Back in the ’70s, when I was a child, my mother used to read the Bible to me. This was how I discovered that the written Torah appeared to condemn male homosexual acts. There are other takes on this apparently, but they’ve always seemed to be against the grain, perverse interpretations of what was pretty clearly extreme homophobia. At the time though, I didn’t have an issue with it and it seemed entirely logical that if sex was for reproduction, any form of sex which couldn’t lead to pregnancy was morally wrong. This was the simplistic understanding of a nine-year old.
When I was twelve, my English teacher compared homophobia to racism, and asked us, if we were opposed to racism, why would we be homophobic? It was the same kind of issue as far as he was concerned. This seemed an eminently consistent and sensible view to me, partly because at the time I considered racism to be a particularly terrible evil. One influence on my acceptance of this opinion was probably my own queerness, although I had yet to admit that to anyone. Certainly my White friend who was in the same English class as I and was similarly passionately anti-racist persisted in his homophobia for as long as I was aware of his opinions on the matter, which would’ve been another few years. In my case, I remember another pupil calling me “gay” in September 1981 and replying to him that it was terrible that he even considered it an insult. He too was still openly and strongly homophobic four years later. The one person who was aware of my sexuality and identity issues, which I used to call my “Problem”, once said of my opposition to homophobia that homosexuality was “not your Problem,” so clearly both she and I made a connection between the two.
But this post is not just about queerness and homophobia.
A few years later I went to University and became Christian. Before making a commitment, I expressed concern that I would have lots of questions about the issues the Christian faith raised for me, which were multiple. I was assured that this would not be a problem and that they encouraged questions. So, I converted and after a few months began to ask my questions, which were not all about homosexuality, but that was one major concern for me. So I brought it up, and the replies were varied. One was that it might currently be “fashionable” to tolerate homosexual activity but that God’s standards were unchanging and humans were not designed for that purpose. This was from a medical student by the way. Another homophobic Christian said, and this was more sympathetic, that he couldn’t imagine how bad it would be to find out you were gay and felt very sorry for them, but he was nonetheless still homophobic. But to me, this was just not an option, because by that point it seemed intuitively obvious that homosexual activity was not wrong and that homophobia was. As I’ve expressed it more recently, if the Bible told you that 2+2=5, you would either reject that part of the Bible (and possibly the whole thing) or try to work out why it seemed to you that it was saying that because it would clearly be saying something else, and since the Bible at least appears to condemn homosexual acts, that’s equally absurd and one could be expected to feel a similar motivation to resolve the problem.
This equation between the idea that 2+2=5 and the idea that homosexual acts are always sinful, I think, attempts to draw a parallel between the certainties of mathematics and the hope that ethics can be equally certain. There are positions in both ethics and mathematics which are called “intuitionism”. In maths, intuitionism is the position that maths has no external basis and is simply a creation of the mind. This is a more recent usage of the term in the philosophy of mathematics, preceded by Kant’s and his successors’ belief that intuition reveals the principles of maths as true a priori – they arise from logical deduction rather than observation. This seems counterintuitive (ha!) because to us, the Cosmos seems to run on maths and logic, and it’s also problematic for an externalist such as myself because we see concepts and ideas as external to the mind and having their own independent existence. It doesn’t seem to me that intuitionism and externalism could both be true, but since intuitionism can involve denial of the law of excluded middle (either P or not-P), maybe they could be. But at that point logic seems to have become what Arthur Norman Prior once called a “runabout inference ticket” where you can just conclude what you like from any premises. It doesn’t seem to be ultimately useful. This could, however, be psychoanalysed as a need for a feeling of certainty and solidity of foundations. It may not be that it’s mere logic.
