When I started writing about how morality can be founded on Nature, it was in the context of a discussion with a couple of friends, one of whom kept raising the example of homosexual behavior as something that he thought obviously "contrary to Nature" and that he expected any teleologically-based ethics to condemn. Since then that conversation has wandered off in other directions, But I thought maybe I should address his question here.
I think the objections of this first friend, at least at a philosophical level, relied on some kind of argument that homosexual acts are intrinsically non-procreative and therefore somehow "wrong by nature." (I emphasize the words "at a philosophical level" because he also tended to wander of the subject and start growling about new laws around bathroom usage. But I didn't find anything of philosophical substance in that part.) But then the other friend broke in asking, "Why don't you think of homosexuality as something like a cleft palate, where Nature clearly intended one outcome but Her hand slipped when She made this one individual so he turned out not to match the design? Then you could say it's too bad and all, but there's no moral problem."
I think my second friend was trying to be a liberalizing influence here, but still I cringed a little at the image. To be clear, I don't have a horse in this race -- not personally -- but I do think it's valuable to understand the truth, and I don't think either of my friends has gotten there yet.
As far as non-procreative sex is concerned, I dealt with that in my previous post here. In the terms of that discussion, any sex that sparks love or brings people together is fulfilling at least one of its natural ends, whatever else we might say. But I can imagine that my second friend might answer back something like this:
"You know, Hosea, I have no problem with the fact that a homosexual couple won't beget new children. But my comparison of homosexuality with a cleft palate gets at another question entirely. I'm asking, 'Why does anybody want to do this in the first place?' It's clear to me why we (or most of us) are born with an attraction for the other sex: without it the species would never survive. But why do 3% of the population have an attraction for the same sex? At a biological or chemical level, how does that even happen? That's what I meant by saying that Nature was trying to reproduce the same pattern She uses for everyone else and somehow slipped."
Suppose he were to ask that. (In real life we haven't had this particular conversation.) What's the answer?
The first part of the answer is that it is misleading to use the words "at a biological or chemical level." As I argued way back in 2012, homosexuality is not a thing. There is no genetic marker for it. The only ways to find out whether someone is gay is to ask or watch; a blood test won't tell you.
The immediate objection to that position is that it makes homosexuality sound like a mere preference, like between chocolate and vanilla, or between pistachio and mint chocolate chip. And in that case, why is the incidence so small? Wouldn't we expect to see more of a bell curve, where a few die-hards are found out at each end who love chocolate and loathe vanilla (or the reverse) while most people are somewhere in the middle?
Indeed we would. And if we conducted our survey in -- oh, let's say Athens in the 4th century BCE -- that's more or less what we would find. Look at the discussion in the Symposium, which covers attraction to both girls and boys and in which the highest teaching comes from a woman (Diotima) ... but where some (not all) of the participants are frank about preferring boys. But in our own society there have historically been such a strong opposition to homosexual behavior and such a pervasive assumption of heterosexuality that you would expect anyone in the middle to settle for living a conventional heterosexual life without ever thinking about it. You would expect that the only ones ever to make an issue of it would be the die-hards out at one end who love pistachio and loathe mint chocolate chip.
That would be our 3%.
So much for the statistical distribution. As for the moral side, I really think it is all covered, in principle at least, in the earlier post.
If Nature, by providing a teleology for Man, is the source of our morality, then what is the morality of sex?
There have been a number of answers to this question over the years. The Catholic Church has articulated a theology of sexuality which is probably familiar in outline to most people: sex is good inside marriage when it is for the sake of begetting children; but sex outside of marriage, or sex acts where children are impossible (think of contraception, masturbation, or many other examples), are "intrinsically disordered" and wrong. What is interesting is that a number of authors who believe they are writing science find themselves in a similar boat for a similar reason: these are the authors who look at sex through the lens of sociobiology or "evolutionary psychology". They seem to have a lot to say about sexual jealousy, differential investments in childrearing, and so on, but to have some trouble accounting for non-procreative sexual activity. And of course the argument would be that non-procreative sexual activity doesn't leave children behind (obviously!) and therefore can hardly be selected-for in any normal Darwinian sense.
