In the photo
at left, Justice Anthony Kennedy presents his considered response to Plato’s Laws, Aquinas’s Summa Contra Gentiles, Kant’s Lectures
on Ethics, and his own Catholic faith.
Asked to develop his argument in a little more detail, Justice Kennedy paused
and then solemnly added: “I got lifetime tenure, beyotch.”
Court
observers expect that Justice Kennedy’s subtle reasoning, backed as it is by a
sophisticated philosophy
of language and philosophy
of law, puts him in the running for the prestigious Ockham Award for
Catholic Statesmanship. Competition for
that prize has, however, been particularly
fierce of late.
The fact that you think natural law arguments don't make sense without God is given as the reason to exclude NL arguments from the public sphere - but the fact that you think utilitarian arguments don't make sense without God get a pass, because you take the atheist utilitarian at his word, even though you think he's wrong.
ReplyDeleteYou're equivocating on the phrase "don't make sense without God."
IMO, NL doesn't make sense without God because it ultimately requires reference to God.
Utilitarianism doesn't make sense as an objective moral theory without God because I don't think there is objective morality without God.
NL is thus ruled out because (in my legally uninformed opinion) it would violate the establishment clause.
Utlitarianism would not be ruled out because it wouldn't reference God, explicitly or implicitly.
Just because Chad Handley thinks an objective account of morality is wrong doesn't mean that that objective theory of morality violates the establishment clause.
You are utterly misunderstanding my point about objective morality. You seem to think that because I think that all objective moral theories fail unless they reference God, that therefore all objective moral theories actually reference God. That just doesn't follow.
ReplyDeleteI wrote a response to this kind of reasoning while you were likely writing this one, but it simply doesn't matter. At that point, your argument reduces to psychoanalysis about the proponents of natural law or utilitarianism. So when you say...
If, as seems to be the case with a prohibition against gay marriage, a law only has religious justification then I would regard such a law as illicit.
...something gets tacked on after the fact. Namely, "And even if you offer up reasons or justifications that are wholly non-religious, well, if I think they're religious anyway then I'm overruling them all."
You can't just say that merely offering up a secular justification will be sufficient, because that's trivially easy to do. It can range from something as flimsy as "We just plain want this law" to "We're trying to create a certain model of a society here, and for aesthetic or functional reasons we think outlawing X is best.", and you've got your secular justification.
And further - are you really saying that laws which are inspired by and consistent with (say) materialist atheism are entirely okay... say, 'Infanticide is alright, because humans are all just animals anyway, and as dependent creatures children only exist at the whim of either the state or their parents'? Unpopular for the moment, but if it became popular, hey - there's no God there so we're not pushing religious views on anyone?
I doubt that Fischer Ames, when he gave the final wording to that amendment, really meant it ruled out any religious arguments whatsoever.
ReplyDeleteAs I thought I made painfully clear several times over by now, I also do not rule out any religious argument whatsoever.
What I rule out is the passing of a law that has religion as its sole justification.
You're equivocating on the phrase "don't make sense without God."
ReplyDeleteIMO, NL doesn't make sense without God because it ultimately requires reference to God.
Utilitarianism doesn't make sense as an objective moral theory without God because I don't think there is objective morality without God.
Which would mean that utilitarianism would ultimately require reference to God in order to make sense.
I recall earlier in this thread that you conceded an atheist could accept natural law, but that 'So what?' could be said in response to their arguments. The same holds for the utilitarian. So how do the cases differ meaningfully?
Chad,
ReplyDeleteIt should be added it far from conclusive that Natural Law must secretly reference God.
All that has really been suggested is Natural Law doesn't recognise the fact/value distinction, is realist, is not mechanistic and materialist and so on in essence it believes in objective morality.
As most people are not going to accept, in practice, at least the conclusions or consistent application of any moral system that does not accept objective morality, it is hard to see how one could even begin to try and banish Natural Law from the public square on these principles. Many might parrot moral relativist slogans from time to time, but most people will always be moral realists or believers in objective morality.
Disraeli once wrote that even Mormon could count more votaries than Bentham. Utilitarian scholars can write all they want about their moral theories, you will never bind the mass of men upon utilitarian principles.
There are even other ways to defend Natural Law than the Thomistic method. There is Stoic Natural Law, which, especially in Cicero's manifestation, can be separated from God. There is C.S Lewis's a posteriori defense of Natural Law in The Abolition of Man. It is true that all such approaches appeal to some kind of objective morality, some kind of objective good, but they do not necessarily involve express theism.
-Jeremy Taylor
ReplyDeleteWhat I rule out is the passing of a law that has religion as its sole justification.
Yes, but by religion you mean anything that is theistic, despite the clear problems that have been raised with such a position.
-Jeremy Taylor
At that point, your argument reduces to psychoanalysis about the proponents of natural law or utilitarianism.
ReplyDeleteNonsense. Some theories really do imply the existence of God and some really don't. Natural law (IMO) really does, regardless of the psychoanalytical state of the person promoting it.
"And even if you offer up reasons or justifications that are wholly non-religious, well, if I think they're religious anyway then I'm overruling them all."
I gave arguments as to why NL leads inevitably to theism. Scott, who knows more about NL than I do, says there are NL scholars who say the same. So, I'm not just deciding it on a whim as you are trying to make it look like I'm doing on this formulation.
Immanent teleology would seem to lead directly to a God in a way that "the best for the most" absolutely does not. It's not as arbitrary as you are desperately and futilely trying to make it seem.
You can't just say that merely offering up a secular justification will be sufficient
Which is why I didn't say that all that was needed is a secular justification.
What I actually said was you needed good arguments related to the social contract.
Do you never tire of building strawmen?
And further - are you really saying that laws which are inspired by and consistent with (say) materialist atheism are entirely okay.
No, I'm saying such laws do not violate the establishment clause.
They might be ruled out for other reasons, and I'm sure they would be, but they don't violate the establishment clause.
Also, it hasn't been established that Natural Law, even in its Thomistic guise only, relies on God's existence.
ReplyDeleteIt relies on negating the so called fact/value distinction, realism, and opposition to mechanism and materialism - in short it relies on objective morality and an objective good. But this is not the same as God, necessarily.
What is more, although many may sometimes parrot moral relativist slogans, the mass of men do and always will believe in objective morality - they will are moral realists.
As Disraeli put it, even Mormon counts more votaries than Bentham. And he was right. The mass of men will not be bound together by utilitarian moral codes alone.
-Jeremy Taylor
Which would mean that utilitarianism would ultimately require reference to God in order to make sense.
ReplyDeleteThat doesn't follow at all, and is in fact, a howler.
You can't make an essentially atheistic or humanistic moral theory "make sense" just by adding God. Adding God to most atheistic objective moral theories would only serve to make them incoherent.
My opinion is:
1. There are objective moral theories that make an indispensable explicit or implicit reference to God. I think those violate the establishment clause.
2. There are objective moral theories that do not reference God at all, and could not reference God at all without immediately becoming incoherent. I think those are just wrong.
There are no inconsistencies in those two beliefs that I can see, certainly none that you've been able to point out..
There's no line of argument for you here. Can we move on?
Scott, who knows more about NL than I do, says there are NL scholars who say the same.
ReplyDeleteActually, that scholar was talking about obligation - God is required to show why we must do what is right.
In terms of public discourse that is not especially relevant. Most people are not going to inquire whether or not we should do what is right if we can prove to them what is right.
In fact this goes directly back to what I mentioned above: Natural Law requires not a God but a belief in objective morality - but most people ultimately will always have such a belief, even if in an inconsistent and inarticulate way.
-Jeremy Taylor
Yes, but by religion you mean anything that is theistic, despite the clear problems that have been raised with such a position.
ReplyDeleteI didn't see those arguments, possibly because you were still posting anonymously when you wrote them. But, yes, IMO, if the sole justification for a law required mere theism, I would still think that violated the establishment clause.
Nonsense. Some theories really do imply the existence of God and some really don't. Natural law (IMO) really does, regardless of the psychoanalytical state of the person promoting it.
ReplyDeleteHow? You can argue 'implies God' with countless things, over which people will ultimately agree or disagree. You can argue the very existence of a moral sense and a desire to create a moral system (like utilitarians do) 'implies God'.
But why does this matter - especially when all you seem to be relying on his is a subjective judgment call?
I gave arguments as to why NL leads inevitably to theism. Scott, who knows more about NL than I do, says there are NL scholars who say the same. So, I'm not just deciding it on a whim as you are trying to make it look like I'm doing on this formulation.
I said that your argument ultimately relies on psychoanalysis, and it really seems to. Hence your taking about how NL philosophers are trying to 'sneak God in under the door'. If what ultimately is required or follows from philosophical arguments are the grounds to dismiss it, then utilitarianism as an objective moral theory is in trouble - for it to be so, they would need God. So would any purportedly objective moral theory, apparently.
Immanent teleology would seem to lead directly to a God in a way that "the best for the most" absolutely does not. It's not as arbitrary as you are desperately and futilely trying to make it seem.
What's apparently arbitrary is your judgment, relevant to legal issues, that one theory's "leading to God" is more problematic than another theory's "leading to God". Why should anyone care about "the best for the most"? For that matter - who decides what "best" is? Who decides who counts in the "most"?
And really, can the theatrics. I'm trying to return to a civil conversation here, but if you want snark, we can spend the next few days insulting each other. Your choice.
Which is why I didn't say that all that was needed is a secular justification.
What I actually said was you needed good arguments related to the social contract.
Good arguments? Okay: on what standard?
If the standards are objective, well... we have a problem, given appeals to objective standards, don't we?
If the standards are subjective, they're whims by another name.
The men I'm constructing aren't made of straw. All too real, sadly.
They might be ruled out for other reasons, and I'm sure they would be, but they don't violate the establishment clause.
What standard do you use to tell what violates the establishment clause?
And really - passing laws based explicitly on the assumed truth of materialist atheism are not problems for the establishment clause? Are they also not Constitutionally problematic in general?
Actually, that scholar was talking about obligation - God is required to show why we must do what is right.
ReplyDeleteWell, that's also sort of my point. I see no reason that we should have an obligation to obey a godless Nature. Particularly because evolution shows us that godless Nature would seem to make lots of stupid, inefficient, sub-optimal decisions. And if godless nature can't even get biology right, why should we trust it with morality?
But is that what the first amendment was really aimed at? To block any basis for laws in theistic moral systems? I think it was not.
ReplyDeleteWhy accept some radical, modern interpretation of that amendment?
To call on the social contract is to mistake the nature of man and society. Man is a social and cultural creature, he cannot be separated, in mundane affairs, from his society and culture. He is, also, a being with desires and needs that temporal and worldly and also moral, creative, and spiritual Society and culture, moreover, are intricate and complex. They arise out of a slow development of a myriad of associations, traditions, beliefs, and manners. You cannot treat this arrangement as being the product of atomistic individuals, somehow existing fully formed outside society and culture, coming together to simply and rationally create a social contract. If one can speak of a social contract it is in the sense Edmund Burke spoke of it:
SOCIETY is indeed a contract....It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in everyvirtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.
^ That was my post - Jeremy Taylor.
ReplyDeleteYou can't make an essentially atheistic or humanistic moral theory "make sense" just by adding God. Adding God to most atheistic objective moral theories would only serve to make them incoherent.
ReplyDeleteReally? Please - show me how 'adding God' to utilitarianism would make it incoherent. I'd love to see that, and since you chose utilitarianism, that'd make a great example.
1. There are objective moral theories that make an indispensable explicit or implicit reference to God. I think those violate the establishment clause.
2. There are objective moral theories that do not reference God at all, and could not reference God at all without immediately becoming incoherent. I think those are just wrong.
"Indispensible explicit or implicit reference to God". Alright.
I'm offering up Natural Law theory. When asked how things have their natures, I assign the explanation either to the impersonal universe, or I say they have them as brute facts, or I say I have no idea and that isn't relevant. Where's the explicit or implicit reference to God coming in?
Note: I could be wrong, of course. But being wrong isn't the problem here, according to you. It's the explicit or implicit reference. I say there's none in what I just offered. Show otherwise.
Chad,
ReplyDeleteBut you are conflating Godless nature with mechanistic and materialistic. What you say may well be true of the mechanistic and materialistic universe of reductionist materialism, but it isn't necessarily true for all non-theistic viewpoints - whether they just ignore the question of God's existence or rule it out.
All that is needed for Natural Law is a belief in objective morality, in an objective good. This could even be, as C.S Lewis leaves it in The Abolition of Man, simply an implication.
Damn it, I forgot to sign that post as well. - Jeremy Taylor.
ReplyDeleteYou can argue the very existence of a moral sense and a desire to create a moral system (like utilitarians do) 'implies God'.
ReplyDeleteYou can make any A lead to any B if you're willing to make a terrible enough argument, but that doesn't mean that some moral theories don't really rely on God in too direct a way to be consistent with the Constitution.
IMO, NL comes very close to saying that homosexual marriage is wrong because that's not the way God made us. It pretty much makes that argument at a single remove. (By saying homosexual marriage is wrong because that's not the way nature which was made by God made us.)
If what ultimately is required or follows from philosophical arguments are the grounds to dismiss it, then utilitarianism as an objective mora
l theory is in trouble - for it to be so, they would need God.
No, utilitarianism is an irreducibly humanistic moral theory. Therefore, God's existence is either irrelevant to utilitarianism or would invalidate it.
Utilitarianism wouldn't automatically become true if God exists, anymore than the dozens of other mutually exclusive accounts of objective morality would suddenly all become true if God exists.
Come on, Crude... how many times are you going to try to reword the same refuted argument before you admit that this particular dog won't hunt?
Why should anyone care about "the best for the most"? For that matter - who decides what "best" is? Who decides who counts in the "most"?
Crude, just because I think those theories are wrong doesn't mean those theories are unconstitutional.
There's nothing here. Drop it. Move on.
Good arguments? Okay: on what standard?
Legal standards. Good as in "accurately interpreting the letter and intent of the law." No objective morality necessary.
What standard do you use to tell what violates the establishment clause?
Whether or not it establishes religious as law, naturally.
And really - passing laws based explicitly on the assumed truth of materialist atheism are not problems for the establishment clause? Are they also not Constitutionally problematic in general?
If the sole justification for the law were atheism - absolutely.
IMO, NL comes very close to saying that homosexual marriage is wrong because that's not the way God made us. It pretty much makes that argument at a single remove. (By saying homosexual marriage is wrong because that's not the way nature which was made by God made us.)
ReplyDeleteNo, it says that sex has certain ends and final causes. You can say God is always lurking around 'at a single remove' by pointing out you can just say "Because God said so!" at any time.
No, utilitarianism is an irreducibly humanistic moral theory. Therefore, God's existence is either irrelevant to utilitarianism or would invalidate it.
Since when? You can be a Christian utilitarian. You can even argue that, say.. maximizing human happiness or well-being is divinely ordained, and the utilitarian approach is the best one. How in the world is it 'irreducible humanistic'?
Utilitarianism wouldn't automatically become true if God exists, anymore than the dozens of other mutually exclusive accounts of objective morality would suddenly all become true if God exists.
Who said anything - ANYthing - about God's existence automatically making utilitarianism true? We were talking about a theory 'making sense' or being coherent. Making sense and being coherent doesn't make something true, and I never said otherwise.
Come on, Crude... how many times are you going to try to reword the same refuted argument before you admit that this particular dog won't hunt?
It hasn't be refuted, and I haven't even needed to reword it. I'm responding to your responses, and I am finding them tremendously lacking. Continuously asking me to drop it won't make your replies better.
Crude, just because I think those theories are wrong doesn't mean those theories are unconstitutional.
I was asking you what counts as 'best' and 'most'. I say, following you, 'best' involves "God at one remove": that which is best is what God commands.
Whether or not it establishes religious as law, naturally.
Well, that's just restating the question. What standard do you use to determine what establishes religion as law?
If the sole justification for the law were atheism - absolutely.
Absolutely, it would be a violation of the establishment clause and/or constitution? Or it would not be?
Really? Please - show me how 'adding God' to utilitarianism would make it incoherent. I'd love to see that, and since you chose utilitarianism, that'd make a great example.
ReplyDeleteI said it would make most incoherent, I think the existence of God would just be irrelevant to utilitarianism.
A utilitarian says that what constitutes the good is what leads to the best outcome for the most people. If he's right, and God exists, what difference does it make? If he's wrong, and God exists, what difference does it make?
I happen to think he's wrong whether God exists or not, but you seem to be saying he'd be right but only if God exists. That makes zero sense.
I'm offering up Natural Law theory. When asked how things have their natures, I assign the explanation either to the impersonal universe, or I say they have them as brute facts, or I say I have no idea and that isn't relevant. Where's the explicit or implicit reference to God coming in?
Well, in that form, NL would slide into category 2, a theory I think is just wrong, but not necessarily unconstitutional.
Maybe God is not as essential to NL as it is to Divine Command Theory, but even in your formulation, I think it's closer to divine command theory than it is to utilitiarainism, since there still seems to be a direct link to God in a way that isn't there in explicitly humanistic theories of objective morality.
It still wouldn't be the case, as you have been trying to suggest, that all objective moral theories equally point to God. Some really do more than some others. The best NL formulations, IMO, really do, as most NL theorists admit/argue.
But I would argue that in its godless form, natural law theory is too weak and too obscure to make the grounds for a good legal argument.
So, even if I'm wrong and a purely secular NL argument is possible, it won't help much.
I'm going to sleep now.
How in the world is it 'irreducible humanistic'?
ReplyDeleteIt exclusively references human well-being in its definition of objective moral good.
Since when? You can be a Christian utilitarian.
You can be a Christian humanist. Humanism is still, obviously, humanistic.
We were talking about a theory 'making sense' or being coherent.
Okay, well how would just adding God to an atheistic moral theory automatically make it "coherent" or "make sense?" How would the existence of God change the level of coherence of hedonism, for example?
I was asking you what counts as 'best' and 'most'. I say, following you, 'best' involves "God at one remove": that which is best is what God commands.
Huh? Can't make any sense of this as a response to what was quoted.
What standard do you use to determine what establishes religion as law?
I'm not a lawyer, but I would say whether or not a religious belief was the sole legal justification for the law.
Maybe you could help me understand how you want me to answer the question by telling me the standard you use.
Absolutely, it would be a violation of the establishment clause and/or constitution? Or it would not be?
If the sole justification for a law was atheism, it would violate the establishment clause, IMO.
Now I'm really going to bed.
A utilitarian says that what constitutes the good is what leads to the best outcome for the most people. If he's right, and God exists, what difference does it make? If he's wrong, and God exists, what difference does it make?
ReplyDeleteI happen to think he's wrong whether God exists or not, but you seem to be saying he'd be right but only if God exists. That makes zero sense.
Where in the world did you get the impression I think utilitarianism is *right* if God exists? Again, we were talking about coherency and making sense.
Well, in that form, NL would slide into category 2, a theory I think is just wrong, but not necessarily unconstitutional.
Finally! Finally, I get through.
Here's the problem: just about any 'religious law' - short of the most explicit invocations of God - can be translated into secular wording. Even quite a lot of the reasoning can have this done: just say 'brute fact!' whenever you need to, or the like. And if you accept this reasoning, then it looks like the replies about NL go through after all
It still wouldn't be the case, as you have been trying to suggest, that all objective moral theories equally point to God. Some really do more than some others. The best NL formulations, IMO, really do, as most NL theorists admit/argue.
What I've said is that, if you believe objective moral theories simply make no sense without God, then any given purportedly 'objective moral theory' is going to have God looming around as a way to broadly make sense of it. Sure, NL theorists may believe NL points to God. Other people dispute them. Who's right? And how is this proven in a court of law anyway?
But I would argue that in its godless form, natural law theory is too weak and too obscure to make the grounds for a good legal argument.
So, even if I'm wrong and a purely secular NL argument is possible, it won't help much.
'Won't help much'? You just granted, as near as I can tell, the constitutionality of laws against gay marriage, among other things. You just think they'd be shitty laws based on poor reasoning.
Fair enough. We've got no shortage of those.
Okay, well how would just adding God to an atheistic moral theory automatically make it "coherent" or "make sense?" How would the existence of God change the level of coherence of hedonism, for example?
ReplyDeleteIf your claim is that hedonism doesn't 'make sense' because ultimately the only way a moral theory makes sense is if God commands the acts prescribed in it, then superficially if hedonism ultimately was rooted in a command of God/gods (I'm sure some old Roman deities could come close with this), well - there's your sense.
I'm not a lawyer, but I would say whether or not a religious belief was the sole legal justification for the law.
And what happens when the religious people come forward with laws that pass what they wish but remove all obvious reference to religion? This isn't exactly a new move.
Maybe you could help me understand how you want me to answer the question by telling me the standard you use.
It wouldn't help, since I think 'religion' snaps up atheist materialism under itself as a term of categorization.
If the sole justification for a law was atheism, it would violate the establishment clause, IMO.
Alright, so you regard atheism as a religion, or so I interpret. Fair enough.
G'night. PS, does your comic book artist draw for Garth Ennis? Because I swear that cover and that style looks an awful lot like something out of Crossed.
'Won't help much'? You just granted, as near as I can tell, the constitutionality of laws against gay marriage, among other things.
ReplyDeleteConstitutionality on this point, anyway.
Chad,
ReplyDeleteYou still haven't really explained the distinction between theistic and atheistic metaphysics and moral philosophy as regards the public square. As long as the theistic variety is based in reason and not in faith or special revelation, then what makes this unacceptable and yet the atheistic variety acceptable?
It seems quite arbitrary to suggest that just because concepts like the divine or God are used in theistic philosophies that this makes them unacceptable in the public square.
Chad,
ReplyDeleteYou still haven't really explained the distinction between theistic and atheistic metaphysics and moral philosophy as regards the public square. As long as the theistic variety is based in reason and not in faith or special revelation, then what makes this unacceptable and yet the atheistic variety acceptable?
It seems quite arbitrary to suggest that just because concepts like the divine or God are used in theistic philosophies that this makes them unacceptable in the public square.
- Jeremy Taylor
@ Chad:
ReplyDelete"If, as seems to be the case with a prohibition against gay marriage, a law only has religious justification then I would regard such a law as illicit."
First of all, nobody's actually talking about prohibiting gay marriage. If two men want to exchange rings and live together, nobody's trying to stop them. What's at issue is whether or not such relationships should be officially supporter by the state, which is a different question altogether. (The government doesn't currently give people money for having friends: is there therefore a prohibition on friendship?)
Secondly, even if we grant that NL requires God to make it intelligible, how would passing NL-based laws violate the establishment clause? NL has been advocated by Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim and Pagan writers, so it's not as if an NL-based law would even implicitly presuppose the truth of any one particular religion.
Thirdly, lots of people here have said that NL doesn't rely on God (or at least, that it doesn't rely on God any more than any objective morality must). Sure, Scott posted a link to somebody who said it does, but lots of people, including lots of commenters here, disagree with that link. Why not give them the benefit of the doubt, especially since you are by your own account not an expert on natural law?
"Sure, Scott posted a link to somebody who said it does, but lots of people, including lots of commenters here, disagree with that link."
ReplyDeleteAnd just to be clear: what G.H. Joyce says there is that natural law by itself can get us only to motives, not to obligations; in order for natural law to have moral necessity (rather than just tell us what is or isn't a good idea), there has to be a lawgiver.
That doesn't mean natural law can't take us pretty far by itself. Joyce isn't even really giving an exposition of natural law at that point; he's giving an argument for the existence of God. The relevance to the present discussion is just that, in the course of making that argument, Joyce says that natural law derives its specifically moral force from God.
The distinction he makes between motives and obligations seems to me to be very similar to Chad's, and in particular it helps to explain why Chad says that an atheist faced with a natural law could ask, "So what?" The point is that unless the natural law is "backed" by a lawgiver, it seems to lack the kind of obligatoriness that we associate with morality as opposed to friendly advice. That certainly doesn't mean that natural law is just useless without God; it just means that if God didn't exist, we wouldn't feel it as binding on our consciences rather than just as something it might be a good idea to take into account.
That view may not be universal among natural lawyers, but it certainly doesn't seem to me to be in any way alien to the tradition.
I'm not saying that it's alien to the tradition to say that NL must be backed up by God to have obligatory force, just that, since there are some who don't think that this is the case, then it makes sense to give the theory the benefit of the doubt and allow natural law arguments in the public square, even if you don't allow religious arguments.
ReplyDelete@Mr. X:
ReplyDelete"I'm not saying that it's alien to the tradition to say that NL must be backed up by God to have obligatory force, just that, since there are some who don't think that this is the case, then it makes sense to give the theory the benefit of the doubt and allow natural law arguments in the public square, even if you don't allow religious arguments."
I'm just clarifying, not disagreeing. Chad himself has already acknowledged that a natural-law argument that made no explicit or implicit reference to God would (or at least might) pass constitutional muster by his standards; he'd think it was wrong, but not necessarily unconstitutional.
Mr. X,
ReplyDeleteI'm not saying that it's alien to the tradition to say that NL must be backed up by God to have obligatory force, just that, since there are some who don't think that this is the case, then it makes sense to give the theory the benefit of the doubt and allow natural law arguments in the public square, even if you don't allow religious arguments.
It's probably not news to anyone here, and this guy is not a Natural Law proponent, but I think it's worth considering what Stanley Fish has to say about secular reasons in the public square.
Scott,
ReplyDeleteIt does seem I was right to begin with. Chad is conflating religious arguments that rely on faith or special revelation with those that are based in reason, like Natural Law. Either that or he is just making a perfectly arbitrary division between reasoned metaphysics and moral philosophy that is theistic or makes use of theistic concepts, and is illegitimate in the public square, and that which is atheistic, and is legitimate. This is, of course, a position, and, indeed, a conflation made, at least implicitly, by many secularists and atheists - but it doesn't make sense and a lot of any plausibility it does have comes from painting the theist as one who simply relies on appeals to faith.
Scott,
ReplyDeleteIt does seem I was right to begin with. Chad is conflating religious arguments that rely on faith or special revelation with those that are based in reason, like Natural Law. Either that or he is just making a perfectly arbitrary division between reasoned metaphysics and moral philosophy that is theistic or makes use of theistic concepts, and is illegitimate in the public square, and that which is atheistic, and is legitimate. This is, of course, a position, and, indeed, a conflation made, at least implicitly, by many secularists and atheists - but it doesn't make sense and a lot of any plausibility it does have comes from painting the theist as one who simply relies on appeals to faith.
- Jeremy Taylor
@Jeremy Taylor:
ReplyDelete"Chad is conflating religious arguments that rely on faith or special revelation with those that are based in reason, like Natural Law."
As you've just acknowledged yet again, "religious arguments that rely on faith or special revelation" and "religious arguments . . . that are based in reason" are both "religious arguments."
The distinction Chad wants to make is between religious and non-religious arguments, and it seems that you agree with him about how that distinction is to be made.
Scott,
ReplyDeleteThe distinction Chad wants to make is between religious and non-religious arguments, and it seems that you agree with him about how that distinction is to be made.
I don't think this is accurate. Chad seems to differentiate not between 'religious' and 'non-religious' arguments, but between 'arguments which either involve or point at theism' or 'arguments which do not'. Now, you can classify any theistic argument as a 'religious' argument, sure - but I think that would be a strange classification. Are buddhist-atheist arguments not theistic? Personally, I don't see materialist-atheist arguments as necessarily 'non-religious'. They certainly require faith, in the broad sense.
Scott,
ReplyDeleteAs I said before, I was imprecise with the term religious.
What is most substantive to the current discussion is that Chad appears to want to rule out all arguments that are religious from the public square and is using the term religious to mean any mention of the Divine or God. This lumps together those whose religious arguments are based on reason and those whose arguments are based on faith, revelation, or religious tradition or authority. This seems to arbitrarily grant legitimacy to the reason based metaphysics and moral philosophy of the atheist but invalidate, in the public square, the just as reason based metaphysics and moral philosophy of the theist. What is more, any rhetorical force such a conflation can have seems to come from the implication that all religious arguments are ultimately arguments of faith and revelation
I can't believe how many times I have forgotten to sign my comments:
ReplyDeleteScott,
As I said before, I was imprecise with the term religious.
What is most substantive to the current discussion is that Chad appears to want to rule out all arguments that are religious from the public square and is using the term religious to mean any mention of the Divine or God. This lumps together those whose religious arguments are based on reason and those whose arguments are based on faith, revelation, or religious tradition or authority. This seems to arbitrarily grant legitimacy to the reason based metaphysics and moral philosophy of the atheist but invalidate, in the public square, the just as reason based metaphysics and moral philosophy of the theist. What is more, any rhetorical force such a conflation can have seems to come from the implication that all religious arguments are ultimately arguments of faith and revelation.
- Jeremy Taylor
@Crude:
ReplyDelete"Now, you can classify any theistic argument as a 'religious' argument, sure - but I think that would be a strange classification."
Strange or not, I think Chad's been fairly clear that that's what he means. As I understand him, if a proposed law is justified only by an argument that directly or indirectly involves theism, he's counting it as "religious" for the purposes of the Establishment Clause.
If that's not what he means, he can clarify—and of course if it is what he means, any of us can agree or disagree. But there's little point in arguing with him over something he doesn't mean.
@The Anonymous and yet Named Jeremy Taylor:
ReplyDelete"I can't believe how many times I have forgotten to sign my comments:"
For whatever it's worth, a Google account is free and will take care of the problem automatically.
