Gay Ethics

Controversies in Outing, Civil Rights, and Sexual Science

Timothy F Murphy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136587535
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Ethics & Professional Responsibility in Law
• Index: Law

Gay Ethics is an anthology that addresses ethical questions involving key moral issues of today--sexual morality, outing, gay and lesbian marriages, military service, anti-discrimination laws, affirmative action policies, the moral significance of sexual orientation research, and the legacy of homophobia in health care. It focuses on these issues within the social context of the lives of gay men and lesbians and makes evident the ways in which ethics can and should be reclaimed to pursue the moral good for gay men and lesbians. Gay Ethics is a timely book that illustrates the inadequacies of various moral arguments used in regard to homosexuality. This book reaches a new awareness for the standing and treatment of gay men and lesbians in society by moving beyond conventional philosophical analyses that focus exclusively on the morality of specific kinds of sexual acts, the nature of perversion, or the cogency of scientific accounts of the origins of homoeroticism. It raises pertinent questions about the meaning of sexuality for private and public life, civics, and science.Some of the issues covered:

• Sexual Morality
• Outing
• Same-Sex Marriage
• Military Service
• Anti-Discrimination Laws
• Affirmative Action Policy
• The Scientific Study of Sexual Orientation
• Bias in Psychoanalysis
• Homophobia in Health Care Gay Ethics presents a wide range of perspectives but remains united in the common purpose of illuminating moral arguments and social policies as they involve homosexuality. The chapters challenge social oppression in the military, civil rights, and the social conventions observed among gay men and lesbians themselves. This book is applicable to a broad range of academics working in gay and lesbian studies and because of its current content, is of interest to an educated lay public. It will be a standard reference point for future discussion of the matters it addresses.

PART I.

STARTING POINTS

Introduction

The essays gathered here suggest how ethics have come to countenance gay and lesbian sexualities and identities in ways that move beyond conventional philosophical analyses that focused exclusively on the morality of specific kinds of sexual acts, the nature of perversion, or the cogency of scientific accounts of the origins of homoeroticism. To the extent that questions about the ethics of gay sexuality have been framed as questions about its sexual events or origins, they have eclipsed other, more important questions about the standing and treatment of gay men and lesbians in society generally. Made possible through years of activism and increasing scholarly attention, the essays here raise questions that are not confined to the nature of perversion or the order of nature. Though they often taken various forms and may begin in discussions of privacy or biology, more often than not the questions raised here are questions of social justice.

In the opening essay, I offer a discussion which confronts the notion that homosex is something set apart in the order of human sexuality. Resisting such a notion, I situate homosex alongside heterosex as its moral confederate, not as its alleged antagonist. I argue that the morality of homosex is not reducible to questions of body parts but instead that homosex is better and more accurately understood as a medium of human expression. Thus understood, the moral meaning of homoeroticism is not confined to derogatory analyses that depend on contentious and limiting assumptions about the “nature” of human sexual interactions. On the contrary, homoeroticism thereby emerges as a valuable and important medium in and through which persons express moral meanings that would not be otherwise possible. It is not even obvious that homosex requires any special moral justification. Thus construed, the ethics that govern the practice of homosex are, then, merely the ethics that govern human actions elsewhere.

If homoeroticism does not by itself require any special moral justification, then ethical questions rightly focus on the way in which gay and lesbian sexuality is socially and intellectually accommodated. The morality of outing has taken a central role in gay ethics at this time when society and politics are in flux with regard not only to the control of information generally but also the public treatment of gay men and lesbians. The essays addressing outing-and being out-offer and defend a wide range of views. Jeremiah McCarthy offers an account that represents outing as an important repudiation of the evils of the closet, though he does not conclude that outing is always moral. By contrast, David J, Mayo and Martin Gunderson describe reasons they think outing should usually be resisted, reasons that are rooted in respect for privacy and self-determination. Mark Chekola acknowledges that the closet serves a shielding function in homophobic society, but he also underlines the ways in which it signifies shame. He describes a number of situations in which pursuit of one’s interests justifies outing, and he ultimately rejects the notion that there can be a general rule against outing. The focus of the essay by Steven Bar-bone and Lee Rice is not so much outing per se as the question of “being out.” They note the ways in which personal identity is better served by a focus on an individualistic ethic; they thus conclude that there exists no general obligation to be out-though they do not deny the value of being out. Instead, for them the better question is not whether one should be out (or be outed) but whether being out serves one’s interests or not. Whatever else separates these essays, taken together they offer formidable reasons to think that there is neither an absolute rule justifying or forbidding outing in all cases.