What interests me about both these positions is that on the surface they look so logical, but in their consequences they look totally at odds with the way human beings really live -- around the globe and over the ages. What's more, it is easy to think you have found the flaw in the argument and then go astray in another direction.
Both the Catholic and the "evolutionary psychological" positions rest on the premise that the purpose of sex is reproduction. From that, all the rest follows. If you want to reject those conclusions, the easiest way is to reject teleology and say "There are no purposes! Go do what you want!" But you know by now that I consider teleology to be a basic fact about living beings, so that too is an error.
What then?
If an argument leads to results which look absurd, but all the steps of the argument are logical, the error is probably in its premises. As noted, the premise behind both the Catholic and the "evolutionary psychological" teachings is this: Reproduction is the purpose of sex. But where is the error? If we concede that there are purposes in Nature, how can this premise possibly be false? Isn't that how we get children, through sex? Isn't it the only possible way to create new children?
Of course it is. And while I do affirm there is an error in that sentence, it's subtle. Only one word is wrong, and that word is not "reproduction." Its "the."
The point is that this premise ("Reproduction is the purpose of sex") itself relies on an earlier, hidden premise which states, "A thing can have only one purpose." But where is the evidence for that? How would you ever go about proving it? Can you prove it?
Presumably the argument would start by conceding that a thing can be used in lots of different ways, but would insist that only one of them is the true natural end or goal or purpose. A car can be used to get money (by selling it) or to impress your neighbor (by polishing it ostentatiously and parking it where he has to see it); but its natural purpose is to drive. And as far as it goes, the analogy sounds plausible. Does it work the same way in Nature? You could argue that I can use the hair on top of my head to make a political or fashion statement depending on how I wear it, but its natural purpose is to keep my head warm. Maybe the rest of Nature is like that too.
Only it's not. I can formally disprove the allegation that everything has only one purpose, as follows:
Lemma: It is possible for a thing to have more than one natural purpose.
Proof: For the sake of an example, consider the penis. What is its natural function: elimination of waste, or reproduction of the species? Both are essential to survival. Neither one can possibly be considered an incidental, side use. Neither one can be considered an abuse. Both purposes are absolutely fundamental. But they are different. Therefore it is possible for a thing to have more than one natural purpose. QED.
And with this proof, both the Catholic and the "evolutionary psychological" teachings collapse. Because while it is obvious that reproduction is a purpose of sex, there is no evidence whatever that it is the only one.
What else then? What other purpose can we reasonably suppose sex to have? Recall that I recently argued that the highest end for Man is friendship. And recall the argument I made ... gosh, almost three years ago, by now ... that the purpose of the orgasm is to make love -- to create or generate love even where it did not exist before (and therefore a fortiori to strengthen it where it does). Based on these two arguments, I think it is inescapable that one essential, natural purpose for sex is to bind us together, to help us love each other, to unite us as friends and lovers.
Naturally there are other ways to make friends too. Don't misunderstand me to say sex is the only path to friendship! But it can be one of them.
But if the purpose -- oops, excuse me, one of the purposes -- of sex is friendship and human bonding, then what should the morality of sex look like? Suddenly there is nothing wrong with all the different varieties of non-procreative sex (including contraception, masturbation, and all the others), as long as they are serving the purposes of love and bringing people together. On the other hand, rape is pretty obviously still bad because it takes something that should be a means towards unity and makes it a violent weapon instead.
I don't have a complete teaching to offer about the other consequences of this new understanding. This is new ground, and I am still thinking it through. But I expect the changes to be real, and -- what is more important -- closer in line with our lived human experience than the earlier teachings were.
Way back in 2012 I posted this article about the ethics of divorce. It makes a couple of points. First, marriage is a "school for character"; in that sense precipitate divorce can look like dropping a class before the first exam when you realize you haven't studied. Second, marriage is an environment for raising children. This means that if you can't raise them safely because there is a risk of physical abuse, divorce should be mandatory. But it also means that if you can't agree on how to raise them -- in particular, if you can't agree on fundamental ethical norms -- divorce should again be mandatory before any children are even conceived. On the other hand, I added, once the children are there you owe it to them to provide a safe and stable environment in which to grow; and this may mean making the best of a bad situation until they are older.
