a premise, they had to provide a reason for rejecting it. If they could provide no reason to reject any premise, or to question the validity of the argument, I informed them that the rules of logic dictated that they accept the conclusion.
It was easy to get a discussion going this way. If the class remained silent, I simply said, “Good. Since you all accept the conclusion, we can move on to the next subject, unless somebody here wants to raise an objection.”
The objections would come, eventually.
II. Reasonable Expectations
I feel that many people want a work of ethics to provide a nice simple formula within which they can plug the issues of the day, push a button, and come out with a simple answer as to what is right and what is wrong. Homosexuality, abortion, capital punishment, product testing on animals, the environment — the properly designed theory (it is hoped) can provide instant answers to all of these issues, and give the person using that formula an unquestionable certainty that he knows right from wrong.
However, we do not expect physics to be able to allow anybody to instantly solve scientific equations with a thought. Nor are scientific theories evaluated according to their ability to allow every man, woman, and child to create complex chemical compounds or to engineer a safe bridge while driving the kids to soccer practice. We do not insist that the principles of math or logic must be comprehensible to the ten-year-old child or be tossed out as obviously incorrect. Theories should be as simple as possible, but ‘as simple as possible’ still leaves a great deal of room for complexity.
Perhaps the best theory is the theory that acknowledges that issues such as abortion and capital punishment are so complex that they do not allow for simple answers. Perhaps the worst theories are those that oversimplify these issues, giving people a false assurance that an easy answer is correct — allowing them to rationalize away the loss of liberty, lives, and well-being that their simplistic answers justify.
I think that a good theory makes sense of many of the concerns on both sides of complex issues. It makes sense of the observation that it is difficult to weigh those competing concerns and come up with a right answer.
However, we can expect the good theory to offer steps toward simplification. It should be able to clear out some of the undergrowth and help us to get rid of the demagoguery and nonsense. Yet, even after this, it may not leave a clear and unambiguous path to ‘the right answer’. There is a potentially huge gap between “simplify” and “simple”.
III. Abortion
Allow me to illustrate these points by looking at the issu of abortion. The anti-abortion argument looks like the following:
- A fetus is an innocent person.
- It is wrong to kill an innocent person.
- Therefore, it is wrong to kill a fetus.
- To abort a fetus is to kill a fetus.
- Therefore, it is wrong to abort a fetus.
This argument appears valid. If it is, then, if the premises are true, the conclusion would be true as a matter of logical necessity. However, some of the premises are questionable.
A. Premise (1): The fetus is an innocent person
What does it take for this to be true? What is a ‘person’, and how can we tell if a fetus is one?
(a) Personhood as a product of independent life.
Some people want to argue that a ‘person’ is capable of living independently of another. Well, that might be true of most persons, but not all. Siamese twins are persons, even if they are so joined that one cannot survive without the other. If somebody were to sustain an injury, where they required mouth to mouth resuscitation or some other assistance to stay alive, they do not instantly cease to be persons during that time, however brief.
The “independence of another” criterion of personhood, in defense of the legitimacy of abortion, is so clearly flawed that I am willing to attach the label “denial of harm”, discussed in the previous section on rationalization along side the claim that animals cannot truly feel pain.
If we abandon ‘independence of another’ as a criterion of personhood, one of the conclusions we are drawn to is that the fetus does not have to be a born to be a person. While still in the womb, it has personhood status. This is because, other than this independence, nothing much changes for the fetus at time of birth.
To illustrate this point, imagine a sadist who, with the consent of the pregnant woman, surgically places electrodes around the genitals of a fetus in the womb. Then, while using small cameras placed in the womb, he subjects the fetus to repeated shocks. Also, using a precise surgical instruments, he vivisects the fetus, keeping it alive while he does so, and doing this for no reason other than the joy of causing pain. Is this permissible?
(b) Personhood as a property of having unique DNA
Another criterion sometimes offered for personhood is that the entity must have a unique DNA structure. There are significant problems with this option as well. First, identical twins do not have a unique DNA structure, yet they are both persons. Second, due to random mutation many cells in the human body acquire a unique DNA structure. It would be strange at best to argue that each cell has all of the rights and privileges of personhood.
(c) Personhood consists in having desires
The moral model that I have been defending in this series of essays offers another criterion. That theory argues that the merits of a desire are determined by its capacity to exist in harmony with other desires regardless of whose they are. Personhood requires having desires — even something so basic as an aversion to pain. If a being, even while still in the womb, has an aversion to pain than that aversion needs to be made a part of the moral calculation.