"What is most substantive to the current discussion is that Chad appears to want to rule out all arguments that are religious from the public square and is using the term religious to mean any mention of the Divine or God."
As I understand him, he's ruling out all arguments that are exclusively religious as Constitutionally acceptable justifications for proposed laws, where by "religious" he means making explicit or implicit reference to theism (whether positive or negative; i.e., he'd rule out as unconstitutional a proposed law that had atheism as its sole basis as well).
He's also said that he doesn't think natural-law-based arguments will be persuasive in the "public square," but so far as I know he hasn't ruled them out. At any rate, ruling them out of the "public square" entirely is very different from, and much broader than, ruling them out as justifications for proposed laws that won't be struck down on Establishment Clause grounds.
I haven't yet expressed any opinion myself and I don't want to get too involved in the main argument, but I will say briefly as a (nonpracticing) lawyer with an interest in Constitutional law that I think Chad is probably right to this extent: practically speaking, a law justified solely on theistic grounds would very likely in fact be struck down under current First Amendment jurisprudence.
Scott,
ReplyDeleteStrange or not, I think Chad's been fairly clear that that's what he means. As I understand him, if a proposed law is justified only by an argument that directly or indirectly involves theism, he's counting it as "religious" for the purposes of the Establishment Clause.
Well, I think I've been just as clear in my responses, particularly as to why that - especially the 'indirect' portion - is a problematic way of considering the matters. I've already outlined some of those problems, so at this point it's just a matter of waiting for responses about them.
Let me add to what I just commented.
ReplyDeleteSure, I will grant that an argument that explicitly invokes, say... the will of God, is 'a religious argument'. "Duh", really.
Arguments that *implicitly* invoke God? That's a broad category, and you can argue everything from the comprehensibility of the natural world to the existence of reason to the assertion of binding moral rights and wrongs to otherwise 'implicitly' invokes God. Or not. Maybe some things are just brute facts, even if I personally don't believe so. The argument I gave, and which Chad said would fall under category 2, only seems to fall under category 2 because I explicitly ruled out God (even if erroneously) by assumption in its formulation. If I didn't make any reference to the 'source' of natures at all, would it have been implicating God? Why not implicating the explanations I ended up giving? Why not regard it as open-ended for legislative purposes?
Either way, I'm cynical enough to think that at times, when a judge finds a law unconstitutional or invalid, there's something going on there besides a professional fidelity to the Constitution.
@Crude:
ReplyDelete"Well, I think I've been just as clear in my responses, particularly as to why that - especially the 'indirect' portion - is a problematic way of considering the matters. I've already outlined some of those problems, so at this point it's just a matter of waiting for responses about them."
Agreed.
Crude:
ReplyDeleteI think you'd need to assume more than that. You'd need to not only assume A) these benefits would come about, B) there would be no competing trade-offs (even beyond the violation of natural law, which it'd seem would be accepted as a wrong/harm even in this case), C) that there were no alternate ways to reasonably gain such benefits in a broad sense, and D) that there are no additional problems caused for others by the existence of such a relationship.
That sounds fair to me. It would seem that we can agree that there are circumstances under which natural law theory would countenance and support homosexual sexual activity, even though it violates the natural function of our sexual organs. In other words, if the benefits of allowing homosexual sexual activity outweighed the risks/harms of it, then it would be morally justifiable, according to natural law theory.
The next question is whether this analysis has ever been done by anyone? And if it hasn’t been done, then why hasn’t it been done? After all, if such a benefit-cost analysis is necessary to determine whether an act is considered morally justifiable or not, then how can natural law proponents who oppose homosexual sexual activity say with any certainty that it is to be condemned on a moral basis?
Brandon:
ReplyDeletethe principle of toleration implies that whenever, under the circumstances, the enforcement of a moral precept would genuinely harm the common good of everyone more than the toleration of the violation, then toleration of the violation is to be preferred. If one took this approach, it's an argument that would have to be actually made on the basis of actual circumstances. It also wouldn't alleviate one of the need to consider other relevant arguments on the subject, since any other arguments on the subject wouldn't magically go away and would have to be taken under consideration in order to determine harms to the common good accurately. But the argument could be made.
I agree. Thanks for the reply.
That sounds fair to me. It would seem that we can agree that there are circumstances under which natural law theory would countenance and support homosexual sexual activity, even though it violates the natural function of our sexual organs. In other words, if the benefits of allowing homosexual sexual activity outweighed the risks/harms of it, then it would be morally justifiable, according to natural law theory.
ReplyDeleteNo. Not if 'we can agree' means 'you and I agree' - I strongly disagree. I nowhere said that I agreed, or would even if all those points were granted. I said this is what else you needed to assume in order to even begin discussing the question - and, while I thought this was obvious, the 'A/B/C/D' that I talked about assuming in order to get the example of the ground are each open to some severe criticism if the discussion is at all meant to be realistic.
Considering that some proponents of natural law theory oppose (for example) lying in any and all circumstances, including some famously touchy ones ones, it's not obvious that any talk of 'benefits and risks/harms' is even obviously appropriate when it comes to considering whether the act could be justified.
The next question is whether this analysis has ever been done by anyone? And if it hasn’t been done, then why hasn’t it been done? After all, if such a benefit-cost analysis is necessary to determine whether an act is considered morally justifiable or not,
It's not obviously necessary, nor did I agree that it was. It may be that 'benefit-cost analysis' is entirely inappropriate, as it arguably is in the case of lying: you don't necessarily get to the "But is lying in this case better than telling the truth?" question at all. You may well be stuck at 'It's a lie, therefore you don't do this - period. End of story. Benefit-cost analysis is not necessary.'
I think if someone accepts that, by natural law reasoning, it's never acceptable to lie - even when you're in WW2 Germany with the gestapo at your door and jews in your attic - then trying to justify anal sex is just not going to happen. Maybe the examples will be funny. (Okay, you're trapped on the moon, and Ming the Merciless offers to spare humanity from obliteration, but you have to do just one thing for him...)
Crude:
ReplyDeleteNo. Not if 'we can agree' means 'you and I agree' - I strongly disagree. I nowhere said that I agreed, or would even if all those points were granted. I said this is what else you needed to assume in order to even begin discussing the question - and, while I thought this was obvious, the 'A/B/C/D' that I talked about assuming in order to get the example of the ground are each open to some severe criticism if the discussion is at all meant to be realistic.
Then why bother specifying conditions that would support my case if those conditions are all ultimately completely irrelevant? Just say that there are absolutely no circumstances under which homosexual sexual activity would ever be considered morally permissible under natural law. That can then be the basis for our discussion.
I think if someone accepts that, by natural law reasoning, it's never acceptable to lie - even when you're in WW2 Germany with the gestapo at your door and jews in your attic - then trying to justify anal sex is just not going to happen. Maybe the examples will be funny. (Okay, you're trapped on the moon, and Ming the Merciless offers to spare humanity from obliteration, but you have to do just one thing for him...)
You are correct that if a natural law theorist states that there are never conditions that make the violation of natural ends to be a morally permissible act, then they will never accept anal sex as a morally permissible act. But then they would have to reject the principle that a lower telos can be sacrificed for the sake of a higher telos, because that would be a condition under which a natural end can be violated and yet one still behaves in a moral fashion. And if they reject that principle, then they would never permit a doctor to remove a malfunctioning organ, even if that would save their life, because that would violate the natural end of the organ in question, which is not to be surgically excised from the body, but rather to remain as part of the body, even if malfunctioning.
Then why bother specifying conditions that would support my case if those conditions are all ultimately completely irrelevant? Just say that there are absolutely no circumstances under which homosexual sexual activity would ever be considered morally permissible under natural law. That can then be the basis for our discussion.
ReplyDeleteBecause I was trying to put in proper relief the question you were proposing and what assumptions need to be made, regardless of whether or not such things were ultimately compatible with Natural Law anyway - and doing so while trying to gauge just what discussion you wanted to have.
because that would violate the natural end of the organ in question, which is not to be surgically excised from the body, but rather to remain as part of the body, even if malfunctioning.
You're asserting that ultimate telos of an organ is "to never be removed from the body no matter what"?
Scott,
ReplyDeleteBut what reason is there, really, for ruling out reasoned theistic metaphysics and moral philosophies and not atheistic ones? Natural Law here is, therefore, supposedly illegitimate, but atheistic utilitarianism is not.
It seems to back up the contention that secularism really does amount to atheism. Any notion of it being a neutral ground, which is quite dubious to begin with, appears to be completely abandoned. Chad at no time really explained this point.
I'm not an American, but it seems to me the First Amendment is a moving target, what it meant for Ames and Madison is quite different to what it meant for Warren and Roberts (let alone Obama and Pelosi). For what it is worth, I can see the good points of the U.S constitution, but it seems to me the Old Republic died long ago.
-Jeremy Taylor.
dguller,
ReplyDeleteSurely, to suggest the lower telos can be violated for the sake of higher telos is divide a being against itself, which hardly seems the best grounds for the fullest development of the being.
There seems to be a difference between removing an organ that has ceased to function and immoral acts.
- Jeremy Taylor
@Jeremy Taylor:
ReplyDelete"But what reason is there, really, for ruling out reasoned theistic metaphysics and moral philosophies and not atheistic ones? Natural Law here is, therefore, supposedly illegitimate, but atheistic utilitarianism is not."
That's a question for Chad, not for me. But I will point out (again) that he's acknowledged that a natural-law-based argument that mde no explicit or implicit reference to theism would count for him as Constitutional, whereas a utilitarian argument that explicitly or implicitly presumed or depended on the truth of atheism would not.
Crude:
ReplyDeleteBecause I was trying to put in proper relief the question you were proposing and what assumptions need to be made, regardless of whether or not such things were ultimately compatible with Natural Law anyway - and doing so while trying to gauge just what discussion you wanted to have.
Fair enough. The discussion I wanted to have was whether the principle that a lower telos can be violated for the sake of a higher telos was permitted in natural law theory. You seem to be saying that this principle would be rejected by NL theorists, but I may be misunderstanding you.
You're asserting that ultimate telos of an organ is "to never be removed from the body no matter what"?
I’m saying that the telos of an organ is its particular function in an organism. The telos of the heart is to pump blood. The telos of the eyes is to transmit external visual information. It would seem that removing the eyes, or the heart, for the sake of the survival of the organism would be prohibited, because that would be a violation of the telos of the organs in question.
Perhaps what you mean is that these organs’ particular functions exist for a higher telos, such as allowing an organism to continue to survive and thrive by interacting effectively with its environment. That would mean that removing an organ for the sake of allowing an organism to survive would be violating its immediate function, but still serving its broader and higher function.
Is that what you mean?
Jeremy:
ReplyDeleteThere seems to be a difference between removing an organ that has ceased to function and immoral acts.
But the organ still functions, albeit suboptimally. For example, say a kidney had a tumor on it, which was having a minimal impact upon its function, but could not be removed without removing the entire kidney. Furthermore, suppose that the tumor was aggressive and would metastasize throughout the body, causing death, unless it was removed.
Fair enough. The discussion I wanted to have was whether the principle that a lower telos can be violated for the sake of a higher telos was permitted in natural law theory. You seem to be saying that this principle would be rejected by NL theorists, but I may be misunderstanding you.
ReplyDeleteAt this point I'm not sure your example really is one of a 'higher telos' being fulfilled at the sacrifice of a 'lower telos', or if - in your example - what you're calling the 'higher telos' is actually being fulfilled in a relevant way.
I’m saying that the telos of an organ is its particular function in an organism. The telos of the heart is to pump blood. The telos of the eyes is to transmit external visual information. It would seem that removing the eyes, or the heart, for the sake of the survival of the organism would be prohibited, because that would be a violation of the telos of the organs in question.
I'm asking some questions to make sure I see where you're coming from on this. If the telos of (say) the gallbladder is 'to flush bile into the intestines for the purposes of digestion', and the gallbladder is not doing this, what telos is being violated by removing it? The telos to flush bile into the intestines? Alright, but it doesn't seem that removing the gallbladder is interfering the the organ's actual operation in that case. The gallbladder is not functioning, period.
Scott,
ReplyDeleteBut Chad ruled out any such Natural Law, although seemingly without properly considering the matter. It seems to me his position is absolutely untenable unless he can answer why any moral system that might make use of concepts like God is automatically illegitimate, whilst those that don't are legitimate, then it is hard to see a foundation for his position.
After all, all moral systems, I suppose, are ultimately either theistic or atheistic, to the degree they must, in the end, attend to spiritual values and relationship with eternity.
dgulller,
Hm. There does appear to be a difference though. How you would express it I can't quite put my finger on, without further thought.
Perhaps, Dr. Feser himself would like to take up this point, as it does seem interesting.
- Jeremy Taylor
Crude:
ReplyDeleteAt this point I'm not sure your example really is one of a 'higher telos' being fulfilled at the sacrifice of a 'lower telos', or if - in your example - what you're calling the 'higher telos' is actually being fulfilled in a relevant way.
Say that individual A is an X. A’s higher telos is to be the best kind of X it can be, which means actualizing as much of A’s X nature as possible. If A actualizes its X nature more than B, for example, then A is a better instantiation of X than B, which is why A is a better kind of X than B. My question is whether NL theory would permit A to violate the function of one of A’s organs if that would lead to A actualizing more of A’s X nature than A otherwise would have been able to do. And if not, then why not?
After all, God himself follows this principle. “Prior” to creation, there was only pure goodness, because there only existed goodness itself. “After” creation, there was more goodness in existence, because creation, by virtue of existing, is itself good, and yet there was also the introduction of evil, because created beings can never perfectly actualize their natures, meaning that they necessarily fall short, and thus are necessarily bad, as well as good. Therefore, if God can choose to create a set of circumstances in which created entities are necessarily and intrinsically bad, as well as good, then I can see a case to be made that human beings can do the same, especially as we are supposed to be called to be as much like God as possible.
I'm asking some questions to make sure I see where you're coming from on this. If the telos of (say) the gallbladder is 'to flush bile into the intestines for the purposes of digestion', and the gallbladder is not doing this, what telos is being violated by removing it? The telos to flush bile into the intestines? Alright, but it doesn't seem that removing the gallbladder is interfering the the organ's actual operation in that case. The gallbladder is not functioning, period.
What if it were functioning, even if suboptimally, but was diagnosed with having a disease that would necessarily lead to the death of the organism at some point in the near future, unless it was removed? It is still fulfilling its telos at the moment, but the organism is doomed unless it is removed altogether.
@Jeremy Taylor:
ReplyDelete"But Chad ruled out any such Natural Law . . . "
One more time (the last, as Chad doesn't seem to be pursuing this any longer himself): Chad has expressly said that would not rule out, as unconstitutional, a natural-law argument that was not based on theism.
It took Crude some doing to get him to that point, but that is what he said—on July 5, 2013 at 10:08 PM.
Say that individual A is an X. [...]
ReplyDeleteFirst, ignorant as I am, I've never seen NL proponents talk of 'higher telos' and 'lower telos'. Maybe (indeed, probably) they did, and I either missed it or they used different language. So, this is a bit new to me, and I ask questions.
But second, insofar as I'm grasping it now, I'm not even seeing that the situation you're describing with the anal sex involves the sacrifice of a lower telos for a higher telos. It absolutely involves a violation of natural law, a frustrating of natural ends - that part I get. Not 'the higher telos'. Not even in principle.
What if it were functioning, even if suboptimally, but was diagnosed with having a disease that would necessarily lead to the death of the organism at some point in the near future, unless it was removed?
Then you have a malfunctioning organ on your hands and superficially it seems justified to do whatever you can to attempt to repair it. You gave an example earlier of an organ with a tumor. Well, I don't see any violation of natural law in removing the tumor. If in the process of removing the tumor you wreck the organ such that it no longer functions, well, that's unfortunate. Even assuming removal of the organ violates a telos in an ordinary circumstance, the doctrine of double effect seems like it'd be appropriate here.
dguller,
ReplyDeleteI have been following this conversation from the sidelines and thought I would put in my two cents worth. If I follow Ed’s arguments correctly (from his previous posts on the subject), I would say AT allows that there is nothing morally wrong with a person frustrating the telos of a part of their body, so long as it is for the wellbeing of the person as a whole. So, for example, I shave my face every morning (and so does Ed, judging from his picture), but it is not morally wrong to frustrate the telos of my hair follicles (which is to grow a full beard) if I have good reason to do so. There is nothing morally wrong with removing a diseased organ; there is probably even nothing wrong with removing a body part prophylactically (a la Angelina Jolie) if there is a good reason to do so, although this is perhaps debatable. There is also nothing necessarily wrong with using body parts in ways that differ from their telos as long as the wellbeing of the person as whole is served (I am reminded of people who are born without arms, and learn to dress themselves and to eat using only their feet). The point Ed has made in the past is that what *is* morally wrong is to use a body part in a way that is *directly opposed* to its telos. This is the idea behind Catholic teaching on birth control, as well as on homosexuality. In both cases one is using their sexual organs in a way directly opposed to the telos of procreation.
I’m not saying I agree with all this, because I think there are definitely problems with this view, but this is my understanding of the AT natural law position.
Crude:
ReplyDeleteFirst, ignorant as I am, I've never seen NL proponents talk of 'higher telos' and 'lower telos'. Maybe (indeed, probably) they did, and I either missed it or they used different language. So, this is a bit new to me, and I ask questions.
Feser writes: “These goods are ordered in a hierarchy corresponding to the hierarchy of living things … The higher goods presuppose the lower ones … But the lower goods are subordinate to the higher ones in the sense that they exist for the sake of the higher ones. The point of fulfilling the vegetative and sensory aspects of our nature is, ultimately, to allow us to fulfill the defining rational aspect of our nature” (Aquinas, p. 180)
But second, insofar as I'm grasping it now, I'm not even seeing that the situation you're describing with the anal sex involves the sacrifice of a lower telos for a higher telos. It absolutely involves a violation of natural law, a frustrating of natural ends - that part I get. Not 'the higher telos'. Not even in principle.
As Feser wrote above, the ultimate purpose of our vegetative and sensory capacities is to facilitate the fulfillment of our rationality, which involves the use of the intellect to identify the true nature of things, which corresponds to what is considered objectively good about those things. This intellectual apprehension is then used to direct the will towards actualizing the good that is determined by a thing’s nature. My question is whether it would be morally permissible to endorse anal sex for homosexuals, if this facilitated a better use of their rational faculties by minimizing psychopathology and interpersonal dysfunction, which both stand as obstacles to proper understanding.
As I said earlier, say you have human A and human B, both of whom are homosexual. Say that A is permitted to engage in anal sex, and B is prohibited from engaging in anal sex. Furthermore, say that it turned out that allowing A to engage in anal sex ended up leading to A’s actualization of his human nature to a larger extent than B actualized his human nature, because B’s prohibition from expressing his sexual self led to psychopathology and interpersonal dysfunction, or whatever. In that situation, I think that the case could be made that A is a better human being than B, even though A engaged in sexual activity that violated the natural ends of his sexual organs, and thus anal sex should be permitted, if it helped homosexual males actualize their human natures more than if it were prohibited.
Then you have a malfunctioning organ on your hands and superficially it seems justified to do whatever you can to attempt to repair it. You gave an example earlier of an organ with a tumor. Well, I don't see any violation of natural law in removing the tumor. If in the process of removing the tumor you wreck the organ such that it no longer functions, well, that's unfortunate.
But the organ’s natural function is to do X. By damaging it during surgery, or by excising it altogether, you are doing violence to it’s ability to do X, and thus intentionally thwarting its function for the sake a higher telos of the organism in question. Thus, it would be permitted to intentionally violate an organ’s function for the sake of a higher function of the organism as a whole.
Even assuming removal of the organ violates a telos in an ordinary circumstance, the doctrine of double effect seems like it'd be appropriate here
Why? Then a homosexual could argue the same thing for their sexual activity. They can say that they are not intending to violate the natural end of their sexual organs, but only expecting that such violation will occur. What they are actually intending is to achieve sexual pleasure and intimacy with a romantic partner with the expectation that this will involve the violation of the natural end of their sexual organs. It would be collateral damage, as it were.
My question is whether it would be morally permissible to endorse anal sex for homosexuals, if this facilitated a better use of their rational faculties by minimizing psychopathology and interpersonal dysfunction, which both stand as obstacles to proper understanding.
ReplyDeleteRight, I simply never saw 'higher telos' and 'lower telos' used. Like I said, that's probably a vocabulary thing.
But the organ’s natural function is to do X. By damaging it during surgery, or by excising it altogether, you are doing violence to it’s ability to do X, and thus intentionally thwarting its function for the sake a higher telos of the organism in question.
No, you're not. There's nothing intentional whatsoever about thwarting its function. In the example I gave, you are trying everything you can in order to help it fulfill its function. You may fail, but the failure is not the intention here. Nor does the example even involve an appeal to a higher function - the appeal is actually to getting a damaged organ to fulfill its own function. This may or may not work.
Why? Then a homosexual could argue the same thing for their sexual activity. They can say that they are not intending to violate the natural end of their sexual organs, but only expecting that such violation will occur.
That doesn't seem at all comparable - the very act they're pursuing is an explicit frustration of a natural end. The act IS the violation, in this case. In the case of attempting to repair a damaged organ, even with a chance of failure, there's no intentional violation. In the case of anal sex, the violation ain't an accident or an unintended consequence. ("Oops! How'd that happen?")
Even from your own point of view where you're assuming that violations of natural law are possibly permissible for the sake of a higher good (and again, this isn't a view I agree with) and assuming that the end you're speaking about really is 'higher' in a relevant way (also questioned), you'd have to admit that achieving progress on those same goals without violating natural law is going to be preferable. And when you're basically talking about a slew of general subjective problems (depression, etc), there are always going to be options - especially nowadays - that obviate anal sex. Everything from counseling to chemical castration gets put on the table.
Nanny Mouse:
ReplyDeleteThere is also nothing necessarily wrong with using body parts in ways that differ from their telos as long as the wellbeing of the person as whole is served (I am reminded of people who are born without arms, and learn to dress themselves and to eat using only their feet).
I would agree.
The point Ed has made in the past is that what *is* morally wrong is to use a body part in a way that is *directly opposed* to its telos. This is the idea behind Catholic teaching on birth control, as well as on homosexuality. In both cases one is using their sexual organs in a way directly opposed to the telos of procreation.
Here’s where I start having problems with this account. Say that you have an organism X with an organ O that has a particular function F. On the one hand, you want to say that using O in a way different from F is okay, as long as the broader well-being of X is actualized. On the other hand, you want to say that using O in a way directly opposed to F is not okay, even if the broader well-being of X would be actualized if O could be used in such a way.
For me, the biggest issue is whether X’s well-being would be enhanced, whether by using O according to F, or different from F, or directly opposed to F. At the end of the day, it is ultimately about X’s well-being that determines how O is actually used. Feser writes: “To will to do what is “natural” for us thus means, in classical natural law theory, something like to will to do what tends toward the realization of the ends which, given our nature, define what it is for us to flourish as the kind of things we are. And to will to do what is “unnatural” thus means something like willing to do what tends toward the frustration of the ends which, given our nature, define what it is for us to flourish as the kind of things we are.” It seems that it is ultimately about choosing to behave in ways that enhance our flourishing as human beings.
Furthermore, I do not really understand the difference between different from F and directly opposed to F. Both involve using O for not-F, after all.
Crude:
ReplyDeleteNo, you're not. There's nothing intentional whatsoever about thwarting its function. In the example I gave, you are trying everything you can in order to help it fulfill its function. You may fail, but the failure is not the intention here.
In my example, though, one is knowingly damaging it to the point of permanent dysfunction by performing a surgical intervention, which cannot possibly be construed as “trying everything you can in order to help it fulfill its function”.
Nor does the example even involve an appeal to a higher function - the appeal is actually to getting a damaged organ to fulfill its own function. This may or may not work.
In my example, the higher function is the overall physical well-being of the person in question, which would require sacrificing the functionality of a diseased organ.
That doesn't seem at all comparable - the very act they're pursuing is an explicit frustration of a natural end. The act IS the violation, in this case. In the case of attempting to repair a damaged organ, even with a chance of failure, there's no intentional violation. In the case of anal sex, the violation ain't an accident or an unintended consequence. ("Oops! How'd that happen?")
Why isn’t it comparable? They are not explicitly saying to themselves, “I know that my penis is supposed to go into a vagina, but I’m going to deliberately frustrate its natural end anyway.” Rather, they probably say, “I want to be physically intimate with my romantic partner, and anal sex is the way I want to achieve this end.” If it so happens that this involves violating the natural end of their penis, then they can say that it is an expected consequence, but not their direct intention.
Even from your own point of view where you're assuming that violations of natural law are possibly permissible for the sake of a higher good (and again, this isn't a view I agree with) and assuming that the end you're speaking about really is 'higher' in a relevant way (also questioned), you'd have to admit that achieving progress on those same goals without violating natural law is going to be preferable. And when you're basically talking about a slew of general subjective problems (depression, etc), there are always going to be options - especially nowadays - that obviate anal sex. Everything from counseling to chemical castration gets put on the table.
That’s fine. What is the evidence that chemical castration improves the well-being of homosexuals? What is the evidence that counseling a homosexual to deliberately frustrate their sexual urges improves their well-being? Ultimately, this then becomes a matter for scientific and empirical study to see which set(s) of permitted and prohibited behaviors are most conducive to the well-being of homosexuals.
Also, if you want to open this door, then would you endorse chastity belts for everyone, with the keys only held by their heterosexual spouses? That would solve the problem of fornication and adultery, which are also frustrating the natural end of sexual organs.
dguller,
ReplyDeleteTo clarify what I take to be Ed’s position, I found this from an old post (http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2010/11/is-it-wrong-to-lie-to-hal.html):
"Classical natural law theory does not say we must never use a natural capacity other than for its natural end, or even, necessarily, that we must use it at all. But it does say that we cannot use it while at the same time frustrating its natural end."
So, in this view anal sex is wrong because it uses the sexual organs in a way that frustrates the natural end of procreation, i.e. intentionally depositing semen into the anus instead the vagina, where it can (potentially) fulfill its natural end of procreation. In a similar way contraception is considered wrong, as well as masturbation.
Now having said that, I do agree with you. I can’t see the reason that using a natural capacity while frustrating its natural end should always be considered wrong, if the overall wellbeing of the person is improved. It seems, in fact, like a totally ad hoc position. But I would be happy if someone more well-versed than me in AT philosophy could comment on the reasoning behind this position.
In my example, though, one is knowingly damaging it to the point of permanent dysfunction by performing a surgical intervention, which cannot possibly be construed as “trying everything you can in order to help it fulfill its function”.
ReplyDeleteBut in my example, one is trying their best to save the function of the organ, while having a very low chance of it. Which is entirely possible to construe as "trying everything you can in order to help it fulfill its function".
In my example, the higher function is the overall physical well-being of the person in question, which would require sacrificing the functionality of a diseased organ.
And in my example, etc.
Why isn’t it comparable? They are not explicitly saying to themselves, “I know that my penis is supposed to go into a vagina, but I’m going to deliberately frustrate its natural end anyway.” Rather, they probably say, “I want to be physically intimate with my romantic partner, and anal sex is the way I want to achieve this end.”
"Physically intimate with my romantic partner" just means "anal sex" in this case. Literally, it's the exact same thing. In this scenario, the proper ends of romantic affection/sexual attraction are malfunctioning (you're granting this, I believe), and the act desired is explicitly one contrary to natural law. It's no accident.
That’s fine. What is the evidence that chemical castration improves the well-being of homosexuals? What is the evidence that counseling a homosexual to deliberately frustrate their sexual urges improves their well-being?
What is the evidence that anal sex does the myriad of things you suggest it does? Even by your own standards, I don't think they compare. There is, however, evidence that chemical castration reduces sexual desire, including wrongly directed sexual desire. Which, I suppose, you'd have to regard as fulfilling a higher telos - except in that case, it's not the case that you're even violating a lower one.
Ultimately, this then becomes a matter for scientific and empirical study to see which set(s) of permitted and prohibited behaviors are most conducive to the well-being of homosexuals.
Sure - as I said, this is assuming the truth of things I dispute, and which the NL proponents I'm aware of, dispute. And even there, you're not clearly getting to where your argument seemed to assumed you'd get - and as a matter of fact, there's a good chance you're getting even *further away*. So keep that in mind as you make the argument.
Also, if you want to open this door, then would you endorse chastity belts for everyone, with the keys only held by their heterosexual spouses? That would solve the problem of fornication and adultery, which are also frustrating the natural end of sexual organs.
'Endorse' as in make it mandatory? No. I don't even endorse outlawing sodomy behind closed doors, for a number of reasons - NL, legal and otherwise. Likewise, I don't 'endorse' this for homosexuals in that sense, precisely because I think the very idea that such steps are necessary for them to live reasonably free of depression, etc, don't require anything close to that.
Now, 'endorse' as in 'we're dealing with someone who is pathologically incapable, despite their own rational desires, to control their behavior - so is this option possible'? Sure it is. Why not? At that point you're throwing an extreme, specific example out and are shutting out other options. If someone finds themselves completely unable to stop having sex with trees, then yes, I'm willing to say that perhaps chemical castration would help them.
Finally, I know that adultery, etc, frustrates SOME telos. But of natural organs? I'd need that explained to me more. Having sex with someone who is not your spouse is a NL problem, but my understanding is that this is vastly different from the homosexual topic. Now, same-sex sodomy would be comparable.
