Category Archives: Moral philosophy

Homosexual acts are immoral and active homosexuals are immoral: 2nd Post

Moral philosophy, Sexual morality

What is the significance of my judgments that homosexual acts are immoral and active homosexuals are immoral?

First and foremost, these judgments express my firm belief that I would be performing an immoral act if I performed a homosexual act and that I would have an immoral character trait as long as I lacked a firm purpose of avoiding such acts.
This belief is not a mere thought that I would be immoral. The thought in the belief is mixed with a sense of the wrongness of the acts and way of life. The sense of wrongness is hard to describe. I usually characterize it as a sense of being under the control of a power with no concern for right or wrong – only for its satisfaction. Lust is a good label for that driving power I dread.

Secondly it tells men with same sex attractions about acts which they should try not to commit and styles of life which they should try to eliminate. They are instructions on how to become better men. The sense of wrongness accompanying the thought of the wrongness of the others’ acts comes from counterfactual thinking. To have a sense of the wrongness of other peoples’ acts I have to think how I would feel if I did what they are doing but having my thought of the wrongness.

When I do not try to think of what it would be like to be the active homosexual with my thought of the wrongness of homosexual acts my typical sense is pity. I am gratefull that I do not have their sexual inclinations.

I have explicitly written that I do not want to gain support for my arguments because people are unclear about my moral disapproval of homosexuality. However, I do not want people to become illogically hostile to my arguments on other issues because they think that I have some judgments about homosexuality which go way beyond judging homosexuality to be immoral.

First note that my judgments about the immorality of homosexuality does not require any definite judgments about how legal systems should deal with homosexuality. In fact, I tend to be rather Libertarian about legal control of sexuality. In regard to social control of homosexuality, I strongly favor a policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” This is based on Golden Rule thinking. If I were afflicted with same sex attraction I would like my friends and family help me “keep it in the closet.”

Note finally that from the perspective of the Paternal Principle habitual masturbators, adulterers, fornicators etc., are all sexually immoral in both their acts and life-style.
For instance with regard to sexual morality, a young man, with heterosexual attractions, who regularly goes to bars to pick up women for one night stands is as morally corrupt as a young man, with homosexual attactions, who regularly goes to gay bars to pick up another man.

The Moral Harm of Flouting Cost-benefit Calculation

Moral Harm and Moral Worth, Sexual morality, Uncategorized

This post offers further considerations about the notion of moral harm introduced in my Dec. 27, 2013 post.

Might people who hold that cost-benefit calculation is the fundamental way of making moral judgments, eg. utilitarians accept the following? If they would, that would indicate acceptance of the notion that there is a type of moral harm based in the nature of how humans ought to be. And this harm is not the type of harm they consider in cost-benefit calculations! In this case, the “abused” component of our nature is our economic rationality. It is possible for a person to engage in a cost-benefit calculation and choose a less than the best alternative on a whim or some hunch “Oh, what the f—, let’s do it anyway.” This flouting of economic reasoning might be how “people escape from prisoners’ dilemmas.” I suspect some young men have entered years of imprisonment because of imprudent choices expressed with such a phrase.

A few philosophers even dismiss the possibility of cost-benefit calculation being used in moral reasoning. Grizez, Finnis et al. have argued that cost-benefit calculation cannot be moral deliberation since, for them, moral deliberation has to offer alternatives for choice. They hold that once a cost-benefit calculation is made the choice of what is best must occur. See Ch. IX of their Nuclear Deterence, Morality and Realism . I disagree. Recognition of an alternative as best is different from choosing it. Causality amongst peoples’ mental states is statistical. If there is deterministic causation for what we desire, believe and choose it lies at the physiological level. Suppose then someone decides by cost-benefit calculation that a certain act is not most beneficial but nonetheless chooses it, that person made a wrong, or irrational, choice. In addition to the excess harm resulting from the wrong choice, there might be additional harm. The additional harm is the acting contrary to the way a rational being ought to be. Utilitarians may implicitly hold that there may be a moral principle that the way a rational being ought to be is to choose the most beneficial act. And that principle is in addition to their utilitarian principle. Might not utilitarians have a moral judgment and sense that feels repelled by and condemns whimsical or willful imprudence? If so, they have “more morality” than utilitarianism.

Moral Harm and Victimless Crimes

Moral Harm and Moral Worth

The purpose of this short post is to point out how the notion of moral harm can be used to clarify the notion of victimless crime. See posts for Dec. 27, 2013 and Jan. 4, 2014 for introduction of the notion of moral harm.