Still, moral value is nothing more than the value of desires relative to all other desires. Moral value relative to desires that do not exist also does not exist — it is like the location of something relative to something that is not real. You can’t wrong a being that does not care. You cannot wrong a rock, or an oxygen molecule, or a pencil.
Up until the point that a fetus has a sufficiently developed brain that it has desires, it has no interests. However, at the point that it acquires desires — any desires at all, even one so basic as an aversion to pain — it acquires interests. When this happens, it becomes a legitimate object of moral concern. It becomes, for all practical purposes, a person.
Those who would deny personhood based on the fact that this being with interests lives inside of another being (with interests) are rationalizing. It is odd, at best, to argue that you can take a person and, without changing a single one of its innate characteristics but change only its location and dependence on others, and convert it from a being with morally relevant interests to a being with as much moral relevance as a hang nail or an appendix.
B. Premise (2): It is wrong to kill an innocent person
The anti-abortion argument given above also depends on the truth of the premise that it is wrong to kill an innocent person. In fact, this is not always wrong.
Wars bring with them ‘collateral damage.’ Ultimately, I don’t like the term ‘collateral damage’. Like the techniques of neutralization discussed in the previous essay, people use this term as a way of neutralizing the harm done to others — allowing one to harm others without feeling guilty about it. This makes harming others far too easy, and far too common. It is an example of institutionalized rationalization, the type responsible for the most wide-spread and horrendous wrongs the world has seen.
We are talking about the maiming and killing of innocent people.
This means that I have to clarify what I mean when I say that ‘it is not always wrong to kill an innocent person. It is always wrong, in the sense that a person ought to have an aversion to doing so. That aversion would lead the individual to seek any alternative available. If he finds himself in a situation where he must kill an innocent people, its wrongness would still gnaw on his conscience.
These cases follow the same general pattern of a case I have previously discussed in detail; that of the father taking somebody else’s car without consent so that he can get his sick child to the hospital. Sometimes, there are greater wrongs to be prevented. The consequence of refusing to risk the deaths of innocent people in World War II would have been to surrender to NAZI tyranny; a far more horrendous wrong.
Imagine that you have a shotgun. Ahead of you, on a subway station, you see a kid put a coin into a vending machine that you know will transmit a detonation code to an atomic bomb in another city. It will kill millions. You cannot stop him by shouting because the station is too noisy. You can only stop the kid by shooting him, and with a shotgun you are quite possibly going to kill him. Do you shoot?
I would.
It would haunt me for the rest of my life, give me nightmares, and wrack my mind and body with emotion each time I thought of it. But I would do it.
It is not always wrong to kill an innocent person.
The person who gleefully kills the kid has something wrong with him. The person who congratulates himself over the fact that he has prevented the bomb from going off and cares nothing for the death he had to cause to fulfill this end is... well... less than perfectly virtuous. The good person would look for alternatives, and regret the fact that there are none available, if the individual is forced into considering the killing of an innocent person.
If abortion follows the model of the cop killing a child to prevent a bomb from being detonated, this argues that abortion is not an action that a properly motivated person takes lightly. It is done as a matter of necessity, not as a matter of convenience.
Yet, this does not argue for making abortion illegal.
Consider this hypothetical situation: A college professor hypnotizes innocent students into committing rape. The kids are truly innocent, and everybody knows that these victims are hypnotized and not fully responsible for their actions. Yet, when a college woman is accosted by one of these hypnotized assailants, she may still act with deadly force to prevent the rape. It’s not the student’s fault he was hypnotized. Yet, this does not change the fact that it is within the victim’s rights to defend herself from rape, by deadly force if necessary.
The hypnotized student rapist only seeks to make use of the woman’s body without her consent for a few minutes. The fetus, similarly innocent, seeks to make use of the body for months. If killing an innocent to prevent the use of one’s body by another without consent for a few minutes is justified, killing an innocent to prevent the use of one’s body for months is even easier to justify.
Let us use a different example. Medical scientists may discover that rapists act on some natural biologically induced compulsion (rather than some mad-scientist induced compulsion). Perhaps they discover that rape behavior is linked to a particular formation of brain tissue formed by a particular series of hormonal interactions that sometimes happens during fetal development.
If we are to argue that a woman may not protect herself against the use of her body without her consent, she would be wrong to protect herself against rape when it is caused by a biologically induced use of her body by these attackers.
So, it is not always wrong to kill an innocent person. However, we do have reason to be concerned with any individual who would kill an innocent person easily — like the cop who gleefully kills a child to prevent a bomb from going off in another town.
