Justifying Same-Sex Marriage by Richardson-Self Louise;

Author:Richardson-Self, Louise;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

II. Justifying Same-Sex Marriage: The Moral versus the Ethical

Forst takes pains to distinguish between the moral and the ethical, where the ethical pertains to personal prudential values, while the moral pertains to the regulation of behaviour between people. The key feature which ethical justifications of human rights share is their substantive focus on the notion of the good life for the individual, and their ‘view of human rights as means to guaranteeing essential minimal conditions for such forms of human life’.[16] Ethical justifications focus on the importance of the human interests they are meant to protect. Thus, ethical accounts of rights are derived from the basic interests that all people supposedly have in realizing certain values. The problem with ethical theories is that conceptions of the good are reasonably contestable and therefore cannot stand as the grounds for universal norms. Only moral norms, in the Forstian sense, can count as universal norms.

Moral norms are discovered after the criteria of reciprocity and generality are applied, whereas ethical beliefs can be meaningful motivators in a person’s life regardless of whether they pass these tests. Ethical values can answer questions about what is right or good for me or for us within a shared ethical community, and ‘moral norms do not replace ethical values or political norms; rather, they enter into competition with them only where these ethical values or political norms become morally questionable, that is to say, where they deny persons basic recognition’.[17] People may be entitled to certain rights given their ethical commitments but only insofar as this would not impose upon others who do not share those beliefs. If a moral norm and an ethical belief conflict, then ethical convictions are not necessarily disqualified or devalued, rather they simply cannot stand as the rule universally. It is precisely because ethical beliefs are not universal that they cannot possibly count as a justification to deny a universal human rights claim.[18]

Given this distinction, the personhood account would be classified as an ethical theory of human rights.[19] Let us take a moment to reconsider the personhood account in light of Forst’s distinction. It is worthwhile to note that there has been a terminological shift. In chapter 2, I argued that the thick assumptions James Griffin makes about personhood indicates that he is making a moral rather than principled argument for marriage. In that context, moral simply means a normative belief that a particular structure for sexuality, companionship, affection, personal economics, and childrearing is a central human good and a belief that people are entitled to rights on the ground that it is a good. Now, let us recall that the only way that same-sex relationship recognition can be justified on the personhood account is if ‘lack of recognition’ meets the material constraint. That is, same-sex relationship recognition must matter for whether a person can function as a normative agent at all if one is to be able to claim a right to it. Normative agency is the precondition for being able to choose and act upon one’s own assessment of the good life (the core of personhood).

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