Edward Feser's Blog, page 50

The latest on Five Proofs

My book Five Proofs of the Existence of God is briefly reviewed by Christopher McCaffery in the March 2019 issue of First Things.  From the review:
Addressing contemporary and historical objections, Feser explains the logic of each proof with impressive clarity… Five Proofs is a useful resource for anyone seeking an introduction to historical arguments about God’s existence and their relationship to contemporary philosophical scholarship. Glenn Siniscalchialso recently reviewed the book in the December 2018 issue of Religious Studies Review.  From the review:
Although the book can be appreciated by newcomers to the field, the book is chock-full with detailed information that will be of tremendous use to theologians and philosophers...  
Always charitable, clear, and intellectually engaging, Five Proofs of the Existence of Godshould be seen as a welcome addition to books on natural theology.
I was recently interviewed about the book by Pat Flynn for WCAT Radio.  You can listen to the interview hereor here.  It’s a pretty wide-ranging discussion that touches on matters that go beyond the book.

Socialism versus the family

Yesterday I gave a talk at the Heritage Foundation on the topic “Socialism versus the Family.”  You can watch the lecture on YouTube or at the Heritage website. The talk has three parts.  In the first, I explain what socialism is (and what it isn’t), and how it can come in degrees.  In the second, I discuss what the family is, and in particular the core notion of the family that underlies the diverse arrangements that have existed in different societies, the general moral outlook that has traditionally governed it in these different societies, and the way evolutionary psychology and social science support the judgment that the family is a natural rather than artificial institution.  In the third, I explain how socialism and the basic structure of the family are incompatible, and how liberal individualism has eroded the family and paved the way for socialism.  As I argue, if conservatives are effectively to oppose socialism, they must also oppose the liberal individualism that opens the door to it.

Adventures in the Old Atheism, Part III: Freud

Our sojourn among the Old Atheists was briefer than I’d intended.  To my great surprise, I see that the previous installment in this series dates from roughly the middle of 2016!  So let’s make a return visit.  Our theme has been the tendency of the best-known Old Atheists to show greater insight vis-à-vis the consequences of atheism than we find in their shallow New Atheist descendants.  This was true of Nietzscheand of Sartre, and it is true of Sigmund Freud.  So lay back on the couch and light up a cigar.  And before you start speculating about what hidden meaning lay behind my sudden return to this topic, remember: Sometimes a blog post is just a blog post. Mechanism and mind
Modern atheism is more than just the denial of God’s existence.  It is closely associated with a conception of nature as a vast, meaningless mechanism – to a first approximation, as nothing more than particles in motion, pushing and pulling against one another the way the metal parts of a machine might, but without any purpose of the kind that the machines we construct have. 
As I have often emphasized, the more precise way of spelling out this mechanical world picture is to start with its rejection of the essentialism and teleology that were central to the Aristotelian conception of nature that early modern philosophy and science replaced.  For the Aristotelian, as for common sense, there is a sharp and objective difference in kind between stone, water, trees, grass, dogs, cats, and all other natural objects.  Each of these things has its own distinctive essence or nature, which the human mind discovers rather than invents.  But the mechanical world picture treats them instead as just superficially different arrangements of the same one basic stuff.  There is no sharp essence or nature of being a tree or a dog per se.  These are just loosely cobbled together arrangements of particles.
For the Aristotelian, as for common sense, there are also ends or goals toward which things naturally aim or point, given their essences.  Water aims at being liquid at room temperature, trees aim at sinking roots and growing leaves, dogs aim at eating and mating and running about, and so on.  But for the mechanical world picture, such aiming or teleology is illusory.  Objectively, nothing really aims at or points at or is foranything.
In short, the idea that anything has a natural purpose is an illusion, because natures and purposes are illusions.  Now, few thinkers push this idea through with total consistency.  Indeed, it cannot be made totally consistent, though eliminative materialists like Alex Rosenberg give it the old college try.  The Aristotelians were right, as I argue constantly and in ever greater depth.  The point for the moment, though, is that whether they work out its implications consistently or not, modern atheists tend to be committed to this general mechanical view of nature.
Now, perhaps if you could instead marry atheism to some broadly Aristotelian view of nature, as Thomas Nagel flirts with doing, then you could end up with an optimistic view of the human condition.  Perhaps you could maintain the idea that human beings have an essence, that there is as a matter of objective fact an end or point toward which human beings aim given that essence, and that this can give human life meaning and purpose even in the absence of God. 
But what you can’t do is to defend such an optimistic position given the mechanicalworld picture.  If the mechanical world picture is correct, then there is no reason to believe that a human being is anything more than a roughly cobbled together aggregate, like the random pile of junk you collect from around the house and quickly toss into a closet in anticipation of guests arriving, or like the heap of various unrelated bits of debris you find on the beach after a hurricane.  There is no reason to think that the parts of human nature can ever cohere, and there can certainly be no point or purpose to human existence that isn’t an entirely made-up one (given the assumption that there are no purposes at all). 
Accordingly, any atheism that is informed by the mechanical world picture must, if it is realistic and honest, take a tragic and pessimistic view of human existence.  There ought to be no delusional happy talk of the kind that (as we saw in an earlier post in this series) one sometimes finds coming from New Atheists like Richard Dawkins. 
Reality principles
Which brings us to Freud.  The popular image of the father of psychoanalysis has it that he thought human happiness could be secured if only we would free ourselves of stifling repressions, especially regarding sex.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  In fact Freud believed that human beings were likely doomed always to be unhappy, and that this was probably the inevitable price of our enjoying the benefits of civilization.
This is famously the theme of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents , wherein he avers that “the intention that man should be ‘happy’ is not included in the plan of ‘Creation’” (p. 43).  As maturity brings one to follow the sober “reality principle” more than the “pleasure principle,” one will find that merely avoiding pain and suffering as far as one can – as opposed to finding positive fulfillment – is the best that can be hoped for.  “[T]he idea of life having a purpose stands and falls with the religious system” (p. 42), Freud says, and since (he thinks) religion is an illusion, there can be no purpose to life and thus nothing the realization of which could bring genuine happiness.
Intellectual pursuits like science and art can provide a few people with some consolation, but the majority of human beings cannot appreciate these things and will likely always need the illusion of religion (pp. 39-41).  And even so, though science and technology have made modern man “almost become a god himself,” they have not thereby produced happiness (p. 66).  Work, too, can provide only relatively few people with satisfaction, and for most people is merely a necessity rather than a source of fulfillment (p. 49). 
