Audio only:
Today Joe reviews an informal debate he had with a former traditional catholic turned atheist on the sexual morality of Catholicism.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I got a fascinating invitation recently to sit down with a guy named Cade to talk about Catholic sexual ethics and gay marriage and trans stuff and all this stuff with a guy who at one point was a traditional Catholic and now is an atheist who is living a gay lifestyle. So his name’s Cade, sorry, I should have started with that guy named Cade. And I’m just going to let him introduce himself in his own words.
Cade:
My background, I grew up in the secular suburbs of Minneapolis, kind of in a cafeteria Catholic household, going to a liberal parish early, early into high school. I went down the apologetics rabbit hole, so I got started with some Catholic answers. I think I read through almost all of your publications at the time. A whole lot of the radio show got into the whole Matt Frat father, Mike Schmitz, who was actually in Minnesota, met him a few different times and then wanted to discern to become a CARite monk. Loved the idea of religious life and ended up in San Diego near Catholic answers to study philosophy and filmmaking. Eventually since leaving and have deconstructed and fall much more on the agnostic atheist side and also like to take a look at Catholic beliefs through a queer lens sense coming out. And Libby, my hashtag best life as people say on my woke left
Joe:
Was like an hour and a half mostly on Catholic sexual ethics generally and natural law, and then gay marriage specifically. And it was, I think it’s fair the way he’s built it is more of a debate. So there were times where you can probably tell, I’m not sure exactly if I should be jumping in or letting him speak. So there may be times when I jump in when I shouldn’t and probably times where I didn’t jump in and I should. So I give that as a little bit of background. I don’t think he was trying to trick me. I think the conversation just went in a different direction than we thought it would. I think it was a really good conversation. I’m happy to have it. And I think one of the things that it reveals is the difficulty in some ways of getting to the bottom of these questions and the importance of getting our basic, someone’s called first principles right at the outset.
So when we’re talking about sexual ethics, and we’re going to be talking a lot about this idea of what’s called natural law, but just on the moral law generally. I’m going to give a long clip here and then I’m going to give some shorter clips as we go from the conversation. And by the way, I will include the entire conversation over on Cade’s channel at the very end. He graciously put the whole thing up and I don’t think he edited it all, or if he did, it was just to eliminate some of the awkward ums and uhs or something like that. So on sexual ethics, I think it’s important to understand what we’re talking about because this is something that not only do a lot of non-Catholics or Catholics get wrong, it’s something I’ve even seen Catholics get wrong where they think of the moral law as is external imposition of authority. And that is neither a good nor biblical way of understanding it. So here’s kind of a contrast between those two.
Cade:
Today we’re going to be looking at the Catholic sexual ethic framework and how it relates to a few different LGBT or queer issues that we want to talk about today. So kind of hand it back to you, Joe, on explaining what is the framework that the Catholic Church uses when evaluating sexual ethics questions and what are the major principles, let’s say, of what the Catholic Church teaches on sexuality. And then we’ll base the discussion from there.
Joe:
That sounds great, and please feel free to jump in and cut in if you interject
Cade:
Whatever.
Joe:
I wanted to start actually found a quote from a 2016 Washington Post article entitled Is Porn Immoral? That Doesn’t Matter. It’s a public health crisis and it’s by the sociologist Gail Dines. And I think this is a good way of framing the conversation because I think that we get the whole idea of morality and ethics pretty backwards from the beginning. So people are often coming into it, whether they know it or not, with a set of misconceptions. And I thought this piece really from the headline on encapsulated that really well. So dines writes the thing is no matter what you think of pornography, whether it’s harmful or harmless fantasy, the science is there. After 40 years of peer-reviewed research, scholars can say with confidence that porn is an industrial product that shapes how we think about gender, sexuality, relationships, intimacy, sexual violence, and gender equality for the worse.
So what I thought was striking about that is, I mean I agree with her conclusions. I think if you asked anyone why Christians are against pornography, those would all be very close to the top of the list if not the top of the list. She thought like, okay, well whether or not it’s a moral issue, it’s this public health issue. And I thought that whole framing is just insane because the whole reason it’s a moral issue, is it a public health issue. So digging into that and kind of thinking about that, I came up with three aspects that I think when we think about morality badly, we tend to think about it, number one, as arbitrary moral laws are arbitrary. So the church says no sex before marriage, but they could just as easily say No sex after marriage or no sex on Wednesdays or during price is right or something.
