The Unnecessary Science (Chapter 3)

As mentioned last time when I looked at Chapter 2, Chapter 3 of “The Unnecessary Science” focuses on natural law morality and, in particular, its intersection with sexual morality, which I myself examined in detail while reading Feser’s work.  Gunther Laird noted in a comment on last week’s post that we were making very similar arguments, which is in some sense true.  We both are arguing that once Feser makes the — correct in my opinion — moves to allow actions that don’t directly frustrate or pervert a function and to note that reproduction is not merely or possibly even primarily about simply producing a child but instead has to include raising that child to maturity then a number of things that Feser might want to prohibit seem to become at least potentially acceptable.  While there was a vigorous debate over that in the comments, for me it seems that if you are performing a sexual act that is set up to not produce children itself — and thus in theory perverting the faculty — it can’t count unless that in some way risks impeding you in having and raising the children you would be able to have and raise.  So if you do and as far as we know you are going to have just as many children in wedlock and are not risking your existing marriage (adultery) or delaying your marriage (by preferring casual affairs to preparing for marriage and finding a spouse), then in my view it is difficult to argue that it remains an example of perverting the faculty in line with Feser’s later moves.

That being said, it was also noted in the comments there that my interpretation was a bit of a trap for progressives, since while it accepted the arguments that some things that progressives advocated for were not necessarily morally wrong, it also advocated for a much different approach to sex than they would accept.  The reason is that I insist that sex for reproduction is the ideal case, and that reproduction is the main end of sex.  This means that I would at least consider all forms of sex that aren’t aimed at reproduction to be at least inferior to sex for reproduction, which means that, for example, I advocate that if you are not prepared when having sex with someone to marry them if a child results then you shouldn’t have sex with them because not marrying them if a child is produced is morally wrong by natural law (it’s not necessarily such by Stoic morality).  This is something that the progressive idea of sex can’t work with.  It wants sex to not be primarily for reproduction, and for all forms of sex to have equal value, even those that do not and cannot result in children or a marriage for the purposes of raising children.

And so I think one big problem Laird has in Chapter 3 is that he needs to defend that position and while accepting at least the natural law premise must argue that the main purpose of sex is not or need not be for reproduction.  The problem with this is that any such arguments have a very large hill to climb, since it really seems obvious that that is what sex is for.  It makes as little sense to claim that sex’s primary purpose isn’t necessarily for reproduction as it would be to claim that the primary purpose of eating is not to provide nutrition for the body.  Not only is that really what it does, not only is that what we’ve used it for for millenia, but it also is what evolution selected it and its specific traits for.  You can argue that sex for pleasure isn’t necessarily wrong, but not that it’s as important or ideal as sex for reproduction.

The preamble out of the way, let me now move on to my rather long list of specific notes on the chapter.

Laird tries to use an example of wet dreams — also known, I believe, as nocturnal emissions — to argue that since we spontaneously and throughout our life “waste” sperm, then masturbation should be allowed as well.  The issue here is that my understanding of the phenomena was that it was pretty much like bed wetting:  a brief period of time before we learn how to control our body better, with perhaps a bit of a loss of function as we age.  Thus, to argue that wet dreams justify masturbation seems to be same sort of argument as claiming that the fact that sometimes we wet the bed means that it is proper for us to simply urinate in our clothes and bed whenever we feel the need to urinate.  No, just because our body sometimes does something naturally does not give us carte blanche to do similar things intentionally.

Laird’s description of it implies, though, that it isn’t just a matter of a lack of control, but is instead something that occurs throughout one’s life, and so there may be a biological reason to occasionally flush out sperm.  This leads to an argument that can work, by arguing that it would be permissible to masturbate in order to achieve that biological goal in at least a cleaner and more consistent way.  However, the issue here is that this would not allow us to consider masturbation acceptable in general, but would instead only allow it precisely as needed to perform that specific function, which will be quite limited.  In fact, any of Laird’s examples that rely on finding a medical or biological reason for it to be necessary or at least greatly desirable suffer from that counter, which is that if that is the case it must only be done a) as is necessary to provide that function and b) only if there is no other reasonable option.  I believe that Feser’s justification for this would probably be that it is not immoral to subvert a faculty of an organism if the other option is the death of the organism, because obviously few if any faculties of an organism will function if the organism is dead.  But that’s far more limited a set of cases than I think Laird needs here.

(Note as an aside that you could make a comment here that if that’s the defense Feser would use then it opens up an argument that if someone demanded that a person, say, rape someone or else they would kill that person that person would be able to use the same justification to perform the rape.  I think Feser would take the Stoic line here and differentiate cases where your death comes at the hands of another person acting immorally from those where it’s happening due to purely natural causes.  If one acts in a manner that would be considered immoral only because someone else will act immorally if you don’t, your duty as a moral person is to force them to act immorally, not act immorally yourself and absolve them of the moral blame).

So I think the Feser could still blanket condemn pretty much all of the actions that Laird challenges him on here, and allow for certain exceptions in extremely rare cases.  That’s not going to get Laird or progressives in general the sort of sexual ethics that they want, nor will it strike any kind of real blow against Feser.

Laird then turns his attention to marriage with similar arguments, but ones that are a bit stronger because he can try to show that in at least some cases different forms of marriage could be in some cases necessary for actually raising children.  The problem with these, though, is that in general they don’t really work for that purpose.  He suggests that harems could work perfectly well, but the issue there is that even if we had one person who had the resources to raise the children from multiple marriages, children need more than wealth to thrive.  They also need attention, and in most harems there is no real way for the provider to provide the attention each would need.  Polygamy, of course, has similar issues, but Laird does point out that that could have advantages in cases where there is a huge imbalance between the genders.  However, that’s a very rare condition, and even then it might simply be better to increase the number of children per couple and through that and death rates eventually right the imbalance than to advocate for temporary polygamy (and permanent polygamy isn’t justified by that condition).