There are wrong acts in which no one suffers any harm beyond the occurrence of acts and conditions which are not as they morally ought to be. There is nothing for which anyone should receive reimbursement for medical treatment. If to be a victim is to suffer some
injury for which a person needs treatment, there are victimless wrongs where the wrong may not be a crime. If the harm suffered is moral harm only and the act is illegal there is a victimless crime. Of course, there are in fact victimless crimes in our several communities. The perpetrators of some victimless crimes quite clearly suffer moral harm. For instance, a pimp,in a municipality outlawing prostitution, who treats his girls well incurs moral harm as well as committing crimes.

Are there are victimless crimes where “crimes” means acts which should be illegal. I do not develop a social and political philosophy in my book Confronting Sexual Nihilism . So I do not address carefully questions about criminalizing sexual wrongs which are primarily, if not totally, moral wrongs. My bias is toward decriminalizing sexual immorality which harms no one physically or psychologically. However, I am not a libertarian who holds that we have no business trying to use the power of law to help us becoming morally better. I disagree with Kant who wrote “Woe to the legislator who chooses to use force to implement a constitution directed towards ethical ends.”

Expect subsequent posts on the clergy sexual abuse scandal which make me uncertain about a sharp demarcation between moral harm and other harms.

Moral Harm vs. Sense of Offense

Moral Harm and Moral Worth

This post relates to my Dec. 27 post in which I introduced the notion of moral harm. Moral harm is the status of the violator of a moral law which results simply by violating the moral law over and above any other consequences of the violation. Here I want to distinguish moral harm from any sense of offense, including guilt, resulting from what we judge to be an immoral act or way of being.
Our moral instincts also include a capacity to feel offended by acts and ways of being.

Our sense of offense is not the kind of moral harm about which I am talking. A sense of offense by itself is not a reliable guide to what is wrong. A moral instinct gives rise to the sense of offense and the normative thought that the act is wrong. The normative thought tells us what the moral harm is. The moral harm is acting contrary to the norm expressed in the instinct. The sense of offense provides a stimulus to think more carefully about what if anything is wrong. However, the sense of offense is not the harm because the sense of offense may diminish after repeated exposure to the wrong act while the instinctive judgment of wrong remains. The harm is derived from the judgment of wrong. An example illustrates distinguishing moral harm from moral offense.

The Target corporation has a “gay friendly” employment policy. Such a policy offends me but after due thought and deliberation I judge it to be morally permissible. Once when I was returning a defective camera the appearance of the courteous and competent young man who served me at a Target service desk highly offended me. Lip-stick and pinkish red fingernails made me avoid eye contact. Still, I do not think that his dressing as he did was immoral. I did not judge hastily by assigning high probability to a suspicion that he engaged in homosexual acts when off-duty. I judge that those acts are morally wrong. The moral judgment flashed through my mind without any sense of offense. Perhaps if I had to witness some of those acts, I would have a sense of offense. However, if I happen to witness the paradigmatically morally proper sexual intercourse of a recently married young couple, I might feel offended or negatively disturbed in some hard to describe way.

Moral Harm and Condom Distribution

Moral philosophy

Today’s post is based on my Dec. 27 post in which I introduce the notion of moral harm. A person harms himself morally simply by violating a moral rule. For instance, a person who steals harms not only the person from whom he stole. He also harms himself. He becomes a thief. A person who misleads others to break moral rules harms himself by becoming a corrupter and misleads those whom he corrupted into morally harming themselves. I concede that the notion of “moral harm” is not universally recognized.

However,intelligent people are able to understand what is being proposed. Whether or not there is moral harm has been an open question since at least Plato had Socrates propose in Gorgias that it is better to suffer a wrong than to do a wrong. Are there no occasions on which it is better to suffer a medical wrong than to do a moral wrong?

Let us examine how recognizing the difference between moral and medical harm helps sort out ambiguities when people use cost/benefit considerations to decide whether a practice is morally permissible because the benefits of following it outweigh the harm done by following it.

This example is dated. However, it is easy to find examples in current events where it is helpful to consider whether people are arguing about medical consequences, moral consequences or both. During the preparation of my book,Confronting Sexual Nihilism , Pope Benedict XVI visited Africa in March 2009. It was reported that he claimed condom distribution programs are not effective for controlling the spread of AIDS. I take seriously what the pope says on faith and morals. When he speaks ex cathedra on these matters I accept what the pope says. How should we interpret his reported claim about condoms and AIDS reduction? The notion of moral harm helps uncover ambiguities.

Benedict XVI was not speaking ex cathedra. He was speaking in an ordinary way about sexual policies. In our ordinary way of speaking of acts and practices we express disapproval by saying that it won’t work or it will have bad consequences. But it is very easy to be confused about what is meant by “bad consequences.” It could mean “bad” without any moral judgment used for deciding what is bad. Or “bad consequences” could be used so that moral standards are also relevant for deciding what is bad. For instance, in a discussion of whether or not a type of pornography is bad, some might hold that whether viewing it has bad consequences we should look at only medical conditions such as bodily tissue damage or clinical psychological trauma done to the viewer or people the viewer interacts with. Others might hold that inciting the viewer to masturbation, regardless of whether or not masturbation does any medical damage is a bad consequence because masturbation is a sexual immorality.

