What's Wrong with Homosexuality? by Corvino John

Author:Corvino, John [Corvino, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The New Natural Law (NNL) View

The problems with Aquinas’s natural law teachings are not news; indeed, they are acknowledged by many of his modern-day admirers. Partly in response to them, an approach has emerged in recent decades known as the New Natural Law (hereafter, NNL) view. The NNL theorists include prominent figures such as Robert George of Princeton, John Finnis of Oxford and Notre Dame, Germain Grisez, Patrick Lee, and various others. Like adherents of the “old” natural law theory, they believe in a set of moral principles that can be known through human reason without appeal to religious revelation. Unlike adherents of the old theory, the NNL theorists hold that “it is not clear … that acting against a biological power is necessarily wrong, nor is it clear that sodomitical and other non-marital acts are really contrary to that direction.”11 So they adopt a somewhat different argument against homosexual conduct than Aquinas.

Understanding their argument requires a detour into some dense academic territory. I warn readers now: this is the “thickest” of the chapters, philosophically speaking. Hang in there! The detour is necessary because the NNL theorists offer the most intellectually sophisticated moral argument against same-sex relations currently available. Although their view is sometimes difficult to grasp, it captures widely held intuitions about the unique moral character of male-female unions.

Perhaps the best way to approach NNL theory is to begin by contrasting it with a more familiar moral theory: utilitarianism. According to utilitarians, an act is right insofar as it promotes the best consequences—often understood in terms of the “greatest happiness for the greatest number”—it is wrong insofar as it produces bad or harmful consequences. Utilitarians thus think of morality in terms of social welfare: In evaluating same-sex relations, they would ask “Do such relations make people happy?” and “Do they hurt anyone?” and then weigh the pros and cons. (Although I am putting this all rather simplistically, utilitarian theory can be as sophisticated as any other.) In light of the last chapter, it is not surprising that utilitarians generally have a positive view of same-sex relations: Bentham, the theory’s progenitor, is a good early example, having written an unpublished defense of homosexuality in 1785.

NNL theorists reject this approach. For them, morality is not primarily about making people happy (or minimizing their pain), especially if happiness is understood in terms of subjective pleasure. It is about conforming our behavior to our given nature as human beings. Although the NNL theorists believe that God designs our nature, they also believe that we can know (most of) morality’s demands without appealing to religious revelation. To do so, we must grasp certain basic goods, which are intrinsically compelling reasons for action. These goods include life and health, knowledge and aesthetic experience, friendship, integrity, and various others. Such goods are “basic” in the sense that they cannot be reduced to one another or derived from more general goods: Instead, they must be known through direct insight and defended dialectically. To put it another way, you either “get” that these things are good, or you don’t.

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