Gay rights, and wrongs: Why Aristotle matters today.

In case you had not already guessed, my major at university was philosophy, with logic and ethics being my main areas of interest, so when I saw "Aristotle" in the title of a story in the BBC News, a couple of days ago, I emailed it to myself after a quick skim. In his very short discussion of a recent British court decision, in "Aristotle on modern ethical dilemmas", philosopher Mark Vernon manages to both mention the names of leading representatives of the radically different approaches to moral questions and perhaps also to show why philosophy really does matter in daily life.

Using as an example the decision "last week [by] Bristol County Court, [which] found that Peter and Hazelmary Bull, of Chymorvah Hotel in Cornwall, acted unlawfully in refusing [gay couple] ]Martyn Hall and his civil partner Steven Preddy a double room." (2011, ¶ 4), Vernon shows how the moral philosophies of deontology, utilitarianism and virtue ethics, as expounded by Immanual Kant, Jeremy Bentham and Aristotle respectively, would answer the question: "Should Christian hoteliers be forced, by law, to offer hospitality to a gay couple?" (¶ 3). As  Vernon reports, the argument is over what is morally right and wrong. The Bulls are a devout Christian couple who sincerely believe that homosexuality and unmarried sex are wrong; Hall and his partner are a gay couple in a civil union (legally equivalent to a marriage), and believe that they have a right to be treated like any married couple. The court agreed with Hall and Preddy that they have the same legal right to be given a room in the Bull's small hotel, and that the Bull's acted illegally in denying them that service because they are not a married male and female couple. As Vernon emphasises in his very brief exploration of the Kantian, Benthamite and Aristotelian answers to the deep moral question raised, the legal ruling by a court does not and cannot settle the much more important moral issues at stake here.

So, is the Bristol Country Court's legal decision the morally right decision?
Although he does not explicitly say so, Vernon appears to agree on broadly Aristotelian grounds that the judges legal ruling is also the moral decision. But I think he is wrong: gay couples, even married gay couples, do not have a right to be served or treated by people the same way those people treat or serve others. When Vernon reports that the judge based his legal ruling "on broadly Kantian grounds", he is correct; and he is also right to explain that Kant would argue "that individuals in civil partnerships must be treated in the same way as individuals who are married" (¶ 5). However, I don't think Kant would agree with Vernon's next sentence, that "it's their right".

The trouble is that between his two sentences, Vernon has made the same sort of mistake that Stephen Law warns against in his discussion of faith defined as "belief without good reason" in "Faith in the Twenty-first Century". (Law, 2003, p. 119 - 120). Vernon has confused two very different meanings of the words he is using. In Law's essay, the confusion is between the idea that faith means "not absolutely proved" and the very different idea that faith means "blind faith", which is completely unrelated to and independent of any reasons, evidence or support. Unless we careful, it is easy for us or others to confuse and switch between these two very different definitions of what we mean when we use the word faith to describe a belief. The usual meaning of faith when contrasted with reason is "blind faith". If a belief in god or anything else is based on reasons and evidence, then it is not faith, but reason. Similarly, Vernon seems to have confused two very different meanings of the word "right". He begins with a discussion of the law, and in that context, the obvious interpretation is that he is talking about the legal rights of gay and lesbian couples, which is certainly all the judge was concerned with. The judges job is to interpret and apply the law, not to decide moral right and wrong (and there is another completely different use of the word right). The judges decision was to find that the gay couple in the civil union had exactly the same legal right as a married man and woman. However, what is controversial, and what Vernon really wants to discuss, is the moral question: do gay couples have a moral right to be treated the same as married men and women? As everything that follows shows, it is the question of moral rights, or natural human rights independent of any law, with which Vernon is really concerned, and it is the moral questions that are controversial. It is the moral question that leads some people to argue that the judge's decision about legal rights is morally wrong, even if it is exactly what the law requires.  This might be confusing, so I'll give an example: the law is anything that a people or government approve as law, so the Thai government could make a law tomorrow that all people with Italian surnames would be paid 1,000,000 Baht / month by the government. That would mean I had a legal right to get 1,000,000 Baht / month from the Thai government. But I would not have any human right to the money - moral principles do not require that I or anyone else with an Italian surname be paid anything by any government simply for having that sort of surname, and a lot of people would argue, rightly, that the law was unjust and immoral, as many well made laws are. A legal right and a moral right are not the same, and it is important not to confuse these two completely different things.