It just some arbitrary set of rules. It’s like the offsides rule in soccer where you’re like, okay, whatever. And then second, if it’s arbitrary, you’re like, well, who gets to arbitrate? And so in this view, the wrongness of a moral law is determined externally and in authoritarian way, meaning it’s all based on power and authority. So God is more powerful than you, so he makes this thing that would’ve been fine not okay. And if that’s your conception where morality is this external thing being imposed upon you, then the third thing that follows is the moral law almost by definition is an impediment to your freedom and flourishing and your hashtag best life. So to quote a phrase I heard recently. So those would be kind of the three aspects of misunderstanding the moral law, meaning if that’s how you’re thinking about morality, just know that the way you are thinking about it and the way that people who’ve really thought about it deeply and believe in it, think about it are just completely passing.
Now you might think people are wrong to think that it’s something other than that, but you should at least be aware that there’s a gulf there in what you are imagining moral law to be and what the people you’re talking to understand moral law to be. So that’s the negative view, that’s the view I’d say don’t hold that. And the flip side, if it wasn’t obvious enough would be to say number one, moral laws are not arbitrary. They are rooted in human nature and we would say human design that God makes you a certain way. So in the same way that the car maker has an instruction manual or if you’ve got a product, it might say Do this, don’t do that. Don’t scrub a cast iron skillet, don’t put it in the dishwasher. All of that’s not some arbitrary limitation. It’s rooted in having a proper understanding of the design.
Sometimes I think when you hear, even think about the name of this show where it is reference to this intrinsically disordered language of the catechism, which sounds totally clinical, sterile, disembodied, maybe even dehumanizing, but it’s coming from this vision where it says, moral law is rooted in a proper understanding of the human person. And so if we want to know whether something is right and wrong, absolutely we should say what does God say about it? But we should also look at like, well, what do we know about the human person and human flourishing? And so anything that hurts my flourishing is wrong. So that’s the first. It’s not arbitrate, it’s rooted in human nature, but that means secondly, moral law is principally something internal like sin makes you suffer, not chiefly because oh, God’s mad at you and he wants to hurt you. No, no, no.
It’s not that sin makes you suffer because you did the thing you were not supposed to do and the reason you weren’t supposed to do it is it hurt. I’ve got a 1-year-old and he knows he’s not allowed to play with electrical cords and he loves to do this as a result, he likes to just pick them up and hold onto them and say uhoh. And fortunately all he does is that. So it’s actually pretty harmless, but he doesn’t know why he’s not supposed to do them. And it just feels like an impediment to his freedom. But the reality is it’s related to his design. So even though there’s an external kind of forcing, don’t do it. The harm caused would be internal. I mean literally in that case because electricity. And so that’s the nature of sin that the harm it causes and the kind of weight or the force of the moral law happens at an interior level.
So even if you, let’s say you had the purge, there’s no laws for one day, and even if that worked with divine law, you would actually do harm to yourself doing all the things that you were told not to do because the reason you were told not to do them is that they’ll hurt you even if there was no external force, God, society, whatever, you would still have this as a consequence. So it’s not authority based, not external based, it’s internal in terms of the way sin plays out and thus the way morality and ethics principally operate. So at this point, Cade I think very naturally raises several different objections to this idea of the moral law, and particularly he’s got in view the question of what’s called natural law. Now natural law, just those parts of the moral law that you can know from reason alone.
So there are some things that we believe in as Catholic Christians that we can’t expect a non-Christian to believe in because it’s something that’s just coming from the Bible, right? So fair enough, something like you need to go to mass. There’s an element of that that you couldn’t possibly have known from reason alone. Now the idea that you should worship the creator in some way is something you can know from reason alone, and that’s why we find religions all over the world. The particulars of what that looks like aren’t something you could know from reason. You have to have God reveal that to you. So sometimes we get confused in our thinking about this because most of the time you know things from a combination of your reason and what God has revealed to you through faith. And so you may not know which things are which, but it’s important in a context like the imposition of law to know well, which things could anyone from reason alone know?