Actually, to amend.
ReplyDeleteUltimately, this then becomes a matter for scientific and empirical study
I disagree. I think it becomes a matter for some kind of study, but 'scientific'? No. It's going to involve, at its core, standards and views and such that are not scientific, and ultimately the process - despite involving some empirical work - will not be science, whatever it is. Valid as it may be.
Rather, they probably say, “I want to be physically intimate with my romantic partner, and anal sex is the way I want to achieve this end.” If it so happens that this involves violating the natural end of their penis, then they can say that it is an expected consequence, but not their direct intention.
ReplyDeleteNow having said that, I do agree with you. I can’t see the reason that using a natural capacity while frustrating its natural end should always be considered wrong, if the overall wellbeing of the person is improved. It seems, in fact, like a totally ad hoc position. But I would be happy if someone more well-versed than me in AT philosophy could comment on the reasoning behind this position.
but still serving its broader and higher function.
I think that perhaps the issue is just what you think the "broader and higher function is". In dguller or Nanny's thought, serving romantic affection does it with sodomy. But natural law doesn't suppose that the proper end of man is subject to his mere preference as if his proper end is changed by his choice, there just IS a rightly sequential ordering of goods proper to man. That order is knowable through reason and is confirmed by revelation: it is to approach closely to the paradigm of the sefl-existent Pure Act who creates out of love, who generates new being.
To put it another way, our natures don't merely have a sexual function added on to other, higher functions, we are integrated through and through, top to bottom, so that our sexuality is all of a part with the proper end of man as rational, social, matrimonial: to know and to love, and in its highest acts, to know in loving, to love in self-giving, to give life in self-giving love. The true conjugal act is a spiritual act of emulating the Creator's loving creation.
That is to say, the proper meaning of human sexual love is, right from the spirit all the way down to the sexual organs, generative self-giving. Sodomy doesn't just happen not to deposit sperm in the right location, it fails to be that sexual love at all.
To put it another way, our natures don't merely have a sexual function added on to other, higher functions, we are integrated through and through, top to bottom, so that our sexuality is all of a part with the proper end of man as rational, social, matrimonial: to know and to love, and in its highest acts, to know in loving, to love in self-giving, to give life in self-giving love
ReplyDeleteThat is a proper end for some people's natures, it is presumptuous to assume every person does or should have that same telos. Frankly, nature doesn't completely agree with natural law since there are a multitude of animals that have been documented exhibiting homosexual behavior of some kind.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mammals_displaying_homosexual_behavior
Although homosexuals cannot generate life unassisted they can sacrifice for each other in other ways beyond friendship, and society is perfectly fine with allowing many heterosexual couples to do so without any insistence upon procreation.
Scott,
ReplyDeleteYes, but what I meant was Chad seems to rule out there is such thing as a Natural Law that is not based in theism.
My point is more that Chad's idea of constitutionally is in no sense neutral. It is giving an arbitrary legitimacy to atheism that it refuses theism. Of course, this is what secularism always does.
- Jeremy Taylor
Step2,
ReplyDeleteThis is an area that has been covered ad nauseum by Natural Law thinkers, to the point that your comments seem to amount to a howler.
That homosexual behaviour exists in animals, or that homosexual desires are not a matter of choice in humans (which is a controversial area - choice does not have to mean waking up one morning and deciding to change your whole sexuality), no more invalidates the Natural Law prohibitions on it than the existence of club feet invalidates the Natural Law view it is in the nature of legs to walk. Nature, to the Natural Law thinker, means specifically what it is in the nature and the final cause of a being to be or do. The nature being referred to is not just what exists in the natural world.
On some level everyone does have the same telos as we have the same nature - we are human beings. Yes, it is perfectly true that we are different individuals who experience and play out our humanity in our particular and individual ways - there is a unity in diversity here. Whether or not heterosexuality is the proper ends for only some people's natures is what is in question; that is, what the discussion is about is whether homosexuality is a deviation from our shared human nature or not.
- Jeremy Taylor
Crude:
ReplyDeleteBut in my example, one is trying their best to save the function of the organ, while having a very low chance of it. Which is entirely possible to construe as "trying everything you can in order to help it fulfill its function".
That’s fine, and that would work well with your example, but wouldn’t be relevant in mine. Remember, I’m trying to show that NL theory ought to permit the violation of a lower telos for the sake of a higher telos, and I’m using the example of surgically excising a diseased organ, even though it is still functional, because the disease would eventually spread and kill the entire organism.
"Physically intimate with my romantic partner" just means "anal sex" in this case. Literally, it's the exact same thing. In this scenario, the proper ends of romantic affection/sexual attraction are malfunctioning (you're granting this, I believe), and the act desired is explicitly one contrary to natural law. It's no accident.
But none of this is relevant to my point, which is that the doctrine of double effect can be neutralized in the case of homosexual intercourse. After all, the DDE postulates a distinction between intending as primary and expecting as secondary. One can intend to do a good X, while expecting that a bad Y will also follow as a necessary side effect of X, and yet the moral goodness of the act is not jeopardized, because it is judged according to the intention and not the expectation. In this case, a gay couple can be intending the good act of deepening their intimate relationship through physical affection, while the anal sex can be a necessary side effect of that good intention. And since their intention is good, while their expectation is bad, the act itself can be judged morally good.
What is the evidence that anal sex does the myriad of things you suggest it does?
I don’t know. I’ll have to look into it. But there’s no point unless we can agree that in principle, if such evidence existed, then it would be relevant to the discussion. There’s no point in me looking into such evidence if you are going to say, “Well, it doesn’t matter, because metaphysically, anal sex is morally wrong, full stop, and under absolutely no conditions could it ever be morally good.”
There is, however, evidence that chemical castration reduces sexual desire, including wrongly directed sexual desire. Which, I suppose, you'd have to regard as fulfilling a higher telos - except in that case, it's not the case that you're even violating a lower one.
The question would be whether homosexuals who were chemically castrated had a higher quality of life and higher degree of human flourishing than homosexuals who were involved in loving monogamous relationships that also involved sexual intimacy.
Sure - as I said, this is assuming the truth of things I dispute, and which the NL proponents I'm aware of, dispute. And even there, you're not clearly getting to where your argument seemed to assumed you'd get - and as a matter of fact, there's a good chance you're getting even *further away*. So keep that in mind as you make the argument.
Why? My argument has been that if the ultimate goal of any human being is to maximize their flourishing, which ultimately comes down to maximally actualizing their human nature, in particular their rationality, then there are a variety of different ways that people can live their life, some of which would tend to actualize more human nature than others. I would presume that living as a woman under the Taliban in a fundamentalist Islamic theocracy in Afghanistan would have a lower degree of flourishing than living as a woman in Switzerland. Applying this to homosexuality, then the question is whether permitting anal sex, even though it is a violation of the function of sexual organs, would lead to a higher degree of flourishing for homosexuals than encouraging them to deny their sexual urges altogether.
Finally, I know that adultery, etc, frustrates SOME telos. But of natural organs? I'd need that explained to me more. Having sex with someone who is not your spouse is a NL problem, but my understanding is that this is vastly different from the homosexual topic. Now, same-sex sodomy would be comparable.
ReplyDeleteAquinas said that all sexual activity that is not heterosexual, between a husband and wife, and for the purpose of procreation, is morally wrong. That would include masturbation, fornication, adultery, and homosexual sexual activity, all of which are in the same group of morally prohibited behavior.
I disagree. I think it becomes a matter for some kind of study, but 'scientific'? No. It's going to involve, at its core, standards and views and such that are not scientific, and ultimately the process - despite involving some empirical work - will not be science, whatever it is. Valid as it may be.
Sure. You come up with a standard of human flourishing as the ideal goal, derive some way to measure and compare it between individuals, and then proceed to assess how much human flourishing occurs in different ways of living for different people. I would consider this to be a scientific inquiry, but regardless of what you want to call it, the bottom line is that if such an investigation showed that allowing homosexuals to engage in sexual activity led to a higher degree of flourishing than prohibiting such activity, then I would argue that NL theory would say that it is morally permissible.
Surely, you would not measure human flourishing (by the way, I think you are, perhaps, using a too humanistic and too rationalistic view of what constitutes human flourishing - the comparison between Afghan and Swiss women, for example - which are more likely to have the great inner virtues like piety or temperance?) simply in a scientific way. You would use reason and philosophical study; you would use history, tradition, and culture study; and you might use, cautiously, empirical-scientific study. This seems the best way to study human nature - a sort of illative process that helps to combine the multiple sources of normative knowledge and knowledge of human nature.
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes to homosexual acts, although there are no doubt marginal and ambiguous exceptions which are often grabbed on (with a complete lack of proportion) to by moderns, the verdict of human civilisation seems near unanimous on their inferiority and flawed nature, to say the least.
- Jeremy Taylor.
After all, the DDE postulates a distinction between intending as primary and expecting as secondary. One can intend to do a good X, while expecting that a bad Y will also follow as a necessary side effect of X, and yet the moral goodness of the act is not jeopardized, because it is judged according to the intention and not the expectation.
ReplyDeletedguller, the principle of double effect employs THREE distinct elements needed for the good moral act, and intentions and anticipated consequences are only 2. The third is the inherent nature of the act itself, apart from the intention. Each human act (known, voluntary, willed) has its own nature independently of the goal the actor intends to achieve with it. The act of worship of the Creator is an inherently good act by its nature, even if the actor intends to achieve something evil through it - like distracting a victim from danger so he can be murdered by a co-conspirator. The totality of such a human act would be, simply, BAD, because all 3 basic constitutive elements (nature of the act, intention, and circumstances) all have to be positive for the human act to be good.
Similarly, the inherent nature of murder is, of itself, a bad act even apart from knowing the intention behind the murder. If the father of a kidnapped child is told to kill the mayor or the child "gets it", and he complies, the fact that the murderer is intending to save his child from extortionists doesn't mean his act of murder is changed away from being murder. Its inherent nature remains murder, and since the nature of the act is bad the entirety of the human choice is evil.
NL advocates insist that the nature of the act, considered of itself, is what vitiates fornication, adultery, rape, sodomy, and masturbation, and the intentions involved (good or bad) cannot un-vitiate the act.
In this case, a gay couple can be intending the good act of deepening their intimate relationship through physical affection, while the anal sex can be a necessary side effect of that good intention. And since their intention is good, while their expectation is bad, the act itself can be judged morally good.
ReplyDeleteThe anal sex cannot be a mere "side effect" of the intention regardless of whether the nature of the act is bad. The chosen means is never a side effect. What you want to be true is that the INTENTION controls even when the means employed is bad, by pretending to relegate the means employed to "anticipated but not intended side effects." But PDE doctrine makes it clear that to have a morally justified act, the bad consequences anticipated cannot be the very means by which the intended goal is achieved. This is universal:
The act itself must be morally good or at least indifferent.
The agent may not positively will the bad effect but may permit it. If he could attain the good effect without the bad effect he should do so. The bad effect is sometimes said to be indirectly voluntary.
The good effect must flow from the action at least as immediately (in the order of causality, though not necessarily in the order of time) as the bad effect. In other words the good effect must be produced directly by the action, not by the bad effect. Otherwise the agent would be using a bad means to a good end, which is never allowed.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/double-effect/
dguller writes,
ReplyDelete"Sure. You come up with a standard of human flourishing as the ideal goal, derive some way to measure and compare it between individuals, and then proceed to assess how much human flourishing occurs in different ways of living for different people. I would consider this to be a scientific inquiry, but regardless of what you want to call it, the bottom line is that if such an investigation showed that allowing homosexuals to engage in sexual activity led to a higher degree of flourishing than prohibiting such activity, then I would argue that NL theory would say that it is morally permissible.
July 9, 2013 at 3:02 AM"
Rhetorically speaking: Should anyone be expected to find the observation that, "the 'flourishing' of active homosexuals might be socially incompatible with the flourishing of non-homosexuals", to be a logically problematical proposition? What then, of the flourishing of neurotics in their neuroses, manic-depressives in their bi-polar swings, sado-masochists in their perversions, and exhibitionists in their need for an audience?
What if the later gave a performance and nobody attended? How would their "flourishing" on their own terms, which ex hypothesi requires an audience, be ensured?
Many, (excluding perhaps dguller and others in particular, but including many others who comment here) when making "moral claims" or proposing moral schema, seem to be adverting - given their own initial conditions - to what can only be interpreted as a kind of a fictive species, an imaginary "one humanity" having no definite attributes or qualities other than a generalized desire for satiety and a capacity of some sort for acting.
They talk then, as if they are discussing a real and common human nature and human flourishing, while they simultaneously and contradictorily presume a nominalistic ontology as their analytical starting point.
Perhaps that's why an unexamined and largely free-floating contract theory is so beloved. But as Hart pointed out in his remarks on the teleological assumptions behind any non-absurd conception of law, no one expects the law or contractual arrangements to validate what amounts to a slow motion suicide pact. Or at least until Rawls and Rorty few used to.
But what exactly is it that supposedly constitutes the class that is ostensibly serving as the subject of the modern contractualist's generalized predications?
In a link on this site to an historian who was commenting on Feser's series on Nagel, the historian, Andrew Ferguson remarks on a somewhat parallel phenomenon involving radical reductionists,
"Fortunately, materialism is never translated into life as it’s lived. ... husbands and mothers, wives and fathers, sons and daughters, materialists never put their money where their mouth is. Nobody thinks his daughter is just molecules in motion and nothing but; nobody thinks the Holocaust was evil, but only in a relative, provisional sense. A materialist who lived his life according to his professed convictions—understanding himself to have no moral agency at all, seeing his friends and enemies and family as genetically determined robots—wouldn’t just be a materialist: He’d be a psychopath"
The problem is, Ferguson's generous attitude allows reductionists and nominalists to talk out of both sides of their mouths. And apparently this is seen not so much as a problem of intellectual incoherence, as an admirable character trait.
Why some "rights protagonsists" see it as uncivil to hold the feet of the nominalist to his own analytical fire, is a point of distributive logic which escapes me.
Maybe it's not a matter of logic. Perhaps "intuitive knowledge" or fellow feelings of some kind are supposed to be involved.
Like S.C. justices expounding on pornography, they admit that they cannot define mankind, but nonetheless claim to know it when they see it.
"Kumbaya" ... and all that.
Tony:
ReplyDeleteNL advocates insist that the nature of the act, considered of itself, is what vitiates fornication, adultery, rape, sodomy, and masturbation, and the intentions involved (good or bad) cannot un-vitiate the act.
Thanks for that important clarification.
A few comments.
First, how do NL theorists determine whether the nature of an act is objectively good or evil? I would presume that at least part of that determination would have to involve the consequences of the act in question. Am I correct here? And if I am correct here, then couldn’t an act that was considered to be morally evil be reevaluated according to its good consequences and its value be revised as morally good?
Second, NL theorists assume that there exists a hierarchy of goods such that the lower goods can be sacrificed for the sake of the higher goods. I’ve quoted Feser to that effect earlier in this thread above. If it could be shown that, under some circumstances, violating the telos of our sexual organs could lead to a large actualization of our higher telos, then would you agree that NL theory would endorse the violation as morally good?
The anal sex cannot be a mere "side effect" of the intention regardless of whether the nature of the act is bad. The chosen means is never a side effect.
I see. So, the anal sex would be the act itself, which is the means by which the end is attained. So, the goal of interpersonal closeness through physical intimacy would be attained by the means of the act. The good effect of the act would be the intended goal described above, and the bad effect of the act would the violation of the natural end of their sexual organs. The action would be considered immoral, because the nature of the act itself, by virtue of its violation of the natural end of the sexual organs, would be bad, and thus according to DDE, the act would be morally impermissible, because not all conditions have been met.
Then I suppose I would redirect my question, as I mentioned above, towards whether anal sex is necessarily an immoral act by nature. You could make the case that it is immoral on the basis of the fact that it violates the natural end of sex organs. Now, that could either be due to the general principle that any violation of the natural end of any organ is immoral, or a more specific principle that allows the violation of natural ends of organs in general, but rejects it when it comes to sexual organs in particular. If you mean the former, then all instances of violating the natural ends of any organ would automatically be immoral, which I don’t think you’d accept. If you mean the latter, then the onus is upon you to show why sexual organs should be held to a different moral standard than our other organs.
The agent may not positively will the bad effect but may permit it. If he could attain the good effect without the bad effect he should do so. The bad effect is sometimes said to be indirectly voluntary.
This presumes a distinction between directly willing the good effects and indirectly permitting the bad effects. What is the justification for this distinction? It seems that one wills both the good effects and the bad effects, if one knows what will follow from the action in question. After all, both the good effects and the bad effects are in one’s mind when one makes a decision to act, and thus both are intended. Perhaps one may prefer the good effects, and focus one’s attention upon the good effects, but that subjective preference and attention does not absolve one of the fact that the bad effects were predictable in advance and part of the conscious appraisal process behind the ultimate volition, and thus part of the matrix of the choice itself. In other words, I don’t think one can segregate one’s choice in a way that the DDE requires. The reality is more messy.
" If you mean the latter, then the onus is upon you to show why sexual organs should be held to a different moral standard than our other organs."
ReplyDeleteDon't you mean "the use of" sexual organs? Or do you really mean, organs held to a moral standard per se, as if the organ itself could be held accountable?
That said, it would seem that the "generative" or "reproductive" organs as they once were called, differ in relatively obvious intrinsic ways from, say, the liver or the spleen.
[By the way, although I have used dguller's remarks now in two comments, I personally would not be interested in defending some psychologically premised, Maslovian-but-for-the-denial-of-a human-nature standard of "human
flourishing". That, I think this lengthy thread well demonstrates, is tantamount to dueling in a fog bank.]
DNW:
ReplyDeleteThat said, it would seem that the "generative" or "reproductive" organs as they once were called, differ in relatively obvious intrinsic ways from, say, the liver or the spleen.
I agree that they differ in some ways. My question was why these differences necessarily lead to different moral principles. In other words, why is it okay to use non-sexual organs in ways that violate their natural function in order to improve the overall flourishing of the individual, but it is not okay to use sexual organs in ways that violate their natural function in order to improve the overall flourishing of the individual.
First, how do NL theorists determine whether the nature of an act is objectively good or evil? I would presume that at least part of that determination would have to involve the consequences of the act in question. Am I correct here?
ReplyDeleteOnly if we allow an equivocation on the term "consequences." In standard moral philosophy, "consequences" of an act are to be DISTINGUISHED from the nature of the act. Sometimes the nature of the act is also called the "object" of the act, but this can be confused with the "intention" so it is not always helpful.
In general, the terms "nature" and (Platonic or Aristotelian) "form" of a thing are most clear in reference to a substantial thing, such as a horse or a human. The nature of a horse is completely distinguishable from the intended goal of a breeder in breeding that horse: the breeder may cause the horse to exist because he wants to sell it for money, but he is not the cause of "horsiness", and the sire and dam are the causes of horsiness in the foal. "To be 'horse-like' " is the nature, "to fetch a good price" is the intended goal. Using the term "nature" or "form" with respect to a machine or game is a little less determinative since they are not natural things, they only have "natures" in a sense. But still, it is possible to distinguish the NATURE or OBJECT of the game of football from the intended goal of playing a game. The object is to score more points, as touchdowns and field goals, than the opponent, but the intention may be "exercise", or "cameraderie" or even just "profit". A person who is a good sport can totally fulfill his intended goal even when he fails in the object because he loses the game, scoring no points at all.
Like with a game, the "nature" or "object" of an action is to use the terms in a derivative sense, but still valid. The nature of an act of an act of sacrifice is to give over something valuable, something that you could retain, to or for the sake of another.
What is confusing to people is that the "object of the act" can, indeed often does, stand to the physical process similar to the way the intended goal stands to the entire activity (physical and moral aspects) itself: comes to be at the end. When the physical action comes to a rest, unless the action failed or was impeded, the "object of the act" will be present as well: if the object of the act of running a marathon is to complete 26 mile run, the object is achieved when you have run 26 miles. The intended goal of the act, though, MAY be achieved contiguously with the completion of the physical act or it may not: if you can imagine more than one reason for doing the act, and one of those reasons comes about not as in and with the act but after the act, then you're probably looking at the intention and not the object. If the reason for running a marathon is good health, well at least some parts of that good health will be present with the achievement of the running (or may not be present - if you die from overexertion). But if the reason for running the act is to impress a girlfriend, and she happens to get hit by a car while you are running, your achieving the intention can be stymied EVEN THOUGH you completed the act itself. Generally the object of the act is so intimately bound to the activity that the object cannot be prevented when the act itself comes to completion. So both good health and impressing the girlfriend are intentions of the act, not the nature or object of the act.
This presumes a distinction between directly willing the good effects and indirectly permitting the bad effects. What is the justification for this distinction?
ReplyDeleteUmmm...reality? The fact that when a real live human being make a real actual choice for the lesser of two evils, they really do feel ambivalent, they actually feel partially responsible for the bad effect and partially not responsible for it. That they a cause in some sense but also that they are NOT the cause, in some also significant sense.
In other words, I don’t think one can segregate one’s choice in a way that the DDE requires. The reality is more messy.
If you don't think DDE and its distinctions are valid, you shouldn't have used it to begin with. I don't know why I should spend time defending the proper application of its standards if you just reject the whole thing.
dguller,
ReplyDeleteThat’s fine, and that would work well with your example, but wouldn’t be relevant in mine.
I'm not reading back right now, but I thought your claim was that an NL proponent would did not allow the violation of a lower telos for the sake of a higher telos could not therefore remove organs. My examples and explanations were meant as a response to that.
But none of this is relevant to my point, which is that the doctrine of double effect can be neutralized in the case of homosexual intercourse. After all, the DDE postulates a distinction between intending as primary and expecting as secondary.
It doesn't apply in that case. Even going by the quick wikipedia summary, stipulation one is 'the act is good, or at least morally neutral'. Anal sex doesn't qualify.
Attempting to repair a damaged organ, even with a radically unlikely chance of success, would seemingly qualify.
There’s no point in me looking into such evidence if you are going to say, “Well, it doesn’t matter, because metaphysically, anal sex is morally wrong, full stop, and under absolutely no conditions could it ever be morally good.”
Well, it's been explained why it's a moral wrong, and you've attempted to point out why those explanations fail. I don't think you've succeeded, but certainly the potential for progress was there. The comment about the differences in violations between anal sex and adultery seem valid, unless the end goal here is just 'find a way to justify anal sex'. I doubt that.
Superficially, I can think of one example: 'a prostate exam that there was a chance someone could find sexually stimulating'. That keeps anal sex or intentions to have sex utterly ruled out, and I don't think the DDE move works whatsoever. But, it's not like the ass is verboten.
Either way, my reply here was clear - even if we accept the violation of a lower telos for a higher for the sake of argument, I don't think you get where you want to go. You certainly don't get there obviously and without argument. Right?
The question would be whether homosexuals who were chemically castrated had a higher quality of life and higher degree of human flourishing than homosexuals who were involved in loving monogamous relationships that also involved sexual intimacy.
Not really. At least, not if I take you right. You seem to be suggesting that at that point we automatically get kicked over to 'human flourishing' as... some kind of utilitarian measure of total reported happiness on the part of the individual or something.
But that's wrong. The natural law proponent's standards would be in play, attempting to minimize violations of natural law, increase fulfillments of telos, etc. So it's not like 'oh anal sex violates natural law, that rates a 0 on the concern scale'. It may rate very high.
Aquinas said that all sexual activity that is not heterosexual, between a husband and wife, and for the purpose of procreation, is morally wrong.
ReplyDeleteNot in dispute. What I'm disputing is where the violation of telos goes. I also am pretty sure Aquinas considered adultery and sodomy on different planes, that were violations for different reasons.
I would consider this to be a scientific inquiry, but regardless of what you want to call it, the bottom line is that if such an investigation showed that allowing homosexuals to engage in sexual activity led to a higher degree of flourishing than prohibiting such activity
And here's the other problem. I'm skeptical of the ability of such an investigation to 'show' what you're talking about in a non-controversial way. It's in the realm of psychology and sociology, the softest of the soft sciences.
This is not a complaint I have specifically on this topic. Take a look at the controversy over whether 'violent games cause violent crime'. Beyond the most meager results - 'blood pressures tend to rise when playing Grand Theft Auto' - the question is close to unanswerable, possibly in principle. The results would at best give us a whole new area to argue over, so hey, there's that.
dguller,
ReplyDeleteThis thread is a little too long for my attention span, but your questions are good ones, so some basic points:
(1) First, how do NL theorists determine whether the nature of an act is objectively good or evil? I would presume that at least part of that determination would have to involve the consequences of the act in question. Am I correct here?
No. You're not completely off, because, at least if they stick fairly closely to Aquinas, consequences determine one of the ways an action can be genuinely good or bad. But the kind of goodness or badness is different from the objective goodness of (the nature of) the action.
The way of determining objective goodness of an action is actually written right in the name, although it is easily missed because the word is used in so many ways: the objective goodness of the action is just the goodness of what you are actually disposing yourself to do, when that is properly understood without bias by vice; that to which you are disposing yourself is the object of the action, and the object of the action is that part of your overall disposition to act that determines the nature of the action itself. It is not determined by the consequences, which are independent of the action itself, although the attempt to get certain kinds of consequences may be closely linked with the object. A good example of this is lying: lying is false-speaking in order to get the consequence that the other person is deceived, so the attempt to deceive is a normal part of the action, but any actual deception is just another, distinct, thing attaching to the action: whether you actually lied, and whether that was good or bad in itself, does not depend on whether anyone was actually deceived, nor on whether that was good or bad as a consequence, nor even on whether you explicitly thought of deceiving at the time (since a habitual liar may speak falsely in order to deceive without ever thinking explicitly to himself that deception is what he wants). (In NLT, consequences are not irrelevant to moral life, but they tend not to be very important for morality itself; they are much more important when we deal with kinds of laws that directly concern outward behavior relevant to living in society.)
The goodness or badness of the object is determined by reasoning -- goodness or badness in practical matters is coherence with well-ordered reason, and moral matters are on NLT simply those kinds of practical matters that deal with the most common or most basic goods. Suppose you are writing a novel: even setting aside whether your novel has the consequences one wishes (fame, for instance, or changing the hearts of millions), you can still ask whether your actual writing of it was done well or badly, and this you would do by looking at what you were trying to do, what's really required for the kind of novel you were trying to write and whether your attempt to do this was consistent, and what you actually did (even if you were trying to do something else). That's pretty much how it works. Matters of right and wrong are just like any other practical matter in NLT; they aren't in themselves some esoteric special genus but just more important because of the kinds of goods with which they are concerned. The major trickiness is that they are unavoidable goods that don't depend on our desires. We are all implicated already, from the beginning, in the good of our own survival, the good of the propagation and upbringing of the human race, and the good of rational life, whether we want to be or not: any plan or decision that deliberately and directly attacked these goods as if they were not goods would be, to that extent, a bad plan or decision, and bad because it was malicious in itself. In practice things are usually massively more complicated than that, since actual inconsistencies with these goods are often partly nondeliberate or indirect. The majority of non-consequence-based moral arguments on a subject are at least relevant to working this out.
I see that Tony published a pretty good comment that made my previous one largely otiose. In any case, the conclusion of my comment:
ReplyDelete(2) Second, NL theorists assume that there exists a hierarchy of goods such that the lower goods can be sacrificed for the sake of the higher goods.
This is not universally assumed by NLTists, but classically it tends to be assumed that there is a hierarchy of goods in the sense that there are goods that have a naturally greater commonality and universality than others: my own good is a very great good, but I also am implicated by my rational human nature in the good of society and the human race, so that the good of, say, raising my child well, if I have one, is in a sense a more inclusive good than the good of my own life, not because my child's life is worth more than mine, but because in working for the good of my child's being raised well, I am working for their good and for the good of the whole human race, including myself. This does not ever make treating my own life as insignificant OK -- e.g., it can never be right to try to lose my life as an object of my action -- but it does mean that I can accept losing my life as a consequence of my action, especially if doing so is likely to contribute, as a consequence, to the good of my child, or my society, or humanity itself.
Thus NLT will never, ever, ever endorse violations: it will allow that, if the consequences are of the right kind, they can be tolerated as a matter of custom or positive law for the sake of the common good; it will allow that a wrong action in a misguided attempt to uphold a higher purpose is generally less bad than a wrong action done selfishly; but they never stop being wrong.
Whether or not heterosexuality is the proper ends for only some people's natures is what is in question; that is, what the discussion is about is whether homosexuality is a deviation from our shared human nature or not.
ReplyDeleteDespite the earlier comic diversion into True Blood territory, I don't know what could make homosexual acts inhuman. It is one thing to say it doesn't live up to an ideal procreative standard (a standard many heterosexual couples intentionally thwart as well). It is another thing entirely to claim it changes their nature into something inhuman, and you best believe I will call you a hypocrite if you fail to use the harshest language of condemnation when describing any non-procreative sex acts between heterosexuals. Btw, I don’t even grant that NFP is morally acceptable under Natural Law, simply because there is no such thing as a successful intent that is irrelevant to the object. Being “open to life” is a trivial excuse, a fig leaf so to speak, in evaluating the intrinsically wrong attempt to avoid pregnancy.
dguller said...
ReplyDeleteDNW:
'That said, it would seem that the "generative" or "reproductive" organs as they once were called, differ in relatively obvious intrinsic ways from, say, the liver or the spleen.'
