A Thinking Reed

Category: Ethics

  • Teleology beyond biologism

    One addendum to the previous post. I noted that old-style “biological” teleology had largely fallen out of favor as a foundation for ethics. However, this doesn’t mean that Christian ethics can or should dispense with teleology altogether. I grazed this point when I said that “ultimate happiness consists in greater knowledge of and union with God or the Good…and this fulfillment only comes to complete fruition in the life to come.” Our telos, in Christian terms, is an eschatological one and is not given “immanently” in the created order. The same could be said of other creatures: if they are to share in the life of the world to come, then their proper end is a transcendent one too.

    This doesn’t mean that biology is irrelevant to understanding the goods proper to the lives of individual creatures. However, from a Christian perspective, the “natural order” doesn’t fully reflect God’s intention for his creatures. This is expressed in the traditional language of creation being “fallen,” which still has some salience, even if we reject the notion of a historical fall. Creation is, Christians believe, on the way to being transformed. The Risen Christ as the “first fruits” of the new creation provides us with a picture of our genuine end. This can and should inform Christian ethical thinking.

  • Creaturely goods and theistic ethics

    In comments to this post, Gaius asked some incisive questions about how a theist who accepts the general evolutionary picture of the world can avoid falling back on some form of divine command theory (also known as theological voluntarism).

    The problem arises because, post-Darwin, it’s difficult to attribute inherent purposive-ness to natural processes. But the old natural law ethics, which has probably been the chief alternative to divine command ethics in Christian history, rested on a teleological view of nature that no longer seems tenable: the good life consisted in realizing one’s essential nature.

    Maybe it’s my Platonistic inclinations, but I’ve never been particularly happy with this choice. I think a full understanding of value will inevitably make reference to the divine, but I don’t think moral rules are simply the arbitrary dictates of God. They are, I believe, rooted in the nature of things, but not properly accounted for by the “biologism” of some versions of natural law.

    My general view is that each individual creature is an expression of (or resembles, or participates in) the divine. The Catholic theologian Denis Edwards, following St. Bonaventure, puts it like this:

    In the life of the Trinity, everything flows from the fecundity of the Source of All, whom Bonaventure calls the Fountain Fullness (fontalis plenitude). He sees the eternal Word of Wisdom of God as the Exemplar, the image of Fountain Fullness. When God freely chooses to create, the fruitfulness of Trinitarian life finds wonderful expression in the diversity of creatures. Each different kind of creature is a reflection and image of the eternal Word. (Denis Edwards, Ecology at the Heart of Faith, p. 71)

    Creation, we can say, is a form of God’s self-expression. Thus, each creature, because it reflects the divine, has inherent value. Further, at least some of these creatures—human beings and many other animals—have an experiential welfare, or, to put it another way, their lives can go better or worse for them. And because these creatures have inherent value (being a reflection of the divine), their well-being matters, not just from their own point of view, but from a universal, or impartial, point of view.

    It’s clearly a matter of controversy what constitutes a good human life—that is, what it means for a human life to go better or worse for the one living it. But there do seem to be some universals. Pleasure, happiness, knowledge, freedom, and companionship seem to be among the goods universally prized by human beings. Likewise, all humans seek, other things being equal, to avoid pain, suffering, frustration, ignorance, bondage, and enmity. (A modified, though not wholly dissimilar, list could be provided for other animals.)

    So, it’s not merely a matter of God’s preference or whim that, say, happiness is preferable to misery. This is a fact rooted in the constitution of the world (which, of course, theists believe is ultimately traceable back to God). And for Christians at least, ultimate happiness consists in greater knowledge of and union with God or the Good. Nothing less will truly satisfy us (and this fulfillment only comes to complete fruition in the life to come).

