Same-sex marriage: Scotland's fractured ethical dialogue...

Alasdair MacIntyre isn’t exactly a household name in his native land.  The philosopher, born in Glasgow in 1929, has made revivifying Aristotelian virtue ethics central to his intellectual career.  I can make no great claims to having read his whole corpus, but was introduced to his most famous work After Virtue (1981), during my honours year at the University of Edinburgh.

MacIntyre opens that work with an arresting, and profoundly challenging thesis.  Something has gone seriously awry in our contemporary moral discourse, he argues. The addled thing is constituted of scraps of reasons, rags and patches of arguments, haphazardly stitched together.  This mottled quilt of ideas appeals to no coherent intellectual tradition, but instead, presses any old argument into service, bundled together any which way in an unsettled, multicoloured combination of claims, concepts and contentions.  

In the morning, I may argue with a friend about euthanasia like a Kantian, defending an idea of ethics as categorical rules, indifferent to consequences. Thou shalt not kill.  Killing is inherently wrong.  End of story. Over lunch, I find myself discussing politics.  Prosecutors have dropped bribery and corruption charges against a prominent arms manufacturer, citing fears that the investigation may imperil international relations and security cooperation with a Middle Eastern country.  My lunch mate feels this is wrong, and that the law should be visited upon the guilty, though the heavens fall.  

 I feel differently, and in a trice, my breakfast Kantianism is forgotten, and I’m soon trading moral reasons which draw on utilitarian conceptions of morality. The greatest happiness for the greatest number for me, I say, confuting the idea of categorically applicable rules of ethics altogether. To assess the morality of the deed, we must look to the consequences which it sets in train. The prosecutors were quite right to drop the case, I say, as the general welfare was best served by not pursuing it.

By the afternoon, in another debate, I’ve abandoned my consequentialism again.  My opponent believes “marriage” is just made up, just a word, and accordingly, it doesn’t matter a fig what such unions are called, or who can or cannot have them.  Per contra¸ I argue that there is a human right to same-sex marriage, rooted in ideas of the dignity of persons and their inalienable, natural rights.  Over dinner, I fall into another dispute with a fourth discussant, this time about homosexuality.  My interlocutor firmly believes that gay identities are an ahistorical form of being, and that contemporary categorisations of sexual orientation simply reflect universal, underlying realities about the sexual nature of humankind. Having read my Foucault, I vigorously dissent from this, contending instead that the sexual subjectivities available to us today are the historically specific creations of discourse, social constructs rather than reflections of underlying, given realities amenable to human understanding. 

In the course of a single day, I’ve been a Kantian and a Utilitarian, have invoked and repudiated the natural law, and both rejected and avowed social constructivist understandings of moral, social and political concepts.  A particularly stark example of fractured and irregular moral argumentation I might be, but this hypothetical, quarrelsome soul isn’t all that difficult to imagine.  With a little reflection, I think most of us should be able to recognise occasions when we’ve sustained an argument on premises whose force we might well dispute in a different controversy.  But how can we conduct meaningful moral debate in such a community? If moral reasons and concepts are just weapons of convenience, always chopping and changing, can our arguments ever be anything other than manipulative, anything more than an elaboration of the motto I believe thus, you should too?

Whether or not you agree with the doctrines being propounded, one of the intellectually interesting aspects of the recent same-sex marriage debate in Scotland has been the often fractured nature of the debate on all sides.  It immediately recalls MacIntyre’s thesis. For me, one of the particularly fascinating processes to observe has been the Catholic church’s attempts to articulate a popular and persuasive argument against same sex marriage.  As Cum Lazaro observes, opposition to same-sex marriage in Scotland clings quietly to the fringes of our political sphere.  As reported at the weekend, it looks like a majority of MSPs support the proposal, with only a few SNP and Tory MSPs dissenting, albeit very quietly.  Although the proposal has not yet been enshrined in law, I think it is fair to say that support for same-sex marriage has become a sort of “common sense” in Scottish political institutions and beyond.  A significant feature of the Scottish press coverage has been the extent to which it has struggled even to imagine why those against same-sex marriage feel so vehemently about it.  For many writers, endorsing the proposals is a sort of relaxed “modernisation with a shrug”.

In the absence of animated political opponents of the measure in parliament, the primary vocal, visible dissenters have been the Catholic church hierarchy in Scotland and its representatives.  John Deighan has appeared both on Newsnicht and the Sunday Politics Scotland on this, with the bellicose Cardinal O’Brien launching rhetorical exocets in tabloid and broadsheet titles. What interests me is how their position has been consistently rather misunderstood, which is partly testament to the difficulty the church have had in cogently presenting their case, and in effectively explaining the understandings of nature, reason and law which their argument relies upon.  It is a timely reminder that if any conversation is going to be meaningful and mutually instructive, we can’t rush into it headlong, without trying to understand the basic ideas and understandings which our interlocutor is relying on. 

Religion may be operating in our public sphere, but that is not to say that religious understandings and explanations find that agora particularly comfortable territory.  In both of Deighan’s TV appearances, he’s cut a rather ruffled, compressed figure – trying the make the best of his cumbersome case, and refashioning it into more potentially populist terms.  I'm not convinced that he succeeded.  Indeed, to my eye, the haphazard combination of claims made by the Catholic church against this proposal - human rights, religious freedom, natural law - much more closely resembles MacIntyre's vision of the fractured, incoherent and confused lay ethicist than the expressions of a confident tradition of objective reasoning, offering the promise of right-reason and intellectual coherence to a dazzled and dazed postmodernity.