I agree that they differ in some ways. My question was why these differences necessarily lead to different moral principles."
I don't follow, though I guess you mean different moral results according to some consistent standard of evaluation.
My position is that they, the liver and the genitals, are not "like kinds" in their operation and "purpose".
Your liver, to the best of my knowledge, operate only within your own body. This doesn't mean you cannot tax its operation and even destroy it, but I doubt that anyone would call that "individual flourshing".
I suppose if you sat alone in a room and drank yourself to death as part of a program of self-realization, the activity might bear some analogy with other forms of private vice. But I don't think that that is the parallel you are arguing for.
" In other words, why is it okay to use non-sexual organs in ways that violate their natural function in order to improve the overall flourishing of the individual, but it is not okay to use sexual organs in ways that violate their natural function in order to improve the overall flourishing of the individual.
July 9, 2013 at 12:31 PM "
Not just different in some ways, but different in socially critical and defining ways. If you accept any teleonomic reality, they are ways which make all the difference. On the other hand if you accept no teleonomic reality at all, then no differing ways of any kind really amount to anything anyway.
In fact, I am hard pressed to imagine a way in which a metabolic organ such as the liver, or a systems organ like the kidney would be capable of being used in ways that violate their natural function for the sake of individual flourishing. Maybe by one's deliberately ingesting poisons?
Most people would probably classify that kind of activity as disordered.
But I suppose given that, that your no doubt still lingering question is predicated on a series of previous assumptions laid out in the last hundred or two exchanges. That would be specifically with those who've been endorsing a natural law framework based on a conceptual criterion of "flourishing" which is derived from psychology's social adaptation and self-realization theories.
That is a line of argument which as I have implied and stated, is not a line I would think is ultimately logically supportable.
It is just too conceptually equivocal or ambiguous to be of much use. Loosely speaking, I suppose the concept of "flourishing" makes sense when speaking of bacteria in a medium, or even human populations on average when taken in relation their political environment. But when taken as applied to individuals and the calculation of the justifiability of their enjoyment of personal idiosyncrasies in a presumptively supportive social context then, I have difficulty seeing what is actually being aimed at for all the intervening ideological clutter.
Sorry I couldn't help.
Step2,
ReplyDeleteYour point seems largely based on emphasis of the term inhuman, the suggestion that natural law amounts to believing homosexuals are monsters or beasts. There are no doubt far more nuanced and balanced ways to describe the subversion of natural ends of human sexuality and nature in homosexual acts than that.
NFP makes use of natural infertility, it is part of a natural, marital relationship, and doesn't rule out fertility all together. If NFP is wrong in the same way homosexual acts are, then the latter is like armed robbery and the former is like helping yourself to a view nuts or grapes while shopping in the supermarket.
- Jeremy Taylor
Despite the earlier comic diversion into True Blood territory, I don't know what could make homosexual acts inhuman. It is one thing to say it doesn't live up to an ideal procreative standard (a standard many heterosexual couples intentionally thwart as well). It is another thing entirely to claim it changes their nature into something inhuman,
ReplyDeleteIt should be obvious, but I guess it needs to be spelled out: there is more than one sense of "inhuman" going around here. Clearly a horse is inhuman because it is a thing of a different nature. A homosexual person is a human no matter what acts he does. And obviously, any acts that a human does are human acts, right? Sure.
But it is also true that some acts of some humans are "inhuman" acts, or the phrase "man's inhumanity to man" could never have been crafted. The sense of "inhuman" acts, then, is different than simply "acts done by a non-human". They are (or can mean) acts that are completely out of order for humans, acts that cannot in any sense coincide with the proper good of human beings. The things Dr. Mengele did to alive Jews as experiments were "inhuman."
and you best believe I will call you a hypocrite if you fail to use the harshest language of condemnation when describing any non-procreative sex acts between heterosexuals.
OK, that's fine. St. Thomas says that ALL of these acts are like the acts of beasts (in being not in conformity to reason, as brute beasts don't use reason); except that they are actually WORSE than the acts of beasts because beastly acts IN BEASTS are not supposed to be rational, whereas human acts are supposed to be rational. So beasts' acts are NON-rational, (a negation), but grave human acts of vice are IRrational, a privation rather than a mere negation, a more serious sort of evil. And he applies this to all such gravely immoral acts, not just those of homosexuals.
Btw, I don’t even grant that NFP is morally acceptable under Natural Law, simply because there is no such thing as a successful intent that is irrelevant to the object. Being “open to life” is a trivial excuse, a fig leaf so to speak, in evaluating the intrinsically wrong attempt to avoid pregnancy.
Well, since the Church is both responsible for promoting the work that made NFP possible, and for analyzing its morality, I am sure that I can take your "don't even grant" with a certain amount of equanimity.
A refusal to act, because one does not desire or intend to cause a pregnancy might, indeed be an immoral refusal to act. But it can never be an act of SEXUAL immorality, because it is not a sexual act. Whatever its moral failings, it cannot be put into the category of "acts that are immoral because they are a misuse of sexual faculties." So, whatever immorality this refusal to act sexually might entail, its immorality would have to fall under some OTHER aspect of man's proper good than that of the abuse of sexual functions. I doubt that you can cook up a reasonable claim for such a moral failing, but feel free to try. Try also, in your attempt, to take account of "Josephite marriages", which have always been considered morally permissible in the Church. Try also to account for the norm of priestly celibacy in the Western Church, even though its lack in the Eastern Church shows that there is nothing immoral about priests being married. In the meantime, I will listen to the Church: NFP is not itself immoral.
Tony:
ReplyDeleteBut still, it is possible to distinguish the NATURE or OBJECT of the game of football from the intended goal of playing a game. The object is to score more points, as touchdowns and field goals, than the opponent, but the intention may be "exercise", or "cameraderie" or even just "profit". A person who is a good sport can totally fulfill his intended goal even when he fails in the object because he loses the game, scoring no points at all.
That’s helpful. So, perhaps one way to put this is that the nature or object of the act is what is essential to the act in order to be that particular kind of act, and the intended goal, when distinct from the object of the act, is what is accidental to the act, i.e. it could be absent from the act and yet the act remains the same particular kind of act. So, the nature or object of the act is essential to the act, and the intended goal is accidental to the act.
One immediate comment about this is that what counts as essential to a game changes over time. Originally, football was a combination of rugby and soccer, and utilized a round ball that could not be carried at all by players. A series of further changes over the decades since the late 1800’s resulted in the modern form of football. Can one say that the original players of football weren’t actually playing football? Perhaps the contemporary form of football is the deviation from the norm, and thus no-one today is actually playing football at all, but only some violation of real football. The point is that, within a number of natural and cultural constraints, people determine what the nature or object of sport activities are, and once a consensus is achieved by the individuals involved, then the act can be said to have a nature at all.
I don’t think that you’ll deny that the above analysis certainly applies to human games, such as football, which are created by human beings, again, within certain natural and cultural constraints. The question is whether this analysis would also apply to natural activities of physical organisms. It certainly applies to evolutionary changes of bodily organs. An organ O at time t1 may have function F1, but as the context changes, O may have F2 at t2 instead. For example, in the evolution of the ear, bones that were originally used for chewing by the jaw evolved to become part of the middle ear to be used for hearing. In order for that to happen, a bone in the jaw had to first change location in order to be free to evolve without affecting the jaw’s movement. In other words, changing contexts allow physical organs to evolve different functions, and thus it may be that what was considered natural for an organ at t1 may change by t2. Furthermore, given the gradual nature of evolutionary change such that it is impossible to identify the precise transitional moment from parent to offspring in which an evolutionary change has occurred, it could be that we think at a certain time that O if for F1, when really it has already shifted to including F2 as a natural part of O.
If this is correct, then we are stuck with a dilemma with respect to moral evaluations in natural law. If all moral evaluations in natural law necessarily involve some knowledge of what the nature of a particular entity is, then if it were necessarily impossible to know with certainty what the nature of that entity is, then our moral evaluations will be on shaky ground. For example, I do not know if I am a human being, or if I am part of a divergent line of human beings that over the next thousand years will branch off into a different species of homo. After all, it is impossible to identify the precise moment in which a new species has evolved in the sense of identifying the first instantiation of that species.
Generally the object of the act is so intimately bound to the activity that the object cannot be prevented when the act itself comes to completion. So both good health and impressing the girlfriend are intentions of the act, not the nature or object of the act.
ReplyDeleteThat would be consistent with the distinction I drew above between the essential ends of successfully completing an activity, and the accidental ends of that activity. If the activity is successfully completed, then the former must be present, whereas the latter may be present.
Now, the question is how to determine the essential and accidental ends of the activity of an entity.
Ummm...reality? The fact that when a real live human being make a real actual choice for the lesser of two evils, they really do feel ambivalent, they actually feel partially responsible for the bad effect and partially not responsible for it. That they a cause in some sense but also that they are NOT the cause, in some also significant sense.
That doesn’t really answer my question, though. Is the justification for the distinction a person’s feelings about it? I thought that morality was metaphysically objective, irrespective of how we feel about it. Also, even if you want to use feelings to justify the distinction, then you have a problem. If you want to use human psychology as a justification, then you must consider the possibility that a person may try to rationalize their decision to minimize cognitive dissonance by inventing a spurious distinction to attenuate their responsibility for the bad effects of an action, even if they knew, full well in advance, that those bad effects would not have occurred, if not for the act itself. In such a scenario, it would not follow that the distinction is itself a valid one. After all, the person may be lying to themselves in order to minimize psychological distress.
If you don't think DDE and its distinctions are valid, you shouldn't have used it to begin with. I don't know why I should spend time defending the proper application of its standards if you just reject the whole thing.
First of all, I always enjoy reading your comments. They are invariably illuminating, even if I disagree with them.
Second, I never brought up DDE to begin with. Crude did, and so I have been discussing both the application of DDE to the case of homosexuality, and the validity of DDE itself. If DDE is valid, then a discussion of the application of DDE is necessary, but if DDE is invalid, then a discussion of the application of DDE is unnecessary.
Crude:
ReplyDeleteI'm not reading back right now, but I thought your claim was that an NL proponent would did not allow the violation of a lower telos for the sake of a higher telos could not therefore remove organs. My examples and explanations were meant as a response to that.
Fair enough, but my counter-examples were designed to show that there are cases in which NL would allow the violation of a lower telos for the sake of a higher telos. And if that is permissible, then the question is whether a similar analysis could be applicable to homosexual sexual activity.
It doesn't apply in that case. Even going by the quick wikipedia summary, stipulation one is 'the act is good, or at least morally neutral'. Anal sex doesn't qualify.
It would necessarily involve the violation of the telos of the sexual organ. The question is whether that in itself is sufficient to warrant an absolute prohibition of anal sex from a moral standpoint. My question is whether one can agree that anal sex is a violation of the natural end of the sexual organ, and yet still argue that it is morally permissible on the grounds that it can lead to a higher degree of human flourishing of homosexuals, which would be an example of a lower telos being sacrificed for the sake of a higher telos.
Either way, my reply here was clear - even if we accept the violation of a lower telos for a higher for the sake of argument, I don't think you get where you want to go. You certainly don't get there obviously and without argument. Right?
Right. The question is how to determine whether permitting anal sex to homosexuality increases or decreases their overall degree of human flourishing. As I said, I think that this would involve a broadly-construed scientific inquiry that would have to be able to measure flourishing in some way, compare it between individuals, and isolate and determine the relative influence of different contributory and causal factors of human flourishing. I would also say that until this analysis and inquiry is done, then we simply do not know whether permitting anal sex for homosexuals is morally justified or unjustified.
Not really. At least, not if I take you right. You seem to be suggesting that at that point we automatically get kicked over to 'human flourishing' as... some kind of utilitarian measure of total reported happiness on the part of the individual or something.
Not necessarily. Take human flourishing to be whatever you want, and call if HF. If your ethical theory states that there are different degrees of HF that are dependent upon different kinds of human activity, then your ethical theory must have some way of determining how much of HF is present in a given individual, and how that amount of HF is related to their particular choices and activities, as well as to their respective environmental influences, and other factors.
But that's wrong. The natural law proponent's standards would be in play, attempting to minimize violations of natural law, increase fulfillments of telos, etc. So it's not like 'oh anal sex violates natural law, that rates a 0 on the concern scale'. It may rate very high.
That’s the precise point. How does one measure behavior and assign it a value on “the concern scale” at all?
Not in dispute. What I'm disputing is where the violation of telos goes. I also am pretty sure Aquinas considered adultery and sodomy on different planes, that were violations for different reasons.
They violate different parts of the norm of sexual activity, but that doesn’t mean that their immorality derives precisely from the fact that they violate the norm of sexual activity, as determined by natural law.
And here's the other problem. I'm skeptical of the ability of such an investigation to 'show' what you're talking about in a non-controversial way. It's in the realm of psychology and sociology, the softest of the soft sciences.
ReplyDeleteThen the only conclusion is that no-one really knows where the truth lies, and we are all on shaky ground here. And that means that I cannot say with certainty and firm conviction that anal sex is morally permissible, but you cannot say with the same degree of certainty and firm conviction that anal sex is not morally permissible. After all, if the only analysis that could decide this issue is possibly impossible in principle to perform, then we must remain silent in our ignorance about this matter. And then what do we do? How do you decide what to do when you cannot decide what to do? And that’s when matters get really interesting.
Brandon:
ReplyDeleteThe way of determining objective goodness of an action is actually written right in the name, although it is easily missed because the word is used in so many ways: the objective goodness of the action is just the goodness of what you are actually disposing yourself to do, when that is properly understood without bias by vice; that to which you are disposing yourself is the object of the action, and the object of the action is that part of your overall disposition to act that determines the nature of the action itself.
I’m not too sure that will work, though. Anal sex is an action, and as such, it must have a nature or object, which serves as the ideal standard by which the goodness of the act is judged. So, performing anal sex in accordance with the standard set by the object of the act of anal sex would be considered “good” on this account.
It is not determined by the consequences, which are independent of the action itself, although the attempt to get certain kinds of consequences may be closely linked with the object.
Tony explained this well above.
A good example of this is lying: lying is false-speaking in order to get the consequence that the other person is deceived, so the attempt to deceive is a normal part of the action, but any actual deception is just another, distinct, thing attaching to the action: whether you actually lied, and whether that was good or bad in itself, does not depend on whether anyone was actually deceived, nor on whether that was good or bad as a consequence, nor even on whether you explicitly thought of deceiving at the time (since a habitual liar may speak falsely in order to deceive without ever thinking explicitly to himself that deception is what he wants). (In NLT, consequences are not irrelevant to moral life, but they tend not to be very important for morality itself; they are much more important when we deal with kinds of laws that directly concern outward behavior relevant to living in society.)
Right. There is the action, which has an object or nature, and then there is the consequences of the action, which can be either good or bad. But how does one determine whether an action is intrinsically good or bad in its object or nature? Presumably, the action would be considered good in itself if that action contributed to the flourishing of the individual performing the action, and that would depend upon the nature of the individual in question. If the action contributes to the individual’s actualization of their nature, which would bring them closer to the ideal standard of the kind of being that they are, then the action would be considered good. Thus, a good action is intrinsically related to the goodness identified with the degree to which a thing’s nature is actualized. Is this correct?
Suppose you are writing a novel: even setting aside whether your novel has the consequences one wishes (fame, for instance, or changing the hearts of millions), you can still ask whether your actual writing of it was done well or badly, and this you would do by looking at what you were trying to do, what's really required for the kind of novel you were trying to write and whether your attempt to do this was consistent, and what you actually did (even if you were trying to do something else). That's pretty much how it works.
But you would first have to have knowledge of what counts as a “good novel”, which would serve as the object of the action in question. And you would presume that there is a single coherent and unified definition of a “good novel” to serve as the ideal standard for all novels. And what if part of the ideal standard for all novels involved a novel’s consequential impact upon others and society at large? Then consequences are built right into the nature of the act itself.
We are all implicated already, from the beginning, in the good of our own survival, the good of the propagation and upbringing of the human race, and the good of rational life, whether we want to be or not
ReplyDeleteI agree that the three goods that you listed here are objective goods for human beings that are derived from their human nature itself. However, you seem to be assuming that those three goods never come into conflict, that they never involve trade-offs in which one is sacrificed for the others. And when they do, in fact, come into conflict, then what standard of goodness do you then use to decide which should be sacrificed? Is there any such standard? If there were, then it would have to be higher than these three goods such that it is turned to in times of confusion between them. It would be like getting confused answers from the bank tellers, and having to go to the branch manager.
any plan or decision that deliberately and directly attacked these goods as if they were not goods would be, to that extent, a bad plan or decision, and bad because it was malicious in itself. In practice things are usually massively more complicated than that, since actual inconsistencies with these goods are often partly nondeliberate or indirect. The majority of non-consequence-based moral arguments on a subject are at least relevant to working this out.
But my question is when these three goods themselves conflict with one another, and not when other goods are given priority over them. What do you do then?
This is not universally assumed by NLTists, but classically it tends to be assumed that there is a hierarchy of goods in the sense that there are goods that have a naturally greater commonality and universality than others: my own good is a very great good, but I also am implicated by my rational human nature in the good of society and the human race, so that the good of, say, raising my child well, if I have one, is in a sense a more inclusive good than the good of my own life, not because my child's life is worth more than mine, but because in working for the good of my child's being raised well, I am working for their good and for the good of the whole human race, including myself.
So, there are a set of objective goods that all human beings share in common, each of which corresponds to something in our human nature, and human flourishing would require us to actualize as many of these goods as possible, which would necessarily involve trade-offs and sacrifices of some goods for the sake of others. So, in order for me to be rational, I must be physically healthy, which requires food, which requires farmers to grow the food, which requires me to support those farmers in order to ultimately achieve my rationality. Ultimately, this just means that everything and everyone is interconnected in complex ways, and that adopting a purely selfish posture would ultimately be detrimental towards oneself. It would be better to adopt a balanced posture in which one prioritizes different goods at different times, depending upon what the situation demanded.
This does not ever make treating my own life as insignificant OK -- e.g., it can never be right to try to lose my life as an object of my action -- but it does mean that I can accept losing my life as a consequence of my action, especially if doing so is likely to contribute, as a consequence, to the good of my child, or my society, or humanity itself.
ReplyDeleteBut the action of suicide has a nature or object, because all actions have a nature or object. This action may conflict with other goods, certainly, but that doesn’t mean that suicide has its own standards of goodness, i.e. being painless, quick, having one’s affairs in order, reconciling with loved ones and preparing them for their upcoming loss, and so on. As a friend of mine once said, “if you’re going to do something wrong, do it right.” So, it would seem that the goodness of an action is not just in its object or nature, but rather how its object or nature is situated within the matrix of other fundamental goods, which form the totality that corresponds to human flourishing.
Thus NLT will never, ever, ever endorse violations: it will allow that, if the consequences are of the right kind, they can be tolerated as a matter of custom or positive law for the sake of the common good; it will allow that a wrong action in a misguided attempt to uphold a higher purpose is generally less bad than a wrong action done selfishly; but they never stop being wrong.
My question is why this is so. If an action contributes to the overall flourishing of an individual by allowing it to maximally actualize other goods while sacrificing one good, then why wouldn’t that action be considered good? Every action is a violation in the sense of sacrificing some goods for the sake of others, and every action leads to a mixture of good and bad outcomes. So, why are some actions treated as necessarily immoral when the matter is far more complex?
@dguller:
ReplyDelete"My question is whether one can agree that anal sex is a violation of the natural end of the sexual organ, and yet still argue that it is morally permissible on the grounds that it can lead to a higher degree of human flourishing of homosexuals[.]"
Well, I think the answer to that question is trivially Yes. However, I think you're really asking whether an adherent of natural law could make that argument consistently with that adherence.
Despite my general sympathy with natural-law-based ethics/morality, I can't call myself a natural lawyer, in part because I simply don't see why the "natural end of a sexual organ" gives rise to any sort of specifically moral (as opposed e.g. to "practical" or "prudent") obligation in the absence of special revelation. I have purposes and goals of my own that don't reduce to those of my organs, so why (again, by natural-law standards, without invoking special revelation) am I morally obliged not to deploy Little Scotty in any manner that can't lead to procreation?
dguller writes,
ReplyDeleteAnd then what do we do? How do you decide what to do when you cannot decide what to do? And that’s when matters get really interesting.
I don’t think so. If one cannot define what counts as a psychologically flourishing state, and if one acknowledges that certain acts misuse the telos of the object(s) in question, the onus is upon the claimant that such acts are justifiable. If we all agree that anal sex is a misuse of the lower extremities, I don’t have to provide an argument for continued proper use. An exception must be argued by a claimant, and if the claim rests upon something unverifiable, then the argument fails.
Scott:
ReplyDeleteWell, I think the answer to that question is trivially Yes. However, I think you're really asking whether an adherent of natural law could make that argument consistently with that adherence.
Yes, that’s what I’m asking. I think that even if one accepts that different organs have particular natural functions and that human beings have a specific human nature serves as their defining essence and ideal standard that they ought to strive to actualize, then even under these conditions, a case can be made that homosexual sexual intimacy can be morally permissible.
Despite my general sympathy with natural-law-based ethics/morality, I can't call myself a natural lawyer, in part because I simply don't see why the "natural end of a sexual organ" gives rise to any sort of specifically moral (as opposed e.g. to "practical" or "prudent") obligation in the absence of special revelation. I have purposes and goals of my own that don't reduce to those of my organs, so why (again, by natural-law standards, without invoking special revelation) am I morally obliged not to deploy Little Scotty in any manner that can't lead to procreation?
I think that you would have that obligation within a natural law framework, but only if either (a) there were no distinction between an entity’s higher ends and lower ends, or (b) there is a distinction between higher ends and lower ends, but to violate the lower ends is necessarily to violate the higher ends. But both (a) and (b) are highly debatable, I think.
Anonymous:
ReplyDeleteI don’t think so. If one cannot define what counts as a psychologically flourishing state, and if one acknowledges that certain acts misuse the telos of the object(s) in question, the onus is upon the claimant that such acts are justifiable. If we all agree that anal sex is a misuse of the lower extremities, I don’t have to provide an argument for continued proper use. An exception must be argued by a claimant, and if the claim rests upon something unverifiable, then the argument fails.
But your position presupposes the truth of the general principle that if an action violates the natural end of an organ, then the action is necessarily morally impermissible. The fact that there are exceptions to this rule that even a natural law theorist will accept means that it is not as universal as it pretends to be.
And the exceptions are actually based upon the principle that not violating the natural end of the organ would lead to a diminished degree of flourishing, which means that the entire basis of NL theory presupposes that one can determine and measure different degrees of human flourishing in some way in order to assess which actions maximize flourishing and which actions minimize flourishing. If no-one can measure or determine the different degrees of human flourishing, then NL theory is impossible to use in practice to determine whether any action is moral or immoral.
"If one cannot define what counts as a psychologically flourishing state, and if one acknowledges that certain acts misuse the telos of the object(s) in question, the onus is upon the claimant that such acts are justifiable."
ReplyDeleteI think the onus is on the one who claims that misusing the telos of the object(s) requires justification in the first place—that there's something morally wrong with such an action that can be counterbalanced only by a positive showing that it's worth doing anyway.
As dguller says, you're presupposing that that's already been established, and your hypothetical argument here is with someone who doesn't agree on that point.
Brandon:
ReplyDeleteSorry, I have to correct something I wrote above:
"But the action of suicide has a nature or object, because all actions have a nature or object. This action may conflict with other goods, certainly, but that doesn’t mean that suicide does not have its own standards of goodness, i.e. being painless, quick, having one’s affairs in order, reconciling with loved ones and preparing them for their upcoming loss, and so on.
They are (or can mean) acts that are completely out of order for humans, acts that cannot in any sense coincide with the proper good of human beings.
ReplyDeleteSince Jeremy already revised his comment the point is sort of moot. However I will say that while I accept your view of what could legitimately be called inhuman, there has yet to be any credible legal evidence that proves harm caused by the nature of homosexual acts. Of course there can be harm caused for various other reasons, but nothing about their sexual orientation as such has been legally determined to harm others.
So, whatever immorality this refusal to act sexually might entail, its immorality would have to fall under some OTHER aspect of man's proper good than that of the abuse of sexual functions.
You are inverting the actions involved. There is in some negative sense a refusal to act sexually during times of fertility, but there is also predominantly a positive intent to act sexually during times of infertility. It is the positive intention that is improper according to your own standard. If the intent of the act is to have sex without procreation and they succeed in their intent, why shouldn’t that be considered subverting the telos of the sex organs? Interestingly, Natural Law proponents will frequently employ a gambit here where the unitive function of sexual relations in marriage replaces the procreative intention. The gambit has no merit. Either procreation is the only proper purpose of sexual activity or it isn’t, intentionally avoiding that purpose is plainly a deviation from the standard.
dguller writes,
ReplyDeleteBut your position presupposes the truth of the general principle that if an action violates the natural end of an organ, then the action is necessarily morally impermissible.
Of course it does. I haven't read all 503 posts, but I thought you had conceded that for argument's sake in order to make the point that it was permissible to violate the telos of an object for a higher level of good. If you have not conceded that, my apologies.
That said, recall that I qualified my statements with "if." I take it that you acknowledge the point if the premises are granted, no?
Moreover, "violate," in this context, means to break, infringe, or transgress. Are we arguing that breaking a rule is morally permissible? If Nature's telos of an organ is "violated," then we are certainly doing something unnatural. Perhaps doing something unnatural is justified, but it appears that justification is required if "violation" is intended.
Scott writes,
I think the onus is on the one who claims that misusing the telos of the object(s) requires justification in the first place...
"Misuse," defined, is the wrong or improper use of something. It is news to me that doing something wrong or improper carries no onus of justification.
"'Misuse,' defined, is the wrong or improper use of something. It is news to me that doing something wrong or improper carries no onus of justification."
ReplyDeleteIt does if the wrongness or impropriety is supposed to be specifically moral as opposed to e.g. practical or prudential.
Scott writes,
ReplyDeleteIt does if the wrongness or impropriety is supposed to be specifically moral as opposed to e.g. practical or prudential.
No, anything wrong or improper is morally impermissible. It appears that you're redefining the word to sustain your argument. "Impractical" bears no relevance to "wrong" or "improper."
"No, anything wrong or improper is morally impermissible. It appears that you're redefining the word to sustain your argument. 'Impractical' bears no relevance to 'wrong' or 'improper.'"
ReplyDeleteSince I'm not making an argument but asking a question, I'm mystified by your remark about redefining a word to suit my "argument."
At any rate, my question is easily rephrased without reference to "wrongness" or "impropriety": granting that using a sexual organ to do X frustrates its natural end/function of procreation, why is it that such use is morally wrong according to natural law? What moral obligation do I have to my penis to use it only according to its natural function?
(And yet again I'm making an exception to my policy of not arguing with anonymous posters.)
ReplyDeleteScott, I'm at work, so I'll have to sign off after this post. I'll only engage your "anonymous" remark.
ReplyDeleteMy Google account is directly tied to my office, and my company has a policy of not associating the company name with anything other than the company's business. I have a Disqus account, but it appears that this site doesn't utilize that, so I'm left with posting anonymously (I'm not signing in and out of Google just to post here).
Moreover, fake names are just as anonymous, so your objection makes no sense to me. It's the argument that matters, not the handle of the poster. I've seen plenty of trolls with names associated with them. Whether "named" or anonymous, I ignore trolls and respond to what I consider sincere comments. If you choose to ignore me, your call. I'll get over it.
"[F]ake names are just as anonymous, so your objection makes no sense to me."
ReplyDeleteFake or not, they distinguish one poster from another.
Fair enough, but my counter-examples were designed to show that there are cases in which NL would allow the violation of a lower telos for the sake of a higher telos. And if that is permissible, then the question is whether a similar analysis could be applicable to homosexual sexual activity.
ReplyDeleteI think it's a push, then. Those justifications apparently don't need to be deployed in order to justify replacement/operation on organs. That was my only focus with that wing of the conversation.
It would necessarily involve the violation of the telos of the sexual organ. The question is whether that in itself is sufficient to warrant an absolute prohibition of anal sex from a moral standpoint.
Not according to the DDE, from what I read, based on the reasoning that's been supplied. I thought this particular response was dealing with the DDE specifically.
I would also say that until this analysis and inquiry is done, then we simply do not know whether permitting anal sex for homosexuals is morally justified or unjustified.
I'd go further and argue that you're not going to 'know', based on the analysis and inquiry, whether it is. You're always going to circle right on back to the metaphysical views, arguments, etc. Even your analysis is hardly going to be scientific, even broadly. Now, the data gathering part may be scientific. But the analysis? No. That will be off in the land of philosophy and metaphysics.
That’s the precise point. How does one measure behavior and assign it a value on “the concern scale” at all?
You'd better hope there's a way, if you intend to appeal to scientific inquiry. That's one of the main problems here, and why I think talk of empirical study and analysis is just helpless on this point. It will be rigged by (and this is just the intellectual, not the practical, concerns) the metaphysical and philosophical aspects - that's where the action remains.
They violate different parts of the norm of sexual activity, but that doesn’t mean that their immorality derives precisely from the fact that they violate the norm of sexual activity, as determined by natural law.
Sure, I didn't deny they were NL violations. I just didn't think they were comparable in the way you seemed to suggest that they were.