The three main sources of our unhappiness are, in Freud’s view, natural forces that lie outside our control, the weaknesses of our bodies, and frustration with the ways we relate to other human beings (p. 57).  The idea that civilization is the source of our unhappiness, and a return to primitive conditions the remedy for it, strikes Freud as “strange,” even “astonishing” (p.58).  In fact it is only civilization that allows us to mitigate the sources of suffering to the extent that we can.  Enmity against civilization and nostalgia for pre-civilized times is rooted in resentment at the frustration of desire that civilization entails:
[I]t is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct, how much it presupposes precisely the non-satisfaction (by suppression, repression or some other means?) of powerful instincts.  This ‘cultural frustration’ dominates the large field of social relationships among human beings.  As we already know, it is the cause of the hostility against which all civilizations have to struggle. (p. 75)
Prominent among these frustrated desires are those concerned with sexual relationships, for “civilization threatens love with substantial restrictions” (p. 83).  Needless to say, Freud is no traditional moralist, but neither is he politically correct.  “Women represent the interests of the family and of sexual life,” he says, whereas a man is drawn by the demands of modern civilization ever further away from home and family to the world of work, to the extent that these demands “even estrange him from his duties as a husband and father” (p. 84).  Hence, Freud judges, women are on that account likely to resent civilization. 
Civilization has also tended to confine sexual activity to intercourse between one man and one woman within marriage (even if it sometimes winks at transgressions), and this is another source of frustration (pp. 85-86).  Famously, Freud thinks that repressed sexual desire is a source of neuroses, which can be eliminated by indulging rather than repressing the desire.  At the same time, he says:
Sometimes one seems to perceive that it is not only the pressure of civilization but something in the nature of the function itself which denies us full satisfaction and urges us along other paths.  This may be wrong; it is hard to decide. (p. 87)
This last remark illustrates Freud’s tendency often to put things tentatively.  He isn’t surethat sexual dissatisfaction has something to do with the nature of sex itself rather than merely with the repressions of civilization, but he also isn’t sure that it doesn’t.  He even finds it “very understandable” that some would propose that civilization’s restrictions on sexual indulgence “cannot be averted or turned aside and [are something] to which it is best for us to yield as though they were necessities of nature” (pp. 148-9), though he also says that he isn’t certain this is really the case.  In any event, he does not regard sexual indulgence as a panacea.
Another key instinct that civilization represses is aggression.  Freud thinks it a delusion to suppose that this can ever be eliminated from the human condition:
[M]en are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. (p. 94)
For this reason, he regards the psychological assumptions underlying communism as an “untenable illusion” (p. 97).  Competitiveness and aggression were not created by the institution of private property, and if that institution were abolished they would simply manifest themselves in some other way.  Abolishing all restraints on sexual desire, and the family along with it, will not eliminate the “indestructible feature” of aggression either (p. 98).  Any group of human beings, no matter how affectionate toward one another, will always find some other group at which to direct hostility.  Communists themselves manifest this tendency in their hatred of the bourgeois (pp. 99-100).  (In a recent post I proposed my own explanation for the paradox that people prone to sentimental chatter about love and peace are often extremely nasty themselves.) 
The bottom line, for Freud, is that while primitive man was freer to indulge his instinctive sexual and aggressive drives, he also did not live long enough to enjoy this freedom much, and was subject to other restrictions (p. 100).  The security and other benefits of civilization require some repression of instinct and the frustration this entails, and we should “familiarize ourselves with the idea that there are difficulties attaching to the nature of civilization which will not yield to any attempt at reform” (p. 101).
An attractive feature of Freud’s Old Atheism, then, is its realism and sobriety.  Science, art, work, a return to primitive living, sexual indulgence, an ethic of nonviolence, socialism, the abandonment of religion – none of these are going to bring human happiness or otherwise substitute for the meaning that religion promised.  Neither Burning Man festivals, nor Reason Rallies, nor Bernie Sanders can save us.  Deal with it.
Ego trip
Freud famously cribs from Plato, transforming the latter’s distinction between the desiring, spirited, and rational parts of the soul into the distinction between id, ego, and super-ego.  That is not to say that the distinction is exactlythe same, but it is similar.  Moreover, a naturalist like Freud is bound to get certain important things wrong, especially where the nature of rationality is concerned.  All the same, you can’t go too far wrong starting from Plato’s classic distinction.  Freud also has some interesting things to say about the social influences on the formation of the super-ego – particularly his analysis of it as a kind of voice of the father figure.  And, let’s face it, id, ego, and super-ego just sounds cooler than desiring part, spirited part, and rational part.
Another merit of Freud’s psychology is its anti-reductionism.  Of course, Freud was highly prone to reductionism in one sense, insofar as he tried to account for vast swaths of human behavior in terms of the instincts for sexual indulgence and aggression.  That was one of his great errors.  But he nevertheless resisted psychological reductionism in the metaphysicalsense of supposing that descriptions at the psychological level could be reduced to, or eliminated in favor of, descriptions at the physiological level.  That doesn’t mean he was a metaphysical dualist – of course he was not – but he was nevertheless skeptical of the idea that in the analysis of human nature, physiology is privileged.  He complained that:
The medical profession had been educated to esteem highly only anatomical, physical, and chemical factors….They clearly doubted that psychic things admit of any exact scientific treatment… In this materialistic – or better: mechanistic – period medicine made magnificent advances, but also failed myopically to recognize the noblest and most difficult problems of life. (Quoted in Walter Kaufmann, Discovering the Mind, Volume 3: Freud, Adler, and Jung, p. 55)
And again:
I always envy the physicists and mathematicians who can stand on firm ground.  I hover, so to speak, in the air.  Mental events seem to me immeasurable and probably always will be. (Ibid., p. 100)
The area where Freud was least interesting was his analysis of religion.  Not because he was an atheist, and not because of his tone or anything like that.  (He was certainly peremptory and condescending, but he was not shrill or sophomoric after the fashion of a New Atheist.)  The reason is just that what he has to say typically has the flavor of anticlimactic out-of-left-field speculation.  For example, all the stuff in Totem and Taboo about religion’s purported origin in a primitive band of brothers killing and eating their father and then feeling guilty about it, is just cringemakingly silly.  Even Walter Kaufmann, a more serious and interesting critic of religion who is otherwise sometimes effusive in his praise of Freud, regarded Freud’s writings on religion as subpar.  (Cf. Kaufmann, Discovering the Mind, Volume 3, Chapter 32)
In fairness, though, here too Freud sets an example of intellectual honesty that his New Atheist successors would do well to follow.  About Totem and Taboo, Freud once said: “Oh, don’t take that seriously – I made that up on a rainy Sunday afternoon” (quoted in Anthony Storr, Freud, at p. 86).  You could say the same thing about pretty much the entire New Atheist literature, with one exception. 