C. Conclusion
Before a fetus has desires — before it has a sufficiently developed brain that it can feel pain — then the fetus is a mere thing. You cannot harm something that does not have desires — that does not care one way or the other.
However, once the fetus has desires, it has interests, and those interests count with everybody else’s. However, those interests do not earn it a right to the use of another person’s body without her consent. If it did, than no woman today would ever be anything other than property.
On the issue of abortion, these considerations suggest that, up until the fetus acquires desires, there is no moral problem with abortion. The fetus is a lump of tissue, with no interests that require our moral consideration. There is, in fact, no moral distinction between being conceived and aborted before one has interests, and never being conceived at all.
On the other hand, the instant the fetus has desires, it has moral standing. Those interests cannot be lightly dismissed. Abortion may still be legitimate, but only in the same way that innocent lives may sometimes be taken in defense of a higher moral principle. The right to autonomy — the right of each person to have control of their own body and not have their body turned over to another person — allows one to kill an innocent usurper of one’s body.
Even here, the right to autonomy over one’s own body exists merely as a right not to be used by another. It is not a right to kill the other. At most, a pregnant woman who has allowed a fetus to grow inside of her to the point that it has acquired interests can argue for having the fetus extracted. She cannot argue for a right to have the fetus killed. This distinction will have a great deal of difference when technology advances to the point that a fetus can be removed and placed in an artificial womb.
IV. Capital Punishment
There are three popular arguments in favor of capital punishment, and I have problems with all of them.
A. Argument 1: Specific Deterrence
This argument states that capital punishment is good in virtue of the fact that it may prevent a future crime. It is better, the argument goes, that this criminal be executed than that some future victim die, or that the rest of us have to live with the fear of being murdered.
I presented my objection to this claim in Chapter 18. Assume that a psychological test is developed and administered to high-school students, and that those who fail the test are even more likely to commit a future crime than the people presently in prison without capital punishment.
If “to prevent a future crime” is a good reason to execute somebody, then we may execute all high-school seniors who fail this test. Imagine, the first day of school for a new class of high-school freshmen, two students are called down to the principle’s office where they are shown the results of the test, declared a threat to society, and given a lethal injection, all in the name of preventing a future crime.
Executing people for the purpose of preventing a future crime is something that we ought not to like.
B. Argument 2: Justice
This argument says that the reason that the murderer should be punished is because he deserves it. The person who kills has given up his rights, in a way that the high-school student who has failed a psychological test has not. As such, the person who kills may be executed, where the high-school student who fails a test may not.
(a) The mysterious disappearing right
I need somebody to explain to me the mystery of this famous evaporating right. What is this entity that somehow permeates a body, making it wrong for anybody to do him harm? Then, when he commits some sort of wrong, like murder, this essence — whatever it is — vanishes. It disappears, and what was once wrong to do to the person, becomes right. Somehow, the individual’s right evaporates, or leaves the body, or slips through some rip in the time/space continuum.
This mysterious disappearing right is a myth that people accept because it helps them to feel good about harming others. But it has no hold on reality. It has no legitimate role to play in real-world decision making.
If we cannot explain these evaporating rights, we have reason to believe that they are fiction. If they are fiction, then they do not justify anything.
(b) Rights as aversions
This may be an odd claim for me to make, since I wrote about rights in the previous section (on abortion). I wrote of a mother’s right to autonomy — to deny others the use of her body without her consent. Here, I question the existence of rights.
Actually, I think that a desire-based theory makes good sense of the concept of a right. Rights theorists have often had problems dealing with a great many issues. To start with, what are rights and how do we know about them? Furthermore, there is the issue of weighing rights against each other. Rights are often presented as absolute. However, an innocent child’s right to life is no protection against killing it to prevent a bomb from going off in another city.
All of these mysteries disappear if we look at a ‘right to X’ in terms of “we would all tend to be much better off if everybody had an aversion to depriving others of X.” To say that there is a right to life is to say that everybody ought to have an aversion to taking innocent life. To say that interaction with another person requires consent is to say that we should all have an aversion to interaction with others without consent. A right to freedom of speech is to be understood as a claim that we ought to have an aversion to using the law to shut people up. These aversions will create deep uneasiness in the pit of one’s stomach to the degree that one contemplated these actions.
As desires and aversions, these rights can be weighed. No right is absolute. The gnawing uneasiness at silencing the press may have to stand against the greater uneasiness at being constantly exposed to the dangers of foreign invasion because all of our military information is freely available to everybody. The uneasiness at taking innocent life may have to be weighed against the uneasiness of allowing a city to be utterly destroyed in a nuclear explosion.