How do you decide what to do when you cannot decide what to do? And that’s when matters get really interesting.
I think it gets entirely banal as a matter of practice. Intellectually it's more interesting.
More seriously, I don't think the position you're advocating passes the smell test. You're appealing to depression, self-hatred, suicide, etc. None of these things - not a one - superficially is 'cured' by anal sex. To put it another way: there's a thousand ways to skin a cat. Which way is the best way? Not sure. Maybe there's no way to tell with rapt scientific certainty. But I think we can rule out the sheer *necessity* of some methods.
To go at this from another direction for a moment - if I identified a subgroup of men who seemed to crave rape, AND if I found a way for these men to rape women without the women knowing or suffering obviously ill aftereffects (disease, etc), would we really start talking about doing cost-benefit analyses of the gained happiness of the men by the act versus etc, etc? Or would we chart a course for finding a way to help these guys live happy lives without the rape?
Scott,
ReplyDeleteAt any rate, my question is easily rephrased without reference to "wrongness" or "impropriety": granting that using a sexual organ to do X frustrates its natural end/function of procreation, why is it that such use is morally wrong according to natural law? What moral obligation do I have to my penis to use it only according to its natural function?
Since I assume you're still couching this in state/government terms (correct me if I'm wrong) should I further assume that you'd deploy this objection to any view of moral obligation on the part of the state?
I'm surprised no one commented on the Stanley Fish article. Seemed supremely germane.
Anonymous:
ReplyDeleteOf course it does. I haven't read all 503 posts, but I thought you had conceded that for argument's sake in order to make the point that it was permissible to violate the telos of an object for a higher level of good. If you have not conceded that, my apologies.
That is the proposition that I am defending, yes. But there is a distinction between the following principles:
(1) If a chosen act necessarily violates the natural end of an organ, then the act is necessarily immoral
(2) A chosen act that violates the natural end of an organ is morally permissible if the act in question results in the actualization of a higher end of a whole person
Notice that if (1) is true, then (2) is necessarily false, and if (2) is true, then (1) is necessarily false, and thus (1) and (2) are distinct propositions. I would accept (2), but reject (1).
Moreover, "violate," in this context, means to break, infringe, or transgress. Are we arguing that breaking a rule is morally permissible? If Nature's telos of an organ is "violated," then we are certainly doing something unnatural. Perhaps doing something unnatural is justified, but it appears that justification is required if "violation" is intended.
It all depends upon whether you accept (1) or (2). If you accept (1), then you have to live with the impossibility of any moral choices, because all moral choices involve actualizing some ends while frustrating other ends. For example, by choosing to go to work, I am also choosing not to spend time with my family. And if any natural end is deliberately frustrated, then the act is immoral, which means that all acts are immoral. The only way to avoid this absurd conclusion is to reject (1), which means to embrace (2), because the reality of moral choice is the prioritization of a hierarchy of different objective ends, some of which are actualized, and others of which are frustrated.
Step2,
ReplyDeleteSince Jeremy already revised his comment the point is sort of moot.
I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean. I didn't revise my comments or in any sense change my opposition to your point. I meant you had been emphasising the term inhuman as if it could only mean an utter monster or beast, not that believers in Natural Law were necessarily using the term that way, including in this context.
Whether or not NFP is illegitimate it is marked out by using the natural infertility of a woman's cycle and not creating that infertility by human interference. It also does not rule out conception in quite the same way.
-Jeremy Taylor
If you accept (1), then you have to live with the impossibility of any moral choices, because all moral choices involve actualizing some ends while frustrating other ends. For example, by choosing to go to work, I am also choosing not to spend time with my family. And if any natural end is deliberately frustrated, then the act is immoral, which means that all acts are immoral.
ReplyDeleteThis is only apparent if you are correct that we must choose between frustrating natural ends. Your example doesn't really prove that: it is not apparent going to work must frustrate spending the ends of family life.
- Jeremy Taylor
Dguller,
ReplyDeleteAnd that means that I cannot say with certainty and firm conviction that anal sex is morally permissible, but you cannot say with the same degree of certainty and firm conviction that anal sex is not morally permissible. After all, if the only analysis that could decide this issue is possibly impossible in principle to perform, then we must remain silent in our ignorance about this matter. And then what do we do? How do you decide what to do when you cannot decide what to do? And that’s when matters get really interesting.
Well, for a start, even if this were true, the Scripture, the near universal human condemnation of homosexual acts, and the quarters and reasons for which moderns have relaxed the prohibitions seem reason enough to take the prohibitions as a default, to me.
@Crude:
ReplyDelete"Since I assume you're still couching this in state/government terms (correct me if I'm wrong) . . . "
That was Chad's argument, not mine; my only concern with that argument was to clarify it.
My question is more basic and has nothing to do with state or government. I'm asking why, in purely natural-law terms and apart from special revelation, the use of a sexual organ in a way that frustrates its natural function of procreation is morally wrong rather than merely a morally indifferent departure from its biological purpose.
(I have no problem understanding why, if special revelation tells us that God forbids anal sex, it's a pretty damned good idea not to engage in it. My question is specifically about the natural-law-based argument against anal sex.)
"I'm surprised no one commented on the Stanley Fish article. Seemed supremely germane."
I thought it was too, but I don't have anything of interest to say about it.
Crude:
ReplyDeleteNot according to the DDE, from what I read, based on the reasoning that's been supplied. I thought this particular response was dealing with the DDE specifically.
If the DDE is not the justification for the claim that if a chosen act necessarily violates the natural end of an organ, then the act is necessarily immoral, then what is the justification? After all, it is not enough to simply say that anal sex is frustrating the natural end of the penis, and therefore is morally impermissible. Something else must be added to the moral analysis to lead to the conclusion of moral prohibition. What is this “something else”?
I'd go further and argue that you're not going to 'know', based on the analysis and inquiry, whether it is.
First, why can’t one “know” after such an inquiry?
Second, if you are correct, then no-one knows if anal sex is moral or immoral.
You're always going to circle right on back to the metaphysical views, arguments, etc.
That’s only trivially true, because the “scientific” inquiry itself presupposes metaphysics, and thus will always necessarily make reference to that metaphysics. However, it does not follow that all scientific conclusions are metaphysical and not scientific. That would be like arguing that because sociology presupposes biology that all sociological conclusions are necessarily biological.
Even your analysis is hardly going to be scientific, even broadly. Now, the data gathering part may be scientific. But the analysis? No. That will be off in the land of philosophy and metaphysics.
Why?
You'd better hope there's a way, if you intend to appeal to scientific inquiry. That's one of the main problems here, and why I think talk of empirical study and analysis is just helpless on this point. It will be rigged by (and this is just the intellectual, not the practical, concerns) the metaphysical and philosophical aspects - that's where the action remains.
Look, NL theory predicates that the degree of goodness of X is proportionate to the degree to which X actualizes its nature. That implies that there are degrees of goodness between the minimal actualization of X’s nature to the maximal actualization of X’s nature. If you are saying that there is no way to measure the degree of actualization of X’s nature, then there is also no way to measure the degree of goodness of X, and without the ability to measure the degree of goodness of X, then there is certainly no way to determine whether X is moral or immoral.
And notice that this has nothing to do with science at all. All I meant by “science” was using the NL standard of goodness with respect to human beings as a scale of measurement to determine how good a particular human being is, and then correlate that degree of goodness with a variety of factors, some of which increase the degree of goodness, and some of which decrease the degree of goodness. The claim of NL theory is that if a homosexual acts upon his sexual urges, then he has a lower degree of goodness than a homosexual that refrains from acting upon his sexual urges. This is merely a hypothesis in need of testing, and the only way to truly test whether it is true is to look and see whether it is true by comparing homosexuals, the presence and absence of sexual activity, and their corresponding degrees of goodness. If you are saying that his is impossible to do, then the hypothesis can neither be confirmed nor falsified, and remains in limbo.
I think it gets entirely banal as a matter of practice. Intellectually it's more interesting.
ReplyDeleteBut this isn’t about intellectual stimulation. This has a practical impact upon people’s lives, and thus is not “banal” at all. Also, it becomes incredibly ironic and ridiculous that the account of practical reason in NL seems to be impossible to practice.
More seriously, I don't think the position you're advocating passes the smell test. You're appealing to depression, self-hatred, suicide, etc. None of these things - not a one - superficially is 'cured' by anal sex.
And yet, if the depression, self-hatred, suicidal thoughts are caused by a person’s inability to express their deepest sexual desires towards a loved one, thus keeping them estranged and distant, then it becomes highly relevant.
To put it another way: there's a thousand ways to skin a cat. Which way is the best way? Not sure. Maybe there's no way to tell with rapt scientific certainty. But I think we can rule out the sheer *necessity* of some methods.
I’m not saying it’s necessary. I’m saying that we don’t know, and that unless there is a method to determine the truth of the matter, even without “rapt scientific certainty”, then the entire account is completely useless in practice, and thus cannot be used at all with any reliability.
To go at this from another direction for a moment - if I identified a subgroup of men who seemed to crave rape, AND if I found a way for these men to rape women without the women knowing or suffering obviously ill aftereffects (disease, etc), would we really start talking about doing cost-benefit analyses of the gained happiness of the men by the act versus etc, etc? Or would we chart a course for finding a way to help these guys live happy lives without the rape?
Why can’t you do such an analysis? You can analyze anything you want. What are some of the costs? Well, the women did not give their consent, and thus the men would be committing the crime of sexual assault that risks imprisonment; the women in such a scenario would live in constant fear of being unconsciously raped by this subgroup of men, which would affect their psychological health; some women will eventually accidentally get diseases (despite your best efforts); some women will accidentally get pregnant (despite your best efforts), which would require clandestine abortions by yourself and your associates; some women who become conscious during the rape will likely develop PTSD; some women will be killed during the violent assault; and so on. What are the benefits? Only that this group of men will achieve sexual satisfaction.
If the intent of the act is to have sex without procreation and they succeed in their intent, why shouldn’t that be considered subverting the telos of the sex organs?
ReplyDelete1. Come again? Are you suggesting that there is something unnatural about intending that the organs' own natural temporary infertility take place? I fail to see how the normal, designed, healthily functioning temporary infertility of the organs can possibly be contrary to the the natural purpose of the organs.
2. "Intent of the act is to have sex without procreation" is a mischaracterization of the intent or the act. A couple who uses NFP with a proper disposition does not "intend the act to be without procreation", what they intend is to employ the sexual faculties knowing that probably procreation will not occur, but they are open to the new life if procreation does occur in spite of the odds (given the typical infertility at that phase). It is admitted that the techniques of NFP can be used with a contraceptive mentality (intending to "not conceive" and thus not being open to the new life if conception occurs), which the Church has explicitly warned against.
Natural Law proponents will frequently employ a gambit here where the unitive function of sexual relations in marriage replaces the procreative intention. The gambit has no merit. Either procreation is the only proper purpose of sexual activity or it isn’t, intentionally avoiding that purpose is plainly a deviation from the standard.
This is wrong also. I am getting tired of having to point this out, but I will again: The rationality of man is not simply a superposition of ANOTHER end of man in addition to the ends of brute animals (pleasure, sustaining life, reproduction), it also RAISES UP those ends so their very character is integrated into the life of reason. Man doesn't merely "reproduce" himself by making new copies, he with intentionality participates with God in co-creating a new person capable of love, producing that new person within a community of love, using the very physical expression of permanent, self-giving love, so that 2 become one flesh united by love. The "unitive end" is not something off in another room from the pro-creative end, they both together express aspects of one coherent end of marriage and sexual love. Thus in man the ends of pleasure and reproduction themselves become ennobled within the integrating end of love, love which is inherently effusive, fruitful, like God's love is effusive.
However, the organic nature man is dealt does not have the capacity to bear a new child with each act of sexual love - it doesn't have that design. Therefore, there is not a one-to-one natural relationship between that aspect of the marital act which refers especially (or more immediately) to unitive love and that aspect of the marital act which refers especially (or more directly) to procreation. (God could have designed it that way, like with fish or something).
One of the ways the mutual love becomes complete is accepting, in humility, a kind of indeterminacy with respect to each single act of marital love: this one may conceive a child, or it may not. Man does not design that indeterminacy, he receives it as part of his nature. Thus there is nothing out of order in using the sexual faculties at a time in which the probability of conceiving is low, as long as you have not intentionally interfered with the natural fertility.
Anonymous:
ReplyDeleteWell, for a start, even if this were true, the Scripture, the near universal human condemnation of homosexual acts, and the quarters and reasons for which moderns have relaxed the prohibitions seem reason enough to take the prohibitions as a default, to me.
First, the Scripture is not universally accepted, and even if it is accepted, there are differing interpretations on its judgment on homosexuality.
Second, there is no “near universal human condemnation of homosexual acts”. It has been almost universally acceptable throughout human history, and has been practiced without condemnation in Africa, the pre-Columbian Americas, China, Japan, Thailand, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, ancient Assyria, ancient Persia, and the South Pacific. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_homosexuality
Third, the exception was actually in regions that became influenced by Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions.
After all, it is not enough to simply say that anal sex is frustrating the natural end of the penis, and therefore is morally impermissible.
ReplyDeletedguller, it is enough to say that such acts are frustrating the natural end of MAN with respect to his sexuality. As I said above, the end of pleasure, in man, is captured and integrated into self-giving and life-creating love, which is his rational end expressed sexually. Each act of the sexual faculties is supposed to be open to that end of life-giving love. Intentionally made-sterile sex is a contradiction to the nature of rational, effusive-love oriented man.
To Jeremy Taylor and Anonymous and everyone else: just use the "Name/URL" option when posting. It doesn't even require logging in. But as Scott points out, it makes following an actual conversation somewhat less painful. (These commenting systems are not remotely designed for serious lengthy discussions, but posting with a name, even a made-up one, helps!)
ReplyDelete(Is there a way to turn off "anonymous" posting on these sites and keep the "Name" option? There isn't any need for the former when the latter is available.)
If the DDE is not the justification for the claim that if a chosen act necessarily violates the natural end of an organ, then the act is necessarily immoral, then what is the justification?
ReplyDeleteIn the example I used for the DDE, the chosen act does not necessarily violate the natural end of the organ. With anal sex, it is necessarily violated.
First, why can’t one “know” after such an inquiry?
Second, if you are correct, then no-one knows if anal sex is moral or immoral.
A) I'm using 'know' in the sense of 'decisively settling the matter'. You're still going to need to bring in your philosophical and metaphysical views, etc.
B) Yep, not in some absolute sense. The closest you can get, I believe, is knowledge given various metaphysical commitments, assumptions, etc.
However, it does not follow that all scientific conclusions are metaphysical and not scientific. That would be like arguing that because sociology presupposes biology that all sociological conclusions are necessarily biological.
Sure, but the moment science starts dealing with heavily metaphysical concepts such as 'moral' and 'immoral' and 'well-being' and 'nature' and 'purpose', you're in a whole other area. I'm not sure sociology even presupposes 'biology' in a relevant sense.
Why?
Because your analysis will turn critically on metaphysical and philosophical commitments you bring to the table to begin with. Otherwise you won't be doing an analysis at all. Not the sort you want, anyway.
This is merely a hypothesis in need of testing, and the only way to truly test whether it is true is to look and see whether it is true by comparing homosexuals, the presence and absence of sexual activity, and their corresponding degrees of goodness. If you are saying that his is impossible to do, then the hypothesis can neither be confirmed nor falsified, and remains in limbo.
Sure. 'Scientifically', it remains in limbo. Makes sense to me.
Notice part of the problem here. You're talking about 'homosexual' almost as if it were some rapt, distinct group, like a simple member of the periodic table of the elements. In reality, we're talking about human beings, in various cultures, with all manner of psychological and social and other influences, upon which we will be applying metaphysical and philosophical standards, complete with all the different views and potential views that come with those. It's ridiculously messy.
Once again: do violent video games lead to crime? That's been tested ad nauseum, and the question was never settled. It's being tested again in a larger way. Do you think it will be settled decisively this time, "scientifically"?
But this isn’t about intellectual stimulation. This has a practical impact upon people’s lives, and thus is not “banal” at all. Also, it becomes incredibly ironic and ridiculous that the account of practical reason in NL seems to be impossible to practice.
The criticisms I'm making are of "scientific" decisiveness. I'm pointing out the mess that's going to take place there, the amount of arguments that will invite. It's just a matter of being realistic.
It's a little like the existence of other minds. Can I prove, decisively, to a determined solipsist that I'm conscious? No. And yet life goes on.
But the action of suicide has a nature or object, because all actions have a nature or object. This action may conflict with other goods, certainly, but that doesn’t mean that suicide does not have its own standards of goodness, i.e. being painless, quick, having one’s affairs in order, reconciling with loved ones and preparing them for their upcoming loss, and so on.
ReplyDeleteCertainly, but goodness with respect to the object (which is just success in attaining the object as intended, or else the goodness of particular parts of the object) is not the same as the goodness of the object; nor does it have anything at all to do with moral matters unless the object is already a moral one. This has been what has tripped up most of the arguments you've been attempting to build from inside NLT; you keep conflating all kinds of goodness into one. This is completely inconsistent with NLT. And necessarily so: moral goodness is just one kind of practical goodness for actions, the kind that has to do with common good arising from human nature as rational animals itself, and there are several kinds of moral goodness, not all equally important in any particular context. You can't slide around in this way; the most vicious human actions one can identify can have many good elements, and certainly can have intended success-conditions, and this is recognized fully by NLT. I mean, take the kind of list you're making and apply it to murder: murdering something is my object, but that doesn’t mean that murder does not have its own standards of goodness, i.e. being painless, quick, letting people having one’s affairs in order, doing it to rectify injustices, etc. (One thinks of the characters in The Last Supper, ridding the world of people who make the world worse.) None of this is necessarily wrong, but none of this changes the fact that the object is to murder, nor is any of it actually relevant to whether that object is a practically rational object with respect to common good, which is what would be at issue.
And yet, if the depression, self-hatred, suicidal thoughts are caused by a person’s inability to express their deepest sexual desires towards a loved one, thus keeping them estranged and distant, then it becomes highly relevant.
ReplyDelete"Caused by"? You'll be establishing that how? As opposed to it being "caused by" any other number of competing explanations - scientifically speaking, of course - including having those deepest sexual desires in the first place?
And really... loved one? What if it's not a loved one? What if it's just some guy? Are you arguing that sex with someone who isn't a 'loved one' is absolutely immoral? But what if THAT 'causes depression'?
Do you see what I mean about the futility of pretending this can be scientifically determined in anything approaching a realistic way?
Why can’t you do such an analysis? You can analyze anything you want.
Sure you can. Can you analyze it without bias, in a way that all reasonable parties will accept (How do we determine which ones are reasonable again?), in a way that's relevant to your argument here? I'm far more skeptical of that.
What are some of the costs? Well, the women did not give their consent, and thus the men would be committing the crime of sexual assault that risks imprisonment;
Alright. So did this just provide an argument against the act, or an argument against the imprisonment?
the women in such a scenario would live in constant fear of being unconsciously raped by this subgroup of men, which would affect their psychological health;
Alright. Clearly we need to change the culture to become more accepting of these acts, or even help them remain hidden from the public in general. What they don't know literally will not hurt them, when we're talking purely about the worry caused by awareness, right?
some women will eventually accidentally get diseases (despite your best efforts);
Which may well be offset by the happiness of the men. And we may well be able to minimize the diseases to an acceptable degree.
some women will accidentally get pregnant (despite your best efforts), which would require clandestine abortions by yourself and your associates;
Oh, I think vasectomies can handle this one.
some women who become conscious during the rape will likely develop PTSD;
Sounds like drugging is necessary.
some women will be killed during the violent assault;
Why? Maybe the men aren't violent.
and so on. What are the benefits? Only that this group of men will achieve sexual satisfaction.
Woah. What about the relieving of their depression? The removal of thoughts of suicide? The increased mood? Self-satisfaction? Ability to think more rationally? Suddenly in this situation the analysis of sexual release gets so much more... curt.
Still, your objections lead to some further analysis. Are you saying that if...
* The women never get pregnant.
* No one ever gets diseases.
* The women never find out.
* Abortions never take place.
* The women suffer no PTSD, etc.
...That the whole 'men raping women while they're unconscious' thing is acceptable? It looks like the 'net benefits' would be 'Some men are happier.', period, end of story.
Is that all that matters?
Scott says,
ReplyDeleteFake or not, they distinguish one poster from another.
Your boycott is still nonsensical. It might be easier to distinguish one poster from another, but it is irrelevant to the argument itself. A vapid statement may be ignored, whether or not a person is named. A serious argument should not be ignored by serious people.
dguller, who is one of the most prolific posters here, has no problem replying to "anonymous" posters. We're discussing ideas, not personalities.
Thanks, Mr. Green for the Name/URL tip. I'll be using it from now on...for the picky at heart. :-)
dguller responds,
ReplyDeleteThat is the proposition that I am defending, yes. But there is a distinction between the following principles:
(1) If a chosen act necessarily violates the natural end of an organ, then the act is necessarily immoral
(2) A chosen act that violates the natural end of an organ is morally permissible if the act in question results in the actualization of a higher end of a whole person.
The instant you concede the word violate, the onus is upon you to defend and/or justify the breaking, infringement, or transgression. One does not transgress without offering justification. If you cannot justify a transgression, then reason would dictate that you refrain from transgressing. After all, it's wrong to transgress, no?
Your concession doesn't work. Consequently, you must drop the concession or choose another word.
dguller continues,
ReplyDeleteIt all depends upon whether you accept (1) or (2). If you accept (1), then you have to live with the impossibility of any moral choices, because all moral choices involve actualizing some ends while frustrating other ends. For example, by choosing to go to work, I am also choosing not to spend time with my family.
Here you inject "frustrating" in place of "violating." You also use the word "all" in place of "most" or "many."
My decision not to exercise road rage on dguller for running a red light does not force me to adopt 2 over 1. No telos is violated by my not blowing your head off. Thus, your use of the word "all" is unwise.
Your "frustration" example is a curious analysis of NLT. A penis' telos includes urination and procreation. So, if in the act of procreation a man scoots over to the restroom because of another urgent need, he's transgressing his telos because he's got to use the restroom? NLT would say no, because he isn't using said appendage contrary to it's telos. There is nothing about urination or procreation that is contrary to the telos of a penis. Similarly, there is nothing that transgresses the telos of spending time with one's family by going to work. The human body is not being utilized in a manner contrary to its nature. A man can go to work and spend time with his family in the same day.
Bill the No Longer Anonymous: It might be easier to distinguish one poster from another, but it is irrelevant to the argument itself.
ReplyDeleteYou're right of course that the arguments are what matter; but we're not disembodied intellects, so mundane practical considerations still apply, and I sympathise somewhat with Scott. I think the most important side-effect is that complex discussions rely a lot on context, so getting different Anonymouses mixed up can significantly affect what one thinks they are saying. (Then again, sometimes it doesn't.)
Thanks, Mr. Green for the Name/URL tip. I'll be using it from now on...for the picky at heart. :-)
We picky-at-heart'ers appreciate it!
Scott writes,
ReplyDeleteSince I'm not making an argument but asking a question, I'm mystified by your remark about redefining a word to suit my "argument."
Your mystification is mystifying. You apparently forget how you replied to me:
I think the onus is on the one who claims that misusing the telos of the object(s) requires justification in the first place—that there's something morally wrong with such an action that can be counterbalanced only by a positive showing that it's worth doing anyway.
Do you see any "question" there? If you see a question, then you're probably unable to see your claim.
dguller has already acknowledged the use of the words "violate" and "misuse." You do the same (above).
You continue,
At any rate, my question is easily rephrased without reference to "wrongness" or "impropriety": granting that using a sexual organ to do X frustrates its natural end/function of procreation, why is it that such use is morally wrong according to natural law? What moral obligation do I have to my penis to use it only according to its natural function?
Now, your "question" finally comes, but only after my reply. As I noted earlier, I haven't read all 500+ posts, but I have read many of them. Your "question" has been answered numerous times. You don't accept them--fine. I was replying to the use of the words in question. When you concede those words in argument, you appropriate onus.
"Frustrate" doesn't carry the same connotation as "violate" or "misuse." I may be frustrated by my inability to spend more time with my family, but that doesn't mean that I am "violating" my telos by going to work. It could be argued that I would be misusing my "body" if I spent time with another family instead of my own, but if I regularly spend time with my family, no "misuse" is occurring, even though there might be "frustration."
Using a penis in an unnatural act is not merely frustrating its nature; it is a misuse thereof. Unnatural acts, as I understand NLT, should be avoided by rational persons. Transgressions are normally bad, mental or physical--unless the act is mitigated (or justified?) by other circumstances. Is that "onus" I hear?
Dguller,
ReplyDeleteObviously, when I mentioned Scriptures,I had Christians in mind. However, it is not the case that it is open to interpretation, firstly, because Scripture should be interpreted according to Church tradition and, secondly, because, absent modernist exegetical gymnastics, the meaning is clear.
When it comes to the near universal traditional condemnation of homosexual acts, my comments are accurate. You give the standard modernist retort, but this is based on an historical analysis lacking all proportion and generally relying on ambiguous and marginal sources or perspectives.
For example, the ancient Greeks did not accept homosexuality. They had an ambiguous toleration of pederasty at certain times and places, but the idea they accepted homosexuality is just false. Even Plato, whose Symposium is often used to support traditional acceptance of homosexual love, could, one moment, seem to tolerate pederasty and, the next, have Socrates use the pleasures of a catamite as a self-evident example of a base and vile pleasure.
The Romans were even less accepting of homosexuality.
Now, sometimes homosexual acts were considered inferior and, generally, to be avoided, but were somewhat tolerated; sometimes, such as in Zoroastrianism and lands that came under the sway of Semitic monotheism, they were tolerated in no sense. And it is certainly the case that different cultures have dealt with the subject of sin and sexual sin somewhat differently - making such sins more of an issue in some societies than others.
But there is next to no evidence of widespread acceptance of homosexuality in human history.
A partial exception is female homosexuality, which is simply mentioned very little in most cultures.
Tony:
ReplyDeletedguller, it is enough to say that such acts are frustrating the natural end of MAN with respect to his sexuality. As I said above, the end of pleasure, in man, is captured and integrated into self-giving and life-creating love, which is his rational end expressed sexually. Each act of the sexual faculties is supposed to be open to that end of life-giving love. Intentionally made-sterile sex is a contradiction to the nature of rational, effusive-love oriented man.
But again, you are focusing upon the frustration of a part of man when you say, “with respect to his sexuality”. Our sexuality is an important and vital part of who we are, but it is certainly not the entirety of who we are. And since it is a part, then it must be balanced against other parts for the sake of the whole. If the whole suffers by following the natural end of a part, then why not violate that natural end of that part in order to increase the flourishing of the whole? Why would NL object to that?
Also, maybe you can help me with a question I have. Say that you have an organ O with a particular natural function F. What is the difference between using O in a way other than F and using O in a way that frustrates F? The former is permissible but the latter is prohibited, and yet I cannot understand the distinction between them.
Thanks.
Dguller,
ReplyDeleteAt the risk of blending Platonism and Aristotelianism, the parts not only support the whole, but they are a reflection of it. Ultimate flourishing, to use your term, is about a total integration of our being, which includes viewing the world in the right way, and especially viewing ourselves and what makes us up correctly. Sexuality is very important to what makes up an individual. Gross sexual immorality and error is dividing our being against itself.
@Bill:
ReplyDelete"Now, your 'question' finally comes, but only after my reply."
You'll find the question posted on July 10, 2013 at 12:06 PM, immediately above your reply to dguller on July 10, 2013 at 12:38 PM.
Crude:
ReplyDeleteIn the example I used for the DDE, the chosen act does not necessarily violate the natural end of the organ. With anal sex, it is necessarily violated.
But what about my example of the diseased organ that continues to function, but can be surgically removed, because the disease itself will spread to kill the person in quick pace? Would DDE justify the removal of the organ? And even if it does, then you have an instance where an organ is being deliberately frustrated while it still functions, and yet it is a permissible frustration for the sake of the whole person.
A) I'm using 'know' in the sense of 'decisively settling the matter'. You're still going to need to bring in your philosophical and metaphysical views, etc.
I’m assuming A-T as the philosophical and metaphysical background for this inquiry. The inquiry I’m proposing would be done within the A-T framework. Within that framework, there is a presupposition that different intentional acts lead to different degrees of human flourishing. Those intentional acts that correspond with the natural ends of the human being as a whole, as well as his or her constituent parts, should result in a maximal amount of human flourishing.
Specifically, if a homosexual A engages in sexual activity while homosexual B does not engage in sexual activity, then A is hypothesized to have a higher degree of human flourishing than B. The only way to truly know whether this is true is to first have a measurable standard of human flourishing, and then use that standard to measure the degree of human flourishing in A and B to see who has a higher degree of human flourishing. If you are saying that this analysis is either practically impossible, or will inevitably lead to inconclusive results, then either way, we simply do not know whether the hypothesis is true or false.
Notice part of the problem here. You're talking about 'homosexual' almost as if it were some rapt, distinct group, like a simple member of the periodic table of the elements. In reality, we're talking about human beings, in various cultures, with all manner of psychological and social and other influences, upon which we will be applying metaphysical and philosophical standards, complete with all the different views and potential views that come with those. It's ridiculously messy.