Ultimately, even progressives have to accept that the best arrangement for raising children is for their needs to be provided by their biological parents as best they can.  In fact, that’s exactly what at least some progressive feminists argued.  A while back, I was involved in a debate on feminist groups about what was called “Choice For Men”, which was the proposal that because women could get an abortion for any reason they wanted — which included that they didn’t want to provide support for a child — and ultimately that the child being born really was their choice that the man should get a chance to choose to absolve himself of support for it as well by giving up all rights to that child.  The best argument against that was that once the child was born it would require support, and that the best people to provide that support were its biological parents.  If this argument is accepted, then it pretty much precludes any of Laird’s examples as being in any way equal to traditional marriage.  Is it possible that we could accept them for a brief time if absolutely necessary?  Possibly, if the only alternative was the extinction of the human race.  Outside of that, there is no good reason to consider them marriages at all.

As an attempt to get same sex marriages into the picture, Laird appeals to a claim of their being a Form of Homosexuality, and so homosexuals getting into relations with members of the same sex and even getting married might well be them actually pursuing their real final end as per their Form.  The problem here is that homosexual acts are behaviours and behaviours follow from Forms and properties, and so it is entirely possible that homosexuals have disordered desires and properties that give them a propensity to act in that particular immoral way, just as someone might have a genetic disposition towards alcoholism without having to possess the Form of the Alcoholic and have drinking themselves into an early death as a final end.  Forms don’t seem to work the way they would need to to let Laird pull this off.  This is on top of the fact that if marriage really has a Form, then it would be about reproduction, which same sex marriages couldn’t conform to anyway.

What he moves onto, then, is trying to argue that marriage itself isn’t really a Form at all, but is instead merely a cultural artifact.  The big issue here is that if he denies that there’s a Form of Marriage, then his arguments for same sex marriage would be taken out as well.  Besides that, Feser derives his Forms from at least his view of nature, so to simply deny a Form exists because it is culturally recognized wouldn’t be a very good argument.  That a culture recognizes something doesn’t mean that it defines it, and if we start from a natural basis for marriage then it being primarily for reproduction, again, seems a pretty safe argument, especially given what I noted above.  As I’m sure I’ve mentioned, there is a difference between the legal definition of marriage and the “real” definition of marriage, and Laird’s attempt to turn the Form of Marriage into a cultural artifact at a minimum risks eliminating that distinction for no good reason.

I debated abortion a bit on the comment sections at “A Tippling Philosopher” and, yeah, I still don’t buy his arguments here.  The two main ones from the chapter and from the comments are that a) if potential rationality is enough to grant the zygote personhood, then sperm and eggs seem to have a similar enough potentiality to grant it to them as well and b) that potentiality and actuality are not the same thing.  The problem with the first argument is that the zygote does seem to be sufficiently different to have its own Form, and so to have different potentialities.  The fact that if nature is left to take its course the most natural progression is for it to end up as a rational being — which is absolutely not the case for sperm and eggs — and that being dependent on someone is insufficient in and of itself to remove rationality or the potential for it (we argued about this a fair bit in the comments on “Tippling”) makes me think that this argument is at a minimum far more complicated to make than Laird would like.

The second argument is a little better, but not the way Laird starts it. He made an argument about Feser ordering a drink and being upset that the waiter instead of bringing ice cubes brought water, which he could then claim had the potentiality for ice and were surely what Feser wanted, right?  My counter was that Feser explicitly asked for the actuality — or at least expected it — and that in that case being given the potentiality was indeed clearly not giving him what he wanted.  The argument though could be used to show that we don’t have to treat potentialities and actualities the same, which then could be used to break Feser’s argument that the potentiality for rationality is sufficient.  Of course, Feser does argue for why the potentiality itself matters, and at the end of the day Laird would need to give a strong argument for why the potentiality is not enough that doesn’t rely on the argument that it would provide an unreasonable burden on the mother or her body.  That …  might be tricky.

Finally, Laird tries to make a link to the idea that Aristotle and Plato at least accepted that under some circumstances infanticide might be allowed to create an inconsistency between that and abortion, by appealing to the principle of totality that I referenced earlier when talking about how you can frustrate a faculty in order to preserve the whole organism.  Here, it would be referring to removing an individual to allow the survival of the entire culture/race, which Laird then notes could work for abortions in at least some cases as well.  The problem with this line is two-fold.  First, as already mentioned, it would only allow it if there is no other choice, seriously limiting its applicability.  Second, why it could be done for infants and not adults is because to do this would require the agreement of the moral agent if they are capable of moral agency, and so for adults they couldn’t be forced into it but would have to agree to it.  For infants, they are not capable of moral choice or agency and so those who are responsible for them would have to make the choice on their behalf.  Thus this doesn’t introduce any real inconsistency.

Ultimately, this is not a good argument to use in defense of abortion because this in no way allows for the woman to have control over the situation and so for it to be her choice.  While we may not be able to compel her to participate as a moral agent, we could certainly consider her to be acting immorally in these cases if she didn’t have the abortion, which is quite uncomfortably close to justifying forced abortions.  If you can’t argue that the choice to abort or not is completely and totally hers, you aren’t defending abortion rights at all.

Next time, Chapter 4, where Laird tries to argue that natural law justifies some moral atrocities itself.

Tags: The Unnecessary Science