Understood this way, there is no evaporating ‘right’ to justify punishment. Rather, there is an aversion to doing harm generating an uneasiness that motivates us against doing harm. However, that uneasiness needs to be balanced against the uneasiness we should also feel at the victims of random violence.
It may well be the case that we should have no such aversion to killing the guilty — not because of a mysterious disappearing right, but because such an aversion will prevent us from doing things that will, ultimately, defend innocent life.
C. Argument 3: General Deterrence
One possible reason why it is good for us to want to execute the murderer is because of its effect in promoting general deterrence. It should cause people to think twice about committing murder. This, in turn, means that each of us suffers a lower chance of being murdered. Even though we suffer some chance of being killed as a result of being falsely convicted of murder, our chance of being saved from murder (and the chance that somebody we know and love will be saved from murder) would be greater than our chance of being wrongly executed (or the chance of somebody we know and love being wrongly executed).
This argument is generally in agreement with the theory of value being sent here. Praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment are used to promote good desires and inhibit bad desires. Condemnation and execution of murderers would be justified if it was shown to be useful in promoting good desires and inhibiting bad desires.
If these premises are true, then it may be good for us to want to execute murderers.
(a) Unintentionally executing innocent people
One of the arguments against capital punishment is that there is a risk of killing an innocent person.
I do not think that this argument has much merit. All forms of punishment that we adopt, from prison time to fines, is sometimes inflicted on innocent people. If the chance of catching an innocent person is an argument against establishing a system of punishment, then no system of punishment is legitimate.
In response to this argument, opponents to capital punishment assert that it is particularly bad to take away a person’s life, because nothing can be given back if it is proved that the accused was innocent.
The theory of value being defended here holds that there is no intrinsic value. Therefore, there is no “particularly badness” in the fact that nothing can be given back if it is shown that a person was executed by mistake. The only badness that resists is the thwarting of desires. On that measure, all forms of punishment take something that cannot be given back.
D. Argument Against: A Will to Kill
In the arguments above I suggested that an punishment may be justified if it promotes a general aversion to killing. However, we have some glaring empirical evidence that this is not the case. Our desire to execute murderers actually leaves us worse off than we would have otherwise been.
The first piece of empirical evidence shows us that regions without capital punishment have lower murder rates. Regions that introduce capital punishment see their murder rates rise, and those that ban capital punishment see their murder rates fall.
Second, older people face less of deterrence against murder than younger people, yet are less likely (rather than more likely) to commit these types of crimes. Somebody who is 80 years old and in poor health, who will certainly die before he can be executed or even convicted of a crime, faces very little deterrence threat from capital punishment. By the deterrence theory, he should be the most likely to commit murder. The healthy young man with his whole life ahead of him would be the least likely to murder. This is what the assumptions behind deterrence theory predicts. Reality suggests that the theory is in need of some refinement.
Unless it can be shown that capital punishment provides us with a genuine benefit, then it is not good for us to like to execute these people.
The deterrence evidence actually suggests the opposite conclusion — that it is not good for us to like to execute these people.
(a) Capital Punishment and the Inhibition on Killing
In Chapter 18, I pointed out that a part of what makes evil possible is the capacity that people have to rationalize their actions. They take readily agreed upon principles in society, and twist them in such a way that their desired action appears legitimate, at least in their own mind.
One of the effects of creating a society whose citizens like to execute certain people is that it creates a citizenry that finds it easier to rationalize murder. The murderer takes the fact that he has been raised to like to execute certain people, and applies it to the person he believes has wronged him. Whether it is a spouse, a relative, or a competitor for a job (or something as trivial as a parking spot), the person raised with the idea “it is good for us to like to kill certain people” finds that he would like to kill the person who ‘wronged’ him.
On the other hand, a child is raised in a society that says that we should never want to kill will have less of an opportunity to rationalize a desire to kill. No matter how one feels slighted, such a person grows up with a stronger aversion to killing, and a lower chance that the slight will result in retributive death. He will lack the capacity to rationalize murder, and this may well make him less likely to commit murder.
This, at least, helps to explain the evidence that comes up when studying the deterrence value of capital punishment. Why is murder more common in regions that have capital punishment and less common in regions that do not have it? A plausible suggestion is that children who are raised in a society without capital punishment learns to dislike killing more than children who are raised in a society that celebrates this violence, telling children that it is something they ought to like.