So, where does that leave the gay couple in a civil union and the married Christian couple who think the gay people are sinners behaving immorally as their religion teaches?

With regard to a legal right, I would agree with Vernon that the judge made his decision on the Kantian grounds that justice requires the people be treated equally (that's not exactly Kant's view, but it's close enough.) There is already a moral component here: justice is a moral, not a legal, concept and most legal systems do include the moral idea that the law should be impartial and consistent. However, after saying that "it is their right", Vernon clearly leaves the legal issues and moves onto strictly moral concerns as he discusses from various perspectives whether the law and the judges decision is in fact morally right. That is, he moves on to discuss whether gay couples have a human right to be treated same way as married male and female couples, and this is where I disagree.

Kant's moral theory might require that the law treat people equally when they are relevantly equal, but it does not require that we treat everyone equally, nor does it give anyone any such right. We might find short people sexy, and Kant would allow that we may therefore discriminate on the basis of height when we choose our marriage or other sex partners, that we have no duty to treat everyone the same way. Equally, when we invite people into our home, we have the right to make up whatever rules we like, however idiotic and offensive they might be: I can require that everyone I invite in be over 1.98 meters tall if I want; that is a stupid rule, and will likely offend many people, but causing offence does not make it wrong for Kant. As Vernon makes fairly clear, Bentham's utilitarian moral theory does not give anyone any human rights at all, so that theory cannot provide gay couples with any special human right to be treated the same as mixed sex couples. Finally, Aristotle argues that things should be allocated not because some people have a right to them, but because they will best use them, so on his theory, the legal privileges of marriage need only be available to those who best use them for the purposes for which they are intended. Aristotle would argue that the law and people should discriminate according to the quality of the relationship created by teh people. He would not give any right that all be treated equal, but the contrary, that marriages and other relationships not be treated equally. For example, that the Bulls could rightly discriminate against married men and women with bad marriages to refuse them admission to their hotel. I think that the theory that Vernon really wanted is the much more recent Kantian type of theory proposed by John Rawls in 1971 (Rawls, 1973; 2001), which could give strong reasons for believing (not merely having faith) that gay couples do have a right to be treated the same way as any other couple in a marriage, or indeed any other sort of committed relationship, whether married or not.

The type of moral theory that is applied has serious repercussions, and they cannot all be right. The search for good reasons to inform our moral beliefs so that they are not merely blind prejudices, wishes, cultural conventions or other arbitrary accidents has kept moral philosophers and everyone else in Western culture who cares about right and wrong, good and bad, justice and injustice, busy and perplexed since Socrates kicked off moral philosophy some 2,400 years ago.

Because these questions are so very complex, I wrote the essay questions you are currently working on to largely avoid them. None of the questions actually ask you to say that something is right or wrong, good or bad, justified or not.

So, what about gay couples? Do they have a moral right to be treated the same as mixed sex married couples? When? Why?
Or as Vernon puts the moral question:  "Should Christian hoteliers be forced, by law, to offer hospitality to a gay couple?" (2011, ¶ 3).

__________

References

Law, S. (2003). Faith in the twenty-first century. In The Xmas Files: The Philosophy of Christmas (p.113 - 123). London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Rawls, J. (1973). A Theory of Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rawls, J. (2001). Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. Harvard: Bellknap, Harvard University Press.

Vernon, M. (2011, January 25). Aristotle on modern ethical dilemmas. BBC News. Retrieved January 29, 2011 from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12275094