Now that I have argued for founding morality on Nature, do I have to change any of what I wrote earlier about divorce?
Not really. Everything about our duty to nurture and protect growing children stands as-is, absolutely without amendment: I even reference our duty to children when I discuss the Leopold and Loeb case in Part Two of this post here. Most of the other points in the earlier essay are based on things we know empirically about how children respond to different kinds of situations in the home. We know that they need physical safety. And we know that in order to develop a kind of emotional security inside themselves, they need stability in the home environment -- the same people, more or less, over long years.
How would this argument have looked from the perspective of the Old Stone Age? Much the same, but perhaps in one respect a bit easier.
The thing is, divorce is particularly destructive in the context of a nuclear family where there are only two adults to begin with. If one leaves, that's a 50% reduction. If the other parent dates for a while before finding a new spouse, that can mean a cycle of suitors trooping through the house, each one trying out for the role of Step-parent. This is anything but stable.
But so far as I understand it, the isolated nuclear family is a by-product of the enormous material wealth of the modern day -- enormous by comparison with earlier ages, who were more likely to live together because it was too expensive to do otherwise. A couple of centuries ago this would have meant multiple generations of the same family under one roof. If we push back as far as the Stone Age, I assume that the basic living unit was probably the clan or the tribe.
On the one hand, this might have made the job of parenthood easier, because there would be more adults to share the work with. Infants and small children are a lot of work to look after. There are times during the day or during the week when even one child is too much work for two adults. But many hands make light work. While two parents can only with difficulty meet the needs of one child, ten adults can do a pretty good job of taking care of forty children. If we lived together in small bands instead of nuclear families, we would have had those uncles and aunts and cousins and friends around to help out when we needed the help, because of course we would also do the same for them.
On the other hand, I think such an arrangement might have made divorce easier too, except it might not have been called "divorce." But if father and mother began to hate each other, and if the whole tribe were already involved in raising the tribe's children collectively, then presumably there shouldn't have been much obstacle to the mother and father simply choosing to have less and less to do with each other. The children would be raised much the same as before, by the same collection of tribal adults. They would have the same adults in their lives, setting boundaries and teaching them to stay away from cave bears and saber-toothed tigers. So the stability of the children's experience could be ensured without the mother and father having to grin at each other through clenched teeth every morning.
No doubt this picture is somewhat romanticized. And in any event I don't recommend it for the modern day. I don't see any pragmatic way to bring back genuinely tribal living in an age of cell phones and streaming personal media. The point of the thought experiment was just to check whether my recent arguments contradict my earlier ones. I don't think they do.
A few weeks ago I was writing about the foundations of morality, and I argued that they can be found in Nature. Specifically I argued that (at least in the classical understanding) it is possible to derive human morality from a teleology of Man; and I argued moreover that Man's nature as a biological organism guarantees us a teleology. The conclusion is that there is a human morality derived from our Nature that is not merely a matter of convention or an assertion of arbitrary will.
The next question, clearly, is: What does this natural morality tell us to do? What ends are we made for? How shall we live? And what kind of man is the highest, noblest, or best kind of man?
Aristotle answered this question by saying that the highest virtue is the virtue of our highest and most distinctive human part, viz., our reason. Since the best activity is that which is for its own sake and not for the sake of something else, the best reasoning is the pure contemplation of the philosopher. And the philosopher himself is the best and highest man.
I approach the question a little differently, although I certainly don't quarrel with all of Aristotle's results. I am just fine with recognizing courage, temperance, prudence, and justice as virtues. But I am not persuaded that human reason is so uniquely and distinctively human, that it is qualitatively (not just quantitatively) different from the kinds of cognition available to the other higher animals, such as dolphins or the other primates. It is true that human technology has allowed us to penetrate far out of the ecosystem where we arose and into most parts of the world, but after all ants seem to have achieved the same victory.