Early 2019 speaking engagements

I recently got back from Blackfriars in Oxford, where I gave talks on classical theism and cooperation with evil.
This Thursday, January 31, I will be giving the 2019 Aquinas Lecture at the University of St. Thomas in Houston.  
On February 11, I will be speaking at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., on the topic of socialism versus the family. On April 17, I will be speaking at a Thomistic Institute event at Stanford University.
I will be one of the speakers at a workshop on the theme Aquinas on Human Action and Virtue, to be held at Mount Saint Mary’s College in Newburgh, New York, from June 19-23.
Further speaking engagements to be announced.  Links to audio and video of earlier talks can be found at my main website.

The Bizarro world of left-wing politics

I have only a little to add to what others have already said about the Kafkaesque Covington affair.  There were, as you all know by now, three main parties involved.  There was the group led by Nathan Phillips, who is now known to be a liar and rabble rouser who appears to have been trying to provoke a confrontation.  There were the “Black Hebrew Israelites,” classified by the SPLC as a hate group and who have been captured on video instigating the whole mess by shouting things that any left-winger would normally denounce as the worst sort of racist, sexist, homophobic, and fundamentalist bigotry.  And there are the Covington Catholic school teenagers, who were there waiting for a bus and got caught in the middle of these two groups of lunatics.  So, at whom do the left-wing press and social media direct their venom?  Not at the liar and not at the racists, but at some poor Covington kid who was… smiling at Phillips.  That’s all he did.  For this act of unspeakable depravity, members of the cybermob opined that he should never be forgiven, fantasized about punching him in the face and putting him and his friends into a woodchipper, hoped for his death and the deaths of the other boys and their families, offered sexual favors to anyone who would assault him, compared him and his friends to Nazis and Jim Crow era racists, called for their doxxing, made death threats against him and his friends and their school, compared him and his friends to the Roman soldiers who spat at Christ, and so on and on.
(That last piece of insanity actually came from a conservativewho was a bit too quick on the virtue-signaling trigger and has since apologized – one Nicholas Frankovich, previously known to me only as someone who once urged his fellow Catholics to be less rigorously logical and more “right brain.”  How’s that advice sound this week, Frankovich?)
It is true that many of these people were initially misled by Phillips’ lies and that many of them have since expressed regret.  But incredibly, some of them are stilltrying to find a way to rationalize the Two Minutes Hate they directed at the teenagers, while continuing to ignore Phillips’ lies and the Black Hebrew Israelites’ undisguised bigotry.  Moreover, even if the initial reports had been accurate, the most that could have been said about the now famous smiling teenager is that he smiled – or disrespectfully smirked at Phillips, we were told, but still a disrespectful smirk is all it would have been.  On what world other than Bizarro world does that make remotely understandable, much less justifiable, all this ghastly stuff about face-punching, woodchippers, doxxing, and all the rest?  What the hell is wrong with these people?
Bishop Robert Barron and Rod Dreher have some interesting thoughts on the subject.  Here are some other ideas.
The hermeneutics of suspicion
James Piereson’s book Camelot and the Cultural Revolution argues that a bizarre inversion of reality changed the face of American liberalism during the 1960s.  John F. Kennedy was shot by a hard-core communist and Robert Kennedy by a left-wing Palestinian nationalist.  Yet the Left spun both assassinations in such a way that they are remembered by many today as having a vaguely right-wing provenance.  The milder form this took was to blame the assassinations on some vague cultural rot that had purportedly set into American life as a consequence of redneck violence and racism.  The more extreme form, of course, was to argue for a secret right-wing conspiracy.  Though the assassinations were in fact driven by hard-left politics, the lesson drawn from them was that we need to be wary of some inchoate sinister alliance between militarists, businessmen, the KKK, etc.  And the paranoid style of politics this reflects has increasingly permeated beyond the left-wing fringes into mainstream liberal politics.
As I have argued elsewhere, the attraction of political narratives that posit vast unseen conspiracies derives in part from the general tendency in modern intellectual life reflexively to suppose that “nothing is at it seems,” that reality is radically different from or even contrary to what common sense supposes it to be.  This is a misinterpretation and overgeneralization of certain cases in the history of modern science where common sense turned out to be wrong, and when applied to moral and social issues it yields variations on the “hermeneutics of suspicion” associated with thinkers like Nietzsche and Marx.  
The result is a kind of Gnosticism, according to which only an ignorant or naïve person would take political phenomena at face value, whereas the person initiated into whatever one’s favored hermeneutics of suspicion happens to be possesses the secret knowledge about “what is really going on.”  Into the bargain, there are, just as in the original Gnosticism, unseen dark forces lying behind the purported illusion – the specters of racism, sexism, capitalism, militarism, fascism, fundamentalism, etc. etc., always lurking offstage somewhere pulling the strings.  Like Gnosticism, the whole thing is a paranoid fantasy, posing as knowledge but in fact a kind of faith-based gestalt.  Speculative political theory drives one’s interpretation of empirical reality rather than the other way around.
(I am not saying, by the way, that no conspiracies of any kind ever occur.  Of course they occur.  But as I have also argued elsewhere, what is philosophically problematic is the kind of conspiracy theory that posits a conspiracy so far-reaching and subtle that it undermines the theory’s own epistemological foundations, in something like the way radical philosophical skepticism undermines itself.)
Again, initially this kind of paranoid thinking was confined to the Marxoid fringes, but since the 1960s it has permeated ever more deeply into the left-wing mainstream.  Hence the tendency to interpret absolutely everything as part of a “larger narrative” of “racism,” “sexism,” “white privilege,” blah blah blah.  To come back to my main topic: The reductio ad absurdum of this mainstreaming of the hermeneutics of suspicion occurs when the ordinary left-wing journalist or Hollywood type looks at what is in reality absolutely nothing more than the face of some innocent teenage kid smiling awkwardly… and sees in it the avatar of the dark forces of oppression which must be annihilated.
Blindness of mind
So, part of the explanation for what happened with the Covington teenagers is that even mainstream left-wingers are increasingly prone to seeing politics through the lenses of an ideological illusion.  But how does one maintain such an illusion?  The motor of self-deception requires potent emotional fuel.  And there is no fuel more potent than sex.  
It is probably no accident that the teenage boys who had aroused such an unhinged response from the Left had just attended an anti-abortion march.  Indeed, some of the most shrill left-wing responses have emphasized this fact.  
Now, abortion involves the deliberate killing of one’s own child, and it is usually done for the utterly frivolous purpose of being able to enjoy the pleasures of sex without the hassle of its natural consequences.  It is about as perverse an act as can be imagined, and even most liberals have until recently halfway conceded its morally problematic character by arguing that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare” (in Bill Clinton’s famous formulation).  
Still, they have been relentless in framing the issue in terms of Orwellian euphemisms: Violently to interfere with the normal course of reproduction is, we are told, a matter of “reproductive health.”  To facilitate mothers killing their own babies is to show respect for mothers.  And so on.  And in recent years the disingenuous “…and rare” business has given way to the “Shout Your Abortion” movement.  For these activists, killing your own baby is something to celebrate publicly and have a friendly chat with the kids about.
Such bizarre inversions of what virtually the entire human race until about 20 minutes ago regarded as common sense and basic decency vis-à-vis matters of sex have become increasingly common as the sexual revolution has progressed.  Thus do we now find ourselves in a situation in which someone who has male gametes, male chromosomes, male sex organs, looks paradigmatically masculine, and has for decades thought of himself as a man and been taken by everyone else to be a man, one day declares that he is really a woman… and anyone who responds with even mild and respectful skepticism stands in danger of being shrilly denounced, Maoist-style, as an ignorant bigot who ought to be fired from his job and socially ostracized.  
Examples could easily be multiplied.  The more extreme the departures from traditional sexual morality, the more shrill and moralistic has been the rhetoric in their defense.  You might have expected the opposite – that such disruptions of long-standing institutions and moral assumptions would be proposed tentatively and with humility – but no.  What is going on?
What is going on, I would suggest, is that it takes a morality to beat a morality.  Sexual behavior that is now being mainstreamed and celebrated would, for all of human history up until now, have been regarded instead as a source of great shame and guilt.  Indeed, even now left-wingers lament the feelings of shame and guilt experienced by those who indulge in such behaviors.  Now, natural law theorists and other traditional moralists would respond:  Well, of course… it’s called “the voice of conscience.”  But the sexual revolutionary will have none of that.  It is, he insists, really the voice of the oppressor – of the “patriarchy,” the forces of “heteronormativity,” or what have you – which has been internalized by the oppressed.  
Thus do we have a Marxoid hermeneutics of suspicion deployed in the service of sexual, rather than economic, revolution.  The proletariat, in this story, comprises everyone whose sexual behavior does not conform to the traditional norm of a man and a woman united in marriage for the purpose of building a family.  Alienation is the residual guilt and shame this sexual proletariat feels for failing to conform this norm, and liberation is the overthrowing of the norm and the political defeat and social ostracization of those who still uphold it.
This opens the door to a counter-morality.  The good person, on this narrative, is the person who rejects traditional sexual morality and opposes those who defend it.  The nagging feelings of shame and guilt are magically transformed into a reassuring sense of pride and virtue.  Moreover, you can link arms with those who fight other forms of oppression, and their virtue rubs off on you.  Getting an abortion or publicly declaring yourself “bi-curious” becomes an act of political courage on all fours with sitting alongside Rosa Parks or marching at Selma.
The whole thing is preposterous, of course, but anyone strongly tempted to what would traditionally have been regarded as sexual vice has a powerful incentive to want to believe it.  And the more you can work yourself into a moralistic frenzy against those who uphold traditional sexual morality, the more thoroughly you can overcome any feelings of guilt and shame for flouting it.  
Natural law adepts will recognize in this an example of the “blindness of mind” that Aquinas says is one of the “daughters” or byproducts of lust, and which I have discussed at length in earlier posts.  As the sexual revolution has come more and more to dominate the agenda of the Left, this blindness has increasingly shaped left-wing psychology.  Thus does a visceral, crusading sexual counter-morality become the emotional glue that keeps the ideological blinders affixed.  Thus does some hapless smiling teenage kid come to be demonized as The Patriarchy incarnate.