    While this general picture makes reference to the nature of things, note that we’re not talking about “reading value off of biological processes” here. Clearly the kinds of goods that contribute to a human animal’s well-being are rooted in our biology, but biological processes as such don’t have the same status in this account as they do in some versions of natural law ethics. To take an obvious example, most of us no longer regard it as wrong per se to interfere with the process by which intercourse (sometimes) leads to conception. We need an independent moral criterion to decide when that may or may not be a good idea. And this will involve reference to the kinds of goods that make for a well-lived human life.

  • The cosmic prodigal son

    I’ve been reading a book called Created from Animals: the Moral Implications of Darwinism by the late philosopher James Rachels. The thesis is that Darwinism does have far-reaching implications for morality, even if not the ones commonly thought. This is in contrast to those, like Stephen Jay Gould, who tried to erect an insuperable wall between the realm of “values” and scientific fact.

    Rachels’ long opening chapter, in which he reviews Darwin’s life and the basic argument of the Origin of Species, is extremely clear and compelling, and worth the price of the book alone (well, at least in my case—I picked it up used for around five bucks). Subsequent chapters delve into the more properly philosophical argument about how Darwin’s findings might be related to ethics.

    What Rachels is trying to show is that Darwinism pulls the lynchpin of “human dignity” out of our existing moral framework by undermining crucial beliefs that support it. He agrees with many other philosophers that you can’t get an “ought” from an “is”—that is, statements of fact do not logically entail statements of value. But, he argues, our belief in human dignity—by which he means the view that human life is uniquely sacred or valuable—derives its support from certain beliefs about the world and our place in it. Chief among these are one religious belief and one secular philosophical belief: that human beings were specially created (in some sense) in God’s image and that human beings are uniquely rational.

    If, as Rachels believes is the case, Darwinism undermines the grounds for these beliefs, then the corresponding normative belief in human dignity will be undermined, even if it is still logically independent of those beliefs. In other words, we could still retain the belief in human dignity as a sheer judgment of value, but without the supporting beliefs (or some substitute), it’s not clear why we should.

    So why does Rachels think that Darwinism does in fact undermine these beliefs? For the purposes of this post, let’s focus on the imago dei doctrine. According to Rachels, the traditional view that human beings are created in the divine image means that “the world [was] intended to be [humanity’s] habitation, and everything else in it given for [our] enjoyment and use” (p. 86). The evolutionary picture of the world, Rachels contends, undermines this for several reasons. First, there have existed long stretches of time–billions of years, far and away the vast majority of time–where human beings did not exist and the universe got along just fine without us. Second, Darwinian evolution undermines the view that all things in nature have the form they do in order to serve some human purpose; instead, it sees the forms of creatures as an adaptation to their environment. Finally, the path of evolution doesn’t require us to posit a god to explain the emergence of human life; on strictly scientific grounds, we aren’t required to believe that the existence of human beings is anything other than a fortuitious (for us) outcome of a blind process.

    It’s possible, Rachels says, to say that God is the “first cause,” the one who sets up the basic laws of the universe, but whose further intervention isn’t required to explain the emergence and development of life. But even if this is accepted (and he’s not sure that it should be–why not just say that the universe is uncaused?), we’re a long way from the God of the Bible or Judeo-Christian tradition. Such a deistic god doesn’t possess nearly the same religious significance as a more traditional one. At that point, it’s not clear why we’d insist on hanging on the word “god” at all.

    Regular readers are probably not terribly surprised to learn that I have some sympathy with Rachels’ argument. Like much of the best atheist and agnostic thought, Rachels’ argument provides the opportuntiy for a purification of religious thought and for smashing a few idols. And surely one of the great idols of the Christian tradition has been precisely the view that creation was made just for us and all other creatures were given for our enjoyment and use. While there are certainly parts of the Bible that support such a view, modern biblical scholars have pointed out that a “humano-centric” interpretation of the Bible (as distinguished from a theo-centric one) is profoundly distorting.

