Instinctual behavior
is neither moral nor immoral, and society is not obligated to celebrate
instinctual behavior. Instead, political
actors and constituencies should focus moral debates (especially the debates
surrounding same-sex marriage) on the moral factors external to instinct rather
than using minority instinct as a rhetorical bludgeon.
People on both
sides of the same-sex marriage debate sometimes posit that what is natural or
instinctual matters. These proponents of
same-sex marriage state that because some people are born instinctively
homosexual, that homosexuality is not morally inferior to heterosexuality. Conversely, some opponents of same-sex marriage
will state that same-sex marriage is immoral because homosexual behavior is not
natural or is not naturally sustainable.
Both arguments miss the mark. My disagreement centers on the fact that
instinct is morally ambivalent.
Sometimes instinct is helpful; sometimes it is not. Sometimes an instinct is ethically sound;
sometimes, it is not.
In this discussion, I define instinct
as a behavior to which one is driven or impelled but which is not
required. Reflexes cannot be controlled,
but instincts can. Generally speaking,
these instincts are manifestations of one’s inborn nature but can also be
affected by environment and culture.
Sexual orientation, for example,
is a manifestation of sexual preference inspired by inborn, environmental, and
cultural factors, and which exhibits varying degrees of plasticity. The debate surrounding same-sex marriage
sometimes relies on the specious premise that the expression of a person’s
instinct, specifically the portions of his or her sexual orientation which are inborn,
is naturally and inevitably an ethical expression of the human experience.
The fact is, however, that
instinct has no morality or immorality about it—not one instinct can be lauded
as completely good, nor can any instinct be castigated as completely bad. Take, for example, the maternal
instinct. This is one of humanity’s
hardest-of-wired instincts, and for good reason. Without it, we would probably not survive as
a species. Its impulse, the protection
and rearing of children, is unquestionably a social good and its application is
profoundly ethical in most circumstances.
However, there are some situations in which it may not be. Should a woman or man misplace that impulse
and want to care for a person other than a dependent child the resulting “parenting”
would be tyranny. (I am reminded of several of C.S. Lewis’s hell-bound
characters in The Great Divorce). Additionally, the impulse to care for a child
may also be extended past its useful time period, allowing the child to remain
in a state of dependency long after it is necessary
or desirable.
Other instincts can yield both
ethical and unethical applications. The
fight or flight instinct can yield ethical results, such as defending one’s
home from a violent invader, or when one flees a dangerous situation. It can also yield unethical applications,
such as when people engage in road rage or when they pick a fight in response
to a slight grievance. The
self-preservation instinct can prevent imminent harm from coming to a person,
such as when one is looking over a cliff or dropping sharp knives. It can also yield unethical applications,
such as when one overreacts and cause great harm to another. Greed can help provide for one’s family, but it
can also unethically take from others. The
instinctive pull most feel toward fat, sugar, and salt can give us much needed
and rare nutrients. It can also cause
obesity and a host of other health problems when such nutrients are not rare.
Sexual orientation is similar, in
that some applications of it are moral and some are not. Sometimes we are driven to use the sex act
for good and beautiful purposes; sometimes, people are driven to use the sex
act for selfish, violent, or depraved purposes.
Our job as moral agents is not to “find” ourselves by discovering the
behaviors to which we are most driven, but to conduct an ethical calculus and
then rationally choose which behaviors we should carry out.
The whole point is that our
behavioral instincts are, in and of themselves, neither good nor bad, and that
the locus of ethical decision-making takes place outside of instinct
itself. As a result, such arguments as
“I’m built this way, so how can it be wrong?” or “It’s not natural!” don’t hold
any water. Instinct, one way or the other,
has nothing to do with morality.
Instead, morality stands apart
from instinct simply because it is so completely rational. Instinctual behavior is the behavior to which
we are driven; it doesn’t require much thought, except perhaps in its
fulfillment. We don’t often question why
or whether we should eat, or sleep, or mate; we only wonder how and when.
Ethics, however, are
rational. When thinking about ethics and
morality, we’re thinking about something that is purely theoretical. To be certain, we often think about practical
applications of ethics in our daily lives, but the heart of the matter
itself—what is right and wrong—inescapably demands that we think in theoretical
terms.
Additionally, ethics and ethical
laws are external to the self. When we
judge our actions as moral or immoral, we are not looking inward to determine
if such actions are in line with a poorly defined most-natural-self; instead,
we look outward to determine if our actions are in line with an externally
created law of behavior that would exist even if we did not.
If we considered instinctual
behavior to be moral and good, we would essentially be making the claim that
only the Self matters. Such a wholesale
acceptance of instinctual behavior would not only imply the most horrible types
of moral relativism, but it would also prohibit moral progression. If instinct were moral, then not only would
it be morally acceptable to do anything one feels driven to do, but we would
never become better than we currently are.
We would, quite literally, be damned by our own lusts.
Most advocates of same-sex
marriage who use the homosexual instinct argument are not actually claiming
that all instinct is good—such a claim is obviously false. Instead, they make the essentially identical claim
that no moral judgment can be made about instinctual behavior. According to such a line of reasoning, the
instinctual behavior of one cannot be inferior to the instinctual behavior of
another. Since each person’s intrinsic value to society is equal, and each
person should be respected, each person’s nature is equally valuable as well
and no reason exists to put one person’s instinct above another.