Washburn contra the “new natural lawyers”

I highly recommend theologian Christian Washburn’s excellent article “The New Natural Lawyers, Contraception, Capital Punishment, and the Infallibility of the Ordinary Magisterium,” from the latest issue of Logos .  Is there anything new to say about the “new natural law” (NNL) position on capital punishment?  There is, as Washburn shows. Washburn begins by noting an odd parallel.  John T. Noonan’s influential book on the history of Catholic thinking about contraception showed that the Church’s teaching against the practice has been consistent for two millennia.  And yet Noonan nevertheless proposed that the teaching could be reversed.  Similarly, NNL scholar E. Christian Brugger’s book on capital punishment shows that the Church’s teaching on the legitimacy in principle of capital punishment has also been consistent for two millennia.  And yet Brugger nevertheless proposes that this teaching could be reversed.  
Part of the oddness of this is that both Noonan’s position and Brugger’s are perverse.  In Catholic theology, the more ancient and consistent a teaching concerning faith and morals, the less plausible can be the case for a reversal of that teaching.  Hence both Noonan and Brugger end up taking a position that is precisely the opposite of what the results of their historical investigations can support.
But another oddity here is that Brugger himself, and other NNL writers, see the perversity in the case of Noonan.  In an influential 1978 paper, Germain Grisez, the father of NNL theory (working together with the great Catholic moral theologian John C. Ford, who was not a NNL theorist), argued that evidence like that cited by Noonan in fact shows that the Church’s traditional doctrine against contraception has been taught infallibly.  Other NNL thinkers have followed them in this judgment.  And yet where capital punishment is concerned, Grisez and other NNL writers draw the opposite conclusion from the same sort of evidence!
Indeed, it’s worse than that.  Washburn notes that the evidence for the traditional teaching on capital punishment is stronger than that cited by Grisez in favor of the traditional teaching on contraception.  For example, the number of Fathers and popes who can be cited in defense of capital punishment is larger in each case than the number that Grisez cites in favor of the traditional teaching against contraception.  Furthermore, the NNL writers apply their standards of evidence in an inconsistent way.  For example, Grisez cites the Roman Catechism as evidence that the traditional teaching against contraception is part of the ordinary magisterium, but he and other NNL writers downplay the fact that the traditional teaching on capital punishment is also found in the Roman Catechism.  Indeed, the Roman Catechism presents moreby way of citations from authoritative sources in defense of traditional teaching on capital punishment than it does in the case of contraception.
In short, if Grisez, Brugger, and other NNL writers were consistent in their application of the standards they deploy in criticism of Noonan, they would uphold traditional teaching on capital punishment no less than traditional teaching on contraception.  The reason they don’t apply these standards consistently is, of course, that traditional teaching on capital punishment conflicts with Grisez’s personal theology, whereas traditional teaching on contraception does not.  The NNL theory is allowed to trump the evidence from tradition in the one case, even while it is claimed to be supported by the evidence from tradition in the other.  For Grisez and company, the attitude is “NNL über alles.”
In defense of his proposal that the Church could reverse her traditional teaching on capital punishment, Brugger claims that a doctrine cannot be said to have been taught infallibly by the ordinary magisterium unless it has been explicitly taught in a definitive way by all the bishops.  Joe Bessette and I criticize Brugger’s criterion in By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed , and Washburn has some criticisms of his own.  First, he says, this criterion of Brugger’s is “a theological novelty” having no support in the tradition.  Second, it is so stringent a standard that it would render impossible a proof of anydoctrine from the ordinary magisterium (including doctrines the NNL writers would want to uphold).  Third, it conflicts with the teaching of Pope Pius IX’s Tuas Libenter, which cites the constant consensus of theologians as evidence of a doctrine’s being an infallible part of the ordinary magisterium.  (Cf. my Catholic World Report article “Capital punishment and the infallibility of the ordinary magisterium.”)
Washburn also points out that while Brugger concedes that the evidence from the Fathers, Doctors, and popes all supports the traditional teaching that capital punishment can be legitimate in principle, that evidence is in fact even stronger than Brugger’s survey indicates.  For example, when considering the teaching of the Fathers and the popes on the subject of capital punishment, Brugger tends to focus on statements pertaining to the question of the status of capital punishment under the Christian dispensation.  But Washburn says that Brugger neglects important patristic and papal statements about capital punishment in the Old Testament, some of which refer to the practice as having been a part of “divine law” or “sacred law.”  As Washburn points out, a practice that is part of divine or sacred law can hardly be intrinsically evil (as NNL theory says capital punishment is), whatever one says about its status under the Christian dispensation. 
Washburn also thinks that Brugger fails to consider the weight of the evidence from canon law and the policies of the popes concerning the use of capital punishment in practice.  I think he is right about this, and to what he says, I would add the following point.  Suppose that canon law and the popes had for centuries officially decreed that abortion or contraception is morally permissible, that these practices were approved of and widely adopted in the Papal States, etc.  This would hardly be consistent with the Church’s claim to be an infallible guide to faith and morals.  For she would have been directly leading untold numbers of Catholics into grave moral corruption for centuries.  Yet Grisez, Brugger, and other NNL writers, who claim that capital punishment is always and intrinsically evil, in effect hold that canon law and the popes did exactly this sort of thing where that practice is concerned.
(Note that it is not a good reply to this to point out that there have been many popes and bishops who were guilty of murder, adultery, fornication, simony, etc.  Of course there have been, but they never taught that these things are good in official magisterial statements, made them official policy, incorporated them into canon law, etc.  The Church’s being an infallible moral teacher is compatible with churchmen being personally corrupt, but not with her having officially taught grave moral error century after century after century.)
In my CWR article on capital punishment and the ordinary magisterium, I emphasized the weight that the teaching of the Doctors of the Church has in Catholic theology, and Washburn makes some important points about that matter as well.  He notes that at least 18 of the 35 Doctors taught that capital punishment can be permissible in principle, and in addition to the Doctors I cited in my article, he cites the Venerable Bede, Peter Damian, Bonaventure, Albert, and Lawrence of Brindisi.  Washburn is also critical of the strained – and indeed, sometimes manifestly absurd – reinterpretations of biblical passages that NNL writers have to come up with in order to try to reconcile scripture with their position.
Anyway, as they say, read the whole thing.

Materialism subverts itself

A naïve understanding of materialism attributes to it a naïve understanding of matter.  Matter, common sense says, is more or less the way it appears to us in ordinary experience.  It is solid, colored stuff that always tastes, smells, sounds, and feels a certain way.  Materialism, on a naïve understanding, is the view that everything that exists is like that.  Even unobservable particles are assumed to be tiny solid, colored objects that have their own tastes, smells, sounds, and feels to them.  Like little stones or marbles.Of course, this is all wrong.  The conception of matter that materialists have inherited from Galileo, Descartes, Boyle, Locke, and the other early modern scientists and philosophers abstracts away these features of the commonsense understanding of matter.  Color, odor, sound, taste, smell, heat, and cold as common sense understands them are said not to exist in matter at all, but only in the mind’s representation of matter.  Matter is characterized instead in mathematical terms, in a purely quantitative rather than qualitative way.  For example, for Descartes, matter is essentially what can be captured in the language of analytic geometry.