As I understand the theology being propounded, the Catholic Church’s position is not an argument from its own especial authority, nor is it primarily premised on any authority derived from divine revelation condensed in scripture. Distinct from protestant traditions of revealed Biblical truth and faith, Catholic theology retains a strong account of reason and the natural law, the law “written on men’s hearts”.  The Cardinal believes that the natural law has substantial content, is accessible to human reason, and affords a natural, reasonable, concept of marriage, sexuality, gender and the true vocation of humankind.  Rejecting the proposition that marriage is a social construct whose ambit and exclusions is merely the product of social and political forces about which reason is silent, the Church adopts a strong, prescriptive account of both nature, reason and the character of true human flourishing – but critically – reason is understood a faculty common to all humanity, and is not just limited to the Catholic faithful.

When it argued that homosexuality is “disordered” or that same sex marriage is contrary to the natural law, the Catholic church addresses the reasoning capacity of all persons.  Even if you don’t believe in God, and are not part of the Catholic church, you are still graced with reason, and it is this reason O’Brien and others mean to appeal to. What’s more, there may only be one reason, one natural law.  Accordingly, for the theologically committed Catholic, familiar distinctions between the secular positive law and religious claims about the contents of the natural law simply cannot be distinguished.  Multiple, contending, incompatible secular and religious and historical concepts of marriage cannot all be equally valid: for the soul committed to natural law accessible to human reason, many of these notions of marriage miscarry.  They are disordered and disordering concepts: hoodwinking simulacra of the true account of marriage.

For those of us who firmly take marriage to be a social construct, amenable to reconstruction and deconstruction in a range of different ways, this concept of reason may seem suspect or deeply eccentric.  However, there are several other similar sorts of claims which lack the theological atmosphere, but essentially make similar arguments.  Consider this one.  There is no god, no cosmic or sentient bearer of law tables for humanity.  However, I believe homosexuality isn’t a choice, isn’t a contingent construction of contemporary discourse and categories of sexuality, but a natural state, which people are born into.  It may well be that gay identities only came to be clearly articulated at a particular point in history, but that doesn’t entail that there is no such thing as natural, homosexual being, whether or not humanity throughout most of its history would recognise it as such. 

After all, the ancients believed that natural volcanic processes were ordained by divine beings: that didn’t mean that the forces studied by modern vulcanology were not operating beneath the earth’s crust.  Homosexuality is, therefore, natural.  As a community, we have no business legislating “contrary to nature”, drawing artificial legal distinctions between naturally equal people.  Accordingly, introducing sexual equality in marriage is set up as a natural imperative for the secular law.  The argument may lack the religious terminology, lacks the explicit theorising of knowledge of sexuality in terms of reason and the content of some natural law guaranteed by a benevolent creator, but in many ways mirrors the arguments against same-sex marriage adduced by the Catholic hierarchy in Scotland, albeit in a radically different direction.  Both positions make claims about the content of some natural order or law, ideas that human law ought to reflect that order, and claims that their accounts of sexuality represent timeless truths to which secular authority ought reasonably to bend. 

For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t agree with either of the two hypothetical arguments.  I’m sufficiently postmodern to be deeply suspicious of any claims about naturalness, whether or not it is promoting or opposing same-sex marriage.  But what both cases show, I think, is the theoretical complexity which inevitably underwrites all of our debates on equal marriage.  All sides of the debate in Scotland seem exceedingly reluctant to recognise this complexity, whether for or against the proposal. The Scottish debate has impatient and for the main, rather shallow. How should contemporary accounts of sexuality be understood? What sort of ontologies and epistemologies are we relying on, and how do these differ from the basic concepts of nature and knowledge which our opponents accept? 

These aren’t avoidable questions.  They lurk, implicitly, in all of the arguments we’ve heard about this proposal.  With a little dissection of those arguments, we can soon see how radically different our conceptualisations of same-sex marriage are, even within the for and agin camps.  One real virtue of MacIntyre’s challenge about the incoherence of contemporary ethical discourse is that it exposes the theoretical complexity of everyday reasoning.  It casts a leery, nitpicking eye over common sense.  What is fascinating about the Scottish example is how far the common sense on same-sex marriage appears to have shifted these last years, but also how much we seem to talk past one another in arguments in debates characterised by their lack of sophistication and any attempt to understand our opponents' views and where they come from.  This tendency is doubtless encouraged by our impatient media, squeezing complex subjects into tiny, 10 minute debate items on telly.

As a supporter of same-sex marriage, I hope that Holyrood will adopt reforming measures, and eliminate the gender requirements for both marriages and civil partnerships.  It seems likely to do so, however, on the back of a intellectually lazy, uncritical common sense. Although I very much disagree with Cum Lazaro on this topic and others, I was arrested by this conclusion to a recent post.  He wrote:

"Scotland is just beginning to build a political culture in which decisions on the running of our nation are debated in that nation. But until that debate is supported by a wider intellectual culture which can do justice to the complexity, depth and conflict in human flourishing, our politicians and journalists will continue to look like five year olds posturing in the hand me downs of their olders and betters across the border."

A wider intellectual culture which can do justice to complexity, depth and conflict?  I like the sound of that.