Because that’s kind of fair play even in a secular society. You don’t have to be a Christian to know murder is wrong. And even though as a Christian you may know it from a combination of both your reason and the 10 commandments. So with that in mind, we’re talking, like I said about natural law, this idea that there are some principles that are going to be knowable from reason alone and that this is going to include some things like elements of sexual ethics. And so Kate is going to begin by just spelling out his objection to the framework,
Cade:
How I’m going to approach the question. And I think what people watching are going to see that we’re both going to approach these questions from wildly different lenses. And so there’s absolutely going to be this huge mismatch to it.
Joe:
It’s really at this point, which is about 10 minutes into the interview or conversation that I realized it was going to be more of an informal debate, which again is fine, but I hadn’t necessarily prepared for that, which is one of the reasons I like having this opportunity to say, here’s some more stuff I would’ve prepared if I knew this was going to be a debate. And so he has several critiques that he offers, and these are critiques that you should know if you’re going to argue from natural law or critiques that maybe you have yourself against the idea of natural law. And the first is that for all of the talk about natural law being this thing that you can know from reason alone, it is suspiciously a very Catholic dominated sort of field. Now that matters because the whole point of natural law as St.
Paul says in Romans two is that there are some things that the Gentiles who don’t have the law know that by nature they know what the law requires. And this shows that the law is written on their hearts that there are some things that God has written on every human heart. So for instance, you know that it is wrong to rob your neighbor, and if you are robbed, you feel a sense of an injustice having been done to you. Now that’s true regardless of your religion. And you can educate yourself into stupidity. You can come up with a moral theory that says actually robbery is okay under these conditions, but the base level knowledge is something that even a child realizes go steal candy from a baby. And you’ll see that they get very out riched about it. They have an intuitive sense not only I want something and don’t have it, but an injustice has been done to me.
So that’s evidence of what we would call natural law. Now obviously not everyone has a sophisticated understanding of this, but moral intuition and everything is rooted in the idea of natural law. When it’s proper moral intuition against society, miseducation, those things can color it and distort it, but that base level knowledge that you should do the good and avoid evil, that’s something that’s built into our human programming, so to speak. Now, Cade’s first objection to this is that sure, for all that talk of how this is open to everybody, again, this looks suspiciously like a front for Catholicism.
Cade:
So when it comes to natural law, my central thesis is that the Catholic conception of natural law is a unreliable investigat and empirically harmful framework that gets to conclusions that are ultimately all or that are ultimately Catholic teachings, but with extra steps. And what I mean by that is that once in this whole conversation, the question becomes, so can we use that framework that you’re bringing and apply it in the secular sphere to questions when it comes to what we want to legislate? And it seems like often there’s this equivocation of like, is this for Christians or is this for the world in that God designed us a particular way and that natural law relies on the presupposition that God has designed us? So it seems like the conclusions are inherently religious.
Joe:
So his argument there is for all the talk natural law, we’re starting with a belief in God and deriving this idea of dividedness and natures and all of this from our starting theological premises. And the counterargument is that no, this actually works the other way around that we actually observe that things are designed, they have a purpose, that they have what’s called a telos, like an end or a goal or a function. And from that people often but not always reason to God. So here’s more of his argument on that point.
Cade:
It seems like the only people who take classical natural law seriously are people who already belong to the Catholic faith that it seems to be an internally consistent worldview. I don’t think there’s any gaping holes within it, but I think that it’s an unprincipled approach in that a secular person, even if they grant the idea of natural law, isn’t going to even come close to the particular nuances of Catholic teaching when it comes to intrinsic evils. I mean, Aristotle isn’t able to come to it, nor do I think any other scholars out there in the field. And even within the field of let’s say ethics or meta ethics among philosophers, natural law theory seems to really only be people that have a need to get to the conclusions of Catholic teaching. And that’s kind of my assorted thoughts that I was thinking of this morning on natural law and how we approach this question.
Joe:
So I think there’s something kind of internally curious about claiming on the one hand that the only people trying to do natural law and virtue ethics are Catholics seeking to justify a belief they really have from the Bible and then trying to come up with some sort of philosophical explanation to justify or rationalize that belief. And then the only figure you cite is Aristotle, a Greek pagan who is clearly not trying to rationalize his belief in the Bible because as far as we know, he’d never heard of the Bible. And it’s not just Aristotle. Some of the biggest names in natural law and virtue ethics are people who weren’t Catholic or they became Catholic because of their interest in natural law and not the other way around. And there’s several important figures we can cite just in the history of 20th and 21st century philosophy in this field.