The modern understanding of matter thus dematerializesit in the sense of stripping away most of the features that common sense takes to be definitive of matter.  Common sense supposes that matter is essentially the kind of thing that we see, hear, taste, touch, and smell.  The early modern conception holds that properly to understand matter, in fact you mostly or entirely have to ignore what you see, hear, taste, touch, and smell.  Matter is not what the senses tell us it is.  Knowing matter’s true nature involves an abstract intellectual exercise rather than straightforward sensory experience.  It is a kind of applied mathematics. 
Looked at in this light, the materialist claim that everything is material is less clear in its import than it might seem at first glance.  For what does “material” mean if we don’t think of matter in naïve commonsense terms?  What does the claim that everything is material entail, exactly, and what does it rule out?
Philosophers and scientists of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century often judged that, given its mathematical bent, the modern conception of matter doesn’t really tell us much about matter at all.  What it gives us is the mathematical structure of matter, but not the nature of the stuff that has that structure.  You see this view, in different forms, in the work of Poincaré, Duhem, Russell, Eddington, and others.  Now, if you read the thesis that everything is material in light of this point, then the thesis turns out to be highly indeterminate.  It is really saying something like everything has such-and-such a mathematical structure.  That is not uninformative, but it is also not nearly as informative as materialism at first seems to be. 
Suppose I said that everything is describable in terms of formal logic.  That is hardly an ontologically significant claim.  Indeed, it rules out nothing at all, since in some sense everything that exists or could exist is describable in terms of formal logic.  To be sure, the claim that everything has such-and-such a mathematical structure is not as ontologically uninformative as that.  For one thing, at least some mathematical properties (such as geometrical properties) are less general than logical ones.  For another thing, even interpreted as the claim that everything has such-and-such a mathematical structure, materialism is committed to the idea that the structure in question is whatever physics tells us it is, which rules out quite a lot.
All the same, there is a lot that it does notrule out.  For example, to say that everything has such-and-such a mathematical structure does not by itself rule out the possibility that everything is also a compound of act and potency, or that qualia are also among the properties that everything has.  In other words, it doesn’t rule out the idea that matter is to be understood along Aristotelian lines, or along panpsychist lines.
The reason it does not rule such claims out is that to say that everything has such-and-such a mathematical structure does not entail that the nature of everything that exists is exhausted by a description of its mathematical structure.  It could turn out that everything that exists has the mathematical structure that physics uncovers, but also has further properties, in addition to that, of which physics tells us nothing.  That is what Russell thought, and it is what contemporary writers influenced by Russell (like David Chalmers and Galen Strawson) have also proposed.  Now, if we allow that qualia can be among the intrinsic features of matter, then, as Chalmers notes, we end up with a position that is either panpsychist or property dualist.  And a position that is compatible with panpsychism and property dualism is not the kind of thing one usually thinks of when one thinks of materialism.  But that is what we get when we read the claim that everything is material in light of the modern conception of matter.
The Russellian view is sometimes called epistemic structural realism.  It holds that the description of the world afforded by mathematical physics is true as far as it goes (hence the view is a kind of realism), but that it is not the whole truth.  Physics can know only the mathematical structure of matter (hence the adjective “epistemic”), but there is more to matter than that.  But one could argue instead that there isn’t more to matter than that.  This is a view sometimes called ontic structural realism.  It holds both that the mathematical description afforded by physics is true (hence it is also a kind of realism), and that it is the whole truth.  Matter is to be identified with its mathematical structure.  There is nothing more to its reality than that (hence the adjective “ontic”). 
Something like this view is defended by philosophers such as James Ladyman and Don Ross in their book Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized, and by the physicist Max Tegmark.  I have a lot to say about Ladyman and Ross’s project in the forthcoming Aristotle’s Revenge , all of it critical.  Suffice it for present purposes to note that this sort of view essentially identifies the physical world with a kind of Platonic abstract object.  Ladyman and Ross try to deal with this problem by denying that there is a clear distinction between abstract and concrete.  As I argue in the book, this position is incoherent and the arguments for it are entirely question-begging.  Moreover, even apart from that it doesn’t really solve the problem at all, because (as the Aristotelian would argue) Platonism itself essentially blurs the distinction between the abstract and the concrete.  For a Platonic Form is characterized both as a universal (and hence as abstract) and as a substance (and hence as concrete).  To blur the abstract/concrete distinction is to fall deeper into Platonism, rather than to avoid it.
Ontic structural realism says, in effect, that what exists is a certain Platonic Form, viz. the world considered as a mathematical structure.  So if we read materialism in ontic structural realist terms, then materialism ends up collapsing into a kind of Platonism.  This too is not the sort of thing one usually thinks of when one thinks of materialism.
The way the Neo-Platonist tradition solved this problem of blurring the abstract and the concrete is essentially by conceding to Aristotle the thesis that universals exist only in intellects, and locating the realm of the Forms in an infinite divine intellect.  For Plotinus this intellect is the first emanation from the One, and for Christian Platonists it is God himself.  Now, if you take the world to be a kind of Form or abstract object and add the thesis that such objects exist only in intellects, then you have what amounts to a kind of idealism or even (depending on how the intellect in question is characterized) a kind of pantheism.  Eddington and James Jeans, another twentieth-century physicist, explicitly went in an idealist direction.  Contemporary writers who suggest that the universe might be a kind of computer simulation, and the abstract structure described by physics to be the software underlying the simulation, come pretty close to idealism or pantheism.  The universe qua computer roughly corresponds to the Absolute Spirit of an idealist and pantheist like Hegel, and the computer simulation to the unfolding of this Spirit in history.  Again, not the kind of thing one usually associates with materialism. 
So, if we start with the modern materialist’s conception of matter and start to unpack it, materialism ends up being transformed into one or another of the various views that one would have thought to be at odds with materialism – dualism, panpsychism, Platonism, idealism, or pantheism.
A similarly surprising result follows if we start instead with the materialist’s conception of mind.  The prevailing tendency for decades now among materialists has been to think of the mind in functionalist terms.  That is to say, it is to analyze mental phenomena in terms of what they do rather than in terms of what they are made of.  That idea, in turn, is typically developed in terms of the thesis that the mind is a kind of software that can be run on any number of different kinds of hardware.  On this analysis, mind, like matter, turns out to be a kind of abstract structure.  Like matter, it is essentially dematerialized, in the name of materialism.  And you get other results that sound odd coming from a materialist, such as the idea that a mind might jump from one embodiment to another by way of software being uploaded from its old hardware and downloaded onto new hardware.  (Transmigration of souls, anyone?) 
When you combine the mind-as-software idea with the universe-as-computer idea, you get the result that the individual human mind is like one of many programs running against the background of the same operating system.  This is reminiscent of the relationship between individual souls and the “world soul” in some pantheist and idealist systems.
I would speculate that the reason more materialists don’t see how close these various implications are to views that are usually thought to be the opposite of materialist is that many of them simply don’t know very much about the history of non-materialist philosophy, or the history of philosophy in general.  In particular, they often have an extremely crude conception of the soul (as a piece of ectoplasm, or as a ghost) and an extremely crude conception of God (as a really big piece of ectoplasm or an especially powerful ghost).  Hence their understanding of what Platonic, Aristotelian, Scholastic, idealist, rationalist, etc. philosophers mean when they use terms like “soul” and “God” is laughably off-base, even when they have any knowledge at all of what such thinkers have said.  Ironically, they more or less materialize these immaterial realities, just as they dematerialize matter.
Further reading:
David Foster Wallace on abstraction

Concretizing the abstract
Think, McFly, think!
Progressive dematerialization
Rucker’s Mindscape
Five Proofs of the Existence of God , Chapter 3

Finnis on capital punishment (Updated)

John Finnis holds that the Catholic Church could reverse her traditional teaching that capital punishment can be legitimate in principle.  I criticized his position in the course of an exchange at Public Discourse several months ago.  Last month Finnis replied in an article at Public Discourse.  Today I respond to Finnis’s reply in an article at Catholic World Report.
Meanwhile, at Denver Journal, Ben Crenshaw kindly reviews By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment .  From the review:
Feser and Bessette should be commended for writing the most exhaustive and convincing defense of the death penalty to date.  There is nothing of import that is left out.  There is no abolitionist argument that is not addressed and refuted.  And there is no flimsy cultural cliché that survives the impeccable logic and weight of evidence that the authors marshal.  For those contending for capital punishment as a just and humane aspect of our criminal justice system, Feser and Bessette’s book will be of indispensable aid. 

End quote.  Crenshaw writes from a Protestant perspective, and his main criticism is that in the chapter on the theology of capital punishment, “intra-Catholic doctrinal debates” are treated at much greater length than scriptural passages are.  