    The Bible is clear in many passages that creation exists not for our sake, but for the creator’s sake. God creates all that is and calls it “good” (not “good for us”). After the flood in Genesis, God makes a covenant with all flesh, not just with humanity. The Psalms tell us repeatedly that creatures of land, air, and sea praise their creator in their own language, without the mediation of human beings. God’s admonition to Job is that the creator’s purposes encompass far more than parochial human interests. The apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon praises the mercy and love of the Lord: “you love all things that are and loathe nothing that you have made; for what you hated, you would not have fashioned.” Jesus insists that our heavenly Father cares for the lillies of the field and the sparrows of the air. St. Paul contends that “all things” are reconciled in Christ and that the entire creation is groaning for liberation from bondage.

    Rachels isn’t wrong to see the anthropocentric interpretation as the dominant one in Christian history. This may have been encouraged by a secular philosophy that defined the imago primarily as reason and free will, thus emphasizing the distinction between human beings and other creatures. A more “functionalist” understanding of humanity’s role as caretakers or gardeners of the earth, by contrast, emphasizes our embededness in and responsibility to the rest of creation.

    If this alternate narrative is right, then the evolutionary story can be seen in a different perspective. Human beings are one among millions of species in whom God takes delight. The story of creation is more of an open-ended process than a static, once-and-for-all act, one that gives rise to a multiplicity of beings that reflect some facet of the divine goodness.

    And the creator has many purposes, or many stories to tell. The overarching story is that of God’s overflowing goodness in creating other beings, beings with whom God wishes to share God’s self. Within that story are sub-plots, like that of humanity. Instead of seeing humanity as the jewel of creation, maybe a truer story would be that we are the prodigal son of creation, the ones who go off and squander the riches left to us by our Father. But the Father is constantly calling us back, willing to mend the broken relationship between us so that we can be restored to our proper place in the household. This isn’t a measure of how great we are, but of how great God’s love is.

    I’m not claiming to have solved all the problems evolutionary thought poses for religion (far from it!), but in this case I think a better understanding of the natural world can actually point us to a deeper understanding of our faith. (I’ll likely have more to say about Rachels’ moral project in a later post.)

  • Hebblethwaite on natural and revealed morality

    In his book Christian Ethics in the Modern Age, British philosopher-theologian Brian Hebblethwaite offers a nice summary of what I tend to think of as the classic Christian understanding of the nature of ethics:

    Christians certainly believe that all goodness stems from God and reflects both God’s own nature and His will for man. But recognition of this comes in two ways: the good for man is built into human nature and can be discerned, however fragmentarily and incompletely, in what makes for human relationship and human flourishing. This ‘natural’ recognition of the good can be affirmed despite the ‘fallen’ state of man. But the true good for man is further revealed, so Christians believe, through the saving acts of God, culminating in the story of Jesus and his Resurrection. (p. 13)

    Hebblethwaite goes on to point out that both of these ways of knowing are subject to distortion and in need of correction:

    Here too there is no guarantee of freedom from distortion in the human media of revelation or in man’s understanding of divine revelation. So it is quite possible for the two channels of moral knowledge, human experience of goodness and human response to the revelatory acts of God, mutually to illuminate and correct each other. Moral criticism of religious revelation-claims is possible because natural human morality is itself a reflection of the image of God in man. Christian morality’s criticism and enhancement of natural human morality are possible since they reflect the definitive revelation of God’s nature and will through His saving acts.

    And yet there is only one moral truth:

    But the two channels, on this view, cannot be ultimately incompatible, since it is the same divine nature that is reflected, however hazily, in human goodness, as is reflected most clearly, on the Christian view, in the character of Christ. But the divine revelation, including the character of Christ, has itself to be understood and applied correctly by men and women down the ages; they may get it wrong, and thus be open to moral criticism.

    Where Hebblethwaite may depart from some classical views is in recognizing the context-bound nature of our understanding of revelation. Even if God reveals his will and nature to us, that revelation still has to be mediated through human language, concepts, and understanding. These will (inevitably?) produce a kind of distortion. This is why Hebblethwaite can say that our natural morality can act as a corrective on “revelation”: because no revelation is sheerly self-authenticating. A purported revelation that outright contradicted some tenet of natural morality would for that reason be highly suspect.