There are a number of problems
with this line of reasoning. First, it
equates ethical reasoning (and the resultant public policy) with instinct,
saying that marriage is only the recognition of one couple’s drive to mate,
rather than a reasoned attempt to define a society’s institutional incentives
toward ethical behavior. Second, by
forbidding moral judgment, advocates of same-sex marriage seem intent to avoid
morality altogether. If instinct cannot
be judged, or if society cannot make judgments about which instincts it incentivizes
and which it does not, then what can ethics
be used for? What is the use of ethics,
if not to make us better than what we are naturally?
After all, the whole point of
civilization itself is to change our natures, to get us away from the
Neanderthal’s cave and towards a reasoned existence as rational creatures. Every part of civilization exists to take us
away from the type of existence that Hobbes’ Leviathan reminds us would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and
short” and towards a holy city where there
are no poor, nor any manner of “ites,” among us.
For decades, however, our society
has glibly accepted that we should instead seek to be our most natural (or
instinctual) selves. People leave for
foreign locales to “find” themselves. We
created and then glorified teenagehood, a life-stage marked by slavish devotion
to hormones and the questioning of moral authority. This wholesale acceptance of the instinctual,
not only as good or moral but also as
inevitable is also behind the sexual revolution and the recent debates surrounding
same-sex marriage.
However, because the premise of
moral instinct is faulty, such an argument is faulty with it. As a result, though American political
tradition rightly requires us to tolerate LGBT lifestyle choices among
consenting adults, we are not morally required to accept, celebrate, or incentivize
such choices simply because some are instinctually drawn to such behavior.
The difference between toleration
and acceptance here becomes relevant.
We, as a liberal democracy, have among us a diverse group of opinions
regarding what is right and wrong. Part
of the challenge of a successful democracy is tolerating the voices and
opinions that disagree vociferously with our own. Those who hold differing opinions from the
majority are welcome to express such opinions both as loudly as they wish and
in what manner they see fit, so long as they do not harm others or take away
others’ rights.
What makes this toleration even
more complex is that there are many ways that people voice their opinions. Sometimes that voice comes in the form of
speech; sometimes, it’s a whole lifestyle.
As a liberal democracy, we must tolerate not only speech such as
internet comments or blog posts, but also lifestyles which directly contradict
our own ideas of morality, providing that such lifestyles do not harm other people
in ways that society agrees are intolerable.
Hence, while some may correctly
argue that a homosexual lifestyle potentially harms children by denying the
child daily access to both a mother and a father, because society considers this
a tolerable harm (as evinced by no-fault divorce laws) such harms cannot
prevent homosexual or other LGBT lifestyle choices from being illegal. In other words, because of our society’s
pluralistic nature, we must tolerate LGBT lifestyle choices.
This toleration, however, does not
require us to accept such a lifestyle as correct or as morally equal to heterosexual
monogamy, nor does a tolerant society have to celebrate or incentivize every
minority lifestyle it tolerates. Instead,
a tolerant society can very well incentivize the lifestyles it wishes to laud while
tolerating, but not supporting or accepting, others. The decision as to which lifestyles to
incentivize and which to merely tolerate can only come after such a society
seriously debates the moral status of the lifestyles in question.
In American society, however, the
debate to determine whether or not LGBT lifestyle choices are moral has been suppressed. Rather than encouraging debate, many
proponents of same-sex marriage would have us glibly accept the premise that instinctual
homosexuality is good and/or inevitable and have us forgo making moral judgments
about LGBT lifestyles entirely (which, in reality, is just making inverse moral
judgments).
Real debate about the moral foundation
of homosexuality and LGBT lifestyle choices has never seriously been
entertained in mainstream America, partly because, like all the most important
debates, it would be uncomfortable. Some
people would be forced to face intelligently-voiced opinions with which they
disagree vociferously. That’s difficult,
even in a mature democracy such as ours.
A real debate about such moral
questions will also unavoidably involve questions about faith, both religious
and secular. For those intent on
eliminating religious faith from the public square (and on disguising secular
faith as “reason”) such a debate would be counter-productive.
That is why the Church and
faithful LDS thinkers, as well as our allies in the pro-family camp, are so
important. Rather than acquiesce to the
premise of moral or inevitable instinct, we have the opportunity to bring the
debate to the correct footing by publically questioning the ethical ramifications
of LGBT lifestyle choices. Some of the
questions we might ask include:
·
Is it ethically sound to charge a mentally ill
person large sums of money to mutilate their genitalia and then tell them
they’ve changed genders? Can one ever
change genders?
·
Is it ethically sound to put young children who
feel they are transsexual on hormone medication in an effort to dampen their
unwanted gender?
·
If same-sex marriage is morally sound because it
is instinctual and because it is conducted among consenting adults, are there
no sexual behaviors among consenting adults that are immoral? Are consent and adulthood the only borders of
ethical sexuality? If so, is teenage
sexuality moral?
These questions are simply the
start of what our society needs to begin asking itself. Such questions need to occur in a larger
moral debate about the philosophical footing of LGBT lifestyles. This may only be brought about when LDS and
like-minded thinkers start questioning the morality of other people’s
instinctual behavior. As followers of
Christ, we have a duty to not judge other people; however, in order to be moral
agents we must judge behaviors, whether or not people are instinctually drawn
to them.