I agree that this is regrettable, but unfortunately, it was also necessary.  It would nothave been necessary if the book had been written at any time before about 30 years ago.  But the amount of sophistry on this subject that has been pouring forth from Catholic churchmen and writers in recent years is unprecedented in Church history, and demanded a lengthy response.  Finnis’s latest article is more of the same, as I show in my reply.

UPDATE 1/6: Theologian Christian Washburn has an essay in the latest issue of Logos critiquing the NNLT position on capital punishment.  Also, in an article recently reprinted in The Wanderer, Fr. George Welzbacher addresses some problems with the translation of the recent revision to the Catechism.

Finnis on capital punishment

John Finnis holds that the Catholic Church could reverse her traditional teaching that capital punishment can be legitimate in principle.  I criticized his position in the course of an exchange at Public Discourse several months ago.  Last month Finnis replied in an article at Public Discourse.  Today I respond to Finnis’s reply in an article at Catholic World Report.
Meanwhile, at Denver Journal, Ben Crenshaw kindly reviews By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment .  From the review: Feser and Bessette should be commended for writing the most exhaustive and convincing defense of the death penalty to date.  There is nothing of import that is left out.  There is no abolitionist argument that is not addressed and refuted.  And there is no flimsy cultural cliché that survives the impeccable logic and weight of evidence that the authors marshal.  For those contending for capital punishment as a just and humane aspect of our criminal justice system, Feser and Bessette’s book will be of indispensable aid. 
End quote.  Crenshaw writes from a Protestant perspective, and his main criticism is that in the chapter on the theology of capital punishment, “intra-Catholic doctrinal debates” are treated at much greater length than scriptural passages are.  
I agree that this is regrettable, but unfortunately, it was also necessary.  It would nothave been necessary if the book had been written at any time before about 30 years ago.  But the amount of sophistry on this subject that has been pouring forth from Catholic churchmen and writers in recent years is unprecedented in Church history, and demanded a lengthy response.  Finnis’s latest article is more of the same, as I show in my reply.

The sexual revolution devours its children

In two recent posts, we looked at philosopher Alex Byrne’s criticisms of claims made by some transgender activists to the effect that sex is not binary and that it is socially constructed.  Byrne is by no means the only philosopher alarmed at the increasingly bizarre claims being made by such activists – and the shrillness with which they are making them.  Kathleen Stock worries that such ideas will cause harm to women.  Daniel A. Kaufman warns that they threaten nothing less than the end of civil rights.  Nor are these philosophers conservatives who are hostile to the sexual revolution.  They are progressives concerned about extremism and anti-intellectualism in their own ranks.  And as if to prove the critics’ point, some of the activists have in response tried to get the critics fired and otherwise to silence them.[Correction: Dan Kaufman kindly responds to this post in the combox below, and offers the following clarification: "I do believe in both the rightness and the viability of the modern liberal project, a la Locke and Mill [but] I do not consider myself a progressive of any sort."]

The identificationist extreme

Kaufman gives the label “identificationism” to the thesis that a person is whatever he takes himself to be, which underlies claims like the ones criticized by Byrne.  To understand the absurd implications Kaufman takes this thesis to have, consider the following example.  (The details of the example are mine, not Kaufman’s.)  Suppose Pat is biologically male, having male chromosomes, male sex organs, and so forth.  The traditional or commonsense view of sex would be that Pat is a man, full stop.  Suppose that Chris, meanwhile, is biologically female, having female chromosomes and female sex organs.  The traditional or commonsense view would be that Chris is a woman, full stop.  And suppose also that Chris is sexually attracted only to other women.  Then common sense would say that Chris is a lesbian – since, as Kaufman writes, “until about five minutes ago, everyone knew what a lesbian is, namely a homosexual woman.”

But now suppose that Pat “self-identifies” as a woman, but also as a woman who is sexually attracted only to other women.  Then Pat too, despite being what common sense would regard as a man, is also a lesbian!  Suppose also that Chris is in no way sexually attracted to “lesbians” like Pat, and indeed finds distasteful the idea of being romantically or sexually involved with them (given that they have male sexual organs, etc.).  Then, according to the identificationist transgender activists criticized by Kaufman, Chris is guilty of “bigotry” against Pat.  On the activists’ view, for Chris to refuse to treat people like Pat the way she would treat any other lesbian is a kind of unjust discrimination.

In effect, these activists are claiming that it is wrong for Chris (who, common sense says, is a woman) not to be sexually and romantically attracted to people like Pat (who, common sense says, is a man).  But this sort of claim, Kaufman points out, “used to be the exclusive province of religious fundamentalists and other assorted social conservatives and reactionaries”!  In short, the identificationist transgender activists are in Kaufman’s view undermining the whole point of the gay liberation movement, which was to validate preferences like Chris’s.

Moreover, Kaufman says, identificationists never explain why there is something “bigoted” about Chris’s set of preferences but not about Pat’s set of preferences.  They simply arbitrarily insist that Pat’s are unobjectionable and must be affirmed and that Chris’s are bad and must be condemned.

Stock worries that identificationism threatens to strip concepts like “woman” and “female” of any clear meaning, and that this will undermine efforts to deal with the unique problems faced by women.  She writes:

[Women] face… a heightened vulnerability to rape, sexual assault, voyeurism and exhibitionism; to sexual harassment; to domestic violence; to certain cancers; to anorexia and self-harm; and so on. If self-declared trans women are included in statistics, understanding will be hampered. A male’s self-identification into the category of “female” or “women” doesn’t automatically bring on susceptibility to these harms; nor does a female’s self-identification out of those categories lessen it. In a sexist world which often disadvantages females, as such, we need good data.

Furthermore, Stock argues, allowing anyone who self-identifies as a woman into areas traditionally reserved for women (changing rooms, women’s prisons, etc.) is bound to increase the incidence of violence against women.  Like Kaufman, Stock is also concerned that identificationism makes the concept “lesbian” so fluid that the self-understanding of those traditionally classified as lesbians, as well as their “special protections as a discriminated-against minority” and their “access to special sources of charity funding,” will be threatened.

In short, just as Kaufman worries that identificationism threatens the gay rights movement, Stock worries that it threatens feminism.  Kaufman argues that it also threatens racial equality.  For racial and ethnic differences are, he argues, no less plausibly socially constructed than sex differences.  Hence if identificationism entails that a person can make himself a man or a woman simply by self-identifying as such, then it no less plausibly entails that he can make himself a member of a certain race or ethnic group simply by self-identifying as such.

Philosopher Rebecca Tuvel made a similar claim last year – and faced a storm of outrage from some of her fellow left-wingers – and, of course, Rachel Dolezal famously faced similar outrage for claiming to be a black woman.  But Kaufman argues that if one grants the identificationist premises, there can be no rational justification for the outrage.  He writes:

Dolezal’s efforts to “self-identify” as black may have backfired, but I would suggest that this is only because she came to the identificationist party a bit too early.  Another such effort, five or ten years from now, done offensively, rather than defensively, in the manner of contemporary gender activism (i.e. by way of accusing critics of bigotry and “violence” and demanding their silencing and worse), might very well succeed.

If it does, he says, this will be “the last nail in the coffin of the traditional conception of civil rights,” because the notions of race and ethnicity, like the notion of sex, will have been evacuated of any clear meaning.

The liberal middle ground

Like Byrne, Kaufman and Stock do not challenge the claim that gender (as opposed to sex) is socially constructed, and thus do not object to a more moderate transgender position.  Again, they also want to uphold the standard liberal positions on feminism, gay liberation, and the sexual revolution in general.  The difference between their moderate liberal position and the identificationist extremism they reject, Kaufman says, is that identificationism rests on a “hubristic deformation of the modern conception of the self.”  He writes:

The reasonable version of this conception entails a rejection of the pre-modern idea that a person is defined entirely in terms of his or her position in a social framework that is governed by a normatively thick conception of natural law, in favor of the notion that (to a substantial degree) who we are is a matter of our internal consciousness and thus, is determined by us.  It was an idea whose ultimate aim was to ground the moral and political autonomy of the individual necessary for life in a modern, democratic polis.

