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Destiny and Morals

No Right Turn analyzes the arguments against homosexuality advanced by Destiny Church.

The chief reason for opposition to the civil union bill is an underlying belief that homosexuality is wrong. The two most common justifications given for this belief are that a) homosexuality is "unnatural", or b) that God (through the Bible) says it is wrong. However, both of these attempts at justification fail to provide an ethical basis for the conclusion that homosexuality is wrong (or any other ethical conclusion, for that matter).

There follows a very informative discussion on the prevalence of homosexual and other non-procreative sex in the animal kingdom. However, I think people who describe homosexuality as 'unnatural' are simply suggesting that, since most people are straight, those who are not are abnormal or unnatural. In the same way, people who like to walk around naked are regarded as 'abnormal' and are subject to criminal penalties if they do so in public, just because we don't like to look at naked people. We don't mind naked animals though.

Given the extent to which government currently regulates our lives, it's sadly not actually an extreme suggestion for Destiny to want homosexuality kept in the bedroom, just because they find it offensive. Anyone who supports the ban on cigarette advertising, or the continued existence of the Advertising Standards or Broadcasting Standards people, certainly has no business criticising the authoritarian views of Destiny Church.

But there's also a more general problem with this claim, and that is that it purports to derive a moral conclusion (an "ought" statement) from facts about the world ("is" statements). But David Hume pointed out long ago that this is troublesome.

Hume's argument is not exactly a fallacy but it doesn't prove what Hume and others seem to think it does.

Absolute moral truths exist and can be inferred from observation, in the same way that physical truths can. Certainly since Popper explained that even physical theories can never be proven with 100% certainty, there's no reason to treat moral statements any differently than physical ones.

If we want to make any objective moral statements at all, we must reject Hume's hypothesis. Since a world without objective morality is too horrible to even contemplate (a few idiot left-wing academics notwithstanding), it is necessary to start any serious discussion by just assuming that Hume is wrong.

In any case, you could easily formulate a statement such as:

"We ought to do what is necessary for our survival."

After all, being alive is an essential pre-requisite for acting morally.

Destiny has simply done what most of us do in normal conversation, which is to omit a premise that their argument needs in order to be valid. If you agree with their factual claims that homosexuality is unnatural, undermines families, spreads diseases, destroys the social fabric or whatever, then you don't actually need very broad additional premises to justify the conclusion that homosexuality is wrong.

The real problems here are:

i) Destiny's factual claims are false,
ii) even supposing that homosexuality is wrong, this by no means logically entails opposition to the Civil Unions bill.

What about the argument that homosexuality (or anything "unnatural") is wrong because God (through the Bible) says so? This is known as the Divine Command Theory of ethics, and its flaws can be seen the moment you pause to think. If things are wrong solely because God says so, morality is essentially arbitrary, a game of divine "Simon says" only with the possibility that rape, torture and murder would actually be good if God decided that they were.

This comes from Plato's Euthyphro and it's an argument that only a philosopher could find appealing. The obvious answer is that God and morality are one and the same, neither precedes the other. Most of the stories about God and the creation of the universe make this plain anyway.

An argument using the Bible can only convince people who already accept that the Bible is correct. That's not necessarily a bad thing. In the same way, if I blog on some event and provide evidence by linking to the New York Times, I know you are only going to be convinced to the extent that you find the NYT reliable. The fact is that many people do trust the Bible (and possibly there are still some who trust the NYT as well). Arguments from authority work, and they should. We can't question everything all the time.

A better response to people who rely on the Bible to justify their view, is to refer them to the sections on eating shellfish, ritual burnt offerings, giving away everything they have, and God causing a bunch of young boys to be ripped apart by bears because they made fun of some guy's bald head.

So what is wrong with Destiny Church's position? Without all the fancy philosophy stuff, they simply need to mind their own fucking business and leave other people alone to live their lives as they choose.

Conversely, gay activists ought to allow conservative Christians the same freedom and autonomy that they rightly demand for themselves.

UPDATE: Greyshade asks in comments:

"Absolute moral truths exist and can be inferred from observation, in the same way that physical truths can." Can you give an example?

Consider two hypotheses:
A) Acceleration due to gravity is proportional to mass.
B) It is morally acceptable to murder innocent children.

To test hypothesis A, a well-known Italian chap drops two different sized rocks from the top of the leaning tower of Pisa. Observers note that both hit the ground at the same. The experiment is reproducible. Therefore hypothesis A must be rejected.

To test hypothesis B, a bunch of terrorist scum seize a school and murder 300 children. Observers note feelings of revulsion and a strong desire to punish the perpetrators. The experiment is reproducible (let's hope only in theory). Therefore hypothesis B must be rejected.

That is how objective moral truths are inferred from observation. We have a moral sense that we use to make moral observations, in the same way as we use our physical senses to make physical observations.

The problem, as I'm sure you've spotted, is what happens when the observers don't agree. In case A, one of them has eyesight problems and needs glasses. Unfortunately, a faulty moral sense is not so easy to correct. That's why arguments about moral truths are harder to resolve than arguments about scientific truths.

My claim is that independent observers, whose moral sense is functioning correctly, will make the same moral observations of any given event.

This is not really a new claim, it's just making the objective morality claim in a different way.

It's actually a bit more complex than that because moral facts are partly dependent on physical facts, but the converse is not true. So I should qualify the above claim by saying that it applies only where the relevant physical facts are known to all observers.