Despite the ambiguity in “bad consequences” public conversation tends towards accepting the medical standard for “bad.” It is as if “bad medical consequences” is the default meaning for “bad consequences.” Nonetheless, confusion on how to evaluate claims remains. Some of the claims seems as if they would be decisively refuted by the facts if the default meaning is used. This is the case for a claim that condom distribution does not effectively hinder the spread of AIDS. What about a claim that considers moral harm from condom distribution? Sexual promiscuity would be such a moral harm. Facts must be gathered to determine the truth of a claim that on the whole condom distribution does not reduce the bad consequences of AIDS cases and sexual promiscuity as much as some other program.

Prior to factual considerations, I think that it is likely that facts will support the claim that on the whole condom distribution does
not reduce the bad consequences of AIDS cases and sexual promiscuity as much as some other program. The pope is best interpreted as making the claim about AIDS and sexual promiscuity.

Moral Harm vs. Medical Harm

Moral philosophy

This post introduces a notion of moral harm. Subsequent posts develop this notion of moral harm. Some comments about my book Confronting Sexual Nihilism provide context for these discussions.

My book makes a case for the following so-called Paternal Principle.

A male may intentionally attain a sexual climax only in sexual intercourse with a consentingwoman to whom he is bound by a life-long, monogamous, socially recognized union for procreation, In addition he should:(1) intend to cooperate with his spouse to protect and promote the lifelong natural development of any conception resulting from this intercourse and (2) strive to appreciate with his spouse the natural value of their sexual satisfactions and cooperate with her to enhance those satisfactions..

In addition to condemning fornication and adultery, the Paternal Principle condemns three of what Aquinas called the unnatural vices: masturbation, homosexuality and beastiality.

A challenge to this principle is that many acts violating the principle seem to inflict no harm on anyone. If the acts are illegal, many people label the acts victimless crimes What definition of harm is presupposed by this type of challenge? I suggest that the following is the working definition of “harm” used in these evaluations of allegedly trivial and harmless sexual acts. There is some physiological or psychological condition such that remedial treatment for it would at least be a plausible candidate for reimbursement by medical insurance. Call this “medical harm.”

Many violations of the Paternal Principle do no medical harm. Indeed some might be medically beneficial! But there is no imperative from reason or morality that only physical or emotional disturbances are harmful.

Consider a derivative sense of “harm” so that a conclusion about what we think is harmful is derived from a judgment that a type of act is wrong. Doing the right act or being the right kind of person is good. Bringing about what is good is, by meaning of the terms, beneficial. Doing a wrong act or becoming the wrong kind of person is bad. What is good is better – more beneficial – than what is bad. So to bring about what is wrong incurs the cost, or harm, of getting less than what is better. This can be said without there being any calculation of benefits and costs.to reach the judgment of wrongness. This derivative sense of “harm” is appropriately called “moral harm” since it is derived from a moral judgment that something is wrong.

I suggest that our shame and guilt about past torture, slavery and racial discrimination indicates that there is a notion of moral harm. We who have done these things have inflicted some harm on ourselves.

The importance of this notion of moral harm, and a correlative notion of moral good,increases throughout my book and in these posts as it emerges as having more than verbal or “spiritual” status. As a case is made that morality, and especially how we ought to be, is in our nature, moral violations can be appreciated as damage to our nature. Conscious choices to conform to moral principles can be regarded as benefits to our moral character.

Some negative sentiments go with the thought of moral harm. There are no pure thoughts apart from any sentiment. So, there are negative sentiments associated with recognition of moral harm brought on oneself by immoral choices. What sentiments? I suggest that a sense of confusion and lack of direction because of being uncontrolled by law broadly characterizes this sentiment of moral wrong. In my own case, it is an awful sense of being ungoverned that comes from actual or imagined medically harmless violations of the Paternal Principle which is my feeling of their wrongness. Nonetheless, it is not the feeling of them being wrong that makes them wrong. Their wrongness is derived from the Paternal Principle

Introductory Post

Book promotion, Moral philosophy

The purpose of my Blog posts is tripartite.

The first purpose is to promote a book I am having published on the philosophical foundations of sexual morality. The book is titled Confronting Sexual Nihilism: Traditional sexual morality as an antidote to nihilism. The book is forthcoming in March 2014. Visit http://www.sexualnihilism.org for more elaboration on the book.

The second purpose is to explore further and defend better themes of the book.

The third purpose is to allow readers of the book to ask and receive answers about themes of the book.

The book is a work in progress whose completion is to extend beyond its publication with Blog posts and material added to the book’s website.

Charles F. Kielkopf
Professor, Philosophy (emeritus)
The Ohio State University