Certain perennial civil rights questions are also addressed in this volume. The question of gay marriage has returned to prominence for a number of reasons, reasons having to do with both the emergence of anti-discrimination laws and social interest in securing access to economic and social benefits that attend marriage and formalized domestic partnership. These questions emerge, too, at a time when courts around the country are coming to disparate and competing conclusions about rights in, for example, adoption, childbearing, and partner benefits. Craig Dean, who, with his partner Patrick Gill, has been fighting for the right to marry in the nation’s capital, offers a brief on how anti-discrimination laws in the District of Columbia-and other supporting moral considerations-frame a convincing legal case for the option of gay marriage. A storm of media attention and public debate ensued President Bill Clinton’s early 1993 statement of intention to rescind the ban on the presence of openly gay men and lesbians in the military. Having taken up the issue before Clinton’s election, Claudia Card is well situated to analyze the way in which universities have moral obligations to resist discrimination. Her essay focuses on the discriminatory policies of the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC), but its arguments extend to the military as a whole. She rightly insists that in addition to their important economic waste, policies of exclusion are the cause and consequence of the defamation of lesbians and gay men. She describes in detail the psychological, intellectual, and moral corruption that are fostered and rewarded by discriminatory policies. She makes it clear that the closeting required by lesbians and gay men in order to succeed in ROTC programs and the military generally are not choices lesbians and gay men would otherwise make except in response to a homophobic environment. She also makes clear the detriments of exclusionary policies to society’s larger moral fabric.

Vincent J. Samar turns his attention to the question of anti-discrimination laws and finds that Western ethical traditions offer considerable and credible justification in favor of such laws. Far from being a bulwark of moral objection to gay and lesbian persons, Western moral traditions offer formidable-if conveniently over-looked-reasons why anti-discriminatory policies ought to be the rule rather than the exception in respect to employment, housing, and public accommodations. So that such laws will not be dismissed out of hand as unenforceable, Samar also details some of the practical ways in which such laws could be in fact reasonably and effectively carried out. In turn, Joseph Sartorelli argues that because such anti-discriminatory policies would fail to countenance many of the social evils endured by gay men and lesbians, affirmative action policies are justified as well. Looking at the way in which affirmative action policies are justified, Sartorelli finds that the social disadvantages suffered by gay men and lesbians–especially while young–constitute grave assaults on self-esteem and the potential for development. These indignities not only hamper the ability to flourish and enforce a servility of temperament, they are at least equivalent in force and significance to those morally undesirable circumstances that elsewhere justify affirmative action policies. Sartorelli finds, therefore, that the chief goal and message of affirmative action efforts should be to effect openness for gay people, given the importance of that openness for personal and political development. These efforts should have, too, important social benefits elsewhere and escape some of the objections raised to existing affirmative action efforts.

Science and medicine also continue to turn their attention to the question of homoeroticism, especially in an age of increasingly advanced biomedical research methods. Frederick Suppe surveys a number of accounts that have been offered to explain the causes of homosexuality, including recent studies about comparative brain structure size and the sexual orientation of twins. He finds that these accounts are typically beset by methodological flaws–including fundamental concepts underlying the research–and are therefore unconvincing in their claims of causality. More important than identifying the flaws of any particular account, he goes on to argue that the question of the origins of sexual orientation is of interest only against a set of objectionable normative assumptions about the nature of human sexuality generally and that it is an inadequately justified scientific question that ought to be abandoned.

Edward Stein, by contrast, grants the legitimacy of inquiry into the origins of sexual orientation but objects to the ways in which such science is used as a prop in arguments on behalf of and sometimes against gay and lesbian civil rights. He argues that empirical questions about the origins of sexual orientation are largely irrelevant to questions about whether and what kind of civic entitlements gay men and lesbians should have. He thinks that purely moral arguments should suffice to establish the rights of gay men and lesbians in society and the law. Arguments for gay and lesbian rights, that is, should not be based in particular accounts that sexual orientation is, for example, genetic in origin. In this sense the question of the origins of homoerotic orientations is morally moot.

Because of their continuing importance in the field, Michael Ferguson considers the notions of fixation and regression in psychoanalytic accounts of the origin of homosexuality. He finds that the use of these notions–especially by those analysts who declare homosexuality to be pathological–cannot be justified on the evidence offered on their behalf. He finds, specifically, that analysts’ biases about the goals and norms of psychosexual development shape the way in which homosexuality has been declared pathologically fixated or regressive. He notes, that is, the intrusion of moral values about human sexuality into putatively value-free, scientific accounts.