Remember, though, what I said in identifying the natural foundation of human teleology: with respect to our internal biological functioning, the " system of regular processes which interact to perpetuate themselves constitutes a teleology at a cellular level, or at the level of the single organism"; and at the level of the organism's life inside an ecosystem, the "system of acquired traits which function in a self-maintaining way can be described as a system of interlocking purposes that are an innate feature of this organism's life in this environment."
In other words, if we have evolved in such a way that we interact with our environment in a stable, sustainable way, where our way of life is both caused by and maintains both the environment and our evolutionarily-acquired features -- in that case, that way of life is what we are made for.
By that criterion, the life we were made for was the life of the Old Stone Age, which represents 99% of human history, and which therefore has a better claim to adjectives like stable and sustainable than any way of life we have seen ever since. What can we say about this way of life? Things that we know for sure include:
- We lived in communities, not large ones by modern standards but larger than a single family.
- We spoke language.
- We cooked our food.
- We made art.
- We cooperated on common goals, like hunting.
It has also been recently argued that human bands in the Old Stone Age had neither property nor marriage, keeping all their tools and raising all their children in common. This thesis is certainly not universally accepted (or at least not yet), but the similarities to Plato's ideal republic are unmistakable.
What are the ends of Man? I think it is the whole package, to be implemented so far as practically possible. We are made to live with others, to work together, to play together, to make music and art, and to raise children. To be clear, almost nobody in the modern day has any idea how to survive like we lived in the Old Stone Age, without medicine or metal or even bread or rice. And surely it is obvious that there is no way to support eight billion people on this planet using only Stone Age technology and no agriculture. So the qualifier "so far as practically possible" is an important one. But we can still live together and work together and all the rest of it. And those are good things for us to do.
What is the highest end of Man? I don't really want to limit the list to only one. Or to put it another way, I think it is a failure of our language that we don't have a single noun which means life-as-a-human-being. If there were such a noun, that would be my choice -- because that is what we have evolved to do, and therefore according to the principles I explained above that is what we are made for. Aristotle said our highest end was reason, and I agree that life-as-a-human-being includes reason as one component; but for the most part I think it is the practical reason of the man-at-work organizing a task with his fellows, and not the theoretical reason of the metaphysician (which by comparison looks a little hypertrophic or even pathological). Freud said that someone in good mental health should be able to "lieben und arbeiten" -- love and work -- and these too are part of the package but not the whole thing by themselves. Still, like reason, they are inestimably precious.
If I had to pick one single phenomenon or behavior as the highest end for Man, I think I would look at our eusociality, which comes as close as anything to a truly defining characteristic for us as a species, and I would nominate friendship. Friendship meets Aristotle's criterion insofar as (in at least the best and noblest cases) we it enjoy for its own sake and not purely in an instrumental way as a tool for getting something else. And from it we can derive all the other behaviors that I identified above as distinctively human. Community, language, and cooperation are surely related to friendship; for the rest, an artist might live alone and even cook for himself, but it is hard to imagine how he could have learned his art (or learned how to cook) without the initial help and support of friends.
Who, then, is the highest man? Aristotle proposed the philosopher; and if he meant a philosopher like Sokrates, who was always talking with his friends in the gymnasium or the marketplace, the suggestion at any rate doesn't look crazy. But the history of philosophy has also known great minds with awkward social skills, thinkers who had trouble connecting with anyone around them. And as I suggested above, it is hard not to see such cases as at least a little pathological. If I can say that the highest end of Man is life-as-a-human-being, then the highest man is someone who can do all those things surpassingly well, someone like Odysseus. H. D. F. Kitto writes in The Greeks (p. 172):
The hero of the Odyssey is a great fighter, a wily schemer, a ready speaker, a man of stout heart and broad wisdom who knows that he must endure without too much complaining what the gods send; and he can both build and sail a boat, drive a furrow as straight as anyone, beat a young braggart at throwing the discus, challenge the Phaeacian youth at boxing, wrestling or running; flay, skin, cut up and cook an ox, and be moved to tears by a song. He is in fact an excellent all-rounder; he has surpassing arete.
