Morals from Nature: What about homosexuality?

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.