    This also allows Hebblethwaite to say that Christian morality can be not only confirmed, but enriched by insights from other sources. We can see, both in other religions and in secular movements, aspects of God’s goodness reflected that may not have been so clear in our own tradition. Christians may be compelled to reject insights that flatly contradict the Christian revelation, but they needn’t believe that they all ready possess the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. For instance, it seems clear that Christian theology and practice have been enriched by the insights of such movements as feminism, Marxism, and environmentalism, insights that are compatible with the essential tenets of Christianity, but which Christians previously weren’t able to derive from the resources of their own tradition. Similarly, other religions can reveal aspects of the truth that Christians might not otherwise have been aware of.

    On this view, explicit belief in God is not necessary to discover the conditions of human flourishing, but those conditions are–ontologically speaking–rooted in or derived from God’s creative will and goodness. Thus the revelation of that will in Christ gives a fuller and clearer picture of the good. Just as importantly, Hebblethwaite argues, the work of Christ, the sending of the Spirit, and the formation of the Church provide resources for embodying that good in our lives and communities that transcend natural human capabilities.

  • Justice among the beasts

    Interesting review of a new book portraying behavior of animals that can fairly be described as moral (via). I think our resistance to seeing animals as in any way “moral” might be rooted in the Kantian legacy of modern moral philosophy. Roughly, for Kant, you’re only acting morally when you’re acting for the sake of the moral law, and in opposition to some natural inclination. By contrast, the Aristotelian tradition says that a moral agent is someone with the dispositions toward and habits of performing virtuous action. By that standard, many non-human animals would count as virtuous.

    UPDATE:     See John’s post here. I did speak hastily in characterizing Kant; acting morally for Kant doesn’t necessarily require acting in opposition to a natural inclination, but rather for the sake of the moral law (though there does seem to be something especially virtuous about doing what duty demands even when we have a strong inclination not to). John also points out that Aristotle is closer to Kant here than my post makes it sound.

  • Notes on human uniqueness and the Imago Dei

    In light of this post, here are some thoughts on what it might mean to affirm human uniqueness and to say that we’re created in the image of God:

    The Bible doesn’t give us much to go in when it says that human beings are created in God’s image:

    Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” (Gen. 1:26, NRSV)

    Later theology has tried to fill in the gaps by attributing a unique characteristic to humanity that mirrors God in some way, usually rationality or free will.

    This has also frequently been taken to imply that human beings are superior to all other life on earth and hence entitled to exploit the rest of creation for their own purposes. (A not entirely implausible reading of the passage above.)

    But biological science has made it more and more difficult to exclude animals from the possession of at least some degree of rationality and other candidates for human uniqueness, calling it into question. It’s also become questionable whether there is an immaterial soul “infused” at some point in the evolutionary process that can account for human uniqueness. Development with continuity seems to be nature’s rule.

    Consequently, more recent theologians have been re-thinking what it means to say that humans are created in the divine image.

    For example, Stanley Hauerwas and John Berkman write:

    the only significant theological difference between humans and animals lies in God’s giving humans a unique purpose. Herein lies what it means for God to create humans in God’s image. A part of this unique purpose is God’s charge to humans to tell animals who they are, and humans continue to do this by the very way they relate to other animals.

    Others have made similar suggestions, saying that humans are created in God’s image in that they reflect the lordship of God to the rest of creation. This is the true meaning of “dominion”: we are God’s vice-regent’s on earth.

    This notion of lordship or dominion, however, must be transformed according to the pattern of lordship displayed by Christ, who Christians believe reveals the true nature of God.