So almost without a doubt, the biggest name in this field would be either Elizabeth Anki, we’ll talk about her in a little bit, or Alistair McIntyre. Now, Alistair McIntyre’s after virtue is kind of the touchstone text in terms of a book length treatment of virtue ethics. And when he writes the first edition, he’s an atheist who is just kind of coming out of Marxism. A couple years later, he converts to Catholicism, but notice the cause and effect there is not, he’s already a committed Catholic who seeks to rationalize his beliefs. No. And intellectually honest inquiry leads him to the realization that virtue ethics is true and this helps to open him up to the idea that maybe human nature does exist and there is a God who designed us with the nature and so on. But that is the result of his honest intellectual inquiry, not a sort of rationalization of a preexisting belief.
And McIntyre’s by no means alone. One of the other major players in the field, Philip afoot, who I just discovered in preparing this episode, was the granddaughter of Grover Cleveland, the US President, even though she’s a British philosopher, fascinating, neither here nor there, pretty interesting. She’s the one who gives us the famous trolley problem. If you’ve got a trolley on the track and you can flip the switch should you do it. And she is a critic of utilitarianism in those kind of ethical systems, and she’s a major force for virtue ethics and for natural law. And she’s an atheist. She doesn’t believe in a God who actually gives us nature. She does believe that things have nature, they have purposes, but she doesn’t believe they’re divinely given. So she’s clearly not trying to rationalize her Catholicism because she’s not Catholic. Third figure I’d point to here is Jay Betsky, his book written on the Heart was I believe 1997.
It’s all about, as the subtitle says, the case for natural law. And it’s something like seven years later that he converts to Catholicism. So again, clearly there are plenty of people who end up Catholic because they take this as Cade says internally, consistent way of viewing the world seriously and realize that it points to their being a God and that it ultimately points to the Catholic claims about God being true. It’s not the case that these are all just blind committed Catholics seeking to rationalize their worldview and make it look more secular than it is. It’s just as a matter of fact not the case. And one of the ways we can see this is not just by looking at the major thinkers, but by doing a sort of application of natural law. So the whole point of natural law is that things have natures, they have purposes, they have design, they have what’s sometimes called a Telus an end.
And as I pointed out to Cade, this can be observed from just looking at the body, not from reading scripture or consulting the stars. If I ask you, what does your respiratory system do? I bet you can tell me its purpose is to respire. It’s right there in the name. If I ask you, what does your circulatory system do, it circulates blood right there in the name. But for some reason when we get to the reproductive system, people will get very confused about what it does. But once again, I would just say it’s right there in the name that if you want to know what is the telos and the purpose, biologists can tell you a good deal of that. Why do mammals have reproductive systems? Well to reproduce, to bear offspring? And so that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it, it doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be good.
In fact, one of the reasons we enjoy it is to incentivize the creation of another generation in the same way that you have taste buds that are there for your pleasure so that you’ll do the work of eating because otherwise you’ll starve to death because it’s an inconvenience. And so all the pleasure and pain, the pains of hunger, the pleasure of taste and all the pains and pleasures of sex are tied to the telos of the reproductive system, which you don’t need the Bible to tell you. You can look at a human body. And so to that end, the thing that we can then say going one step further is every other system in your body is complete. You have a complete circulatory system, you have a complete respiratory system, but you only have half of a reproductive system, which means that when we talk about orientation, we often talk about psychological and psychosexual orientation that you’re romantically attracted to or sexually attracted to somebody else.
But physically everyone is heterosexually oriented, that you have one piece of a two piece puzzle and you can tell where that fits based on the design, based on the structure of the organ or based on a deeper biological understanding. So you have half a reproductive system and it’s only completed with one party of the opposite sex. And so right there we have what we might call a biological basis for what becomes the human institution of marriage. So again, you can come to that conclusion just by understanding that the respiratory system is for respiring. There’s no verse in the Bible. You don’t need to read about the breath of God going into Adam to be able to understand that. You can look at the lungs or you can look at the circulatory system circulating blood, and you can look at the reproductive system, you can observe animal behavior, you can do just biology and come to a lot of these conclusions.
