A Quick Note on Penguins
Jason Kuznicki on Sep 16th 2005 10:09 am |
Frankly, I’m sick of ‘em. Straight, gay, ex-gay, whatever. Enough with the penguins already.
Look… Sea turtles slither up to the beaches, lay their eggs in the sand, and skulk away under cover of darkness, never to see their young again.
Or consider bonobos, about which we read,
Sexual intercourse plays a major role in Bonobo society, being used as a greeting, a means of conflict resolution and post-conflict reconciliation, and as favors traded by the females in exchange for food. Bonobos are the only non-human apes to have been observed engaging in all of the following sexual activities: tongue kissing, face-to-face vaginal intercourse, oral sex, genital rubbing between females, and “frottage” between males. This happens within the immediate family as well as outside of it. Bonobos do not form permanent relationships with partners.
You want to talk about the moral lessons nature teaches us? Don’t even get me started.
Whenever you are going to claim that nature teaches us straighforward lessons about human conduct, what you are really saying is that you want everyone else to consider your way of thinking as perfectly unproblematic. What you are counting on is that somewhere deep inside all of us, some reflexive chord will be struck, not by rational argument, but by the very cuddliness of nature itself and by the sloppy thinking that says that everything natural is good.
Fundamentally, it isn’t fair to ask nature to do this kind of heavy lifting. Now you may happen to find penguins (or even, gods forbid, sea turtles) to be good examples of how humans ought to act–but merely being able to find an animal model of the social arrangement that you prefer does not in itself make that arrangement any more legitimate or natural for humans: Even if penguins were perfectly monogamous and perfectly heterosexual–which everyone now knows to be false–this in itself proves nothing about how humans should live. Penguins are no more morally endowed than the sea turtles who abandon their young or the bonobos who have sex as a greeting between brother and sister. These creatures are not morally endowed because so far as we can tell, they could not choose to do otherwise.
Humans, who can always choose to do otherwise, need more to go on than this.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go scratch up some of my furniture. I just saw my cat doing it, and it looked like fun.
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Jason,
Are you specifically addressing the comments being made by the religious right on the documentary March of the Penguins? Because the point being made in Ed’s post, as well as comments on this blog, seemed to just be relating to homosexuality being natural and evident in other species. Are you also suggesting that using the naturalism of homosexuality in other species is a bad argument- philosophically- to make when defending it in humans?
This isn’t meant as criticism by any means. I’m just asking for a little bit of clarification.
I don’t think Jason is criticizing me because I think he knows that my invoking of penguins was only to show how selective and absurd it is for those who are anti-gay to invoke “nature” as an argument against it. I agree with him completely. While I think it’s ridiculous to claim that something that is observed throughout nature is “unnatural”, it’s also ridiculous to think that merely because one observes something “in nature”, it’s okay for humans to do. If that were the case, we’d be eating our young if they appear weak and killing each other to insure access to the most mates.
Yes, I do mean to cut both ways here.
Just as we would never abandon our children in imitation of cute natural sea turtles, so too we ought not to conclude that merely because we see any other behavior in nature, that behavior must be fine in humans. Not even if it’s practised by human-like bonobos, and not even if we really really want to behave that way in the first place. Instead, we should consider whether that behavior is good or bad for us, as human beings.
Natural doesn’t imply good, but natural implies natural.
Yeah, I was pretty sure that’s what he was saying, and I agree with that too. I was just unsure of the context.
Thanks
When people start talking about how good gay penguins are at raising other penguins’ children, I think the discussion has left the area of “homosexuality exists in nature.” Even if the Penguin Analogy were just about showing naturally occuring homosexuality, we could just as easily look at human society and show that homosexuality has existed all over the world throughout history, without resorting to other species. I also don’t think the argument over whether homosexuality is natural is really very important — things can be natural but immoral. Isn’t the whole idea of a system of morality to overcome natural impulses?
For the record, I don’t think that Ed was implying that since gay penguins want to be parents gay humans should be allowed to marry and adopt. I think he was just telling a funny story. But I guess he can clarify that.
Oops… I hadn’t seen Jason’s and Ed’s replies yet when I posted that.
I think the point about finding occurances of Homosexuality is only worth making as a repsonse to people claiming that homosexuality is not natural. Otherwise it doesn’t prove much.
It is interesting to notice that the same people who refer to nature to fight homosexuality are probably the same who will claim that human being are superior beings and have nothing to do with animals. As Jason points out in his post, this only proves the speciousness of their arguments.
[...] This is the reason why many conservatives and libertarians, find themselves drawn to the conclusions of evolutionary psychology, and this, I think, is the answer to Kuznicki’s penguins post. The reason that people are interested in the sexual behavior of penguins is because they think that by examining their behavior we can extrapolate basic natural rules by which we can judge human behaviors. I agree with Kuznicki, however, that such an attempt is misguided in this context, but the purpose of it is comprehensible. [...]