    Accordingly, Andrew Linzey calls human beings the “servant” species:

    The uniqueness of humanity consists in its ability to become the servant species. To exercise its full humanity as co-participants and co-workers with God in the redemption of the world. (Animal Theology, p. 57)

    Just as God in Christ enters into the suffering of the world to redeem it, human beings are called to become priests, offering themselves in costly service to creation.

    Human dominion over creation is a de facto reality whether or not we can identify some uniquely human characteristic, such as rationality, that isn’t shared to some degree with non-human animals. We have it in our power to drastically alter the climate, to cause the extinction of millions of species, and to make the earth uninhabitable for life as we know it. (This is where Christians would depart from some “deep ecologists” who view human beings as simply one species among many.)

    Lordship as servanthood, however, would involve human beings living generously toward each other and the rest of creation. And it would mirror the lordship of the Good Shepherd who gave himself for others.

  • The quest for the happy meal

    Here’s a look at the lengths people are going to to get humanely-raised meat. Mostly I want to applaud this, but at the same time I continue to have this nagging feeling that there’s something incongruous about going to such lengths to treat animals well in order to kill and eat them.

  • A vegan critique of Pollan

    Erik Marcus, vegan and animal rights activist, has a review of The Omnivore’s Dilemma that is appreciative, but critical in key places. Key quote:

    Pollan’s book convincingly shows that animal agriculture can, in fact, operate in a way that respects the environment. For a reader who’s acquainted with the staggering wastefulness of animal agriculture, it’s hard not to get caught up in Pollan’s account of the Polyface [Farms] alternative.

    What Polyface has accomplished is a genuine achievement. However, Pollan never points out that there’s a reason why Polyface is plunked down in rural Virginia-hardly the heart of cattle country. This model of farming could simply never be transplanted to the arid, near-dessert landscape of America’s western states-the region that produces nearly all American beef. It’s one thing to practice boutique farming and to raise 50 grass-fed cattle a year on lush, rain-soaked land in rural Virginia. It’s quite another to imply that Polyface could be anything like a model for transforming America’s beef industry. You simply can’t scale up what’s happening on a 50-steer farm in Virginia to positively transform the way that more than 20 million cattle are raised in the American West.

    I don’t know enough about the ins and outs of animal agriculture to know if this is right or not, but it does support my hunch that a world of humane animal agriculture would necessitate less meat eating, even if it wouldn’t eliminate it.

  • Pollan on the ethics of meat eating

    In general I find Michael Pollan’s indictment of our current industrial food system, which floats on a sea of subsidized corn, fossil fuels, and chemical fertilizers, entirely persuasive. And his account of a week spent at self-described “libertarian Christian environmentalist” Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm, where the natural ecosystem of a functioning farm is respected and animals are pasture-fed and humanely slaughtered, is compelling in making the case for a more humane and sustainable agriculture.

    In the last part of the book Pollan, who is tracing the origins of four distinct kinds of meals (industrial, big-organic, “beyond organic,” and self-produced), decides to examine the shortest food chain of all: a meal made entirely from ingredients that he hunted, gathered, and grew himself. Pollan, a hunting novice, goes in search of wild boar in northern California to form the centerpiece of his meal.

    This leads Pollan to an intellectual excursus on the ethics of meat eating. Pollan concedes much of the case made by animal rights proponents like Peter Singer and Tom Regan: in modern factory farms we inflict a degree and amount of suffering on sentient animals that is impossible to justify merely in order to satisfy our own gustatory pleasures. The industrial forms of agriculture that are, in Pollan’s view, undermining human health, pleasure, and well-being, rob literally billions of animals of any kind of dignified existence.

    But Pollan isn’t prepared to go all the way with animal rights-ers who oppose all killing of animals for food. One of his more compelling arguments, I think, is that animal domestication isn’t analogous to slavery, as some of the more overheated animal liberation rhetoric might have it. It’s more like symbiosis: certain animal species realized that they had a better shot at survival by entering into a kind of bargain with us where we feed them, shelter them, and protect them from predators in exchange for them providing us with eggs, milk, and eventually meat. “From the animals’ point of view the bargain with humanity turned out to be a tremendous success, at least until our own time” (p. 320).