In the concluding essay, Abby Wilkerson takes up the question of homophobia in medicine today. She rightly understands that such a question is not reducible to whether medicine does or does not formally declare homoeroticism to be a pathology. Indeed, she discovers that there are many ways in which medicine functions homophobically, and evidence for such homophobia may be found in the way in which people with HIV-related disease are treated by health care professionals, in the way in which medicine is used as an authority in the interpretation of AIDS, and in the representations of people with AIDS. She also is adept in pointing out how certain ways of framing questions about health care ethics, especially the presumption of “objectivity,” can function homophobically in masking the legitimate health interests of gay men and lesbians.

While these questions are all significant to contemporary debates, they certainly do not exhaust the topics that properly fall under a consideration of gay ethics. In this regard, a note on the history of the volume is in order. I originally intended the collection to address questions of both gay and lesbian ethics. In fact, because of the way in which the essays here range over topics of interest to both gay men and lesbians, that intention has been met in a number of significant ways. But the collection has in fact addressed issues mostly from the perspective of men because–and only because–more men came forward in response to my search for contributors than did women. In their accounts, many of the essays here do speak of both gay men and lesbians, and even where they do not many of the arguments would apply without much modification equally to men and women. There is, though, certainly room for an anthology of lesbian ethics that collects essays mostly by women who will have their own perspectives about the way in which questions of ethics should be framed and answered.

It is also inevitable in these times, it is worth observing, that an editor runs up against hard questions of terminology. This collection has been assembled under the rubric “gay ethics.” I do not intend that title in the literal definition of rubric as signifying a custom or form wholly established and settled by social authority. Indeed, this rubric will seem to some a mistake for a number of reasons, especially as it might be interpreted as conflating the interests and identities of men and women. It also fails to capture the interests of some who assume more self-consciously provocative labels or who aspire to more inclusive terminology. Certainly, all homoerotic behavior, identities, and politics do not transpire under the labels of gay or lesbian. Nevertheless, the terminology of gay ethics seems to me to have a useful function in identifying the nature and scope of the essays gathered here, and I have chosen that terminology in order to stress the continuities of these essays with the moral and political efforts that preceded them. This is only to say that there is abundant room, too, for other anthologies, for example, an anthology of “queer ethics” and the questions such perspectives make possible in regard to matters of language, identities, politics, and tactics.

That so much remains possible to do, moreover, is instructive in its own right. There are many ways in which the history of ethics has failed to use its rich resources and powerful tools in identifying, resisting, and proposing amends for the evils suffered by gay men and lesbians. Its failures in this regard have been committed both by act and omission. The essays gathered here do not recover all the ways in which the moral traditions might be used as resources for the ethical critiques made possible through gay and lesbian perspectives. Neither do these essays identify all the issues of moral interest in contemporary politics, law, religion, and society. These essays do, however, raise durable questions about the meaning of sexuality for private and public life, civics, and science. They pose challenges to enduring forms of social oppression in the military, civil rights, and even in the social conventions observed among gay men and lesbians themselves. They contest the agenda and moral interpretation of science. They also challenge the healing arts to attain a higher standard of ethics than they otherwise now have. And in so doing, they all make evident the ways in which ethics may and should be reclaimed to pursue the moral good for gay men and lesbians.

Timothy F Murphy

[Haworth co-indexing entry note]: “Introduction.” Murphy, Timothy F. Co-published simultaneously in the Journal of Homosexuality (The Haworth Press, Inc.) Vol. 27, No. 3/4, 1994, pp. 1-7; and: Gay Ethics: Controversies in Outing, Civil Rights, and Sexual Science (ed: Timothy F. Murphy) The Haworth Press, hie, 1994, pp. 1-7. Multiple copies of this article/chapter may be purchased from The Haworth Document Delivery Center [1-800-3-HAWORTH; 9:00 am. - 5:00 p.m. (EST)].

@ 1994 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.

Homosex/Ethics

Timothy F. Murphy, PhD

University of Illinois College of Medicine at Chicago

SUMMARY. Against the view that homoeroticism requires any special justification or consideration, this essay argues that homoeroticism is morally unproblematic in itself and that its genuine moral significance resides in illuminating the nature and meaning of human relations. Seen as a form of language, homosex shares common moral justification with heterosex as a bearer of human meanings and intentions. Thus understood, homosex is an important moral good as a language that expresses human meanings in ways that are not otherwise possible.

Though it might by now have become utterly ordinary, homosex continues to vex private conscience and public opinion. There are perennial questions (why is there homoeroticism?), and there are questions unique to our time (can openly gay men serve as Boy Scout leaders as their closeted counterparts in fact already do?). Discussion about the morality of homosex often trades in moral and religious cliches, this on all sides, and it is sometimes hard to avoid the conclusion that not only does moral philosophy not offer any pathway to a unified theory of human judgment, neither can it propose any definitive conclusion about the morality of homosex.

While it does seem to me that the moral arguments on behalf of homosex do carry the day against their competition, I do not want to rehearse here the usual ar...