And yet people feel perfectly comfortable to state in the cleanest and crispest of fashions that anal sex is morally impermissible, period. I think that the moral permissibility or impermissibility of anal sex is also “ridiculously messy”, and thus does not admit of such rigorous determinations, at least not at this point in time. Maybe they are so “ridiculously messy” that there will never be a point in time in which we can make a clear moral determination either way. But that just means that we do not know, in any sense of the word, whether anal sex is moral or immoral. It will be fundamentally undecidable.
Once again: do violent video games lead to crime? That's been tested ad nauseum, and the question was never settled. It's being tested again in a larger way. Do you think it will be settled decisively this time, "scientifically"?
It has been settled. There is no statistical connection between violent video games and violent activity. See http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17914672. That was a meta-analysis that compiled hundreds of peer-reviewed individual studies into a higher synthetic review. Yes, there are individual studies that show a connection, and other individual studies that show no connection. The solution is not to throw your hands up in the air and give up, but to do a comprehensive review and meta-analysis of all the studies and see what the total result is.
"Caused by"? You'll be establishing that how? As opposed to it being "caused by" any other number of competing explanations - scientifically speaking, of course - including having those deepest sexual desires in the first place?
ReplyDeleteThe same way that I would establish any causal relationship. Total up all the causal factors that result in the particular effect, and rank them in terms of strength and importance. I would also total up all the factors that seem to inhibit the effect from occurring. I would then put it all together into a matrix of activating and inhibiting factors to get a sense of all the contributions to that effect’s occurrence.
I don’t doubt that psychopathology is multifactorial, but I also don’t doubt that the ability to express oneself sexually is an important factor itself. I also don’t doubt that having sexual desires that one despises would also contribute to psychopathology. So, as we both agree, the matter is certainly very complex and messy.
And really... loved one? What if it's not a loved one? What if it's just some guy? Are you arguing that sex with someone who isn't a 'loved one' is absolutely immoral? But what if THAT 'causes depression'?
First, I would prefer to focus upon sexual relations between people who love each other.
Second, I wouldn’t say that having sex with someone who one does not love is immoral. I would say that the degree of flourishing would likely be less than that involved in a loving, committed relationship, but that would also depend upon the personalities involved. Some people are avoidant of commitment, and prefer to remain independent and unattached. For them, causal sex with individuals that they do not have a deep and loving attachment to improves their life satisfaction.
Do you see what I mean about the futility of pretending this can be scientifically determined in anything approaching a realistic way?
Not at all. You are actually making a number of excellent scientific concerns that would be applicable to any attempt to demonstrate causality in a multifactorial situation. You are basically cautioning me not to ignore confounding factors in my analysis, which is absolutely of paramount importance here. We would have to look at anything and everything that increases and decreases human flourishing.
Sure you can. Can you analyze it without bias, in a way that all reasonable parties will accept (How do we determine which ones are reasonable again?), in a way that's relevant to your argument here? I'm far more skeptical of that.
We can try to minimize bias, which is all that is possible for human beings. And there is no need to bring up the specter of extreme skepticism here. If you have to go there in this discussion, then the discussion itself will be fruitless.
Alright. So did this just provide an argument against the act, or an argument against the imprisonment?
We have to start with where we are, and where we are is that such activities run the risk of imprisonment. That should be taken into consideration. If someone believes that this activity should not be a criminal offense, then they can try to make the case to the public and change the laws through their elected representatives. But for now, that’s just how it is, and we have to start with what is, and not with what we wish would be.
Alright. Clearly we need to change the culture to become more accepting of these acts, or even help them remain hidden from the public in general.
ReplyDeleteYou are perfectly free to make the attempt. And just so you know, nothing remains hidden from the public forever. Someone will make a mistake, and something will leak, and this activity will be exposed, at least to some extent. To assume otherwise is the characteristic of conspiracy theorists.
What they don't know literally will not hurt them, when we're talking purely about the worry caused by awareness, right?
Except that they would know, as a practical matter. Only a completely unrealistic and fantastic imagination could think otherwise.
Which may well be offset by the happiness of the men. And we may well be able to minimize the diseases to an acceptable degree.
Except that it won’t be offset, because women will be physically harmed through the infection by sexually-transmitted diseases, genital trauma, side effects of the anaesthetic that you are applying, and so on. None of that can be offset by the happiness of the men, because their pleasure will be transient, and the diseases will be lifelong, and have an impact upon the entirety of those women’s futures, including procreation, romantic relationships, stigma, and so on. And then there’s the fact that consent is absent, and any physical and unwanted contact is bodily assault.
Oh, I think vasectomies can handle this one.
Vasectomies are 99% effective, which means that 1 woman out of 100 will become pregnant. And who’s to say that all the men will want a vasectomy? Maybe some would want to have children, possibly with one of the women that they raped?
Sounds like drugging is necessary.
My point was that even with drugging, some women will regain consciousness during the act. The literature says that 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 10,000 patients undergoing anaesthesia will awake during the procedure, and subsequently suffer significant mental trauma.
Why? Maybe the men aren't violent.
But some men will be violent, and one cannot predict who will be violent and who will be peaceful.
Woah. What about the relieving of their depression? The removal of thoughts of suicide? The increased mood? Self-satisfaction? Ability to think more rationally? Suddenly in this situation the analysis of sexual release gets so much more... curt.
Yes, all of that would have to be factored into the equation.
* The women never get pregnant.
Which is impossible.
* No one ever gets diseases.
ReplyDeleteWhich is impossible.
* The women never find out.
Which is impossible.
* Abortions never take place.
Which is impossible.
* The women suffer no PTSD
Which is impossible.
, etc.
This would also have to include the wholesale change in the society’s culture and legal code such that this raping activity is validated and permissible, which is also likely impossible.
That the whole 'men raping women while they're unconscious' thing is acceptable? It looks like the 'net benefits' would be 'Some men are happier.', period, end of story.
So, yes, if the impossible becomes possible, then your scheme would be permissible. But since the very conditions for the permissibility of your scheme are impossible, it follows that your scheme is itself impossible.
Bill:
ReplyDeleteThe instant you concede the word violate, the onus is upon you to defend and/or justify the breaking, infringement, or transgression. One does not transgress without offering justification. If you cannot justify a transgression, then reason would dictate that you refrain from transgressing. After all, it's wrong to transgress, no?
That is the precise issue, though. Either all violations of the natural ends of our organs are morally prohibited, or some violations are morally prohibited and other violations are morally permissible, which means that there is something else other than just the violation itself that is salient to determining whether the act that involves the violation is morally permissible or prohibited.
It is my contention that this “something else” is the degree of overall human flourishing of the individual. If the degree of overall human flourishing can be increased in the course of violating the natural ends of an organ, then the violation is morally permissible. If the degree of overall human flourishing can be decreased in the course of violating the natural ends of an organ, then the violation is morally prohibited.
Here you inject "frustrating" in place of "violating."
I see no difference between the two.
You also use the word "all" in place of "most" or "many."
And I meant it.
My decision not to exercise road rage on dguller for running a red light does not force me to adopt 2 over 1. No telos is violated by my not blowing your head off. Thus, your use of the word "all" is unwise.
But even in that case, whatever you decide to do other than blowing my head off will still mean that you are not deciding to do an infinite number of other goods that you could have chosen to do.
Your "frustration" example is a curious analysis of NLT. A penis' telos includes urination and procreation. So, if in the act of procreation a man scoots over to the restroom because of another urgent need, he's transgressing his telos because he's got to use the restroom? NLT would say no, because he isn't using said appendage contrary to it's telos. There is nothing about urination or procreation that is contrary to the telos of a penis.
You are correct. I would revise my statement to include urination as a telos of the penis. So, any use of the penis other than for urination or procreation is a violation of its telos.
Similarly, there is nothing that transgresses the telos of spending time with one's family by going to work. The human body is not being utilized in a manner contrary to its nature. A man can go to work and spend time with his family in the same day.
But while he is at work, he is not spending time with his family. In order to actualize one good, he must reject many others.
But what about my example of the diseased organ that continues to function, but can be surgically removed, because the disease itself will spread to kill the person in quick pace? Would DDE justify the removal of the organ?
ReplyDeleteRemove the diseased portion. If it fails to function, unfortunate - remove it. Where was the violation?
Specifically, if a homosexual A engages in sexual activity while homosexual B does not engage in sexual activity, then A is hypothesized to have a higher degree of human flourishing than B.
ot all 'sexual activity' is viewed equally by NL. Are you really trying to argue the woman committing (say) bestiality is, by NL, engaged in a 'high degree of flourishing' than the chaste woman?
And yet people feel perfectly comfortable to state in the cleanest and crispest of fashions that anal sex is morally impermissible, period.
Yep. And that determination isn't dependent on the outcome of social science studies.
The solution is not to throw your hands up in the air and give up, but to do a comprehensive review and meta-analysis of all the studies and see what the total result is.
Because a comprehensive review of a hundred flawed, awkward studies is better than one? It's not been settled, and barring some amazing advances, it probably never will be.
Note that actually settling an issue is radically different from having people say the issue has been settled. THAT is easy. There's a reason that people didn't just point to a 2007 meta-analysis to try and settle this: because the arguments for 'settling' are illusory.
The same way that I would establish any causal relationship. Total up all the causal factors that result in the particular effect, and rank them in terms of strength and importance.
Great. Then let's see you establish your actual contention here: that lack of anal sex specifically leads to depression, thoughts of suicide, etc. Account for all the related factors (attitude, beliefs, approaches, biological differences, etc). I suppose you'll have to do this even to begin your other analysis about how best to solve the problem.
This should keep us arguing for a good 40 years, before you even get to the next step(s).
I'll skip past your other replies and go to the heart of the matter.
So, yes, if the impossible becomes possible, then your scheme would be permissible.
And if what you said is not 'impossible', but 'appropriately low odds', then it would seem it's in principle justifiable. You say 'impossible', but that can't be 'impossible in principle' but 'in practice' - and practicalities can change.
But here's where we diverge. You think rape of sleeping women would in principle be justifiable, so long as we could eliminate (or minimize?) the negative effects. I don't think that: I think there is a moral dimension to consider, and that this doesn't boil down to a utilitarian determination of outcomes. There are reasons to condemn and guard against rape, period, 'the enjoyment of the men involved' be damned.
Which is part of why pursuing the sort of social sciences analysis you want to evaluate anal sex dies on the vine. You make it sound as if only by analysis can we determine if the act is immoral. Well, no - we know it's immoral straightaway by NL; what you're looking for is if, all things being equal, it's justifiable while being immoral.
And by your standards, to even get there, you'd need evidence that the lack of anal sex was even a problem to begin with. Specifically a willful lack based on adherence to NL doctrine, because it's not as if I'm arguing for legal barring of consensual anal sex. Lacking that, you'd have to be forced to admit that /there may not even be a problem here for you to seek a solution to/.
ReplyDelete"Second, there is no “near universal human condemnation of homosexual acts”. It has been almost universally acceptable throughout human history, and has been practiced without condemnation in Africa, the pre-Columbian Americas, China, Japan, Thailand, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, ancient Assyria, ancient Persia, and the South Pacific. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_homosexuality"
dguller,
While I appreciate your general reasonableness and attempts at balance, I think that you're overstating the case here.
Without bothering with Wiki, I think we can agree from our own studies of the classical world and literature, that in the case of Greece, while plenty of literature and more than a few vase paintings illustrate that homosexuality was apparently widely practiced, to say that it was viewed as acceptable universally, would be an error.
If some of the dialogs are to be trusted as Plato's, "Rival Lovers" for example, Socrates clearly does appear as a contemptible pederast in addition to all his other annoying traits.
Plato's own attitude however, if in fact his presumptively earlier dialogs can be construed as suggesting his own acceptance in addition to merely recording the attitudes or behaviors of others, seems to have undergone an evolution toward the reasoned negative.
The Laws, for example, and I think you would agree, presents a much less "sympathetic" view of such behavior.
A famous modern historian of Rome has acknowledged homosexual behavior as widely practiced yet universally execrated.
If we use your own source as a reference we find this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_Scantinia.
I suppose some might argue that the fact that the Republican law applies only to the freeborn and appears not to extend protection to those who do not count as peers, had no legal person-hood and could in fact be killed at will by their masters, signals some level of tacit acceptance.
If so, it's an acceptance that falls far short of affirmation or respect; and denotes a tolerance which applies to those whose lives and bodies don't count.
The ancient Germans of course, who Tacitus so professed to admire for their domestic virtues, drowned homosexuals and the effeminate in bogs. Face down, and with a noose around their necks, reportedly.
Scott writes,
ReplyDeleteYou'll find the question posted on July 10, 2013 at 12:06 PM, immediately above your reply to dguller on July 10, 2013 at 12:38 PM.
With all due respect, those questions weren't directed at me. I replied to a specific argument made by dguller, not you. You then replied to my post by making a claim. I replied to that claim and you insisted that you had only asked a question. Focus, Scott.
@Bill:
ReplyDelete"With all due respect, those questions weren't directed at me."
With all due respect, you joined a discussion already in progress and can't reasonably expect that every point already discussed needs to have been directed at you personally. My post in reply to you was pretty clearly, or so I thought, a follow-on to what I'd already posted in reply to the very same post to which you were replying, in the post immediately before yours.
"I replied to a specific argument made by dguller, not you. You then replied to my post by making a claim. I replied to that claim and you insisted that you had only asked a question."
Well, I said dguller was right that you were presupposing the very point at issue. I suppose that's a claim of sorts, but it certainly isn't an "argument" in the sense you clearly intended in your response (that I was "redefining [a] word to sustain [my] argument").
"Focus, Scott."
I'm not having any trouble focusing, but I'll be happy to focus on something other than you if your only interest here is in being testy and/or scoring points in some imaginary contest. My question is legitimate, you haven't been able to offer any answer to it that doesn't beg the question, and life is short.
dguller replies,
ReplyDeleteThat is the precise issue, though. Either all violations of the natural ends of our organs are morally prohibited, or some violations are morally prohibited and other violations are morally permissible, which means that there is something else other than just the violation itself that is salient to determining whether the act that involves the violation is morally permissible or prohibited.
You're getting the cart before the horse. Again, the instant you use the word violate, you acknowledge a transgression. Consequently, the "issue" is settled by your concession. If we look to NL for direction in moral decisions, then it follows that violating nature is prohibited.
I see no difference between the two. [between frustrate and violate]
I see a big difference between the two. Ping-pong anybody?
Actually, I explained the difference. There is a world of difference between suspension and misuse.
And I meant it. [using the word all]
Then you are clearly mistaken for the reasons I offered. Recall the context by your following remark:
[Y]ou have to live with the impossibility of any moral choices, because all moral choices involve actualizing some ends while frustrating other ends.
Again, a frustration isn't necessarily of violation, so your remark is irrelevant. Moreover, I am "frustrating" no telos by refraining from murder. Using my example, if I see you run a red light, I can still proceed to walk to the store or drive to my destination. Nothing is frustrated or violated by refraining from an unlawful act. Your use of the word "all" is thus unwise. Whether or not you meant it, it is unwise.
But even in that case, whatever you decide to do other than blowing my head off will still mean that you are not deciding to do an infinite number of other goods that you could have chosen to do.
Again, suspension is not misuse. If you think that NLT presupposes our omnipresence, you are mistaken and are grossly misreading it. How is it possible that we could actualize every possible act simultaneously? If that's your objection to NLT, I think you have some more reading to do.
Scott says,
ReplyDeleteWith all due respect, you joined a discussion already in progress and can't reasonably expect that every point already discussed needs to have been directed at you personally.
I wasn't expecting any reply from you. You chimed in and I replied to what you wrote. You got your facts mixed up, but you don't like having that pointed out.
I'm not having any trouble focusing, but I'll be happy to focus on something other than you if your only interest here is in being testy and/or scoring points in some imaginary contest. My question is legitimate, you haven't been able to offer any answer to it that doesn't beg the question, and life is short.
I think your replies manifest who is being "testy" here. As already stated, your "questions" have been answered numerous times. You don't like them? Fine. Life goes on.
Jeremy:
ReplyDeleteObviously, when I mentioned Scriptures,I had Christians in mind. However, it is not the case that it is open to interpretation, firstly, because Scripture should be interpreted according to Church tradition and, secondly, because, absent modernist exegetical gymnastics, the meaning is clear.
That itself is one interpretation of Scripture.
When it comes to the near universal traditional condemnation of homosexual acts, my comments are accurate. You give the standard modernist retort, but this is based on an historical analysis lacking all proportion and generally relying on ambiguous and marginal sources or perspectives.
What historical analysis can you direct me to that demonstrates the universal condemnation of homosexuality? The Wikipedia page indicates that homosexuality was an acceptable practice in many regions throughout the world, and provides a number of references in support of that contention.
For example, the ancient Greeks did not accept homosexuality. They had an ambiguous toleration of pederasty at certain times and places, but the idea they accepted homosexuality is just false. Even Plato, whose Symposium is often used to support traditional acceptance of homosexual love, could, one moment, seem to tolerate pederasty and, the next, have Socrates use the pleasures of a catamite as a self-evident example of a base and vile pleasure.
I’m no expert, but this contradicts what I’ve read on the subject, which is that it was widely accepted, but under certain conditions. For example, it was acceptable to be the active agent in the sexual act, and there was stigma associated with the passive recipient, who was usually in a socially inferior position, which included youth and slaves. However, a youth who was the sexual partner of an exalted and prominent adult male would acquire respect and honor from the sexual intimacy. What was problematic was sexual intercourse between free adult males, because the passive recipient would lose respect, which was not befitting a free adult male.
The Romans were even less accepting of homosexuality.
Again, from what I’ve read, they embraced homosexuality under the same terms as the ancient Greeks.
Now, sometimes homosexual acts were considered inferior and, generally, to be avoided, but were somewhat tolerated; sometimes, such as in Zoroastrianism and lands that came under the sway of Semitic monotheism, they were tolerated in no sense. And it is certainly the case that different cultures have dealt with the subject of sin and sexual sin somewhat differently - making such sins more of an issue in some societies than others.
The point is that the status of acceptance of homosexuality throughout human history is not the universal condemnation that you are endorsing. There were varying attitudes in different places and times.
But there is next to no evidence of widespread acceptance of homosexuality in human history.
Perhaps I overstated the case. There may not have been widespread acceptance, but there also was not widespread condemnation and rejection. There typically was a designated and appropriate place for homosexual activity in most societies.
But again, you are focusing upon the frustration of a part of man when you say, “with respect to his sexuality”. Our sexuality is an important and vital part of who we are, but it is certainly not the entirety of who we are. And since it is a part, then it must be balanced against other parts for the sake of the whole. If the whole suffers by following the natural end of a part, then why not violate that natural end of that part in order to increase the flourishing of the whole? Why would NL object to that?
ReplyDeleteAlso, maybe you can help me with a question I have. Say that you have an organ O with a particular natural function F.
dguller, you may be over-focused on a single organ. In the case of our human end with respect to sexuality, it is not only carried out using more than one organ (hands, lips, voice, as well as legs and back), it involves the use of other faculties than just physical ones. It is well known that having sex affects hormone levels and that has an impact on affections. Having (willing) sex increases the affective bonding between two people, all other things being equal.
This points to the fact that a person's end with respect to his sexual faculties isn't an end or a function located in a single organ. So, you can use the organ in a way that doesn't damage the organ itself while still acting in a way that is incompatible with the end of the person with respect to his sexuality. Rape doesn't do anything physically unnatural to the ORGANs of sex, but it still violates the sexual aspect of both the man and the woman because it contradicts the orientation of the sexual faculties toward love. It violates the coherent interrelationship between the organs, the physical pleasure, the affective dimension, and the pro-creative aspect. So does masturbation. Sodomy does also.
If you are a cave man using a rock to break a stick, a little sand on the rock doesn't "violate" the functionality of the rock, even though it doesn't add to it either. If you have a gas-powered log-splitter, throwing a little sand in the gears does indeed violate the functionality. Throwing sand into the gas tank does even worse. Our sexuality is more like a fine-tuned race car in terms of the complexity and interrelationship of components, and throwing in acts that are inconsistent with the total orientation of our sexuality toward life-giving love is not going to be insignificant to the coherence of the system as a whole.
@Bill:
ReplyDelete"As already stated, your 'questions' have been answered numerous times."
Excellent. Then you or someone else should be able to point me to at least one post that explains why, according to natural law apart from special revelation, refraining from anal sex is not merely a good idea but morally obligatory—why, to borrow a well-turned phrase from G.H. Joyce, we're faced here "not with a counsel, but with a command."
It won't do to repeat that anal sex involves "misuse" of an organ; that response either begs the question or equivocates on "misuse," and either way it simply reflects a misunderstanding of what's being asked.
The question (and it is a question, by the way, so I'm not sure why you keep putting the word in scare quotes) is why—in view of the fact that I have purposes and goals of my own that don't reduce to those of my organs—such "misuse" carries any specifically moral import.
As far as I can tell, the only non-question-begging response to date has been from dguller—nor, since I posted the question only yesterday, do I see that there has been time for all those "numerous" responses you say I've received.
Tony posted the following while I was composing my own previous post:
ReplyDelete"[A] person's end with respect to his sexual faculties isn't an end or a function located in a single organ. So, you can use the organ in a way that doesn't damage the organ itself while still acting in a way that is incompatible with the end of the person with respect to his sexuality."
Even though this wasn't posted in reply to me, it actually does (at least begin to) address my question. Thanks, Tony; that's helpful.
Crude:
ReplyDeleteRemove the diseased portion. If it fails to function, unfortunate - remove it. Where was the violation?
First, if removing the diseased portion causes dysfunction in the organ, then you have just frustrated the natural end of the organ. Its natural end is to function in the body, and by damaging it, you have eliminated its ability to pursue its natural end.
Second, if there was no way to remove only the diseased portion, but rather the entire organ had to be removed, then that would also count as a frustration of the natural end of the organ.
Not all 'sexual activity' is viewed equally by NL. Are you really trying to argue the woman committing (say) bestiality is, by NL, engaged in a 'high degree of flourishing' than the chaste woman?
I do not know. The fact that I find such conduct gross does not have any bearing upon its degree of goodness. I would be very surprised to discover that the women involved in bestiality had a higher degree of flourishing than chaste women, but that could only be due to my biases and prejudiced intuitions. Reality often contradicts our intuitions, and that is why it is important to engage in objective inquiry rather than subjective intuitions.
Yep. And that determination isn't dependent on the outcome of social science studies.
Why not? Why the desperate need to avoid any kind objective inquiry into whether the factors that you believe contribute to human flourishing actually do contribute to human flourishing? You have reasoned yourself to a hypothesis that factor X contributes to human flourishing, which may be true or false. Only further investigation beyond the original train of reasoning can provide evidence for or against the hypothesis. Until then, it remains in the realm of possibility. Why you think that reasoning to a hypothesis is enough to demonstrate the truth of the hypothesis is beyond me. Every hypothesis is the conclusion of some line of reasoning, but it is only when the hypothesis is tested in reality that we can get a sense whether the reasoning was actually valid or not. I see absolutely no reason why this should not be the case here.
Because a comprehensive review of a hundred flawed, awkward studies is better than one? It's not been settled, and barring some amazing advances, it probably never will be.
Yes. You have to take in the totality of evidence before making a determination. Or would you prefer cherry picking only evidence that supports your position?
Note that actually settling an issue is radically different from having people say the issue has been settled. THAT is easy. There's a reason that people didn't just point to a 2007 meta-analysis to try and settle this: because the arguments for 'settling' are illusory.
There’s also a reason why empirical study of alternative therapies, such as homeopathy and acupuncture, continue, as well, but it does not mean that the matter hasn’t been conclusively demonstrated to be ineffective. It’s just that some people can’t take “no” for an answer, and there are a number of reasons for this.
Great. Then let's see you establish your actual contention here: that lack of anal sex specifically leads to depression, thoughts of suicide, etc. Account for all the related factors (attitude, beliefs, approaches, biological differences, etc). I suppose you'll have to do this even to begin your other analysis about how best to solve the problem.
ReplyDeleteI’m not saying that I’ve demonstrated this. It is a hypothesis in need of empirical verification. But the point is that I am openly honest about the fact that it is just a hypothesis in need of further study, and not claiming that because I have some lines of reasoning to support it, that it must necessarily be metaphysically true, and that I can make clear pronouncements on the basis of this truth. You seem to think that I’m making a stronger claim here than I actually am.
And if what you said is not 'impossible', but 'appropriately low odds', then it would seem it's in principle justifiable. You say 'impossible', but that can't be 'impossible in principle' but 'in practice' - and practicalities can change.
Not in this case, unless you can eliminate the possibility of error in multiple steps in your master plan to drug women unconscious and rape them without leaving any changes that are detrimental to their emotional and physical health. Your plan would have to be incredibly complex, and the more complex a plan, the more likely something will go wrong at some point due to a mindless error or mistake. So, if your plan is predicated upon the impossibility of error, then your plan itself is impossible.
But here's where we diverge. You think rape of sleeping women would in principle be justifiable, so long as we could eliminate (or minimize?) the negative effects. I don't think that: I think there is a moral dimension to consider, and that this doesn't boil down to a utilitarian determination of outcomes. There are reasons to condemn and guard against rape, period, 'the enjoyment of the men involved' be damned.
The “outcome” is the maximization of human flourishing. That is the moral standard of NL itself. If your morality makes this the centerpiece of determining what acts count as moral or immoral, then you have to be able to measure human flourishing, and to demonstrate how different acts in different circumstances cause different degrees of human flourishing. Until then, it is all sheer speculation and armchair theorizing.
Which is part of why pursuing the sort of social sciences analysis you want to evaluate anal sex dies on the vine. You make it sound as if only by analysis can we determine if the act is immoral. Well, no - we know it's immoral straightaway by NL; what you're looking for is if, all things being equal, it's justifiable while being immoral.
But you don’t know “by NL”. NL says that if act A contributes to human flourishing HF, then A is moral. This account itself presupposes that HF should be measurable and comparable, and that A is causally related to HF. I think that this is an intriguing hypothesis in need of empirical confirmation, and until then cannot be taken to be true or false, but the null hypothesis is that it is false until proven true.
It is my contention that this “something else” is the degree of overall human flourishing of the individual. If the degree of overall human flourishing can be increased in the course of violating the natural ends of an organ, then the violation is morally permissible.
ReplyDeleteIn the second sentence, the conclusion "then..." is to be denied because the conditional "If the degree..." is to be denied. A human being, and his ends, relate to his rationality all the way up and down. We are not a mass of totally independent ends, so that we may pursue one and ignore all the others, all higgledy piggledy: inherently, while we are pursuing aproximate end we are doing so within a context which relates that to our remote, final, ultimate end, and thus it necessarily finds its relation to all the other ends we choose in reflection of that final end also.
If a man who knows (through philosophy) and has faith (with Christianity) that there is no pantheon of gods but only the one true God, and is told to sacrifice to Jupiter or die, he cannot rationally say to himself: "I will go ahead and commit idolatry and a lie by sacrificing to Jupiter, because that will leave me alive to enjoy and fulfill so much more of the proper human ends for decades to come." His ordered love for the highest good over all other goods, and his subordinate love for the lesser goods only in their proper order to the proper final end, does not allow such a choice (not morally or rationally, of course). He cannot love the lesser goods proportionately without loving them in their proper order to the ultimate good, and so he cannot deny God for lesser goods without violating the due order of goods.
The "overall human flourishing" isn't a matter of amassing one good after another, he with the mostest number wins, it is a matter of the order of goods from highest to lowest. This is why a St. Francis can be totally at peace and live with joy in absolute poverty, why any of the martyrs could go to their deaths singing praise of God, etc. Thus, an act which violates the very (natural) law which relates a lower good to higher goods cannot be ordered to, or compatible with, pursuit of the higher goods in their proper order. Such an act is contrary to the natural law even if it doesn't damage any organs or if it leaves the organ still capable of being used to pursue higher goods.
Scott, your first post here was on July 3rd at 7:41 am. Since that post, the question you ask has been answered numerous times. You either do not like the answers or you are not paying attention. I have not read every post, but I've followed closely enough to know what the ebb and flow of the discussion has been. I will not plow through the thread for you.
ReplyDeleteWhat you agree with is up to you. I won't lose sleep over it.
@Bill:
ReplyDelete"Scott, your first post here was on July 3rd at 7:41 am. Since that post, the question you ask has been answered numerous times."
That's odd, because I didn't even ask it until July 10. But I'm done wasting my time and Ed Feser's bandwidth on you.
Scott writes,
ReplyDeleteThat's odd, because I didn't even ask it until July 10. But I'm done wasting my time and Ed Feser's bandwidth on you.
You've really got a problem, Scott. Yes, this is a total waste of time. You may have asked it recently, but "it" had already been answered. Bye.
Scott: It does if the wrongness or impropriety is supposed to be specifically moral as opposed to e.g. practical or prudential.
ReplyDeleteBut prudence is just knowing how to act morally... Some matters are more serious than others, and so forth, but I don't think there's the kind of distinction here you're looking for. (I didn't follow the difference between "counsel" and "command" in the reference you posted earlier, though admittedly I took only a glance at it. It sounds like mixing a sort of divine command theory with natural law.)
This sort of question has come up in previous threads; I'm used to regarding natural law as sufficiently obligatory in itself. Acting against your own nature is irrational, but there's no additional justification for why you should act rationally — that would be asking for reasons to be reasonable. Either you are reasonable already, or else you aren't and reasons won't matter.