    What changed in our own time, of course, is that we radically revised the terms of the “bargain.” Animals confined to tiny cages, denied sunlight, mutilated, and driven to aberrant behaviors are no longer living lives appropriate to their kind. So, even on the most generous reading of the bargain, we aren’t living up to our end. Pollan concludes that “people who care about animals should be working to ensure that the ones they eat don’t suffer, and that their deaths are swift and painless” (p. 328).

    Pollan makes the interesting suggestion that one of the reasons we’re so confused in our attitudes toward animals, veering from sentimentality to extreme brutality, is that the mechanization of animal husbandry has rendered unnecessary the cultural framework that helped pre-modern people negotiate relations with their non-human fellows. “[I]t was the ritual–the cultural rules and norms–that allowed them to look, and then to eat. We no longer have any rituals governing either the slaughter or eating of animals, which perhaps helps explain why we find ourselves in this dilemma, in a place where we feel our only choice is either to look away or give up meat” (pp. 331-2).

    A more transparent process of raising and slaughtering food animals, he thinks, would force us to come to terms with what we’re doing in ways analogous to our ancestors’ rituals. Factory farms are invisible and inaccessible to most people, who likely don’t give much thought to the precise process by which that neatly wrapped package of meat ends up in the supermarket. But if we saw what was going on, we would have to make changes.

  • Natural law, homosexuality and the ELCA

    Carl Braaten has published a spirited defense of natural law ethics at the Journal of Lutheran Ethics with which I’m in substantial agreement. I think that if natural law ethics didn’t exist we’d have to invent it, and that people who claim to be deriving their ethics solely from uniquely Christian principles have usually smuggled covert premises in from other sources. So, best to be above board about the whole thing.

    However, toward the end of his article Braaten goes on what can only be characterized as a tirade about homosexuality, and this makes me think that he’s working with a defective notion of natural law. Now, Carl Braaten has undoubtedly forgotten more about theology than I’ll ever know, so I enter here with trepidation, but his account of the ethical issue here strikes me as tendentious and inaccurate.

    Braaten writes:

    We know by reason what the natural law tells us — the sexual organs are designed for certain functions. God made two kinds of humans, “male and female created he them.” (Gen. 1: 27) By the light of reason human beings the world over, since the dawn of hu­man civilization and across all cultures, have known that the male and female organs are made for different functions. Humans know what they are; they are free to act in accordance with them or to act in opposition to them. The organs match. What is so difficult to understand about that? Humans learn these things by reason and nature; no books on anatomy, psychology, or sociology are needed.

    Nor do people first learn what the sexual organs are for from the Bible. Scholars say there are seven explicit passages in the Bible that condemn homosexual acts as con­trary to the will of God. This is supposed to settle the matter for a church that claims its teachings are derived from Scripture. But for many Christians this does not settle the matter. Why not? The answer is that they don’t believe what the natural law, transpar­ent to reason, tells us about human sexuality. In my view the biblical strictures against homosexual acts are true not because they are in the Bible; they are in the Bible be­cause they are true. They truly recapitulate God’s creative design of human bodies. The law of creation written into the nature of things is the antecedent bedrock of the natural moral law, knowable by human reason and conscience.

    The problem with this passage is that both the argument from reason and the argument from Scripture elide crucial factors. Let’s start with the argument from reason. It’s undoubtedly true that human sexual organs have particular functions. But does it follow straight away (pardon the pun) that human beings must always use their sexual organs in those particular ways, or that it’s never permissible for them to be used in any other way? Anyone who thinks that it’s morally ok to have sex for non-procreative reasons is conceding that it’s permissible to use one’s sex organs in a way that doesn’t constitute their primary function.

