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

Sexism, Logic and Intuition II - Martin Prior

Sexism, Logic and Intuition II

I was originally intending to write on ‘Socialism and the ethics of gender rôles’, but I got bogged down.  Anyway, this article is of course going out on the Valentine’s Day Issue, when very recently Rupert Murdoch was thinking aloud that perhaps Page Three might well be scrapped.

So I am now adding a Part II to the paper I wrote last year, where I argued:

“Let us know get to the substance of the issue: certain activities are regarded as ‘treating women as objects’.  Well firstly, an argument condemning activity between consenting adults on the basis of a simile is a very questionable ethical argument.  Many things have a resemblance to something else: if I lift somebody up from the floor, in a sense I am treating somebody as an object, so one must go directly to the basis of the similarity that causes concern.

“But even if we accept this description of the activity: treating some adults as objects with their consent does not imply we should treat all such adults as objects regardless of their consent.

“So we cannot condemn say beauty contests for treating people as objects, but I believe we can go back to intuition: if our intuition is that the people present at such activities ‘treat blondes as stupid’ and the like, then we may feel that even if the event is not intrinsically sexist, in practice that is precisely what it is.  But we must also avoid making generalisations.”

I think that Mr Murdoch’s reasons for having (and perhaps not having) Page Three are entirely cynical: he wants to boost his circulation.  Indeed it is a perversion of democracy that opinion-formers can attract a readership by such cynical methods – not least those who push their views by scare-mongering against Trades Unions, and thereby induce working people to act against their own interests.

I don’t believe in banning Page Three: if in our idealistic monogamous society the numbers don’t match, let the remainder of dividing by two pursue their needs privately and unobtrusively, perhaps towards the end of the paper.

But Mr Murdoch is to my mind a sexist since he has so little respect for women that he can use them in this way.  I think that if he wants to drop Page Three, this will also be cynical and disrespectful to women – particularly the moral self-congratulation - and he should be compelled to run it, and endure the loss of circulation he fears would happen.

Note on the ethics of gender rôles: in previous articles I have discussed

(i)             the importance of rôle combination in gender rôles, probably any rôles – permitting the learning of skills at a young age,

(ii)           the need for socialism to relate society and/or customs through skills to the environment.

Skills and technology are to my mind pivotal to the egalitarian goals of socialism, and I believe that whatever customs are evolved for effective combination of rôles, there should not be the stereotyping between the genders at the level of skills and technology.

But then, if there is no aptitude stereotyping, so that each subject attracts equal numbers of men and women, will the sciences attract more women.  Or the humanities attract more men?

Martin Prior

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Gender' Issue 38