gayness considered, completely and totally for the last friggen time

If you are gonna teach an introductory ethics class, you really oughta include homosexuality in your applied section...not because it is the most pressing moral concern facing...well...anyone, not because it is the most important issue of the twenty-first century and not because it is a really complicated, theoretically challenging topic. The reason you have to consider it is because it may be the issue that inspires the largest variety of absolutely horrible, useless, completely pathetic arguments around.
Sadly, if you were to ask 100 people their 'moral' stance regarding homosexuality you will get fewer than five reasonable answers. The popular arguments for both sides just plain suck. Folks advocate completely incoherent notions of morality when they talk about gay stuff, or they advocate moral standards that they don't really believe in...
Sooooooooo...since my self appointed position here is common sense distributor/reason provider AND since this topic seems to actually interest folks (you should see the absurd amount of time dedicated to the topic on various blogs) I'm gonna do you all a favor and explain why the arguments you hear (and likely some you hold) are completey friggen lame. Hopefully this will allow each and every last one of you to move the hell on and spend your energy on more interesting social, moral and/or political concerns.

So, as my gift to you I'll go over the really common, really shitty arguments, on both sides of the gayness/morality discussion, over the course of the next few of days.

We'll start with the popular arguments for why gayness is just plain wrong...

i. 'God said so...'

Any sort of Divine Command theory is going to suffer from a number of problems that are so darned problematic as to make the theory pretty damned useless when it comes to making real world moral decisions...I'll run through 'em for you, even though i probably shouldn't have to.

Perhaps the most obvious troubles that you'll arrive at in attempting to derive morality from divine command are the practical problems: 'God said blah blah blah....' cannot serve as reasonable justification for a particular moral belief because there are so darned many competing accounts of who God is and what God said.

There are roughly four hundred, ninety-three thousand and twenty-one different conceptions of God. All of which have roughly THE EXACT SAME justification for their existence. So which one do we follow? If we narrow it down to...say... a Christian conception, which interpretation? Catholic? Fundamentalist? Should I ask a Baptist or a Seventh-Day Adventist? They sure as heck aren't gonna agree on what is morally kosher and what ain't...so how do i decide? Let's say I somehow narrow it down even further (I'll go with Catholic), then our question is which sort of Catholic? What sort of interpretation of the Bible? Even if i can find a particular flavor of religion I like (we'll stick with Catholic...still), what about the questions that the Bible doesn't answer specifically? and/or those where it seems to give conflicting answers (if any answers at all)? The bible doesn't (despite what you may have heard) specifically say that abortion is wrong. So...is abortion wrong because the Bible apparently indicates that God 'knew' me before I was born? OR is it not really a big deal because the old testament flavored penalty for sort of/kind of accidentally 'killing' a fetus is to pay a little restitution?

So, the practical problems for divine comman are pretty darned hard to get around. How on earth do we decide which God? Which interpreter of his word? If we have a certain interpreter how do we reconcile the conflicting, misleading and/or contradictory stuff that seems to be all over the place in just about every religion? Seems like a totally hopeless pain in the ass doesn't it? That ain't even the half of it...

Although determining what God said may seem to be a practical, epistemological problem, it doesn't entail that a Divine Command theory is wrong (just that it may be impossible to justify. The really damning criticism of Divine Command theory is pretty darned simple: it is impossible for a rational being to embrace the notion that what justifies a moral claim (in other words, what makes the moral claim 'right') is merely that God said so....why? Because, if the only demand is that God said it, pronounced it or issued the rule, it is not only entirely arbitrary it also entails the possibility of a contradiction. If there is the possibility of a contradiction...well, that just can't fly. For example: If all that is required for a particular action to be morally right (or wrong) is that God say so, then he can say whatever the heck he wants...He may very well say, ' kill every dude with an italian horn and visible chest hair!' and that then would be a moral imperative, it would be the right thing to do. Not only that, but s/he could say, 'You must both kill the gold chain wearing, chest hair flaunting guido's and not kill them!'...The problem, i hope, is apparent. Not only could it be the case that God is reduced to an arbitrary bossy pants, but there is no prohibition on his/her contradicting him/herself. And that can't work for roughly a million reasons (not the least of which is that if you allow for contradiciton you can do or believe anything.)

Now, i imagine a protest from the back of the room, 'Hey! Dumbass, God wouldn't command stupid stuff like that because he is all good and loving and knowing AND you idiot he wouldn't contradict himself because he is rational!' Well, here is the deal...If you are even tempted to respond in that manner you have already conceded that Divine Command just don't work. If you are saying that God is too darned nice to command that we kill folks who have horrible personal style...then you have given up on the notion that God saying something is what makes it right (go and read Plato's Euthyphro, Socrates makes the same sort of point much better than I do.) What you are saying is that it is the nice, good, loving thing to do and that is why God commands it. If God commands it for a reason then that reason is part of the justification for why it is right. If that reason is part of what makes it right, then you don't believe in Divine Command.

Similarly let's consider the contradiction example: God says, 'Kill those guido bastards! AND Don't kill those guido bastards!'. The objection was, 'God wouldn't say something contradictory you idiot!' Well, why not? The answer, inevitably is, "...because God isn't stupid. He is rational!' Well, if he is rational then you are relying on reason to justify the rightness or wrongness of the claim, not just his word...Either way? you are damned if you do and damned if you don't (pun thoroughly and completely intended).

So, let's review....

Divine command just can't work. It can't help us make good moral decisions because there are too darned many competing accounts and no meaningfully relevant difference with regard to the evidence/justification for any of them. If help making moral decisions is something we want to do, Divine Command fails miserably because it won't be convincing to a rational agent... Perhaps more important is the logical problem. If the only justification we require for a moral claim is that God said so, the claims become arbitrary and lame. God could just be bossing us around for no good reason. If, however, we say that he has any sort of reason for what he commands, we concede that his saying so isn't what made the claim right in the first place and we refute the notion of Divine Command before it gets off the ground...

Divine command theory is just plain weak, whether you are talking about homosexuality or how many days you ought to refrain from sitting in the chair of a woman who was having her period. If however, you want to adopt it as consistently as possible, you best embrace every damned law in the Bible...from the shape and length of your beard to the crops you are gonna grow next to one another, because if you don't your position isn't even strong enough to demand the objections I offer here. You are conceding that interpretation is cool and your word, your interpretation of God's word is cool, therefore you have to concede that any other interpretation is cool too (unless of course you have some sort of direct access to god that I don't have...which you don't and can't).

All in all, Divine Command is a tough position to hold. To commit to it in a remotely consistent way, you would need to be willing to follow each and every prohibition the bible makes (which of course you aren't) and even if you were, you still wouldn't have any reason to believe that your beliefs were better than the muslim's or jew's around the block.

Our consideration of Divine Command leads us to a slightly more sophisticated (emphasis on slightly) slightly more defensable (still emphasizing slightly) position in the western tradition that is often used to condemn homosexuality on moral grounds: Natural Law Theory. Sadly, Natural Law is not going to offer us any help with regards to determining whether or not homosexuality is wrong because(as we will see next time) it (articularly as it is used in the debate regarding the right and wrong of gayness) is ridiculously problematic as well.