It’s not a matter of you needing to even pray about it to be quite frank. Alright, so that’s the first objection. This is just a thinly veiled Catholicism. No, I agree with him that it often comes to extremely Catholic conclusions, but that’s because all truth converges. So a proper truth from reason and a truth from scripture should end up in the same place. If I know from reason that it’s wrong to steal, and I know from the Bible is wrong to steal, that’s not an argument against theft. Being actually okay is like, oh, well, you just think that because the Bible tells you so it’s like, no, no, maybe the Bible’s just right. And so likewise, if you find that this internally consistent philosophical system, this way of viewing the world, this way of viewing ethics leads to Catholic conclusions independent of the people being Catholic, that’s just confirmation of the Catholic claim. But the next objection that Cade raises, it seems to be kind of the opposite. So rather than this just being a way for Catholics to announce the Catholic church’s teaching, he objects also that natural law theorists disagree.
Cade:
Like I said, with it being unreliable is that if natural law were negotiated like other ethical frameworks like act or rule utilitarianism, we expect disagreement in those because those fields allow for it. But it seems like Catholicism comes to these very hard, very, very concrete barriers when it comes to ethics. Talking about things like intrinsic evils, it seems like we don’t have a clear way to determine Te Loy. We don’t know that they exist, we don’t know what they are or how they work and if is even their preferred, preferred pronouns to throw in a joke in the middle of the conversation.
Joe:
So I agree with about two thirds of what he’s just said there. So on the one hand, he’s absolutely right that natural law theorists will sometimes disagree even on some important issues. And he’s also right that this is true of any kind of philosophical framework. If you say, I’m going to be a utilitarian, you’re going to find utilitarians disagree with each other. So if it’s an argument against a philosophical system that philosophers disagree with each other, well I’ve got bad news for you, philosophers love disagreeing with each other, even philosophers in the same kind of school, Thomas disagree with each other, virtue, ethicists disagree with each other, emotive is disagree with each other. This isn’t itself an argument against a philosophy. If anything, it seems to prove that these people are actually doing honest inquiry and not just serving as the PR spokespeople for the magisterium of the Catholic church.
He’s also right that the Catholic church takes firmer positions at times then you would necessarily be able to get from natural reason alone. In fact, the Catholic church agrees with him there. I’m going to get to that in just a second. The third is the part where I disagree. It doesn’t follow that because there’s some disagreement on the precise nature of ends that we can’t say if ends exist. People who are utilitarians believe that we should do the greatest good for the greatest number of people and they wildly disagree about what that looks like in concrete cases. That doesn’t mean that there’s no such thing as greatest good or greatest number of people or anything like that. The fact that we might disagree on how to achieve a goal doesn’t mean that the goal doesn’t exist. It does mean that we might have opposite ideas of how to achieve it.
It does mean that we might disagree about the idea of nature, but that doesn’t disprove nature in the philosophical sense any more than say two biologists disagreeing, disproves the existence of biology. So with that said, I want to turn back to the area where I suggested the Catholic church would agree with Kate, which is there are times where God has revealed something more clearly than we would necessarily get from reason alone. And the 10 commandments are going to be a great example of that. Everything in the 10 commandments is knowable from reason. We can nuance that a little bit about the Sabbath, but even the idea that you should honor and worship God that’s knowable from reason, but that you shouldn’t covet other people’s stuff that you shouldn’t steal, that shouldn’t murder, that you shouldn’t create false idols. All of that reason alone can tell you that.
And so we have on the one hand, St. Paul in Romans one talking about how certain things are knowable from reason alone. For instance, he says, of the pagans, ever since the creation of the world, his invisible nature that’s namely his eternal power and deity has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So clearly there’s an element where, so I want to resist. Sometimes you’ll hear Catholics say, oh sure, just embrace, we get this all from Catholicism. And so let’s just openly enforce Catholicism on the secular polity. And that’s not actually the Catholic answer to this because it’s obscuring this role of natural law and the distinction between revealed and natural law. But there’s an overlap. And Vatican one talks about this, that even though Romans one is true, that some of this stuff is noble by reason. Nevertheless, the council says it is pleased, his wisdom and goodness to reveal himself and the eternal decrees of his will to the human race in another and supernatural way, as the apostle says.
And then it quotes Hebrews one, that God has revealed himself in various ways through the prophets and then ultimately by his son. And then Vatican one says, indeed it must be attributed to this divine revelation that those things which in divine things are not impenetrable to human reason by itself, can even in this present condition of the human race be known readily by all with firm certitude and with noad mixture of error. That’s a mouthful. Let’s unpack it. There are things which you could in principle figure out from reason alone which God has nevertheless seen fit to reveal explicitly directly in Revelation. And again, the 10 commandments are a really good example of this why, so that they can be known by everybody with firm certitude and without the risk of error creeping in. So maybe I could come up with an ethical system that says greed is good and it’s actually really good to covet.