In fact the only question-mark that I have to set against Odysseus is that he seems to be a dangerous man to know ... look at the fate of all his shipmates on the voyage home, or of even innocent bystanders during his slaughter of the suitors. So I am actually not completely certain how well he stands with respect to the virtue of friendship. But perhaps the example is valuable anyway.
Nor is this ideal the special preserve of Antiquity. The very same perspective was captured in the late twentieth century by Robert Heinlein, in Time Enough for Love:
A human being should be able to fix a flat, con a ship, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, deliver a baby, heal the sick, comfort the dying, lie convincingly, take orders, give orders, write a sonnet, fight nobly, and die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
This is a piece that I wrote 25 years ago -- the date of the file on my home computer was October 23, 1995 -- but I still think the basic point is not wrong. I have made some minor adaptations (by dropping out proper names, for example).
Is it possible to convert someone from one religion to another?
In a trivial sense, of course it is. Anyone with a big enough army can force the people around him to enter certain buildings on certain days and do certain things. After enough repetition, belief will follow. A religion that offers social advantages can attract converts for purely secular reasons. And there are always people who want to be like their friends and therefore join their friends' religion for that reason.
But all these are uninteresting cases, because they have no real reference to anything beyond this world. The more interesting case is this: Is it possible for one person to convert another, when the latter is pondering the issue for himself, in the absence of any secular motivation? I suspect that the answer here is "No," but this requires explanation. For I do not deny that such conversions take place. C.S. Lewis was such a man, and became famous for his conversion in adulthood. What I deny, to be precise, is not conversion but converting. I deny that in the most serious case, the verb convert can be transitive: Lewis certainly converted to Christianity, but J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson did not convert him.
The point is that religion is rooted in experience and not ratiocination. Therefore, absent secular motivations or the like, persuasion is impossible without that personal experience, in the same way no one can be persuaded to like Mozart until he has heard Mozart. Consider a couple of examples.
I have twice been asked to help someone decide whether a religion is true. When I was at university, a friend once prayed intently for something improbable that she didn't really want; and when she got it she was rather scared. (She was depressed over something involving her current boyfriend, and prayed for a painless way to die that wouldn't make anyone feel guilty. She woke the next morning to find a gas leak in her room.) So she came to me to ask whether this was proof that prayer works. She said she chose me because she knew if she asked her ostentatiously Christian friends they would say Yes, while her ostentatiously atheist friends would say No, in each case categorically and by rote. But she thought I would give the matter serious thought, and she didn't know in advance what I would say.
Some years later my father was attending a Bible study circle lead by a buddy of his, and asked me what I made of the proofs of Christianity that this fellow urged on him. I asked, "Why do you ask me? Why not ask someone else who could give you a more certain answer?" He said that anyone else he asked would give him an answer that he could already predict, so he wasn't interested.
Think about that for a minute. In my father's eyes, testimony was worthless from someone whose answer he could already guess. Now supposing I gave him an answer, Yes or No. Would he accept it? On the contrary, once I'd answered with any certainty, I would become someone whose answer he could thenceforth guess, and so my testimony would become worthless. I would not have answered any questions for him about the truth or falsity of Christianity; I would only have given him information about me -- namely, that I was now predictable as far as that question goes.
In a real sense, then, nothing I could have said would have convinced him either way. If he were predisposed to believe, and I disagreed, I would become in his eyes an Atheist and therefore wrong. If he were predisposed to disbelieve, and I disagreed, I would become in his eyes a Believer and therefore wrong. Once you are prepared to discount the testimony of people who are (as you think) required to say what they say by blind adherence to some kind of dogma, then you can only convert yourself. And that in turn can take place only when you have had something happen inside you to prepare the way, to make you predisposed to convert. Anyone who tries to convince you of something which you have not experienced in some way -- for which the soil of your mind has not been somehow already prepared -- becomes in your view a lunatic or an idiot, whose testimony cannot be taken seriously. So you will only take seriously the testimony of someone preaching to you a faith which you want to hear, where the hard work of re-setting your emotional disposition (the crucial part of conversion) has already been done by you. In this sense, you can convert to a different religion, but no one else, in the most serious sense, can convert you.