    But this doesn’t get at the deeper issue. What gives natural law ethics its traction isn’t that it asks what the purpose of bodily organs are. It functions as an ethic because it asks: what is good for human beings (and the rest of creation)? To ask what the functions of sexual organs are is only part of the broader question of what is good for human beings. To say that organs function in a certain way and so must (only) be used in this way is actually to revert to a rather crude version of divine command ethics – God created them that way, so that’s the way you have to use them, and don’t bother asking why.

    If we do ask why, however, we see that human sexuality functions to further the good of human beings, individually and as members of a series of ever-widening communities. But then any particular sex act is necessarily subordinate, in terms of moral evaluation, to this broader notion of what is good. And determining what this broader good is requires the use of our reason and powers of observation to understand what kind of life is good for human persons. Non-procreative sex was long held by the Christian tradition to be immoral, but seen in the broader perspective of what’s good for individuals, communities, societies, and creation as a whole, we can see reasons why it can be moral.

    Braaten assumes that because sexual organs are made to function a certain way that they can therefore only be used that way, morally speaking. But if we can simply read our ethics off of nature in this way, what do we do with the fact that there are people who find themselves exclusively attracted to members of the same sex? They’re just as much a part of “nature” as the particular configuration of human sexual organs, at least in the sense of being something naturally occurring (if not statistically “normal”). If what is given is the standard for what is right, how do we decide between two seemingly incompatible natural givens?

    What a more “holistic” natural law ethics needs to ask, it seems to me, is this: Given that gay people exist, what is good for them (and the communities of which they are a part) and how should their sexuality be ordered toward those distinctively human goods that we are all called to realize? The fundamental question then, is not: what are sexual organs for, but what are people for? As Keith Ward puts it “[t]he physical and biological structures of the natural world must always be subordinated, in morality, to the realization of those universal goods which all free agents have good reason to want” (“Christian Ethics” in Keeping the Faith: Essays to Mark the Centenary of Lux Mundi, Geoffrey Wainwright, ed., p. 232). The kinds of goods that free personal beings are naturally oriented toward realizing take moral precedence over the biological processes that constitute the substratum of those persons.

    Again, this is something that can only be answered by reason and experience. Some conservatives have contended that gay sex is intrinsically ordered toward narcissism or other anti-social tendencies, which is at least the right kind of argument, since it claims that homosexuality is inherently opposed to human flourishing. But it simply doesn’t measure up to empirical reality. Gay people’s sexuality is capable of contributing to the building up of relationships that exhibit all the virtues that straight ones do and in my view the onus is on those who would deny this fact.

    Regarding the argument from Scripture, Braaten surely knows that there is widespread disagreement not so much about whether the Bible condemns certain same-sex acts, but whether the kinds of monogamous faithful relationships exhibited by many gay people fall under that condemnation. Again, the question can’t be settled simply be saying that the Bible forbids x until we ask further why does it condemn x? What underlying reason is there for a given prohibition and does it apply to this particular case?

    Natural law ethics is animated by the idea that creation is rational and that it mirrors, if imperfectly, the mind of God. A corollary of this is that God’s commands aren’t inscrutable demands, but are intended to guide us toward our ultimate good and are, in principle, transparent to our understanding. To understand what that good is requires the exercise of our own reason, which partakes, at least in some small way, of the Divine Reason. This doesn’t mean that our reason is perfect or that it doesn’t require additional illumination from God, but there is an underlying rationality to the moral principles that arise out of the fact that we have been created in a particular way.

    Braaten seems angry that the ELCA should even take up this issue, since the right answer is so obvious (to him). But it’s only obvious (if at all) if one adopts the biological reductionism that he (erroneously in my view) identifies with natural law ethics. A more holistic view sees biology in service to the realization of distinctly human goods and, as such, doesn’t give it the last word in determining what is right. Straight people who think of themselves as safely “in” the charmed circle of being approved by God might consider what it would mean to adopt this biologistic ethic in all its rigor.