We’ve been
talking of late about “perverted faculty arguments,” which deploy the concept of
perversion in a specific, technical sense.
The perversion of a human faculty essentially involves both using the faculty but doing so in a way
that is positively contrary to its
natural end. As I’ve explained before,
simply to refrain from using a
faculty at all is not to pervert
it. Using a faculty for something that
is merely other than its natural end
is also not to pervert it. Hence,
suppose faculty F exists for the sake
of end E. There is nothing perverse about not using F at all, and there is nothing perverse
about using F but for the sake of
some other end G. What is
perverse is using F but in a way that
actively prevents E from being
realized. It is this contrariness to the very point of the
faculty, this outright frustration of
its function, that is the heart of the perversity. (See the paper linked to above for exposition,
defense, and application of the idea.)
As I note in
my essay on the perverted faculty
argument, not all
deliberate frustrations of a natural faculty are gravely immoral. For example, lying involves the frustration
of a natural faculty and thus is wrong, but it is usually only venially
sinful. So what makes the perversion of
a faculty seriously wrong? In particular, why have traditional natural
law theorists and Catholic moral theologians regarded the perversion of our sexual faculties as seriously wrong? (The discussion that follows presupposes that
you’ve read the essay just referred to – please don’t waste time raising
objections in the combox unless you’ve done so.)
The
foundations of traditional sexual morality, like the foundations of all
morality, are to be found in classical natural law theory. I set out the basic lines of argument in my
essay “In Defense of the Perverted Faculty Argument,” which appears in my book Neo-Scholastic Essays. The title
notwithstanding, the perverted faculty argument is by no means the whole of the
natural law understanding of sexual morality, but only a part. It is an important and unjustly maligned part
of it, however, as I show in the essay.
Along the way I criticize purported alternative approaches to defending
traditional sexual morality, such as the so-called “New Natural Law
Theory.” Anyway, you can now read the essay online.
After you’ve done so, you might follow up with some other things I’ve written on the subject of sexual morality.
If you think that the brain, or the genome, or the universe as a whole is a kind of
computer, then you are really an Aristotelian whether you realize it or
not. For information, algorithms, software, and other computational
notions can intelligibly be applied within physics, biology, and neuroscience only if an Aristotelian philosophy of nature is
correct. So I argue in my paper “From
Aristotle to John Searle and Back Again: Formal Causes, Teleology, and
Computation in Nature,” which appeared in the Spring 2016 issue of Nova et Vetera.
You can now read the paper online.