Geometry is a notorious example of something which used to seem purely logical and valid without the need for observation to verify it. Euclidean geometry generally needs to be based on axioms which are intuitively true, such as “a straight line segment is the shortest distance between two points” and “a straight line segment can be extended infinitely as a straight line”. However, the fifth postulate is difficult to state simply. It can be stated thus: “If two lines are drawn which intersect a third in such a way that the sum of the inner angles on one side is less than two right angles, then the two lines inevitably must intersect each other on that side if extended far enough.” This amounts to the idea that parallel lines never meet, or meet at an infinite distance, and whereas it certainly seems true, the complexity of stating it rigorously makes it suspicious. In fact, it turns out that the Fifth Postulate is the result of observation rather than deduction, and other geometries are possible based on either assuming that parallel lines diverge or that they converge. The former, known as hyperbolic geometry, can be locally true in this Universe and would be most noticeable near the event horizon of a black hole, and the latter, known as Riemann geometry, is actually real geometry as it applies over most of the Universe, particularly on a large scale. Possibly counterintuitive truths which hold in the real world are, for example, that if you imagine the Earth wrapped in bandages, and you kept wrapping it in ever deeper layers, you would eventually find that you were surrounded by bandages and would be inside the ball rather than outside it, and that there is at any one moment a finite maximum distance between two points after which the direction between them reverses. These facts can be known easily to be true on a spherical surface: our antipodes are a maximum distance between two points on the surface of this bandageless orb, after which the directions between them reverses – go far enough east and you find yourself west of your starting point – and a large enough circle on the Earth’s surface will start to shrink if it “grows” any further.
If it’s possible for that postulate to be cast into doubt, and in fact turn out to be false, what else in mathematics could be? One possibility is that logic is also like this. For instance, truth and falsehood could simply be poles in between which other truth values exist or there could be truth values situated beyond truth, i.e. truth from falsehood could simply be the first step towards a “supertruth” infinitely more true than mere truth itself. If there’s that much play in both geometry and logic, perhaps all mathematics is merely an intuitionistic game. Even so, we do tend to operate on the principle that maths is set in stone and reliable most of the time.
Ethical intuitionism is in a sense the opposite kind of view to mathematical intuitionism. Formulated in response to the perceived failure of utilitarianism, it ran into its own problems later which are also thought to have shaped ethical thought later. As I’ve mentioned before, the Utilitarians attempted to prove the utility principle’s desirability by saying that everyone desires to be happy, which is in any case not true, but also suffers from the problem that one needs to attempt to prove that the greatest happiness of the greatest number is worthy of being desired, which is a problem with the English language: we lack the word “desirandous” or any clearer equivalent and are stuck with the “-able” at the end of “desir(e)”. Consequently, in Edwardian times the philosopher G E Moore sought to establish ethics based on the idea that goodness was a simple, non-natural property which could be intuited by people. There is a big problem with this: cultural and interpersonal relativism, which is why he said it was a simple principle: it could not be analysed into a simpler form. The later philosopher Alasdair Macintyre suggested that this step led to later problems in discussing ethical issues which were then picked up on and influenced newer theories.
As the twentieth century wore on, logical positivism and behaviourism became important. Both of these attempted to tidy up pesky things like religious language and psychological states to things which could be observed by the senses. According to Macintyre, because ethics had come to be discussed in terms of what could be intuited and was considered to be essentially impossible to analyse further, conversations about right and wrong in academic circles tended to get reduced to mere emotional expressions. This was known as emotivism, and in fact more or less amounts to ethical scepticism, although there were two versions of it. One actually attempted to reduce expressions of right and wrong to emotional expressions akin to screaming and laughter, just expressed verbally. Another form of emotivism claimed that ethical statements were simply expressions of approval and disapproval implying exortations to another to do the same. Later still, prescriptivism emerged, which was a revival of Kantian ethics which claimed that to say something was good or right meant that it was universalisable (what if everyone did the same?) and entailed an imperative. The problem with this position is well-known. It depends on how it’s described. “Everyone needs to eat” could be given as a reason for poor people to shoplift food, but “everyone needs to make a living” is a reason shoplifting might be wrong. Again, we could be reduced to merely emotional arguments. An oddity about this period of what’s called “non-cognitivist ethics”, i.e. that actual meaning is not relevant to right or wrong, is that it was held by Bertrand Russell, yet he was a strong campaigner on ethical issues such as free love and nuclear disarmament. He himself commented that he couldn’t reconcile the apparent contradiction.