Such a society may also find that it is more resistant to going to war than a society that celebrates killing. Which may, in turn, explain why the nations of Europe not only have fewer murders, but seem to have developed a stronger sense of revulsion for war, than America.
E. Conclusion
Ultimately, I have so say that I do not have a strong opinion on capital punishment one way or the other.
Morality weighs all desires, including the future desires of a person who may be a victim of a future crime. Consequently, specific deterrence has some merit — even if there are some clear problems with the thesis that it is good for us to like killing such people.
The argument for specific deterrence has its special problems. To argue for a fondness for killing people to prevent future crimes, is to argue for a fondness for killing those high school students who fail their psychological tests. If execution is justified, it is justified for both; if not justified, it is justified for neither.
The objection to the problem of general deterrence is not an objection that it is wrong to consider matters of general deterrence when considering the merits of capital punishment. General deterrence is relevant in principle, but evidence suggests that it is not relevant in practice. We get a much stronger deterrence effect from teaching our children not to want to kill even those who make us the most angry, then we get from teaching them to want to kill in some instances.
V. Euthanasia
I have stated earlier that one of my greatest fears is that of experiencing great protracted pain and being forced to endure it, even though in my advanced age and the cause of the pain (e.g., terminal cancer) is such that there is nothing on the other side of the wait, but death.
This ethical issue is one in which it can be said that well-meaning people of today do the most evil, without meaning to, in the same way that the ‘good’ inquisitor, crusader, and slave owner of the past did harm. It is a case of good people, too quickly and easily adopting a position, and acting on that position, when they should not have. Because they adopt their position based on a mistake, others are made to suffer needlessly, and the ‘good person’ ends up causing more suffering than he prevents.
The mistake, in this case, is the idea that life has intrinsic value, and consequently protecting life even when life has lost all real value, both for the person living it, and for others.
All value exists as relationships between states of affairs and desires. Living is required for the fulfillment of most of our desires, so it is no mystery that life has a great deal of value. However, that value is instrumental value. It is the same type of value that we find in money, or kitchen utensils, or a car. It is useful. Life is far more useful in most cases than any of these other things, but a difference in degree, in this case, is not a difference in kind.
However, life is not required for the fulfillment of all desires. Some desires, such as the desire to avoid great pain, may not be a desire which one has to be alive to fulfill. If an individual is too feeble to act so as to fulfill his desires, or is incapable of knowing that they are fulfilled, or how to fulfill them, life is, at best, useless.
We can also imagine the case of a person who dedicated his life to saving his money so that, when he died, it may be used to do some good. This was his heart’s desire. However, his desire is thwarted when, as an old man, he lays in an irreversible coma, never to experience another lucid moment, while the money he wanted to leave behind to do good goes to pay for somebody to change his diapers and adjust his feeding tubes.
In those cases where death fulfills desires better than life, death has more value than life. To force a person to accept life in a situation where death will best fulfill his interests, is no different than him to accept death when life would best serve his interests.
In the section on capital punishment I argued that there may be a problem with teaching children that killing can sometimes be justified. The problem with this lesson is that it may help people to rationalize killing when it is not justified. Allowing those whose interests are best served by death to obtain it may be subject to this type of abuse. Research should be conducted to determine if this is the case. However, saying that it is permissible to use somebody else’s property with their consent does not seem to foster a tendency to steel, and a moral permission to have sex with somebody with consent does not promote rape, so recognizing the value of ending a life with the consent of the individual will not likely increase incidents of murder. To be sure, given the importance of life, we can stipulate that there should be a presumption in favor of life unless the patient can convince experts beyond a reasonable doubt that death is best.
Even if murder rates are not likely to be higher in a society that allows euthanasia, we would have to worry about the effect of allowing voluntary euthanasia would have on the suicide rates. Anguished teenagers, having been taught as children not to be adverse to the idea of a suffering person taking their own life, may be less adverse to their own suicide. The teenager’s anguish, however, is likely to be temporary and the suicide irrational. A general aversion to suicide, needed to keep these teenagers from considering the option, may have the unfortunately side effect of prohibiting those for whom suicide is rational from pursuing this option.
There is a concern that if voluntary death is allowable, people may be coerced into agreeing to death under circumstances where it would benefit those who are behind the coercion. Here, I want to make an important note. Coercion does not require legal penalty or punishment. Coercion can be as subtle as the glaring disapproval of a daughter or son who is disappointed that an aged parent has not yet taken the final journey. It can take the form of a doctor working for an HMO strongly recommending euthanasia, not because it is in the best interest of the patient (though the doctor may have rationalized her recommendation this way), but because it is in the best financial interest of the company. These are legitimate worries.
