(This has been quite a week for natural law thought, what with Princeton philosopher Robert George featured in a New York Times Magazine spread and all. That excellent spread raised a lot of commentary, including a response by homosexual Catholic and erstwhile conservative Andrew Sullivan, excoriating George at his blog for The Atlantic. That commentary was sent to me by a leftist friend with the simple question, “thoughts?” in the subject header. It seemed only natural [pun intended] to put those first-reaction “thoughts” for my friend out there for the world to see.)
As you know from previous discussions, I prefer to let the adversary do the talking, so in response to Sullivan’s quotes:
“There does seem something intuitively right about seeing our ‘nature’ as some sort of guide to the way we should live our lives.”
OK, here’s where he goes wrong. Sullivan is a voluntarist at heart, much like most Western thinkers in recent centuries. He continually defines the “natural” based on what feels right, what occurs in the absence of coercion to the contrary, and what people want to do. When he asks…
“What do we mean by nature? How do emotion and reason interact? How precise and universal can we be in adducing morals from something as diverse and varied as the fruits of natural selection? How can we be sure we aren’t smuggling in all sorts of pre-existing views of what nature is and what morality is when we declare something “unnatural”? How does an argument that designates an entire sub-section of humankind as inherently immoral square with the goodness of God’s creation or the morally neutral power of Darwin’s theory?”
…he’s saying that we mean things that happen by “nature.” He’s implying that emotion and reason interact in such a way that an emotion is an a priori good, justified by instrumental reasoning after the fact (equally true whether it’s homosexuals who employ reasoning to justify their sex lives or heterosexuals who employ reasoning because they want to oppress “the other”). He’s saying that we start with the fruits of natural selection, then adduce morals from them based on what we want/what feels right to us/what empowers us/what we will to do. He’s saying that we do smuggle in “pre-existing views” of nature (he’s kind of correct on that one, and I’ll come back to this in a minute). And he’s saying that an entire sub-section of humankind who wants to do something should be condoned in doing so unless it infringes on someone else’s general liberty, either through God or Darwin.
The problem is that Sullivan’s argument starts with will as the basis for liberty, and looks for ways to justify what we want to do once we’ve determined what it is that we want. George (and I) are intellectual supremacists, arguing that reason has to be the king of the will a la Aristotle and most Western thinkers prior to the so-called Enlightenment. In a nutshell, just because someone wants to do something by nature does not mean that this desire is in accordance with human nature. I can want to have sex with a rock, or to kill my neighbor because of his skin color. But will does not determine morality. Reason does, because reason is at the apex of human nature. Many animal natures, ours included, contain will; only human nature contains reason. Reason looks for purposes and reasonable uses of things. A reasonable use of physical strength is material work or defense of innocent people, not arbitrary violence. A reasonable use of sex that takes into account its primary effect, which is procreation, cannot justify either homosexual or other non-procreative sex.
Sure, homosexual tendencies exist in the will by nature; as Sullivan says, “even” the Vatican recognizes that. But the Vatican isn’t just interested in keeping the gay man down (no sick pun intended). It is interested in preserving the primacy of reason and not the will as the basis for moral liberty. We have all kinds of tendencies that are unnatural. Look at the tendency held by so many towards greed and materialism of the sort you rightly rail against. You acknowledge that economic liberty ought to be oriented around the purpose of fulfilling human need, and I agree with you there despite our many disagreements about the best way to do so. Natural law thinkers extend the same kind of purpose-driven liberty discerned by reason to sexuality, politics, personal choices, etc.
Sullivan is wrong to say that “sexual orientation is the critical category here, not procreation or nature as it is actually found, and the result is to retain a stigma and legal discrimination against homosexuals – simply because they are what they are.” Again, he assumes a lack of reason behind the motives of his opponents (and I don’t doubt that he’s right as far as most on the American Right go). But he sees the entire debate over homosexuality as a clash of wills, not of reasonable positions. Intellectually speaking, that makes it very hard for him to justify his position over the alternative, much though a clash of wills is par for the course in current American politics. Stigmas are not always unreasonable, even if they do condemn something many people want to do.
Finally, Sullivan raises the point that, “You’d think that Christian scholars would be intrigued to figure out the questions – what are homosexuals for? why did God create them? why did natural selection favor their persistence?” An interesting question, to be sure, but not with the assumption that whatever a person desires is an a priori moral right. The question Christian theologians would file these points under is, “Why does sin seem so right and so appealing to a creature made in the image and likeness of God?”
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