I have come across that site before! Even if one doesn’t agree with her conclusions, I personally like and respect what she’s done.

Full agreement here! (what else from a convinced Calvinist? )

Have you ever come across this article?

http://www.musingson.com/intro1.html

Your response raises two questions immediately:

(1) Is it really the case that the argument runs, “I was born this way; therefore, it’s morally neutral”?

I’ve never heard anyone argue for strict moral neutrality before. Rather, always it has been an argument from subjective validation: These are my feelings and sexual desires, and I am validated in expressing who I am.

That appears (to me, at least) to be an argument from the nature of things — i.e., my desires — to the moral validity of my actions.

Can you point me to a source who argues for moral neutrality?

(2) How would such an argument run? Martin’s point is to demolish the notion that we can “read out” moral norms from nature.

Assuming he has successfully done so, I can’t see how reading out moral neutrality could be any more successful than reading out moral reprobation.

In short,

“It’s against nature, so it’s wrong”

is no more valid than

“It’s within nature, so it’s permissible.”

Thanks for your thoughtful response to my post!

In regards to the Dionysius example, neither Aristotle (I think) nor myself would argue that wickedness is not a cause for thievery. The point is that someone’s wickedness alone is not sufficient evidence to prove that he or she is a thief. It is a logical leap, and thus unfounded. In a court of law, such reasoning would not hold up. One would need physical evidence and eyewitness accounts to draw such a conclusion. And in a court of law, the particular expression of criminality makes all the difference: shall you sentence the accused to a year in prison or to death?

If the existence of two genders is to be instructive in terms of sexual norms, or in the particular context of this post, the legal definition of marriage, then one must turn to other evidence, other lines of argument, more comprehensive ways of looking at the world, that would explain the existence of two genders, such that it would be instructive. Alone, the existence of two genders can tell us very little about sexuality and marriage.

Let me be clear about the cancer example: I provided it for the purpose of analogy. It is the same argument to suggest that the existence of two genders proves that only men and women were designed to be in sexual, romantic, and marital union with one another, as it is to suggest that the existence of cancer means that dying a death from out of control cells was designed by God. Both arguments read intention into existence. But as you rightly point out, one need not believe that God intended for people to die from cancer. However, in the same light, the former argument is insufficient too. We need not see two genders as a prescription for sexuality and marriage.

Thanks for a thoughtful blog post. I have quite a few thoughts in response and would like to wrestle with your arguments a bit here.

Regarding your example of Dionysius, while I agree that Dionysius’s wickedness is not a sufficient explanation for his thievery, this nevertheless does not exclude wickedness from being a potential cause of his thievery. It is reasonable to suggest that a man’s lack of scruples may (perhaps in conjunction with other factors, such as apparent need and opportunity) be relevant to his criminal habit, regardless of its relevance to the particularities of its expression.

In the same way, even though the existence of two sexes (and particularly the necessity of two sexes for procreation) is not alone sufficient to prove that heterosexuality is God’s design for humans, it cannot be altogether dismissed as irrelevant. The argument as FOF puts it may be invalid, but the non-necessary sign itself is not eliminated from still being potentially instructive.

Also, if the presupposition at work in the FOF argument is “that everything that exists was intentionally designed by God” (you don’t directly say this, but I think it’s what you mean to say), your extrapolation of it in the cancer example seems logically unfounded. “That everything exists was intentionally designed by God” does not “require one to believe that God designed cancer to ravage people’s bodies.” It simply requires one to believe that God designed cancer (or designed a world in which cancer could be produced). Period.
The fact of cancer’s existence and creation by God says nothing about potentially malicious reasons for it. At the very least, it says that God is a God who permits (and necessarily creates, even if indirectly) disease and suffering. Let’s not be hasty in bringing the conversation to theodicy before it’s fair game.

At the end of the day, I think you are correct in saying that the existence of two sexes is regularly used to “prove” much more than it is logically capable of proving; that said, let’s not forget the empirical observations we’re working with when dismantle the arguments that are using them poorly.

Forgive me for the length of this, and please feel free to correct any errors I might have made in this response. I’ll look forward to reading your future posts.

You make an great point and I actually don’t disagree. My intention with this post is not to dissuade those on the pro-traditional marriage side, but rather analysis. Within a religious setting, e.g. in the context of a sermon, verses suchas Leviticus 18:22 would likely be used as part of an argument against gay marriage or homosexuality.

However, for a wider audience, rhetors tend to appeal to traditional morality or “common sense.” While Focus on the Family is a religious (Christian) organization, in its efforts to preserve the marriage status quo, it must persuade people who may not find Bible verses particularly convincing. To do so, FOF turns to arguments like the one mentioned in this post.

You’re right to point out that both arguments–pro-gay and pro-traditional marriage–are arguments from non-necessary signs. We can use neither to arrive at a moral code for sexuality.

Sometimes the pro-gay argument you mentioned is produced in response to charges that being gay is a choice or that only heterosexuality is natural. If the debate over the morality of homosexuality rests on it being a choice or innate, then this would be an appropriate argument.

To be fair to the pro-traditional marriage argument, such an argument is sometimes supported with quotes from religious texts, as Jeremy mentions below, depending on the audience. However, it seems that an increasing number of people find the traditional interpretations of these verses insufficient reason to condemn homosexuality.

I agree with your conclusion though don’t necessarily follow your reasoning in light of Leviticus 18:22 and elsewhere. For those who see the Bible as the literal word of God and marriage as a sacrament, Aristotelian logic won’t be instructive. For me, respect for the dignity and the subjectivity of the other and loving acceptance of difference trumps traditional morality; but not everyone sees it that way.

Jeremy

Jeff, I think you’re misreading the ‘born that way’ argument – as I understand it, it goes more like this: ‘I was born this way (or ‘a god made me this way’), therefore it is morally neutral’.

Starting from this position, an attempt to declare homosexuality immoral would then founder on similar fallacies to those mentioned by Mr Camper.