Ultimately, the morality of euthanasia requires weighing these possibilities against the great deal of genuine pain, suffering, and loss that the elderly, ill, and injured are forced to endure.
There is no institution in existence that does not create some potential for wrong choice. Permitting gambling, drinking, and even fast food, stock investing, and driving, all create options for some people to make bad choices — in some cases, fatally bad choices.
It does not seem likely that the ‘bad choices’ that people might make if euthanasia is permitted will weigh nearly as high as the ‘good choices’ that people are prohibited from making when euthanasia is not permitted. Permitting euthanasia is not truly likely to blind masses of people to the general value of their own life. If anything, they will almost certainly still cling to life far longer than reason would suggest.
Precautions can be taken against most of the abuses mentioned above. We can institute a requirement that requests for euthanasia be reviewed by an independent board that is not under the influence of the insurance company. If euthanasia is an option for those who find it rational, and experts are provided where individuals can discuss this option seriously, teenagers who truly feel that their suffering is too great may seek help they would otherwise avoid where suicide is considered taboo.
Ultimately, I argue that we have a lot we need to learn about the moral permissibility of euthanasia. There are a lot of questions that are only partially answered. Those who insist that it is clearly wrong are mistaken — forcing people to live who have nothing to live for certainly thwarts desires. Those who insist that it is clearly permissible are mistaken — a stronger love of life may well reduce murder and suicides, and there is a serious potential for coercing people into suicides we want them to have, rather than what will actually be in their interests.
The Hippocratic Oath has a doctor saying, “Above all, do no harm.” In Chapter 13, I argued that there is no such thing as ‘desire-independent’ value, and ‘harm’ can only be understood in terms of thwarting strong and stable desires. A person who is in great pain has a strong and stable aversion to pain (a strong and stable desire that he not be in pain). Where living thwarts this desire, the doctor who does not aid a person’s death is not preventing harm, but causing it. ‘Above all, do no harm,” means, “Do not force life on the patient a person whose desires are better fulfilled by death, and who rationally chooses death.”
VI. Homosexuality
A. The Choice Argument
Again, I want to begin by clearing away some of the underbrush that many people get tangled up in.
Some seek to defend homosexuality on the thesis that it is not a matter of choice. Who, after all, would choose the anguish and distress of having a desire to engage in homosexual acts?
This is a poor defense. If there was a biological disposition towards rape, for example — if we were to discover that rapists have a particularly dense clump of cells in some relevant part of the brain — this would not make rape permissible. Rape would still be something that we generally had reason to fight against.
If such a desire were not a matter of choice — if it were not susceptible to the influences of praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment — then the only conclusion that we could draw is that we should not be trying to control it through praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment. We will need to look for other options.
Accordingly, if homosexual acts are permissible, then there is nothing wrong with choosing to engage in homosexual acts. An agent does not have to want to do something to have a right to do it. I have a right to go to the grocery store right now, even though I do not wish to go there. If homosexual acts are morally permissible, then even those who are not homosexuals have a right to engage in them — not just homosexuals.
For all practical purposes, the proper criteria for evaluating these acts is harm to others. A desire is bad to the degree that it thwarts other desires — to the degree that it harms others. If homosexual acts cause no harm, then the desire to engage in them contains no badness.
The same criteria, by the way, applies to the aversion to people engaging in homosexual acts. It, too, needs to be evaluated according to its tendency to cause actions that thwart the desires of others. This is a test that homophobia — the aversion to people engaging in homosexual acts — fails. It is a bad desire. It is also a desire that is susceptible to the influences of praise, blame, reward, and punishment. It follows from this that the aversion to people engaged in homosexual acts is the immoral desire, not homosexuality itself.
B. The Burden of Proof
Take any of the actions you have done in, say, the past hour and attempt to defend it as permissible. The only thing one can think of saying is, “What’s wrong with it?” Somebody must begin the debate by identifying a possible element of ‘wrongness’ before the debate of its permissibility can even make sense. So, with respect to homosexual acts, ‘What’s wrong with them?’
The standard argument against homosexual acts goes as follows:
- Homosexual acts are unnatural.
- Whatever is unnatural is wrong.
- Therefore, homosexual acts are wrong.
The task here is to come up with a definition of unnatural that is consistent in statements (1) and (2), and within which both (1) and (2) are true.