Some theists, not including me incidentally, see ethics as that which is commanded by God – theological voluntarism. There is no right or wrong except what God chooses to tell us to do or forbids us from doing. This crops up, for example, in some Jewish views of kosher diet. Although explanations have been offered, such as the idea that pork is forbidden to avoid parasites or that the forms of certain species, such as cloven hooves, allow special access to the divine, another explanation is that the rules are completely arbitrary and only exist to ensure that God’s people obey without asking why. Belief in theological voluntarism sometimes leads to the peculiar claim that atheists cannot have a moral compass, when it is in fact a pretty weak form of metaethics. It also gives rise to the moral argument for the existence of God, which is that the awareness of morality as a real thing as opposed to mere custom with no real basis means there must be an ultimate moral authority to back it up. I don’t see things this way at all. I see God as merely reporting on what the right thing to do is from a position of infinite wisdom and knowledge. God might sanction something, for instance, due to positive consequences which we can’t perceive ourselves. In the case of kosher food, for example, it might be that there is a very good reason for it but we cannot understand that reason. In fact I would say that veganism is the “new kosher”, and in fact the “new halal”, so in fact I do use my own reasoning to avoid the negative consequences and associations of deliberately eating animal products. Surprisingly, there are atheist theological voluntarists who claim that ethics would make sense if there was a God, but there isn’t, so it doesn’t!
It certainly seems that any God would be bound by logic and mathematics, although this isn’t always held to be the case. By the same token, God to my mind would be aware of right and wrong, and this means that there is a fact of the matter about these things rather than them being non-cognitivist. Alasdair Macintyre sought to replace previous metaethical theories with ideas of vice and virtue, but I would reject that on the grounds that it seems to lead to judging people directly as essentially good or evil, which seems intuitively wrong to me. And there’s that concept again: intuition.
The essential problem with the idea of a moral sense is cultural relativism, and similarly, circumstances altering cases. Take the campaign against sex robots. Those who oppose them argue that it’s wrong to consume bodies as goods and that sex robots and sex workers have the same undesirable status: humans (let’s face it, probably men) would be using sex workers as means rather than ends and therefore also sex robots. Others disagree, claiming that condemning sex robots is transferring concerns about sexual objectification to actual objects. This is an example of how moral intuition could be questioned. The situation could also be tweaked: what’s the morality of allowing paedophiles to have robot children? These two examples also bring up the issue of “the wisdom of disgust”, something which is often evoked to justify homophobia and which might also explain kashrut. Disgust, culturally mediated in this case, is the reason sanitary towels are advertised using blue rather than red liquid. Presumably on another planet the humanoids all have bright blue blood and red liquid is used to advertise them instead. We have instinctive abhorrence of excrement, which protects us from danger. A teleological view would say that God has made us disgusted by excrement in order to keep us healthy, and likewise has made people disgusted by homosexual activity, thereby justifying homophobia. I would say this is an excellent reason for rejecting the idea of the wisdom of disgust. Research has apparently shown that right wing people are more likely to equate disgust and immorality, which means rhetorically it might be more persuasive to appeal to disgust if your interlocutor is right wing. To me, the idea of there being a strong connection between disgust and ethical judgement is never going to gain any ground because I used to have a button phobia, and it’s clearly absurd for a person disgusted by one specific feature of the world to expect it to be banned or controlled in some way simply because of that disgust. That’s clearly not a good guide to morals.