Maybe it’s even good to steal by reason. I should know that’s wrong. But nevertheless, you’ll find people who fall into that error. So to avoid the possibility of you falling into error, the 10 commandments are revealed, even though strictly speaking they didn’t have to be. It’s still helpful for them to be because now everybody has access to them. You don’t have to do a lot of work to get there and you’re less likely to fall into a mistake. So Kate’s right, the unaided reason, you might end up with a diversity of opinions about a certain topic that with the aid of revelation, we would have a clear answer on this then leads him to pose a question that I think is a common one, but I would suggest is actually malformed. I’ll explain why
Cade:
All to say, I think if people are honest in this discussion of this comes from my religion or this comes in spite of religion or this comes because that I’m not religious. I think it’s an honesty step. And so to your earlier point when it comes to your position on gay marriage, maybe explain that to the audience a few reasons why you think that. And then is that a religious determination because of Catholicism or is that purely secular and your mind could change based off of the studies?
Joe:
So right, I mean, I would just say consider your opinion on theft and murder. Are those things that you know to be wrong from scripture? Certainly if you’re a Christian or a Jew or many of the world’s religions, are those also things that you know to be wrong from reason also? Yes. So is it based on your religious belief or your secular belief? Well, it’d be both. But then he suggests that if it’s based on secular belief that it must be open to being changed by the studies. And I would just say that’s wrong because that’s assuming a certain view of how secular knowledge works or ought to work in which there are no intrinsic evils, there are no principles that are always true, and anything could be upended by the next study that comes out. And we’re going to talk about that as we go on.
But think about this just in the context of murder and theft. Those are fairly non-controversial. If some study came out that said, Hey, if you steal from people the GDP goes up, would you be like, I guess I’m going to go take my neighbor’s PlayStation. I don’t know if PlayStations are still the latest thing we No, that’s old. I’m an old person. I’m going to go take my neighbor’s gaming system. No, you wouldn’t say that. Hopefully you would realize it doesn’t matter what the study is. I know from reason and if I’m a Christian from faith as well that this is wrong and this is inherently wrong. Regardless of the ends, they don’t justify the evil means of stealing. Okay, that bit about studies is relevant because a lot of his argument against natural law is that actually if you look at the latest and greatest studies, you’ll see gay marriage is actually good. And his claim is that it’s good not just for the individuals, but also even good for children who are subjected to it.
Cade:
I’d also throw in there that as you pointed out, when it comes to true human flourishing, it seems that natural law has this game of special pleading in that it talks about natural law is our participation in authentic human flourishing. So then the question becomes, if we see something that does lead to authentic human flourishing and there’s studies that support that, then would natural law say something different? So I think we’ll talk about this later in detail. When it comes to something like gay marriage, I would say that the ability for couples to get married of the same sex leads to human flourishing and to legislate or to make steps against that actually causes harm.
Joe:
Now, you’ll hear this kind of claim a lot, just trust the science and science we trust that sort of thing. But there’s one study in particular, or really it’s a set of studies, it’s kind of a meta analysis sort of, and it’s one that I didn’t have access to at the time, but now do and have more intelligent things I can add to the conversation. It’s the so-called Cornell studies
Cade:
When it comes to kids flourishing, I grant the premise that kids raised in the two parent household, statistically speaking, do better. I don’t think any serious sociologist is disagreeing with that particular data set. And what we see, if we look at something like Cornell’s, what we know where it looks at out of 75 out of 79 studies that they looked at when it comes to gay marriage, when you account for factors, some of the studies that are like, ah, kids don’t do as well when it comes to gay parents rely on one of the parents having been divorced or both parents having been divorced and in straight marriages and then coming together later in life. And I mean, we know that divorce is tough on kids or they look at particularly adoption issues. And we know that adoption especially later in life, which we know that gay couples are more likely to do, is something that statistically speaking has challenges both for straight and gay couples. So if we count for all relevant factors, and that’s why I like to use the language of similarly situated kids do just as well if not better, according to a majority of peer reviewed studies.