I discussed these options in Chapter 5 on Logic. However, in that chapter, I gave a neutral account of these options. Here, I will not be neutral.
‘Unnatural’ could mean ‘manmade’. If we use this definition of unnatural, (1) is true — at least human homosexual acts are carried out by humans, and (2) is clearly false — human heterosexual acts are just as manmade. If whatever man (humans) do is wrong, then everything that humans do is wrong. Which is certainly an absurd conclusion.
Another possibility: ‘unnatural’ things are things not found in nature. Unfortunately, this would include writing ethics and reading the bible — act that I have never witnessed any creature in nature performing. It applies to reading ethics books as well, by the way. It also applies to wearing clothes — every other creature in nature walks around naked.
Yet another possibility: homosexuality is unnatural because it does not lead to procreation. Whatever does not promote procreation is ‘unnatural’. Is this true? Well, it seems that we are going to have to ban computer games — as well as watching sitcoms on television, reading a book — well, most books, pornographic books may still be permitted if it leads to procreation. There’s daydreaming, sleeping more than is strictly necessary, eating more than necessary, and so on. In other words, a whole lot of things that do not lead to procreation are certainly not wrong. Furthermore, if you can go to the movies with a person of the same gender, why can’t you go to bed with him?
Of course, we can also raise questions against the idea that homosexual acts do not contribute to procreation. An ant colony has only one individual directly involved in procreation — the queen (except for a few minutes with a drone). Everybody else contributes to procreation indirectly. There is no evidence that I am aware of that says that having a certain percentage of the population not concerned with raising their own children does not, overall, promote procreation within the colony or community. This is a feature found in nature called “kin selection”, where family members who have no offspring help to care for the offspring of their relatives. Homosexuals may provide the same role in indirectly promoting the procreation of others as priests.
Possibility number four: homosexuality involves using an organ for something other than its intended ‘natural’ purpose. If this is the claim, well, I use my fingers to type, and to hold my wedding band. The bridge of my nose holds my glasses, and my waist to hold my pants up. My wife hangs earrings from her ears and a necklace around her neck, and a bracelet on her wrist. All of these, shockingly, involve using an organ for something other than its intended purpose. If this is the reason for calling homosexual acts wrong, then, once more, we have a moral objection to raise against wearing clothes.
The fact is, there is no definition of ‘unnatural’ that makes both of the premises in the above argument true at the same time. Those who object to homosexuality in virtue of its being ‘unnatural’ are doing no more than making up excuses as a way of pretending that their bigotry serves a higher, more noble cause.
C. The Yucky Argument
Homosexuality is ‘yucky,’ some think.
Actually, I consider eating liver to be ‘yucky’. However, not only do I have to put up with the knowledge that some people actually do it, but I have to put up with my favorite grocery store putting raw internal organs out on the shelf in plain sight.
‘Yucky’ is not the same thing as ‘wrong’.
However, I think that this ‘yucky’ argument is the true reason some people find homosexual acts objectionable. Unfortunately, the argument, “I think homosexual acts are yucky; therefore, it is morally permissible for me to harm anybody who does it,” is not a valid implication. If it were, then I could say to a girl that I am attracted to that, “I think that your refusal to have sex with me is yucky; therefore, it is morally permissible for me to harm you if you actually do refuse.”
All of these other arguments are mere excuses by people who want to force others to appease their desires without feeling guilty about it — by casting their immorality in a favorable light. It’s rationalization, plain and simple.
A particularly vile rationalization, which fits the category of Denial of the Victim in the previous section, is the belief that homosexuals molest children. In recent history, we have learned that there is far better evidence supporting the thesis that priests molest children than we have for homosexuals. However, that is beside the point. The ultimate question is whether the desire to have sex with somebody of the same gender is more likely to cause one to want to have sex with children than wanting to have sex with somebody of the opposite gender, and whether the two can be separated. There is no evidence for this, and more than enough reason to morally condemn the individual who is too quick to find this type of claim convincing. People such as this are not fighting for morality, they are immoral people themselves searching to excuse their hate.
D. Freedom of Religion
There are those who argue for a right to hold an aversion to homosexuals and their interests on the grounds that their religion commands it of them.
However, if a particular religion argued for the legitimacy of holding blacks as slaves, or for sacrificing children or virgins on an alter to some deity, or to slaughter others belonging to a different religion, ‘freedom of religion’ would not give them the right to practice these evils.