But identificationism goes beyond this to:

a complete rejection of material or social reality… maintaining that the individual is entirely self-made; that who and what I am is a matter of my own consciousness and will alone, irrespective of nature or social consensus. The result is an incoherent, unstable ground.

Kaufman sees in this extreme position an echo of Descartes’ substance dualism, Locke’s “continuity of consciousness” account of personhood, and Kant’s “noumenal self” – all of which essentially make the body, and materiality in general, something external to the self.  If you take yourself to be only contingently related to your body and to materiality in general, then it can seem plausible to hold that your genitalia, chromosomes, etc. are irrelevant to making you what you are, and that you can define yourself entirely independently of them.

The moderate position Kaufman favors, by contrast, “[does] not deny that the relevant material realities exist, but rather, that they have any legitimate moral or political valence in a modern, democratic society.”  Kaufman, Stock, and other critics of identificationism want to affirm that biology is partially constitutive of a person in a way that rules out the extreme thesis that you can make yourself male or female simply by self-identifying as such, but without abandoning gay liberation, feminism, moderate transgender activism, and the sexual revolution in general.

Now, the 64 dollar question is whether this middle ground liberal position between identificationism on the one hand, and “a normatively thick conception of natural law” on the other, is stable.  And the fuzziness in Kaufman’s characterization of it does not lend confidence.  Kaufman says that a person should not be “defined entirely” in terms of his position within a social framework governed by natural law, that what we are is determined by our consciousness of ourselves only “to a substantial degree,” that we should be wary of a “complete rejection” of our material nature, and that we are therefore not “entirely self-made.”  

That indicates that what a person is is at least partiallydetermined by what Kaufman calls “material realities” – by biological facts of the kind the natural law tradition puts heavy emphasis on and the identificationist position ignores entirely.  Kaufman wants to let in enough biology to rule out the latter position but not enough to let in the former.  But exactly where do we draw the line, and why there?  Kaufman does not tell us.

Of course, no one can do everything in one article.  But the question is not some quibble over details.  It is a challenge to the very possibility of a middle ground liberal position.  If there is no principled or non-arbitrary way to draw the line, then either we have to go the whole hog for identificationism or we have to reconsider the possibility that the natural law position was right all along.

Can the center hold?

Here’s one way to see the problem.  It is notoriously difficult to characterize biological features except in functional terms.  You cannot adequately characterize the eye without making reference to the function of seeing, or the heart without making reference to the function of pumping blood.  This is as true of sexual features as of any others.  For example, male genitalia serve the function of getting male gametes together with female gametes.  It is also true of some psychological features no less than of physiological ones.  For example, hunger and thirst have the function of getting us to eat and drink, so that we will have the nutrients and hydration needed to sustain ourselves.

Claims about biological function are not undermined by examples of organisms that fail to perform the function well or at all.  The existence of blind people doesn’t undermine the claim that the function of eyes is to allow us to see.  Nor does it show that the eyes of blind people have a different function than those of people with sight.  The eyes of blind people and of people with sight have exactly the same function.  It’s just that blind people can’t perform that function, for whatever reason (e.g. damage to the eye or to the optic nerve).  Similarly, the existence of people who suffer from pica – the compulsion to eat things that have no nutritional value (dirt, stones, metal, etc.) – does not cast any doubt on the claim that hunger has the function of getting us to take in nutrients by eating.  Nor does it show that hunger has a different function in people who suffer from pica than it does in other people.  Hunger has exactly the same biological function in everyone.  It’s just that, because of a psychological abnormality, people who suffer from pica do not perform that function as well.

Now, according to the natural law tradition associated with thinkers like Aquinas (and which Kaufman rejects as the opposite extreme from identificationism), intersexuality, homosexuality, and the like are analogous to blindness, pica, and other dysfunctions.  For example, on the natural law view, having physiological sex characteristics that are not unambiguously male or female is like having eyes or optic nerves that are damaged.  It in no way shows that sexual organs do not have the biological function of getting the gametes of the opposite sexes together, and neither does it show that the sexual organs of intersex people have a different function from those of other people.  Rather, their sexual organs have exactly the same function as that of everyone else.  It’s just that, due to genetic defect, physiological abnormality, etc., they are not capable of performing that function well or at all.

Similarly, on the natural law view, sexual desire has the biological function of getting us to mate with people of the opposite sex, and the existence of people with sexual desires that are partly or wholly homosexual does not show otherwise.  Nor does it show that the function of sexual desire in people with same-sex attraction is different from the function it has in other people.  Rather, the function of sexual desire is the same in everyone.  It’s just that in people with desires that are partly or wholly homosexual, that function is not performed as well.  According to the natural law view, same-sex attraction is comparable to pica.  

Thus does Aristotle explicitly draw this comparison in his discussion of disordered pleasures in the Nicomachean Ethics (at 1148b 15 – 19a 20).  Thus does Plato – his own homosexual inclinations notwithstanding – argue in The Laws that sexual relations are natural only when procreation is possible (at 839a), so that sexual pleasure is natural when indulged between men and women but unnatural in the context of same-sex sexual activity (636c).  Despite the prevalence of homosexuality in Greek culture, the Greeks didn’t see homosexuality as a kind of identity or basic orientation, any more than blindness or pica entails a kind of identity or orientation.  They saw it merely as the having of certain desires, the goodness or badness of which needed to be evaluated the way any other desire is evaluated.  Some of them judged such desires acceptable, whereas others (like Aristotle and the later Plato) did not.  The medieval natural law tradition that built on Plato and Aristotle inherited both this approach to understanding same-sex desire, and the negative evaluation of it.  Like the Greeks, they didn’t see the question of homosexuality as a matter of either affirming or condemning a class of people, but merely of affirming or condemning a certain kind of desire.

The implication of this view is that no one is really homosexual if being homosexual is interpreted as a kind of natural state or basic orientation.  According to the natural law analysis, being attracted to people of the same sex is not like being sighted or having a natural inclination to eat and drink, but more like being blind or suffering from pica.  The blind person no less than everyone else is naturally oriented toward seeing, the person suffering from pica no less than everyone else is naturally oriented toward eating what will provide nutrition, and people with homosexual desires no less than everyone else are naturally oriented toward having sexual relations with people of the opposite sex.  It’s just that physiological dysfunction frustrates the realization of the natural end in the case of blind people, and psychological dysfunction frustrates the realization of the natural end in the case of people exhibiting pica and in people with homosexual desires.  On the natural law analysis, everyone is naturally oriented toward sight, eating nutritional food, and heterosexual sexual relations.

Now, the point of this exposition is to make concrete the difficulty facing the middle ground liberal position of Kaufman, Stock, et al.  They would, of course, disagree with the natural law analysis of homosexuality.  The problem is that it is hard to see how they can do so in a principled way given their rejection of identificationism.  Again, Kaufman rejects identificationism on the grounds that it entirely divorces our “material” or biological attributes from the self.  In Kaufman’s view, one’s biological features can make it the case that one simply is, as a matter of objective fact, a male, and that’s that.  The fact that one might not feellike a male is in Kaufman’s view irrelevant to the biological facts.  Hence he rejects talk of “’girl-penises,’ sex not being bimodal and the like.”  

But in that case, why should we not also say that every person is naturally heterosexual, whether all people feel that way or not?  Why does biology trump one’s self-conception in the case of a male who thinks of himself as really being female, but not in the case of a male who thinks of himself as really being homosexual?  If we say that the former is as a matter of fact male, even if he thinks of himself as female, why shouldn’t we say that the latter is as a matter of factmade for sex with females, even if he thinks of himself as made for sex with males?  Or, if we say that the latter is correct to take his natural orientation to be toward sex with other males, biology notwithstanding, then why shouldn’t we say that the former is correct to hold that he is really a female, biology notwithstanding?