@Mr. Green:
ReplyDelete"But prudence is just knowing how to act morally... Some matters are more serious than others, and so forth, but I don't think there's the kind of distinction here you're looking for."
That may be, and if so, that's the answer to the question I'm asking.
To put it in the baldest terms, I seem to see a difference between something's being a good idea ("It's wise to wear a helmet when you ride a motorcycle") and something's being morally obligatory ("Thou shalt not murder"). Obligation seems, on the face of it, to require some other party, external to myself, to whom I can be obliged—in Joyce's argument from conscience, a Lawgiver. As Joyce puts it, I can't owe a debt to myself.
The question here is subtly but crucially different from the one that Chad was asking. His question was whether natural-law ethics could be grounded without reference to a God Whose existence could be established by natural theology. My question is whether such ethics can be grounded even given that God's existence can be established in that way (as I think it can), without relying on special revelation.
(Again, I have no difficulty understanding why, given special revelation that God Says "Don't Do X," we're obliged Not To Do X. That's pretty obvious.)
But if the difference I think I see between its merely being a good idea not to do X and its being a moral obligation not to do X is illusory, then that fact is itself the answer to my question, and the question itself disappears.
Is it fair to say, then, as you seem to have said, that for natural law, all morality is really just a matter of prudence? That seems in a sense to level all morality "down" rather than "up," if you know what I mean—but if that's really the point, then I at least understand it.
Obligation seems, on the face of it, to require some other party, external to myself, to whom I can be obliged—in Joyce's argument from conscience, a Lawgiver. As Joyce puts it, I can't owe a debt to myself... My question is whether such ethics can be grounded even given that God's existence can be established in that way (as I think it can), without relying on special revelation.
ReplyDeleteWell, even given the God of natural theology, that should be enough to establish the "ought" of obligation toward someone outside yourself. Natural law says we have an obligation to honor and give thanks to the One who is our cause and sustainer. And all other virtues are tied to honoring God's design of human nature.
But aside from that, natural law also says that we are social beings, and hence we have obligations to other individuals and to society as a whole. We have an obligation, for example, to strive to become capable, independent adults (instead of permanent leeches on the rest of society), so we have an obligation to achieve some level of education, training, preparation for adult life.
More on point here, we have an obligation to behave in such a way that we can be whole and complete husbands and fathers (or wives and mothers) when we get married, which means striving to develop the virtues of chastity and self-control even before marriage. We have, therefore, an obligation to learn discipline of the sexual faculties, training them toward ONLY that use which is in conformity with man's proper exercise of sexuality - in and with the act of love by which a man and a woman express permanent, exclusive, socially validated commitment to each other AND love and permanent commitment to any child which may be the natural fruit of such a physical union. Any use of sexuality outside that context will constitute a failure of your obligation to others because it damages your ability to relate to them appropriately. Infidelity damages your love of your spouse. Contraception damages your commitment to the natural fruit of sexual union. Masturbation damages your capacity to use your affective faculties to bond with a spouse.
Are you suggesting that there is something unnatural about intending that the organs' own natural temporary infertility take place?
ReplyDeleteI'm claiming that waiting until those organs are expected to be infertile is in fact violating the procreative ideal towards which all sexual activity is supposed to be oriented. It's a little funny how all of a sudden nature with a small n is morally crucial and determinative instead of the ideal Nature that is integrated into our deepest soul. Let me try a counterexample: Say a famous classical musician is convinced that his gift of playing music is his true, proper purpose in life. Yet twice a month due to some purely natural cause he has tremors in his hands that render him unable to play music. Would you say he was fulfilling his purpose in life during the times he tried to play music when he had tremors, perhaps on the low probability the tremors would subside?
Thus in man the ends of pleasure and reproduction themselves become ennobled within the integrating end of love, love which is inherently effusive, fruitful, like God's love is effusive.
I don't think the Old Testament supports that view of God, by extension the New Testament cannot support it either.
Anyway, thank Godwin you brought up Dr. Mengele. Along with all the other comparisons on this thread to inhuman monsters, rape, armed robbery, etc., when describing consenting adults it is comforting to know that conservatives have a nuanced and balanced view about homosexuality.
dguller,
ReplyDeleteFirst, if removing the diseased portion causes dysfunction in the organ, then you have just frustrated the natural end of the organ. Its natural end is to function in the body, and by damaging it, you have eliminated its ability to pursue its natural end.
I may well have, but that was never the intention, nor the aim of the act. I may be trying to do all that I can to -save- the organ. I may fail. Neither natural law nor the DDE requires happy, perfect outcomes.
Also, if I shoot someone with a pistol with the intent to murder them, I *may* actually shoot a tumor out of them or the like and help their health. This doesn't make the act good, or permissible, despite the happy outcome.
Second, if there was no way to remove only the diseased portion, but rather the entire organ had to be removed, then that would also count as a frustration of the natural end of the organ.
We'll just have to try our best. And since our central goal is consistent with NL, even under the strictures you're laying down, this seems permissible.
Reality often contradicts our intuitions, and that is why it is important to engage in objective inquiry rather than subjective intuitions.
Intuitions? Who's appealing to intuitions? Objective inquiry, in my view, includes philosophical and metaphysical reasoning. And the sort of analysis you're offering, on the other hand, absolutely requires those very analyses - which you seem to be filing under 'subjective intuitions'.
Why not? Why the desperate need to avoid any kind objective inquiry into whether the factors that you believe contribute to human flourishing actually do contribute to human flourishing?
'Desperate need'? Dguller, I've been trying pretty hard to avoid any and all psychoanalysis. If you want to shit up this conversation, go ahead. But thus far, it's been polite. Why ruin it?
There has been no 'desperate need' on my part. I have pointed out the limitations of the social sciences, the complexity of the matter, the standards that will have to be used in order to do ANY relevant analysis, etc. I have acknowledged some limitations of scientific inquiry. Don't try to frame this as *me* being responsible for those limitations. They exist no matter what I say. Or, for that matter, what you say.
Yes. You have to take in the totality of evidence before making a determination. Or would you prefer cherry picking only evidence that supports your position?
Nowhere have I justified cherry picking, nor relied on it, so what you're implying here is beyond me. The problem here is not only with the 'evidence' (or more properly, data), but also with the analysis - because the analysis is going to depend, critically, on NL views to begin with. Did you think the analysis would *not*, when the truth of NL is being taken for the sake of argument?
There’s also a reason why empirical study of alternative therapies, such as homeopathy and acupuncture, continue, as well, but it does not mean that the matter hasn’t been conclusively demonstrated to be ineffective. It’s just that some people can’t take “no” for an answer, and there are a number of reasons for this.
For one thing, in Asian countries, the argument (among scientists) is apparently that acupuncture has been demonstrated to *be* effective. Sure, sometimes people can't take 'no' for an answer. Now, if only we could agree on who... (I'd say homeopathy is a joke. Acupuncture, no idea. Never looked into it.)
And keep in mind, those are far superficially far, far more tractable topics of inquiry. Whether tumors grow given such and such treatments is vastly more tractable than psychological and societal questions being based off metaphysical and philosophical value structures. 'Medical science' generally is nowhere near as soft in the 'soft science' sense as psychology and sociology are, and philosophy isn't even a 'science' at all, in that sense.
ReplyDeleteI’m not saying that I’ve demonstrated this. It is a hypothesis in need of empirical verification. But the point is that I am openly honest about the fact that it is just a hypothesis in need of further study, and not claiming that because I have some lines of reasoning to support it, that it must necessarily be metaphysically true,
And I'm open about the practical and in-principle limitations of these methods of inquiry. Nor have *I* been saying that my reasoning 'must necessarily be metaphysically true'. It's reasonable enough, especially compared to the alternatives. Indeed, I'd argue vastly more reasonable in many cases. But that reason doesn't hinge on whether a sociologist agrees with me, or whether the study he writes up - especially with metaphysical and philosophical assumptions about harm and function and flourishing that I do not share - supports my view.
So, if your plan is predicated upon the impossibility of error, then your plan itself is impossible.
I think you may be confusing 'unlikely' with 'impossible'.
The “outcome” is the maximization of human flourishing. That is the moral standard of NL itself.
Not in the sense you seem to understand it. Are you cashing this out in primitive utilitarian terms? Again, I don't really care if your calculation yields a net result of additional happiness for careful rapists. The act should not be done, period. That good may come of mass, controlled rape is no justification for it, certainly not based on the NL I understand.
If you disagree in principle, alright, you have a wildly different NL in mind.
But you don’t know “by NL”. NL says that if act A contributes to human flourishing HF, then A is moral.
Again, you seem to be operating with some mistaken understanding of NL. Brandon (though he'd likely strongly disagree with me on various points) said as much - a 'good outcome' does not make an act moral on NL. The prospect of a good outcome does not justify lying either.
but the null hypothesis is that it is false until proven true.
If natural law were a scientific hypothesis (it is not) and if your attitude about null hypotheses were correct (I think the best null hypothesis is 'neither true nor false - it is not privy to evaluation right now, possibly ever' in science), I'd consider this. As it stands, it's just a non-seq.
But, I suppose this means you regard the proposition that anal sex is moral to be false. Null hypothesis and all.
@Tony:
ReplyDeleteThat's a good answer, and it elaborates on your previous post (which I mentioned I found helpful even though it wasn't a direct reply to me). Thank you.
Tony:
ReplyDeletedguller, you may be over-focused on a single organ. In the case of our human end with respect to sexuality, it is not only carried out using more than one organ (hands, lips, voice, as well as legs and back), it involves the use of other faculties than just physical ones. It is well known that having sex affects hormone levels and that has an impact on affections. Having (willing) sex increases the affective bonding between two people, all other things being equal.
I agree that sexual activity involves multiple parts of the human being. But the precise immorality is supposed to lie in the misuse of the sexual organ itself in a way that violates its natural end. That’s why I’m focusing upon that specific aspect of the issue
This points to the fact that a person's end with respect to his sexual faculties isn't an end or a function located in a single organ. So, you can use the organ in a way that doesn't damage the organ itself while still acting in a way that is incompatible with the end of the person with respect to his sexuality.
Okay.
Rape doesn't do anything physically unnatural to the ORGANs of sex, but it still violates the sexual aspect of both the man and the woman because it contradicts the orientation of the sexual faculties toward love. It violates the coherent interrelationship between the organs, the physical pleasure, the affective dimension, and the pro-creative aspect. So does masturbation. Sodomy does also.
But the claim of the NL theorist is that if any of these components of the sexual act are absent, then the sexual act in its entirety is immoral. My question is why this has to be an all-or-nothing affair, and whether the partial actualization of our sexual nature is necessarily a net negative with respect to our overall state of human flourishing, especially if other aspects of our human nature may be actualized to a greater degree with a partial actualization of our sexual nature. So, I agree with the multidimensional nature of your analysis, but I think that it is more conducive to my points than to yours.
Our sexuality is more like a fine-tuned race car in terms of the complexity and interrelationship of components, and throwing in acts that are inconsistent with the total orientation of our sexuality toward life-giving love is not going to be insignificant to the coherence of the system as a whole.
That is precisely what is at issue, i.e. whether partial actualization of our sexual nature is worse with respect to our overall state of human flourishing than no actualization of our sexual nature. And since actuality is correlative with goodness, because being is interconvertible with goodness by virtue of the doctrine of the transcendentals, then the more actualization of our nature corresponds to more goodness in our existence. At least, that’s always been my understanding of the matter.
Tony:
ReplyDeleteIn the second sentence, the conclusion "then..." is to be denied because the conditional "If the degree..." is to be denied. A human being, and his ends, relate to his rationality all the way up and down. We are not a mass of totally independent ends, so that we may pursue one and ignore all the others, all higgledy piggledy: inherently, while we are pursuing aproximate end we are doing so within a context which relates that to our remote, final, ultimate end, and thus it necessarily finds its relation to all the other ends we choose in reflection of that final end also.
Exactly. The degree to which we actualize our human nature is the degree to which we realize our final end as human beings. And we achieve that final end through intermediate ends that unite and combine to reach the final end. This is the multifactorial aspect of all of our activity, which is ultimately supposed to reach a single end, but often through the attainment of different ends along the way. For example, in order to use my reason, I must be physically healthy, partially because I need the proper use of my senses in order to acquire information about the world that I can reason about, as well as being in a state of physical health and not starving, in pain, and so on, in order to focus my mind on philosophical and theological matters. All of those ends are subservient to the ultimate end.
So, I agree that these ends are not “independent”, because they are all directed towards the same ultimate end, but I don’t think it necessarily follows that there are never circumstances in which some intermediate ends can be violated and yet one can draw closer to the ultimate end than if the intermediate ends in question were not violated.
If a man who knows (through philosophy) and has faith (with Christianity) that there is no pantheon of gods but only the one true God, and is told to sacrifice to Jupiter or die, he cannot rationally say to himself: "I will go ahead and commit idolatry and a lie by sacrificing to Jupiter, because that will leave me alive to enjoy and fulfill so much more of the proper human ends for decades to come." His ordered love for the highest good over all other goods, and his subordinate love for the lesser goods only in their proper order to the proper final end, does not allow such a choice (not morally or rationally, of course). He cannot love the lesser goods proportionately without loving them in their proper order to the ultimate good, and so he cannot deny God for lesser goods without violating the due order of goods.
Yet the man could pretend to sacrifice to Jupiter, and intend to be making a sacrifice to the one God instead, and then pray for forgiveness. This would certainly make sense if the man had a family who depended upon him to take care of them, and who would also suffer from the stigma of his death as a heretic.
And none of this addresses my point that if the violation of a lower good could bring someone closer to the ultimate good than not violating that lower good, then the violation of the lower good is a moral act. After all, if that were true, then the violator would have actualized more of his human nature than the non-violator, and thus would be a closer approximation to the ideal human being than the non-violator.
The "overall human flourishing" isn't a matter of amassing one good after another, he with the mostest number wins, it is a matter of the order of goods from highest to lowest. This is why a St. Francis can be totally at peace and live with joy in absolute poverty, why any of the martyrs could go to their deaths singing praise of God, etc. Thus, an act which violates the very (natural) law which relates a lower good to higher goods cannot be ordered to, or compatible with, pursuit of the higher goods in their proper order. Such an act is contrary to the natural law even if it doesn't damage any organs or if it leaves the organ still capable of being used to pursue higher goods.
ReplyDeleteBut my scenario does not affect the “order of goods from highest to lowest”. In fact, it presupposes that there is such a hierarchy, and that there are circumstances in which a lower good would have to be violated in order to achieve the higher end. In that case, the order is preserved, because the lower end is violated precisely because it is lower than the higher good.
Any thoughts?
Dguller,
ReplyDeleteThe Scripture is clear. I have never come across an interpretation that could mitigate the prohibitions against homosexuality that wasn't based on blatant exegetical gymnastics and modernist principles that have nothing to do with the viewpoint of the Scriptural authors.
Are you saying the wikipedia page was an historically reliable source? It was a hodge podge of disproportionate and dubious nonsense. They even started talking about Sufis praising the beauty of youths and Safavid male brothels as if these were examples of meaningful acceptance of homosexuality.
I'm aware of no sources on the universal, traditional view of homosexuality, although I have read some scholars of comparative religion that echo its near universal condemnation, like James Cutsinger. Most books on homosexuality would, presumably, be from the modernist perspective - my reading list is too long for the foreseable me to read such works, indeed, even more balanced, traditionally orientated ones on such subjects. My knowledge is only from what I know of certain cultures, especially the Greeks.
On the Greeks, what you are saying is not radically different from what I'm saying. Indeed, it is what the wikipedia says. This position, however, is the best gloss that the pro-homosexual side can put on the facts. The truth is that homosexual activity was considered base amongst free men, as you say. To say you could do it to your slaves was no praise of the practice amongst the Greeks. There is little evidence I'm aware of that the active partner was considered in a good light. There is little praise of homosexual activities, except for pederasty at all, and in fact a marked dislike of any such practices amongst two individuals who were old enough, in the Greek terminology to grow beards. Even pederasty had an ambiguous place in Greek society. It was restricted to certain and, in time, to the Classical and earlier Hellenistic age, fading in its popularity as the centuries wore on after the fourth and third centuries BC. Even at its most widespread acceptance it was ambiguous. As even Plato tells us, a youth's family would often consider his having an older male lover to be a disgrace.
The Romans had similar attitudes to the Greeks, except they tolerated homosexual acts even a little less - just read Horace or Juvenal!
For my purposes I'm do not mean, by universal condemnation, that homosexuality was almost always treated as it was in medieval and early modern Christendom. Different civilisations, cultures, and faiths treat sins and sexual immorality in different ways. Fornication is similarly almost universally condemned, but the Christian and the Buddhist who fornicate, and wish to make amends, are going to have different mindsets and approaches to the act and how they make amends. All I'm suggesting is that it was almost always, at least, treated as inferior and generally something seedy to be avoided. This is the case and shows no acceptance of homosexuality in any meaningful way. After all, prostitution is often called the oldest profession and is seen in almost all cultures and is rarely seen as anything but a seedy and inferior profession, at best.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, it should be noted that, statistically speaking, homosexuality, especially for men, means promiscuity. Even those male homosexuals who have long term relationships almost always, according to the statistics, have sex with those other than there partners.
Is this violation of lower telos for higher telos going to accept this state of affairs? Or is it going to try and stop homosexual promiscuity? Which is almost like saying stopping homosexuality itself.
Someone above mentioned that they couldn't understand how it mattered to their ultimate moral state where they put their penis. This to me sounds like a remarkable statement. We could argue about the effects of masturbation without pornography, perhaps, but every other sexual activity I can think of requires the profound participation of most of one's psyche. Sexuality is likely to have a huge impact on one's overall being.
My favorite part of this incredible thread is the exchange between dguller and Crude, examining dguller's hypothetical tumor-on-kidney case, wherein removing the that organ (frustrating its natural end) would result in the realization of a "higher telos" for the whole person. Well, what does Christ have to say?
ReplyDelete"And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire"
I imagine the natural lawyers around here would think that this supports their own position, but from where I stand Mr Guller showed admirable restraint in keeping that arrow in the quiver.
--Patrick CF
So, I agree that these ends are not “independent”, because they are all directed towards the same ultimate end, but I don’t think it necessarily follows that there are never circumstances in which some intermediate ends can be violated and yet one can draw closer to the ultimate end than if the intermediate ends in question were not violated.
ReplyDeleteI think that only happens when you state the lower or intermediate end abstractly and imperfectly, not in connection with how it sits in relation to the final end. For example: abstractly, it is bad to knowingly put yourself in harm's way, where you could get shot. But concretely, when you are a soldier and you specifically are tasked with taking out a machine gun nest, putting yourself in harm's way is serving the higher end, your role in supporting a peaceful society. When you state the act in its fullness, you are not violating the lower end, you are qualifying it. Your body is MADE to serve the higher end, so doing so isn't violating the good of the body (properly speaking), it is only "violating the good of the body considered as if it were not ordered to the higher end." That's just "violated in a sense", not simply.
Another example: it is bad to abstain from food for 40 days if you have food. That harms the body. However, when the total picture is stated, the goodness of the act becomes clear: to not eat for 40 days in spiritual preparation for an enormously challenging vocation that will demand perfect subservience of the body to the spirit. Since the body is supposed to be at the service of spiritual goods anyway, imposing a discipline on it that harms it in a sense but perfects it in another (more important) sense is not, simply speaking, to "violate" the lower end (pleasure or comfort), but to put it in its proper place.* The mistake of the phrasing of "violated in order to achieve the higher end" is that it considers the organ or faculty that is "violated" as if it were independent of the person who is actually integrated toward the higher end. The person isn't a collection of organs that HAVE THEIR OWN ends, he is a one single thing with an end as such.
*Many authors insist that the virtuous man who rightly orders all his acts, including exercising discipline and restraint over the lower faculties, habituating them to submission to reason, for better pursuit of the higher ends, ACTUALLY ENJOYS the operations of the lower faculties more than the licentious person who does not exercise self-control. To take a not very good example: the gourmand who stuffs himself may (a) not pay attention to the taste of the wine, never noticing its exquisite sensations, and (b) may spend all too much of the meal worrying about it being over "too soon" (instead of being content for it to be over when it should be over,) and the worry disrupts his enjoyment of the eating. The qualitative enjoyment of the virtuous person exceeds the qualitative enjoyment of the gourmand, even though he eats much less. "Virtue is its own reward" is not mere noise.
But my scenario does not affect the “order of goods from highest to lowest”. In fact, it presupposes that there is such a hierarchy, and that there are circumstances in which a lower good would have to be violated in order to achieve the higher end. In that case, the order is preserved, because the lower end is violated precisely because it is lower than the higher good.
ReplyDeleteBut it does affect the order of goods, because it's not any different from treating the lower goods as if they were not goods at all: that a lower good is (under particular circumstances) inconsistent with a higher good does not give us the conclusion that it is not a good or not to be respected as such. And when we are talking about the relevant kinds of moral goods, even lower moral goods, we are still talking about the universal goods of human practical reason; "violations" of good, i.e., acts that violate even the lesser requirements of this human common good, are irrational and disruptive of the good of practical reason itself -- and the good of reason is already the highest kind of good.
Your comment about ends gets directly into this: intermediate ends, when we're talking morality, are not mere means, but really and truly ends in themselves; they are good in their own right, not merely instrumentally, and (ex hypothesi) they are normatively good, and reason requires that they be pursued for their own sake. They are intermediate or subordinate because they also subserve even greater ends; but this doesn't magically make them merely means to a further end. Again, this is a point at which you can't conflate all goods into one: that these goods subserve even higher goods does not mean that it is not bad to treat them as mere means. In fact, that's precisely one of the ways people do wrong: they treat things that are not mere means as if they were mere means.
examining dguller's hypothetical tumor-on-kidney case, wherein removing the that organ (frustrating its natural end) would result in the realization of a "higher telos" for the whole person.
ReplyDeleteAs with my answer to dguller: that removal of the kidney might be "frustrating the natural end of the kidney" considering the kidney as if it were a separate entity of its own. When you describe the entirety of the act including its place within the larger context, the act of removing isn't frustrating the natural end of the kidney which is to contribute to the physical health of the body. The description of the act as "frustrating" is simply too narrow for accurate analysis.
@Tony:
ReplyDeleteTo put your point in a rather neo-Hegelian way that may not be entirely congenial to you: you seem to be saying that the role of this or that organ in one's well-being or flourishing is as a part of an overarching system that is in some manner expressed in each of its parts and that takes its meaning from that overarching system.
If so, then it appears to me that while your point addresses (and to a great degree answers) my question, it leaves dguller's pretty much where it was. (His suggestion, as you know, is that an "organ-level" functionality might be overridden by a "person-level" moral need.)
Reading Tony's comment, I think I should point out that we are approaching the same point while holding different background suppositions in dguller's argument constant: Tony's answer is based on supposing the 'violation' of the good to be moral and drawing out what would follow from that ex hypothesi (it could only be 'violation in a sense' and not violation full stop), mine is based on supposing that the goods are properly moral goods in the context, required by practical reason, and drawing out what would follow from that ex hypothesi (the violation would be wrong by definition). These are related to the only two coherent ways in which one can take something to be a good in the properly moral sense (i.e., it is in some sense a good that is always there rationally to be pursued, given human nature, even though not by every action in the same way) and wholly subordinate it to some higher good: one can pursue it in such a way as consistent with the full character of the necessary task at hand (this is Tony's qualification) or one can abstain from the very kind of actions that would require pursuing it directly (and thus not put oneself in a position actually to violate it).
ReplyDeleteI imagine the natural lawyers around here would think that this supports their own position, but from where I stand Mr Guller showed admirable restraint in keeping that arrow in the quiver.
ReplyDeleteI think if dguller were to open the door to any invocation of Christ's teaching on the issue, any apparent victory would be momentary and entirely pyrrhic. The conversation has been proceeding with me based on appeals to natural law, not orthodox Christian teaching, for a reason.
Tony:
ReplyDeleteI think that only happens when you state the lower or intermediate end abstractly and imperfectly, not in connection with how it sits in relation to the final end. For example: abstractly, it is bad to knowingly put yourself in harm's way, where you could get shot. But concretely, when you are a soldier and you specifically are tasked with taking out a machine gun nest, putting yourself in harm's way is serving the higher end, your role in supporting a peaceful society. When you state the act in its fullness, you are not violating the lower end, you are qualifying it. Your body is MADE to serve the higher end, so doing so isn't violating the good of the body (properly speaking), it is only "violating the good of the body considered as if it were not ordered to the higher end." That's just "violated in a sense", not simply.
I do not disagree with any of that. In fact, it would be a nice summary of my own position during this discussion, which has been that lower ends can be “violated in a sense” if they serve a higher end.
The person isn't a collection of organs that HAVE THEIR OWN ends, he is a one single thing with an end as such.
But it does not follow that each organ does not have a particular end, which also works to serve a higher end. The heart’s function is to contract its muscles in order to pump blood through the circulatory system, which has a number of other higher functions, such as provide nutrition to organs, remove waste from organs, transport immune cells to infected areas, and so on, each of which serves a higher function of maintaining internal homeostasis, which serves a higher function of maintaining the life of the organism. The only reason why the heart serves the higher function of maintaining life is because of the lower ends that I mentioned above.
And, again, none of this explains why it is never permissible to violate the immediate function of an organ if performing such a violation would actually lead to a larger degree of flourishing for the organism in question than if the organism did not violate the immediate function of the organ.
As with my answer to dguller: that removal of the kidney might be "frustrating the natural end of the kidney" considering the kidney as if it were a separate entity of its own. When you describe the entirety of the act including its place within the larger context, the act of removing isn't frustrating the natural end of the kidney which is to contribute to the physical health of the body. The description of the act as "frustrating" is simply too narrow for accurate analysis.
But this is just another way of saying that one can violate the immediate end of an organ for the sake of the ultimate end of the whole, which is exactly what I have been saying. So, if a case can be made that homosexual men who engage in anal sex have a larger degree of human flourishing than homosexual men who do not engage in anal sex, then “you are not violating the lower end, you are qualifying it”, and the sexual organ is “‘just "violated in a sense’, not simply”, which is all consistent with a moral act.
Brandon:
ReplyDeleteBut it does affect the order of goods, because it's not any different from treating the lower goods as if they were not goods at all: that a lower good is (under particular circumstances) inconsistent with a higher good does not give us the conclusion that it is not a good or not to be respected as such. And when we are talking about the relevant kinds of moral goods, even lower moral goods, we are still talking about the universal goods of human practical reason; "violations" of good, i.e., acts that violate even the lesser requirements of this human common good, are irrational and disruptive of the good of practical reason itself -- and the good of reason is already the highest kind of good.
I never said that the lower good is not a good at all in the context of the higher good. It is still a good, but it is a lesser good compared to the ultimate good in that situation. There are degrees of goodness, and morality is about maximizing the degree of goodness in oneself, in others, and in the world around us. That often requires choosing to reject the actualization of some goods, and instead actualize other goods, which is a kind of violation of the rejected goods. However, it does not follow that the goods that were rejected are bad, but only not good enough in this particular scenario, and thus are rejected for the sake of other goods, which are good enough.
Your comment about ends gets directly into this: intermediate ends, when we're talking morality, are not mere means, but really and truly ends in themselves; they are good in their own right, not merely instrumentally, and (ex hypothesi) they are normatively good, and reason requires that they be pursued for their own sake. They are intermediate or subordinate because they also subserve even greater ends; but this doesn't magically make them merely means to a further end. Again, this is a point at which you can't conflate all goods into one: that these goods subserve even higher goods does not mean that it is not bad to treat them as mere means. In fact, that's precisely one of the ways people do wrong: they treat things that are not mere means as if they were mere means.
This seems to directly contradict what Tony wrote above. He puts a stronger emphasis upon the ultimate end, and that if an organ is used in any way, even in a way that violates its immediate end, then it cannot be said to violate the ultimate end, and thus is only violated “in a sense”. You put a stronger emphasis upon the intermediate end, saying that it must be taken in itself as a good to be actualized, i.e. “pursued for their own sake”, and not “merely means to a further end”. But in that case, it is always wrong to deliberately choose to do something with or to an organ that would violate its immediate end, because then you are using them as means to a higher end.
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ReplyDeleteReading Tony's comment, I think I should point out that we are approaching the same point while holding different background suppositions in dguller's argument constant: Tony's answer is based on supposing the 'violation' of the good to be moral and drawing out what would follow from that ex hypothesi (it could only be 'violation in a sense' and not violation full stop), mine is based on supposing that the goods are properly moral goods in the context, required by practical reason, and drawing out what would follow from that ex hypothesi (the violation would be wrong by definition).
ReplyDeleteActually, your two positions basically correspond to my (1) and (2) above, which I would rewrite as:
(1) A chosen act that violates the immediate natural end of an organ is morally impermissible (because the immediate natural end is treated as a means to an end and not an end in itself)
(2) A chosen act that violates the immediate natural end of an organ is morally permissible if the act in question results in the higher actualization of the ultimate end of the whole person (because the immediate ends are all ultimately directed towards the actualization of the ultimate end)
In (1), the immediate end is just as important as the ultimate end, and thus is treated as an end in itself and not a means to an end, and in (2), the immediate end is less important than the ultimate end, and is treated as a means to an end. They are mutually exclusive positions.
