Fallacies in Homoeroteleology
Timothy Sandefur on Mar 23rd 2007
As one who often argues issues of natural law, I want to add to what Dr. Kuznicki says below. The argument that “the natural purpose of sex is procreation” is a sophistical argument in another way: it drops the context in which we are using the term “natural.” To say something is a natural purpose, or telos, we have to understand what it is that we’re talking about in the first place. The telos of an acorn is different than the telos of a carrot, for example, and they differ in turn from the telos of a telephone—because different things have different natures and therefore different ends. The end of a sheep or dog and the end of a human being differ, too, and radically, because a human being possesses (at least a degree of) free will and the capacity to choose our own ends. If the end of a human being is to live an active and reasonable life, then that’s a very different thing than the end of a dog or cow:
[L]iving is apparently shared with plants, but what we ar looking for is the special function of a human beingl ehnce we should set aside the life of nutrition and growth. The life next in order is some sort of life of sense-perception, but this too is apparently shared with horse, ox and every animal. The remaining possibility then is some sort of life of action of the (part of the soul) that has reason…. [And the function of something is related to its nature, so that a good X is something that does an X’s function well] for a harpist’s function, e.g., is to play the harp, and a good harpist’s is to do it well. Now when we take the human function to be a certain kind of life, and take this life to be the soul’s activity and actions that express reason…the human good turns out to be the soul’s activity that expresses virtue.
Among the activities that go into a healthy human psyche (and this we can learn from observation) is the use of sexuality to express love, even without procreation. The obvious example is infertile couples. I think we ought to hesitate to say that George and Martha Washington or James and Dolley Madison were violating the law of nature when they slept together. But we use sex for things other than procreation. We should not be surprised in the least by humans taking hold of Biology’s purposes and turning them toward our own, since this is one of the distinctive characteristics of human beings: we make noises to communicate, but also to talk to ourselves, or write poems, or sing for no particular reason at all. We eat for sustenance, but we also eat to express ourselves or commune with God, and so forth. To contend that our purposes must never diverge from Biology’s purposes is to commit what Daniel Dennett calls “the nudist fallacy”: since we are born without clothes, clothing must therefore be “unnatural.” But in fact, clothing is completely natural for human beings, once we keep in mind that when we speak of something being “natural,” we are talking about natural for human beings—those things that arise from the qualities of human nature: in this case, the use of sex to express love.
Of course, things like adultery or promiscuity are, in my view, harmful to human beings and out of synch with their natural ends*: hence they bring on harmful psychological consequences. (As Nathaniel Branden put it, for every irrational value, there is a hangover.) But this is true both in homosexual and heterosexual relationships. “Unnatural” sex is sex that does not serve the natural end of human beings. But this is different than the natural end of sex for a dog. One would not say that human beings walk “unnaturally” because we walk on two legs while a dog is more in keeping with nature because he walks on four; walking on four legs is natural for a dog, while walking on two legs is natural for human beings.
What I’ve always found peculiar about the pseudo-Thomistic argument that homosexuality is “unnatural” is the way it reduces human nature entirely to biology, thus rejecting the quality of the mind (or soul, if you like) that is so distinctive about us. One encounters the same tendency in anti-abortion or stem-cell-research arguments: these cells have human rights because they possess human DNA, regardless of the fact that they do not have minds. And yet one hears this argument from precisely the same people who complain about modern society overlooking the soul, and treating human beings like numbers or like robots and ignoring their individual human qualities! Conservatism thus once again contradicts itself: when we are talking about the economy, we are damned for allegedly ignoring man’s spiritual nature, but when we look for individual rights or teleology to arise from man’s mind, and not from his mere possession of human DNA, well, then we’re baby-killers. Which is it?
*–which is, of course, not an argument for their being illegal. If natural law means anything, it is that Nature will punish those who violate it, and doesn’t need help from the state.
Filed in The Belfry, The Biosphere, The Boudoir