It seems, then, that the identificationist is on to something.  The movement for gay rights effectively severed a person’s self-identified sexual orientation from biology, and the identificationist is pointing out that if we are going to do that, then to be consistent we will have to sever one’s self-identified sex from biology.  If appeals to biological function cut no ice in the one case, neither do they cut any ice in the other.

There are three ways that Kaufman, Stock, et al. might try to respond to this, though none seems very promising.  The first would be to dismiss talk of biological function as a mere teleological façon de parler that has no deep philosophical implications.  Now, just on general philosophy of biology grounds, I don’t think this sort of move can work.  I would argue that the notion of biological function is both ineliminable and irreducible.  That is to say, we can’t make sense of the biological facts without it, and we can’t analyze it in non-teleological terms.  

But put that to one side for present purposes.  The trouble for defenders of the liberal middle ground position is that to make this strategy work, they not only need to get rid of the notion of biological function, but to do so in a way that doesn’t give the game away to identificationism.  And I don’t think that is possible.  As I noted in my posts on Byrne, it is very difficult to spell out the biological difference between male and female in non-teleological terms.  Hence, if Kaufman, Stock, et al. were to chuck out function talk altogether so as to avoid having to accept the natural law view that homosexual desire is dysfunctional, then they would also undermine the case for saying that there is an objective biological difference between male and female.

A second strategy would be to accept the notion of biological function but deny that consistency requires treating claims about sex and sexual orientation as on a par.  On this strategy, we could say that there is an objective matter of biological fact about whether someone is male or female, but no objective matter of fact about whether sexual desire has the function of getting us to mate with people of the opposite sex.  The trouble with this move is that it seems both ad hoc and biologically implausible.  What criteria for biological function could one draw up that would make it plausible to say that eyes are for seeing and hunger for getting us to eat, but that sexual desire is not for getting us to mate with the opposite sex?  Why would one even try to look for such gerrymandered criteria if it weren’t for the ad hoc purpose of trying to avoid both identificationism and natural law theory?

A third strategy for the middle ground liberal position would be to argue that sexual orientation is more like gender than it is like sex.  Again, Kaufman, Stock, et al. have no beef with the transgender activist who says that genderis self-made.  Like Byrne, they object only to the claim that sex is self-made.  With sex, biology determines that you are either male or female, but with gender things are more fluid.  Someone who is biologically male might well identify as a woman.  Now, Kaufman, Stock, et al. might argue that a similar distinction might be made where sexual orientation is concerned.  They might allow that as a matter of biologicalfact sexual desire is naturally heterosexual, but then argue that sexual orientation is like gender in being fluid and socially constructed.  

But this strategy won’t work either, because to allow that sexual desire has, as a matter of biological fact, a heterosexual function, would be to imply that homosexual desire is biologically dysfunctional.  And if you are going to say that, then it is hard to see why you wouldn’t also have to say that for a biological male to think of himself as a woman is also dysfunctional.  But once you do that, then it is hard to see how you can maintain a sharp distinction between the biology of sex on the one hand, and gender and sexual orientation on the other, without lapsing into the precisely the radical Cartesian/Lockean/Kantian divide between persons and their biology that Kaufman wants to avoid.  

As I suggested in my posts on Byrne, the reason that identificationists take the extreme position they do is that they perceive that the distinction between sex and gender is not in fact a sharp one.  The more robust the biological distinction between the sexes is, the less plausibly fluid gender is.  The more fluid the distinction between the genders is, the less plausibly robust the biological distinction between the sexes.  Hence if you are going to insist on fluid gender differences, you are going to have to deny robust biological sex differences.  The identificationist transgender activists can plausibly say to Kaufman: “Weare not the ones positing a radical Cartesian divide between persons and their biology; you are!  It is precisely because we see persons and their biology as continuous that we conclude that, since gender is socially constructed, so too must the biology of sex be socially constructed.”  

If this is right, then the identificationist is not, after all, committed to a kind of Cartesian divide in human nature, but rather to a kind of biological anti-realism or social constructivism.  The natural law tradition, meanwhile, is committed to a robust realism about human biology.  So, who are the ones positing a radical Cartesian/Lockean/Kantian divide in human nature, then?  Defenders of the middle ground liberal position like Kaufman, Stock, and Byrne, that’s who!

The natural law diagnosis

So, again, it is hard to see how to find a principledor non-arbitrary middle ground between identificationism on the one hand and the natural law position on the other.  If one rejects the identificationist position as incoherent or biologically unsound, then it seems that one will have to reconsider the possibility that the natural law tradition was correct after all.  Or, if in the name of the sexual revolution one rejects the natural law position, then it seems that one will have to go the whole hog for identificationism.  If this is correct, then in one respect the identificationists are being perfectly logical.

In another respect, of course, they are not – namely, insofar as they present their position in a shrill and ad hominemway that is destructive of fruitful philosophical debate and free speech.  Kaufman is right to complain and worry about that, and to his credit he has repeatedly insisted that tactics like flinging epithets and shouting down opposition have no place in philosophy.

What is the explanation of the shrillness and illiberalism of many identificationists?  The natural law tradition suggests an answer.

In Books VIII and IX of The Republic, Plato was famously critical of democracy, which he took to be the worst form of polity next to tyranny.  Indeed, he thought it had a tendency to degenerate into tyranny.  What he objected to in democracy was not primarily its procedural elements, but rather the egalitarian character type that it fostered.  On Plato’s account, the egalitarian tendency is to give every desire and way of life equal respect, and this entails a leveling down of standards.  The egalitarian becomes increasingly unwilling even to consider the possibility that some desires or ways of life are worse than others.  The very idea becomes intolerable to him.  Since he is unwilling to subject his appetites to the evaluation of dispassionate reason, he gradually comes to be ruled by them.  And sexual desire, because it is uniquely unruly and concerns the most intense of pleasures, tends especially to dominate him.

As each citizen becomes less and less willing to allow social norms or legal restraints to limit the indulgence of his desires, an egalitarian society tends to degenerate into a war of competing subjectivities.  What happens eventually is that the more ruthless and cunning of these appetitive personalities figure out ways to impose their wills on the others, and that is when democracy starts to give way to tyranny.  The tyrannical character type is, on Plato’s account, essentially an extreme version of the lawless and appetite-driven character type produced by egalitarian societies, and he is especially prone to be dominated by lust.

Plato’s analysis suggests, then, that the more someone of an egalitarian personality type is dominated by his sexual desires, the less capable he is going to be of a dispassionate and objective evaluation of those desires, and the more ruthlessly willful he is likely to be in pursuing them.  An egalitarian society given to the indulgence of ever more exotic sexual tastes is, if Plato is right, also bound to be a society in which those tastes are championed in an increasingly intolerant way.

Aquinas makes some complementary points in his account of what he calls the “daughters of lust” in Summa Theologiae II-II.153.5(of which I offered an exposition in an earlier post).  Sexual indulgence that is excessive or involves acts that are unnatural or that is disordered in some other way has a tendency in Aquinas’s view to lead to what he calls “blindness of mind.”  The intensity of sexual pleasure can make it difficult to think logically and dispassionately about matters of sex even in the best circumstances.  And when repeated indulgence has habituated a person to sexual activity that is disordered, he is likely not to want to think dispassionately about it, and to be increasingly incapable of doing so.  The very idea of there being an objective standard by reference to which his indulgence is disordered becomes intolerable to him, and he becomes increasingly willful in his indulgence and hostile to anything that might block it.

Aquinas’s account, like Plato’s, would thus lead us to expect that the more indiscriminate people become about matters of sex, the less willing they will be to discuss such matters in a calm and rational way, and the less capable they will be of doing so.  

No doubt some would be inclined to respond by simply shouting “Bigot!” at Plato and Aquinas and ignoring their arguments.  Which, of course, only confirms their diagnosis.