Many people don't particularly enjoy debates anymore because debates these days often degenerate into redundant arguments and name-calling. Naturally, that would never happen on Duke's campus. But if we want to get somewhere we need to understand why this degeneration happens at all.
Philosopher Alasdair McIntyre observes that the poverty of our moral and political discourse today is due in part to emotivism-"the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character." If this is true, moral arguments simply cannot be rationally persuasive; they can only be emotionally persuasive.
Could this be why public discourse is so heated yet so vapid these days?
It remains fashionable today to claim that there is no basis for "right" and "wrong" extrinsic to us. When you relinquish your belief in any real moral law, however, you also abnegate your ability to rationally criticize others for failing to live up to it. Moral indignation has been especially in vogue in response to my last column "I don't hate gays (and neither does God)." Unfortunately, the proponents of gay marriage have been forced by their emotivism to argue on purely emotional grounds.
Think about it. If right and wrong are beyond mere personal opinion, we need a way of rationally discriminating between them independent of our emotions. Natural law-the basis for much Christian moral theology-provides it. It was acknowledged by the Greeks (chief among them Aristotle), Aquinas, Spinoza, the Enlightenment philosophers (some attackting it) and every other respectable philosopher.
Natural law is concerned with the ultimate purposes (or teleology) of our inherent designs. A common analogy is a knife, which can be described in physical detail but will not be fully understood until its purpose-cutting-is stated. Everything that's designed has this teleological angle to it.
The same goes for us. Without acknowledging our moral purposes (what Aristotle might call the telos) we cannot know whether we are fulfilling or frustrating them, and we cannot fully understand ourselves-just as we can't understand a knife without knowing why it was made. Mature self-knowledge hinges on an integrated understanding of the human person-body, mind and soul.
When we talk about "natural" (an act accordant with our inherent designs) and "unnatural" (discordant with them) in moral terms, it is in this context, a context foundational for canon law, thus English law, thus American law.
And so natural law is particularly important in understanding sexual morality. The salient examples: the human genitalia, among other things, are designed for sexual intercourse. The anus, on the other hand, is used for defecation. It is prima facie unnatural to combine the two. Doing so frustrates their purposes and our telos, rendering anal intercourse immoral by the tried-and-true standards of natural law.
This is not a fashionable "reinvention of hate." The new fad is instead relativism, the dismissal of thousands of years of moral philosophy because, well, you don't like it.
Note also that the existence of homosexual behavior in nature has nothing to do with natural law, which concerns what ought to happen (morals) rather than what does happen (statistics).
My (count 'em, six) published detractors seemed entirely ignorant on this point. They have demonstrated no knowledge of any sensible moral framework in which to phrase their beliefs. Instead, they've removed all of the important terms of this debate (like "good" and "natural") from their proper historical, philosophical and moral grounding, rendering them largely meaningless save for emotive purposes. Unfortunately, emotive discourse is rationally incomprehensible, and moves effortlessly from indignation to insult.
Believe me, I'm happy that "gay pride" has some substance. But let no one deceive you into thinking that "gay pride" is only about a marginalized group trying to garner the respect of personhood. Every decent person on campus already gives them this respect, and I said I would tolerate nothing less.
Nor is the existence of legal differences a sign of "inequality"; it's an acknowledgment of differences extant between social institutions (whether family units, businesses or churches). If these differences don't matter when it comes to marriage, then indeed the polygamist may simply claim that he should have equal partnership rights under the law-unless you're going to discriminate based on his "natural" sexual inclinations to marry multiple partners. Love is love, after all, isn't it?
I wrote my previous column to show that it was OK to question the gay movement. Sadly, the past two weeks has demonstrated the opposite, and in the process proved my column's conclusion: it is not OK. The gay movement demands respect for the gay lifestyle, and if you speak against it you will be vilified and your religion will be mocked-with impunity. There are no premises here, only a conclusion-and how dare you disagree?
But by comparing me to racists and dismissing my writing has hateful, you have not merely called me a bigot: You have called every person who disagrees with you on gay "sex" and "marriage" a bigot. That's an awful lot of people to defame.
As predicted, this has had a stultifying effect on discourse. Being called a bigot is "other-izing" and dehumanizing: you don't listen to or respect bigots. They're just wrong (morally and intellectually), because any argument premised on hate is invalid. Directed against a thoughtful and respectful presentation of the other side, that conduct is unjustifiable, indefensible and abusive. And that is hateful.
Justin Noia is a Pratt junior. His column runs every other Thursday.
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