There are a lot of people today promoting a horrendous interpretation of the First Amendment, that the “free exercise” clause prohibits the government from interfering with any religious practice. If we accept this interpretation, this would imply that the government would have no right to interfere with the Christian mob who hauled the infidel out of his house and burned him at the stake. The inquisitors would simply assert that any government interference violates the “free exercise” of their religion.
Clearly, the free exercise of one’s religion ends where that person is causing harm to others. If religion is used as an excuse for harming the interests of homosexuals, then this is a case, like that of the inquisitors dragging the infidel from their home, where the government can legitimately step up and restrict the free exercise of religion.
E. Summary
Morality is concerned with the goodness and badness of certain desires and aversions, according to whether those desires or aversions fulfill or thwart other desires.
There is a distinction to be drawn to the aversion to engaging in homosexual acts, and an aversion to allowing others to engage in homosexual acts. Just as there is a distinction between eating liver and onions, and an aversion to allowing others to eat livers and onions.
Here, we are concerned with the aversion to allowing others to engage in homosexual acts, and to form homosexual relationships. This aversion is desire-thwarting. This means that it is bad, in the only way that things in the real world can be bad. Furthermore, the fact that so many people do not share this aversion tells us that it is learned and not innate. It is subject to the influence of praise, blame, reward, and punishment.
All of this suggests that morality demands that we use the tools of praise, blame, reward, and punishment to inhibit the formation of an aversion to people entering into homosexual relationships. Reason calls this aversion a form of bigotry, properly condemned, and, where acted upon, properly punished. Reason calls standing up to this bigotry an rightful act, praising those who take up this cause, and rewarding those who bring about the most good.
There is an objective morality, and that morality condemns bigotry against homosexuals.
VI. Conclusion
This chapter presented a few of the more widely discussed issues of the day, and the treatment of each is way too brief. I have no strong sentiments about many of these actually — I think some are debated for a reason. That reason is because the correct answer — how each of these things would stand relative to a good person’s desires — is truly difficult to discover. The person that one should view with the greatest suspicion is not the person who holds that capital punishment, for example, is justified or unjustified, but the person who claims with the utmost conviction that they know what the right answer is.
In each of these areas, there are claims about which I could be mistaken, and about which I offer very little defense. Yet, they are claims upon which the answer truly depends. For example: To what degree does widespread acceptance of ‘the SOB got what he deserved” make it easier for people to rationalize murder, and thus make murders more common? I can’t give any certain answers to this question. That has to be left up to scientists and researchers.
Yet, I know exactly what will happen when researchers release their data. Those who like the conclusion that the research supports will say that the research is sound (without actually going to the effort to evaluate the soundness of the research), while those who are opposed to the conclusion that the research supports will instantly argue that the research was faulty (without actually taking care to determine whether the research contains the faults they ascribe to it).
In other words, people will base their acceptance or rejection of the evidence based on their preferences for the conclusions. This is the opposite of what they should be doing; basing their conclusions on the best evidence available.
Though I have given little support for any particular answer, I have shown, I think, that some of the most widely used claims made in each of these issues are clearly flawed. Yet, they are used. The other wrongs that I have discussed here are insignificant compared to the wrong using bad arguments to support conclusions about who should and should not suffer harm. Ultimately, I can have far more respect for the person who holds that capital punishment is justified, but believes it based on good evidence and strong reasoning, than I can have for the person who is utterly agrees with me that capital punishment should end, but bases his conclusion on bad evidence and poor reasoning.
This is where the true problem lies; on matters of life and death, so many people care so little about getting the answer right that they eagerly grab onto whatever argument that lends support to their desired outcome. The possibility of innocent people suffering from wrongs supported by weak arguments seems to count for nothing.
If we were to clear away these poor arguments, I am still not saying that the right answer would be clearly exposed and obvious to all who would but gaze upon them. The right answer might still be difficult to determine, and there could well remain room for reasonable people to disagree. However, at least we would have fulfilled the obligation to care enough to throw out the rhetorical rubbish that gets in the way.
Or, at the very least, we could demonstrate the integrity to admit “I only have so much time, and cannot study every issue in sufficient detail to draw informed conclusions. So, on these issues, I am forced to leave the decision in the hands of those who have studied it, and I will focus my limited energy instead on those issues over there. I am not to have an opinion on every question asked of me, when I know exactly how ill informed some of those opinions are.”
This is what I found that I had to do — focus my attention on specific concerns while leaving those issues I skip for others to study. Ultimately, what concerns me most is the wrong of using poor justification — unsupported premises and invalid arguments — when drawing conclusions on matters of life, and love, and death.