Homophobia, Intuition and Logic II

I was pleasantly surprised when 'Homophobia, Intuition and Logic' got into the Philosophy Takeaway magazine, and I was interested in the comments. I did indeed speculate as to how and why societies might turn to homophobia. In the article I started by looking at what ethics might say:

1. Social liberalism: gays are OK, they should be free to do as they wish provided nobody else suffers, and who else suffers apart from homophobes, who are really suffering from their own prejudices rather than homosexuality?
2. Universalisation: what would happen if everybody ‘did it’? The human race would not survive.
3. The Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Naturally… if I were gay I would expect them to bash me. [really?]
4. The ethics is nought, homosexuality is a sin… like abortion is murder, and some say corporal punishment is violence and pornography is violence.

And much of what I discussed looked partly at why innate homosexuality might evolve and how homophobia could be linked in with constraints on heterosexual relationships. We must now have a number (v) argument:

5. The frying-pan argument: the relevant physical organs are not made for homosexual activity – likewise you don’t use a frying-pan to boil water.

Maybe you could call this the utility argument: I prefer the ‘frying-pan’ term, and one of my readers agreed, perhaps with undue prompting, that it was really the universalisation argument.

Well in fact if I am using my pot to slow-cook my kleftiko, I am not going to rush out and buy, borrow or steal another pot for a quick cuppa because using a pan disobeys a utility rule – let alone the frying-pan rule. Although if I have servants, getting such an implement is what they are for.

There are two issues I would like to raise, one is whether gay or bi is nature or nurture, and secondly, how to uphold monogamy you may well try and stigmatize the ‘left-overs’.

Is gay/bi nature or nurture? I would say both, and the nature addresses long-term considerations. If over a long period of time, there is a surplus of women, a society will be more harmonious if there is a significant proportion of gay women. Likewise for men. But to address short-term variation, there will be nurture. And probably this will depend on the gender ratio of the people surrounding a child in its early years. And bisexuality also helps to address short-term variation in the gender or sex balance.

But coming to another issue: how far do stigmatising, phobia and the like help society counteract nature and nurture in a harmful way? Clearly when missionaries introduce monogamy to societies where there is a surplus of women, this is likely to cause pressure against men to not prefer their own, and also creates a lot of lonely women, possibly mothers, unless there is bisexuality among women, which missionaries are not that likely to encourage.

And similar distorting effects occur with female infanticide in places like India, where the resulting surplus of men almost certainly leads to New Delhi being described by some as the ‘rape capital of the world’.

So perhaps, ethical intervention should only occur for consent and against deception.

And in our own society, the monogamous heterosexual – and fully clothed – model is upheld. But it is mathematically impossible for everyone to achieve this ideal, not least if there is also an imbalance in homosexuality. So we stigmatise prostitution and pornography as well as adultery. To my mind it is the sexual imbalance, rather a male desire to exert power over women, that drives pursuits such as prostitution and pornography, and neither in themselves involves deception and lack of consent, except to counter-act the stigmatization.

And we can only address problems by recognising causes: ban Page Three maybe, but regulate activity and don’t thrust it on other people.

Martin Prior

Philosophy Takeaway Newsletter 62

Homophobia, Intuition and Logic - By Martin Prior

Homophobia, Intuition and Logic

            I have recently written two articles on Sexism, Intuition and Logic, and I could continue on this topic, especially as The Sun produced one (possibly more) ‘toplessless’ editions.  I said there that it is not the actions which are sexist, but the persons pursuing them.  And so, despite the toplesslessness, the patter was the same.

I could say more, but I think I should turn to homophobia, where the issues are complimentary with racism and sexism.  Let us look at what ethics might say:

(i)            Social liberalism: gays are OK, they should be free to do as they wish provided nobody else suffers, and who else suffers apart from homophobes, who are really suffering from their own prejudices rather than homosexuality?

(ii)           Universalisation: what would happen if everybody ‘did it’?  The human race would not survive.

(iii)          The Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  Naturally… if I were gay I would expect them to bash me.  [really?]

(iv)         The ethics is nought, homosexuality is a sin… like abortion is murder, and some say corporal punishment is violence and pornography is violence.

Well, the gays don’t seem to do too well, three to one against!   I shall look briefly at (iv), then more closely (ii) and not at all at the Golden Rule.

Number (iv) passes the buck to some emotive but poorly defined concept.  Murder is unlawful killing but we are talking about what should be lawful, so we have a circularity.  And war is violence too.  As for sin, which many warmongers deplore, we have the Tom Lehrer song – at least a verse:

And when at last the police came by

Sing rickety tickety tin

And when at last the police came by

Her little pranks [murder of her whole family] she did not deny

To do so she would have had to lie

And lying she knew was a sin, a sin

And lying she knew was a sin.

Universalisation (ii) is more complex: in a society where survival is more crucial – and precarious – than social liberalism, people may well get nervous.  Marriage and property are intricately intertwined.  If sex outside marriage is a sin, and many societies see it like that because of the risk of disease, then homosexuality is clearly ‘outside marriage’ at least until recently.

People try and rationalise customs which have a pragmatic base: as I said before, they try and justify gender roles through an unproven innate difference.  Likewise with what people see as sin, since apart from anything else, it enables people to see themselves as virtuous.

To my mind, homosexuality is an essential part of an evolving species: evolution requires variability.  Furthermore, for much of human evolution I believe there has been a surplus of women, and society will be more stable if the imbalance is alleviated through gay women.  This is less problematic than polygamy – perhaps.

But then when missionaries impose polygamy on a society with a surplus of women, the imbalance is made much worse, and we can easily comprehend why another feature of Christianity, homophobia, was also taken up.

A caveat here: what I have said above should be regarded as hypotheses rather than proven fact or argument.  More on scientific method below.

To my mind we should not only tolerate homosexuality, but accept it as a positive force, as did the pre-missionary First Nations in Canada and America, who called them ‘two-spirit people’.  Their role might approximate to avuncular.  If they were called ‘aunties’ as a colloquial description, this might capture such a role, though as I have said, it would depend on who used the term whether it was a homophobic or positive term.

So much for the ethical analysis, with a little bit of sociology/anthropology and biology thrown in.

Scientific method: it is now possible for male gay couples to adopt children, and there is some evidence that the adopted children are strongly loyal to their adoptive parents.  But while this is a form of equal rights, do not children have an equal right to have a mother?  We come back to the issue of psychology and the innateness of the maternal role.  This is the realm of scientific method, and I am not sure the scientists are in agreement over these issues.

So while equality is important, not least when there is a conflict of interest, why not re-assert the positive role of these ‘uncles/aunts’?

Martin Prior

 

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Open Topic' Issue 43