Crude:
ReplyDeleteI'll post a response to your earlier comments later in the day. Sorry for the wait.
Step2,
ReplyDeleteYour attacks on NFP miss the mark.We are only obliged not to violate the ends of our sexual organs, not to always aim at procreation in each sexual act. As NFP does not introduce a violation of the ends of our sexual organs, but is simply an instance of a natural infertility, then your point misses the mark. You clearly feel the distinction being drawn is too nice and too fine, but you haven't given much beyond your general feelings by way of argument, or really even dealt with the distinctions in a thorough manner.
Also, there are all sorts of ways things can be compared. If, when you talk about homosexuality being compared to armed robbery you meant my comparison that NFP was (at worst) like stealing nuts in the supermarket whilst homosexual acts would be like armed robbery, the comparison here is clearly not meant to be an absolute standard - to suggest that homosexual acts are absolutely as wrong as armed robbery (although, you seem to imply the usual modern lack of concern for sexual immorality all the same, which underestimates its significance as much as you are accusing us of exaggerating it). This seems somewhat disingenuous, and doubly so as I actually had taken exception to your suggestion that the use of the word inhuman to describe homosexual acts meant NLT meant homosexuals were monsters or beasts.
Indeed, many of your points seem rhetorical; the problem is this is a combox discussion where most of the participants and readers are NL sympathisers and hardly likely to swayed by such rhetoric.
Also, love is not simply a gushing sentiment. To dismiss the Old Testament as somehow neglecting love, in the way you do, is to expect the sentimentalism of the eighteenth century to be the viewpoint of ancient Israelites.
ReplyDeleteCrude:
ReplyDeleteI may well have, but that was never the intention, nor the aim of the act. I may be trying to do all that I can to -save- the organ. I may fail. Neither natural law nor the DDE requires happy, perfect outcomes.
But if you knew that it would be the result, then would it be moral, even though you knowingly frustrated the natural end of a bodily organ by damaging it to the point of dysfunction, or surgically excising it altogether from the body?
Also, if I shoot someone with a pistol with the intent to murder them, I *may* actually shoot a tumor out of them or the like and help their health. This doesn't make the act good, or permissible, despite the happy outcome.
True.
We'll just have to try our best. And since our central goal is consistent with NL, even under the strictures you're laying down, this seems permissible.
But again, if the ultimate goal is to promote overall human flourishing, and it is permissible to violate or frustrate the natural ends of individual organs for the sake of the ultimate goal, then why is it necessarily and metaphysically true that this is inapplicable to the sexual organs?
Intuitions? Who's appealing to intuitions?
I thought that you were appealing to the “ick” factor of bestiality.
Objective inquiry, in my view, includes philosophical and metaphysical reasoning. And the sort of analysis you're offering, on the other hand, absolutely requires those very analyses - which you seem to be filing under 'subjective intuitions'.
Philosophical and metaphysical reasoning forms the overall framework for the analysis that I’m offering, which means that it is a necessary part of my aforementioned inquiry, but it is certainly no sufficient, because in the absence of real-world observation of whether the particular hypotheses generated by the philosophical and metaphysical argumentation, we simply do not know whether they are true or false.
There has been no 'desperate need' on my part. I have pointed out the limitations of the social sciences, the complexity of the matter, the standards that will have to be used in order to do ANY relevant analysis, etc. I have acknowledged some limitations of scientific inquiry. Don't try to frame this as *me* being responsible for those limitations. They exist no matter what I say. Or, for that matter, what you say.
Then why the strenuous objections to the kind of inquiry that I’m proposing is absolutely necessary to determine whether some acts are moral or immoral? You seem to think that arriving at a conclusion on the basis of philosophical and metaphysical reasoning means that the conclusion is true. I’m saying that it might be true, but it also might not be true. We would have to look and see to determine its actual truth or falsity.
After all, there is the claim that act X contributes to human flourishing HF, whereas act Y does not contribute to HF (or contributes to a lesser degree of HF than X does). Just because that claim is consistent with the general metaphysical and philosophical framework of NF, until it is tested in reality, it should be treated as a hypothesis. I agree that testing it would be extraordinarily difficult, but so what? You can say that about most research. That does not mean that its degree of difficulty absolves you of the need to engage in it if you want to know whether your beliefs are true or false. And certainly, if the research is impossible to conduct, either in principle or in practice, then no-one knows the truth of the matter. And then what do we do in this inherently undecideable situation?
So, if a case can be made that homosexual men who engage in anal sex have a larger degree of human flourishing than homosexual men who do not engage in anal sex, then “you are not violating the lower end, you are qualifying it”, and the sexual organ is “‘just "violated in a sense’, not simply”, which is all consistent with a moral act.
ReplyDeleteBut it can't. The nature of sex in the larger scheme of the whole person's end doesn't allow it. The sexual act's purpose aligns many component parts, including physical pleasure and emotional bonding with permanent commitment and life-giving donation of self, all together. And the permanent commitment is, itself, directly attached to the life-giving donation of self. So it is impossible for an act of sodomy, no matter how much it might serve for sensual pleasure and emotional satisfaction, to ALSO serve the higher purposes successfully. Indeed, what sodomy does is it serves the lower at the expense of the higher. Which is, generally, a pretty good description of an immoral act.
Nowhere have I justified cherry picking, nor relied on it, so what you're implying here is beyond me.
ReplyDeleteMy point was that obviously neither of us would endorse cherry picking, and thus your point that my analysis or inquiry would have to take into considerable all relevant evidence and findings was a truism, and certainly not anything that counted against my position.
The problem here is not only with the 'evidence' (or more properly, data), but also with the analysis - because the analysis is going to depend, critically, on NL views to begin with. Did you think the analysis would *not*, when the truth of NL is being taken for the sake of argument?
I’ve always granted the NL framework as a given in this inquiry. My point is that the NL framework itself is consistent with the kind of inquiry that I’m proposing is absolutely necessary to determine which acts are moral and immoral within the NL framework. If you are claiming that the inquiry is itself impossible, then the NL framework cannot help us to determine what acts are moral and what acts are immoral. And that makes practical reason in NL completely impractical.
And keep in mind, those are far superficially far, far more tractable topics of inquiry. Whether tumors grow given such and such treatments is vastly more tractable than psychological and societal questions being based off metaphysical and philosophical value structures. 'Medical science' generally is nowhere near as soft in the 'soft science' sense as psychology and sociology are, and philosophy isn't even a 'science' at all, in that sense.
And yet if the kind of inquiry that I’m proposing is necessary to determine what acts are moral and immoral, then either it is possible (albeit extremely difficult) or it is impossible (whether in principle or in practice). If the former, then we have to do the best that we can and make determinations with a number of caveats and limitations, and a significant amount of uncertainty, which is perfectly fine. If the latter, then we cannot make any determinations regarding the morality or immorality of any action within the NL framework at all.
And I'm open about the practical and in-principle limitations of these methods of inquiry. Nor have *I* been saying that my reasoning 'must necessarily be metaphysically true'. It's reasonable enough, especially compared to the alternatives. Indeed, I'd argue vastly more reasonable in many cases. But that reason doesn't hinge on whether a sociologist agrees with me, or whether the study he writes up - especially with metaphysical and philosophical assumptions about harm and function and flourishing that I do not share - supports my view.
A hypothesis can be more reasonable than another, and yet be false. “Reasonable” is dependent upon a background conceptual framework, and whether a hypothesis is maximally consistent with the propositions of that framework. However, there are a number of instances of hypotheses that seemed reasonable at the time, but turned out to be false, and actually required the wholesale revision of important parts of the conceptual framework itself. And the only way that any ever found out that those areas of the conceptual framework required revision to begin with was by testing reality to see if it corresponded to the hypotheses in question. Without that testing, it is all sheer speculation and imagination, which has an unknown bearing upon reality.
I think you may be confusing 'unlikely' with 'impossible'.
ReplyDeleteIt is practically impossible that a conspiracy that involved a large number of rapists, as well as the assorted staff involved in the kidnapping, drugging, and safe return of the women would necessarily make a mistake at some point, especially the larger the number of people involved, and the longer the time period in which the program was running.
Not in the sense you seem to understand it. Are you cashing this out in primitive utilitarian terms? Again, I don't really care if your calculation yields a net result of additional happiness for careful rapists. The act should not be done, period. That good may come of mass, controlled rape is no justification for it, certainly not based on the NL I understand.
I am not talking about happiness or utilitarian considerations, and so there is no need to keep reading them into what I’m saying. I’m accepting the overall NL framework in which human nature is such that its final end is human flourishing, which you can just call HF. All acts are judged according to whether they increase or decrease HF, which is the final end of all human beings. If this is true, then there must be some way to determine and measure different degrees of HF, and associate them with different actions to see which actions increase or decrease HF. We can certainly reason and hypothesize about which actions we predict will increase or decrease HF, but until you actually go out and see whether this happens in reality, you are merely hypothesizing and speculating, which is a flimsy basis to make sweeping and firm judgments about anything at all.
Again, you seem to be operating with some mistaken understanding of NL. Brandon (though he'd likely strongly disagree with me on various points) said as much - a 'good outcome' does not make an act moral on NL. The prospect of a good outcome does not justify lying either.
If the “good outcome” is an increase in HF, then it is good, according to NL.
If natural law were a scientific hypothesis (it is not) and if your attitude about null hypotheses were correct (I think the best null hypothesis is 'neither true nor false - it is not privy to evaluation right now, possibly ever' in science), I'd consider this. As it stands, it's just a non-seq.
You are correct. The null hypothesis should be “neither true nor false”. As such, if no form of inquiry could determine whether the hypothesis was true or false, then we are in a situation of radical undecidability without the hope of resolution.
But, I suppose this means you regard the proposition that anal sex is moral to be false. Null hypothesis and all.
No, I would consider the proposition to be possibly true or false, but not necessarily true or false. That is why I’m saying that an inquiry should be conducted to determine whether it is true or false.
Tony:
ReplyDeleteBut it can't. The nature of sex in the larger scheme of the whole person's end doesn't allow it. The sexual act's purpose aligns many component parts, including physical pleasure and emotional bonding with permanent commitment and life-giving donation of self, all together. And the permanent commitment is, itself, directly attached to the life-giving donation of self. So it is impossible for an act of sodomy, no matter how much it might serve for sensual pleasure and emotional satisfaction, to ALSO serve the higher purposes successfully. Indeed, what sodomy does is it serves the lower at the expense of the higher. Which is, generally, a pretty good description of an immoral act.
First, this fails to address my question as to why the partial actualization of our sexual nature is worse in terms of human flourishing than the non-actualization of our sexual nature, especially when the degree of actuality corresponds with the degree of goodness by the doctrine of the interconvertibility of the transcendentals.
Second, if the sexual act has a number of components, then why is it that all the components must be present in order for it to be a proper sexual act at all?
Third, why is “life-giving donation of self” a necessary part of overall human flourishing, and not just a very important part of overall human flourishing? You seem to imply that sexual procreation is an intrinsic and necessary part of human flourishing, such that its absence lessens overall human flourishing. In other words, why is sexual procreation a higher purpose than fostering close and deep emotional attachments between people in love? And if it is, then does it follow that all Catholic clergy are farther from the ideal of humanity than procreating non-clergy?
dguller
ReplyDelete"It is practically impossible that a conspiracy that involved a large number of rapists, as well as the assorted staff involved in the kidnapping, drugging, and safe return of the women would necessarily make a [sic] mistake at some point, especially the larger the number of people involved, and the longer the time period in which the program was running. " (emphasis yours)
Whether this is practically impossible or highly unlikely hardly matters. Even absent such a programme at least one woman has been raped in a way that left her entirely unaware, in a way which didn’t injure her, didn’t make her pregnant, didn’t pass on disease, and that she hasn’t found out about.
Sure it’s easy to say a hypothetical is ok, when it has to be impossible. But are you okaying this almost certainty because some pervert’s “human flourishing” has been maximised (which makes your case for buggery being a boon, not bad, under Natural Law)?
Forget the hypothetical programme victims for a moment, and read about a real woman who was raped for two years before finally finding out that she was being abused.
In the two years before discovering her rape:
Was anything bad being done to the victim?
Did the police do the right thing in intervening?
Bearing in mind the perpetrator’s ”ultra-rare medical condition somnophilia – dubbed sleeping princess syndrome – in which predators obtain sexual thrills from victims who are asleep” did “human flourishing” justify his actions?
Jack:
ReplyDeleteIn the two years before discovering her rape:
Was anything bad being done to the victim?
Did the police do the right thing in intervening?
Yes, the act was wrong, because she was being violated against her will and without her consent, which compromises her autonomy, self-ownership, and personal integrity, and is also a violation of commutative justice. And since physical contact without consent is assault, which is a criminal act, the police did the right thing to intervene.
Incidentally, Aquinas says in Objection 1 at ST IIa-IIae, Q65, A1:
ReplyDelete“Now according to nature it is appointed by God that a man's body should be entire in its members, and it is contrary to nature that it should be deprived of a member. Therefore it seems that it is always a sin to maim a person.”
And his response is:
“Nothing prevents that which is contrary to a particular nature from being in harmony with universal nature: thus death and corruption, in the physical order, are contrary to the particular nature of the thing corrupted, although they are in keeping with universal nature. On like manner to maim anyone, though contrary to the particular nature of the body of the person maimed, is nevertheless in keeping with natural reason in relation to the common good.”
Now, here is talking specifically about physically maiming a part of the body, and endorses the general principle that I’ve been defending, i.e. that violating or frustrating the natural end of a part can be permissible if that action is conducive to the flourishing of the whole.
But if you knew that it would be the result, then would it be moral, even though you knowingly frustrated the natural end of a bodily organ by damaging it to the point of dysfunction, or surgically excising it altogether from the body?
ReplyDeleteI think I could know it would *likely* be the result. That seems to be about as far as I can ever get on this one. It's certainly not the result I'm intending by the act.
But again, if the ultimate goal is to promote overall human flourishing,
It's not, certainly not in the way you seem to be interpreting where this makes immoral acts moral if the end result is thought to be net positive. That's just utilitarianism.
I thought that you were appealing to the “ick” factor of bestiality.
I don't appeal to the ick factor of much anything. I thought the bestiality case was more clear cut in a relevant way.
Then why the strenuous objections to the kind of inquiry that I’m proposing is absolutely necessary to determine whether some acts are moral or immoral? You seem to think that arriving at a conclusion on the basis of philosophical and metaphysical reasoning means that the conclusion is true. I’m saying that it might be true, but it also might not be true. We would have to look and see to determine its actual truth or falsity.
No, I'm saying that philosophical and metaphysical reasoning AND empirical observation and even experiment can inform us, but 'this experiment will determine its actual truth or falsity!' is a load in this case. THAT is what I'm objecting to. You seem to think that the results of science - ANY science - are decisive. But no. Not all experiments are created equal, not all fields are equal, not every question is equally tractable. Again: these problems aren't created by me. They don't go away if I ignore them.
After all, there is the claim that act X contributes to human flourishing HF, whereas act Y does not contribute to HF (or contributes to a lesser degree of HF than X does)
Actually, you're the one - from start to finish - who has been equating NL with some apparently utilitarian 'human flouishing' view. I agree that human flourishing plays a role, but not in the way you seem to think it does.
I agree that testing it would be extraordinarily difficult, but so what? You can say that about most research. That does not mean that its degree of difficulty absolves you of the need to engage in it if you want to know whether your beliefs are true or false. And certainly, if the research is impossible to conduct, either in principle or in practice, then no-one knows the truth of the matter. And then what do we do in this inherently undecideable situation?
You may be equivocating on kinds of difficulty. Testing for the Higgs Boson is extraordinarily difficult - you need a multi-billion dollar device. But you can get pretty damn accurate results for the sort of questions the relevant scientists are asking, using it. 'Testing' to answer the sort of questions we're discussing - where it's practically impossible to even get anything resembling a 'control group' - are another thing entirely.
The sort of 'knowing your beliefs are true or false' you're speaking of is unavailable. It's also not necessary. If the bulk of reasoning takes place in the philosophical and metaphysical realm, so long as that is acknowledged, I'm superficially fine with it. In fact, the bigger problem is some yutz (not you) running around talking about how SCIENCE proves his moral theory or political position, when it damn well doesn't.
But if you knew that it would be the result, then would it be moral, even though you knowingly frustrated the natural end of a bodily organ by damaging it to the point of dysfunction, or surgically excising it altogether from the body?
ReplyDeleteI think I could know it would *likely* be the result. That seems to be about as far as I can ever get on this one. It's certainly not the result I'm intending by the act.
But again, if the ultimate goal is to promote overall human flourishing,
It's not, certainly not in the way you seem to be interpreting where this makes immoral acts moral if the end result is thought to be net positive. That's just utilitarianism.
I thought that you were appealing to the “ick” factor of bestiality.
I don't appeal to the ick factor of much anything. I thought the bestiality case was more clear cut in a relevant way.
Then why the strenuous objections to the kind of inquiry that I’m proposing is absolutely necessary to determine whether some acts are moral or immoral? You seem to think that arriving at a conclusion on the basis of philosophical and metaphysical reasoning means that the conclusion is true. I’m saying that it might be true, but it also might not be true. We would have to look and see to determine its actual truth or falsity.
No, I'm saying that philosophical and metaphysical reasoning AND empirical observation and even experiment can inform us, but 'this experiment will determine its actual truth or falsity!' is a load in this case. THAT is what I'm objecting to. You seem to think that the results of science - ANY science - are decisive. But no. Not all experiments are created equal, not all fields are equal, not every question is equally tractable. Again: these problems aren't created by me. They don't go away if I ignore them.
After all, there is the claim that act X contributes to human flourishing HF, whereas act Y does not contribute to HF (or contributes to a lesser degree of HF than X does)
Actually, you're the one - from start to finish - who has been equating NL with some apparently utilitarian 'human flouishing' view. I agree that human flourishing plays a role, but not in the way you seem to think it does.
I agree that testing it would be extraordinarily difficult, but so what? You can say that about most research. That does not mean that its degree of difficulty absolves you of the need to engage in it if you want to know whether your beliefs are true or false. And certainly, if the research is impossible to conduct, either in principle or in practice, then no-one knows the truth of the matter. And then what do we do in this inherently undecideable situation?
You may be equivocating on kinds of difficulty. Testing for the Higgs Boson is extraordinarily difficult - you need a multi-billion dollar device. But you can get pretty damn accurate results for the sort of questions the relevant scientists are asking, using it. 'Testing' to answer the sort of questions we're discussing - where it's practically impossible to even get anything resembling a 'control group' - are another thing entirely.
The sort of 'knowing your beliefs are true or false' you're speaking of is unavailable. It's also not necessary. If the bulk of reasoning takes place in the philosophical and metaphysical realm, so long as that is acknowledged, I'm superficially fine with it. In fact, the bigger problem is some yutz (not you) running around talking about how SCIENCE proves his moral theory or political position, when it damn well doesn't.
My point was that obviously neither of us would endorse cherry picking, and thus your point that my analysis or inquiry would have to take into considerable all relevant evidence and findings was a truism, and certainly not anything that counted against my position.
ReplyDeleteIt sure does when your position seems to be 'either we get a decisive and final answer from science or we're completely in the dark'. You're in the dark even if you turn to science on this one, unless you start picking up universe simulators or such.
And that makes practical reason in NL completely impractical.
I think you're going to have to search long and hard to find any NL proponent who considers NL in such a way that they'd think your reply here is even within the ballpark.
And yet if the kind of inquiry that I’m proposing is necessary to determine what acts are moral and immoral,
It's not. I think at this point what you mean is that it's necessary to determine things to your level of satisfaction.
I'm not against the inquiry, full stop. Go ahead, perform it. But the level of decisiveness you'd like out of it is simply absurd, it's absurd to pretend it's even available, and you still haven't acknowledged one of the central problems with it: namely that, even if your view of NL is granted (which I dissent from), you're going to have to figure out how to evaluate acts. You seem to want to treat 'net gain of happiness' as THE standard. From what I understand of NL, that is a completely busted standard.
A hypothesis can be more reasonable than another, and yet be false.
Welcome to the risk we all have to take when making decisions about the world we live in. Bonus difficulty: the accepted wisdom of experimental science can also turn out to be radically wrong. This has happened in *physics*, where problems are often vastly more tractable. In psych/social sciences? There's a reason some people have trouble even calling them sciences.
It is practically impossible that
Practically impossible? Sure, at the moment. But not in principle possible. Practical impossibilities may be overcome.
And I don't care if they are in this case. The act should not be permitted.
If the “good outcome” is an increase in HF, then it is good, according to NL.
Not in the sense you're taking it to be, no. I think if you're going to stick to this line, then we're at a wall - I've seen multiple people in this thread try to explain the problem with this tack, but you're still sticking to it.
As such, if no form of inquiry could determine whether the hypothesis was true or false, then we are in a situation of radical undecidability without the hope of resolution.
At this point I can't help but wonder how you deal with the claim that all science is provisional. By your standards accepting that would apparently rocket you into complete self-doubt about everything but logical truths, I suppose.
Actually, a certain amount of that self-doubt is a good thing.
No, I would consider the proposition to be possibly true or false, but not necessarily true or false. That is why I’m saying that an inquiry should be conducted to determine whether it is true or false.
I don't know. Would performing such an inquiry be moral? I suppose we'll need to test that first...
Yes, the act was wrong, because she was being violated against her will and without her consent, which compromises her autonomy, self-ownership, and personal integrity, and is also a violation of commutative justice. And since physical contact without consent is assault, which is a criminal act, the police did the right thing to intervene.
ReplyDeleteHow do you know the net result, until the police intervened, was not positive? Isn't this the sort of thing that requires scientific experiment?
And why does the existence of a law seem to deliver major input into morality in this case? Aren't there laws which would be immoral to follow? Certainly following them may lead to not-optimal results.
Some thoughts on the discussion: First, Natural Law does not say that if something contributes to human flourishing then it is moral. It is easy for murder, robbery, etc. to contribute to flourishing in all sorts of ways, but Natural Law is not a sort of utilitarian or consequentialist calculus. And as Tony and others have been pointing out, human nature is integral or holistic: it is the human person who has ends, not an organ by itself. (An organ is just a kind of thing that makes it easy to focus on one part or operation out of context.) So the whole body has life and growth as its end (or rather the whole person has bodily life and growth as an end), and organs contribute to that in their own way.
ReplyDeleteSo there is never a question of justifiably "violating" an organ (i.e. violating the body in some way or other). If you have a gangrenous limb that endangers your life, you can cut it off, because the limb is no longer serving its purpose — it has already failed to serve its purpose; amputation is not violating something that is no longer there. But what if the limb still somewhat is able to walk/etc.? I think the correct thing to say under natural law is that it is still not a violation to amputate it — remember that the end of all limbs and organs, of the body as a whole, is to grow and sustain life. If part of your body is so diseased that it threatens your life, then it is not fulfilling its purpose, regardless of what partial functionality it may still possess. (A totally gangrenous leg still has mass just as healthy leg should, for instance!) The threat to your health does not have to be immediate; even if it would take some time for the disease to spread to the rest of your body, a member that is slowly killing you has already failed to act as it should. (This also suggests that preventative amputation could be immoral. Perhaps if some organ were highly susceptible to disease, that might be defended — after all, to be so susceptible in the first place means there's something wrong with it in some way; if it were perfectly healthy, it would not have a particularly high chance of going wrong. Certainly chopping off a perfectly good leg simply because it "might" get gangrene some day is not justifiable.)
More from Aquinas, via the same just-quoted series:
ReplyDeleteA member should not be removed for the sake of the bodily health of the whole, unless otherwise nothing can be done to further the good of the whole. Now it is always possible to further one's spiritual welfare otherwise than by cutting off a member, because sin is always subject to the will: and consequently in no case is it allowable to maim oneself, even to avoid any sin whatever. Hence Chrysostom, in his exposition on Matthew 19:12 (Hom. lxii in Matth.), "There are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven," says: "Not by maiming themselves, but by destroying evil thoughts, for a man is accursed who maims himself, since they are murderers who do such things." And further on he says: "Nor is lust tamed thereby, on the contrary it becomes more importunate, for the seed springs in us from other sources, and chiefly from an incontinent purpose and a careless mind: and temptation is curbed not so much by cutting off a member as by curbing one's thoughts."
Which would support my own contention that in the case of sodomy, regardless of any perceived good engaging in it would provide, alternatives are available to pursue - and should be pursued. And if absolutely no alternatives to a given desire are possible - if someone is pathologically obsessed - then we're into the realm of surgical methods.
[continued...]
ReplyDeleteActually violating the end of some organ — which is to say, violating the end of the human person by means of some particular organ — would be something like forcing yourself to vomit after eating. That is not how the digestive process properly contributes to your health, so it is an abuse. Skipping lunch is fine — it isn't doing anything to your digestive system at all. (Of course if missing that meal was dangerous to your health it would be a violation, though not of digestion in particular.) The human reproductive system is different from other organs and processes in that it is not directed towards one's own growth, but it nevertheless must be used according to its proper function (or not used at all). The reason that the different components of human sexuality have to go together is because that's how human beings are built: if instead of being human, we were creatures that could exercise the bonding aspects separately and independently from the reproductive aspects and so on, then it would quite possibly be good to do so. But we are human, therefore to try to separate those aspects is not to act in a healthy human way.
Hence homosexual acts are clearly distinct from the non-violations mentioned. They are not a kind of amputation or operation that prevents some already-corrupted part of a person from causing further damage. They are not the lack of operation of some human function. It would of course be permitted to amputate ones reproductive organs (under suitable circumstances!). And there are less drastic methods that sometimes work — for example, one might be able to perform surgery on a damaged leg and save it. But note that even if the leg lost all sense of feeling, it would not then be right to use the leg as a sledgehammer — that would be a violation. Likewise, there may be a justification to operate on ones reproductive organs with the result that they are rendered infertile. (This is the sort of case where the DDE is typically consulted.) But as with the numb leg, natural law still requires that those organs not be used in a way with contradicts their proper (healthy) purpose. Again, it is the whole person who acts and has ends; and he may not play off one part of his body against another, to game the system and somehow "maximise" his flourishing score.
dguller
ReplyDelete“Now, here is talking specifically about physically maiming a part of the body, and endorses the general principle that I’ve been defending, i.e. that violating or frustrating the natural end of a part can be permissible if that action is conducive to the flourishing of the whole.”
I don’t read that article as endorsing your general principle that violating or frustrating the natural end of a part can be permissible if that action is conducive to the flourishing of the whole. It’s a specific point about what a rightful public authority may mete out as punishment. Aquinas is quite clear that maiming would not be lawful for a private individual even with the consent of the member’s owner .
Moreover, if read just as expansively in his Reply to Objection 3 Aquinas would be seen to be underlining a point Crude made to you earlier – that, when it comes to furthering a homosexual’s human flourishing, there’s always some alternative to anal sex; an alternative that doesn’t violate or frustrate the natural end of a part.
Oops, got delayed in posting. My points were already made.
ReplyDeleteCrude:
ReplyDeleteI think I could know it would *likely* be the result. That seems to be about as far as I can ever get on this one. It's certainly not the result I'm intending by the act.
There is no likelihood about it. The intervention would involve the destruction of the essential functional components of the organ, making functionality impossible. And you would have to know this in advance, which means that it is part of your intention. Intention isn’t just what you want to happen, but about what you expect to happen, given the nature of the act and its likely consequences.
It's not, certainly not in the way you seem to be interpreting where this makes immoral acts moral if the end result is thought to be net positive. That's just utilitarianism.
So, the morality of an action is not determined on the basis of the action’s impact upon the person’s overall human flourishing? That goes against everything that I’ve read on this subject, which admittedly is not comprehensive. One odd consequence of such a position is that the morality of the action is independent of the person’s final end, which also means that it is independent of the person’s nature, because formal causes are incoherent without final causes, and vice versa. If you eliminate final causes from the account, then you also eliminate formal causes.
No, I'm saying that philosophical and metaphysical reasoning AND empirical observation and even experiment can inform us, but 'this experiment will determine its actual truth or falsity!' is a load in this case. THAT is what I'm objecting to.
And I don’t understand why you are objecting, other than the fact that the inquiry that I’m saying is necessary is really, really hard, and possibly impossible to do at all. And if that is your objection, then I don’t find it persuasive at all.
Actually, you're the one - from start to finish - who has been equating NL with some apparently utilitarian 'human flouishing' view. I agree that human flourishing plays a role, but not in the way you seem to think it does.
Then what role does human flourishing play, according to you? To me, the degree of human flourishing in A is proportionate to the degree to which A actualizes the ideal standard of humanity that exists in A’s human nature. The more A actualizes his human nature, the closer A is to the ideal of humanity, and the closer A is to the ideal of humanity, the more A is said to be flourishing as a human being.
The sort of 'knowing your beliefs are true or false' you're speaking of is unavailable. It's also not necessary. If the bulk of reasoning takes place in the philosophical and metaphysical realm, so long as that is acknowledged, I'm superficially fine with it.
Why isn’t it necessary?
Also, are you saying that there are not different degrees of approximation towards the human ideal such that the closer approximations to the ideal correspond to a higher degree of human flourishing? Are you saying that there are such different degrees, but there is no way to measure or know where on the scale from minimum to maximum expression of humanity an individual person occupies? Are you saying that there is a way to measure it, but there is no way to correlate that measurement with particular human actions in order to determine which actions correspond to a higher location in the scale of human flourishing?