To return to the history of my opposition to homophobia as an intuition, it does seem to be informed by some kind of reasoning. I have a kind of tangential stake in it, some might say a direct one, but it’s also influenced by the fact that disgust as a guide to ethics is manifestly absurd to me due to the button phobia, and also by a kind of inductive inference from racism. But it’s also very deep-seated, to the extent that the very fact that fundamentalist Christians tend to be recalcitrantly homophobic is sufficient reason to reject their world view, and it’s disappointing that they don’t themselves perceive things that way.
I have to say that in spite of difficulties with it, I find intuitionism the most appealing metaethical theory. Although the biggest problem with it is that it seems to make it impossible to resolve disagreements about right and wrong, moral codes tend to agree broadly across cultures, even when their connections must’ve been in the palaeolithic, and to me this suggests that there does seem to be something like a moral sense. This is metaphorical. I don’t imagine there is a sensory organ of some kind in the brain which responds to “conscience radiation” or something. However, I do think we have a moral instinct, and it makes sense to have an innate conscience which enables society to hold together and operate without individuals being taken advantage of too much, although sadly this seems to fail very often. There’s also a problem with the fact that if you actually do try to extract widespread moral principles from the religious and social codes of the world, many of them are homophobic, sexist and so forth. This is why a deeper set of principles must be used. This was the subject of my first degree dissertation, which wasn’t actually very good. I’m not going into it again here.
An ethical sense would seem to be identical with the conscience and distinct from disgust and charm, both of which are often misleading. For an example away from sexual ethics, disgust could prevent one from treating an illness, performing life-saving surgery or working in sanitation, but all of these are very positive things to do ethically. Conscience has been called “the voice of God”. In a situation where a theist has difficulty with conservative religion because of its homophobia or sexism, their conscience cannot allow them to concede or tolerate that prejudice, and if conscience is the word of God, God would themselves be convicting them to rebel or do something else to act against it.
Although the moral argument for the existence of God doesn’t work for a separate divine being “out there” in the Universe or beyond it, there’s another possible take on this based on Ultimate Concern. The philosopher Paul Tillich manages to separate the issue of theism from religion with this concept, which makes the idea of religion less Westernised as it allows for non-theistic religions, which of course do also exist in the West, for example Spiritualism and the Free Zone. Tillich calls faith “the state of being ultimately concerned”. By this he means whatever one holds sacred. This, I think, is a widespread object in most people’s psyche, including non-religious people. It needn’t be God. It could be love, altruism, rationality, compassion, perhaps even one’s own ego for narcissists, but it’s just as real for most non-religious people as it is for religious people and theists. For a Quaker, it might be the spark of divine in us all, and for atheist Quakers there may be no need to alter that. Conscience could be an Ultimate Concern, in other words one’s God, and because this closes off the concept from argument and questions about the existence of an external deity or not, it could be quite a good one. It’s even ineffable in some ways, because of the inscrutability of ethical intuition.
It is of course problematic to have a set of inaccessible moral principles due to the difficulty in being able to see them collectively in the same way. Coming back to sexual orientation though, this is something which can actually be known because it isn’t so much observed as immediately present to the consciousness, when, for example, one might feel attraction to someone of the same gender. One possible response would be to deny it because it clashes with one’s religious values, and clearly this is a fairly common phenomenon given the large number of people involved in reparative “therapy” who are either openly gay already or admit to it, and pastors who have been stridently homophobic and again turn out to be gay, but this shouldn’t be taken as the rule for homophobia among the religious. There really are people who struggle with the homophobia of the Abrahamic religions and only very reluctantly concede to it. On the other hand, I used to know a man who said he wished he could be as disgusted by other kinds of sin as he was by what he saw as the sin of homosexually expressed love. There is an internal process going on here. In one situation, one is divided against oneself because one knows oneself to be queer but struggles against it. In the other, which rather self-righteously I would claim for myself, one’s awareness of one’s queerness and its incontrovertible nature leads one to reject any understanding of religion which is homophobic, and to be honest, if it turns out homophobia is central to any faith, the voice of God, as it were, would surely lead me to reject that faith.
A Box Of Chocolates 