Joe:
So the first thing that we should know is what we know project at Cornell is by no means some sort of neutral analysis of the evidence just in the pursuit of truth. It’s an advocacy project and only very thinly veiled. And if you look at the bios of any of the people involved, particularly the director of it, Dr. Nathaniel Frank, who is living a gay lifestyle, and both in his bio that for more than two decades he’s been a consulting research and communication strategist for L-G-B-T-Q organizations. This is openly activists running the kind of collection of research and deciding which research gets reported on and which doesn’t. And so as a result, they’re claiming conclusions that just cannot be justified from the flimsy evidentiary basis that they have. I’ll give you a few examples. They acknowledge some of the critiques they’ve been getting in the what we know projects own analysis on what does the scholarly research say.
They said that they identified 79 scholarly studies that met their criteria. So notice they’re already screening some studies out, which is normal, but it’d be great to have a deeper look into what their bases are for what they include and what they exclude. Because a lot of the ones that get included are pretty weak studies, but they’re going to say 75 of them find that the children of gay and lesbian parents fair no worse than other children and they’ve got reasons to throw out the other four. But then they say, well, many of the sample sizes were small and some studies lacked a control group. So yikes and yikes, if you know anything about research, this isn’t double blind. There’s not like two groups that you’re comparing a control and a variable and you’re dealing with a small sample size. These are all things that are big red flags.
Nevertheless, they say researchers regards to the studies as providing the best available knowledge about child adjustment and do not view large representative samples as essential. Now already that’s a little bit striking. I understand there’s a role for things like longitudinal studies, but a lot of these aren’t. But then they say some critics of the LGB parenting research object to the small non-random sampling methods known as convenience sampling. So now we’ve introduced a third problem with the research is this is not randomized and they say yet within the field, convenience sampling is not considered a methodological flaw, but simply a limitation to generalizability. Well, the problem here is they are generalizing. They’re saying the scholarly research says there’s no worse outcomes. That’s a generalization that by their own analysis can’t be defended on the flimsy evidence that they have of small sample sizes, no control group, non-random sampling methods and the like.
Nevertheless, in fairness, they do point to a couple of studies that they say are immune from these critiques. They say it is important to note moreover that some of the research that finds no differences among children with same-sex parents does use large representative data. A 2010 study by Stanford researcher Michael Rosenfeld, used census data to examine the school advancement of 3,500 children with same-sex parents finding no significant differences between households headed by same sex and opposite sex parents when controlling for family background. So I thought it’d be nice to take a closer look at this study and the first thing to note is that it’s only looking at one factor how likely a student is held back or how likely they move on to the next grade. And so that’s already a little bit striking because if the claim is the outcomes are just as good and by just as good you only mean how likely are they to fail a class?
And that’s it. That’s an astonishingly exaggerated claim to draw from that evidence. Now in fairness, you’ve got 79 different studies, but a lot of them are bad studies. Some of them don’t agree with you. So these are still pretty wild conclusions to be coming to on the basis of literally looking at one factor of just how likely are students to have to repeat a grade. The other thing that should be noticed is that as they explain the studies find that while the children of same-sex couples are as likely to progress normally through the grades as children of most other family structures, there is one family structure that consistently outperforms them. Heterosexual married couples, which I thought was the whole claim that they did just as well. But no, actually these studies says heterosexual married couples are the family type whose children have the lowest rates of grade retention.
Grade retention means you have to repeat the grade so the lower the better. So in other words, they have the highest rate of going on to the next grade or of graduating, but then it says, but the advantage of heterosexual married couples is mostly due to their higher socioeconomic status. Now that’s an explanation to try to explain away the data, but there’s a very different claim between saying, yeah, even though the children of same-sex couples actually do a lot worse, that might just be because of money and saying the children of same-sex couples don’t do a lot worse because they in fact do and as we’re going to see they do pretty markedly worse. And that’s with rosenfeld putting a pretty big thumb or two thumbs as we’re going to see on the scales. But even he has to try to explain away the disparities that you might notice.
The Cornell study claims don’t exist. The disparities do exist and Rosenfeld tries to explain them away. He suggests there are actually several theoretical reasons for explaining away these disparities. The first is that maybe it’s the legal privileges of marriage. We’re going to remember that. So it’s the idea like, oh, because dad and dad aren’t married, therefore their son’s doing worse than school. That’s the argument. Second, the evolutionary theory that parents invest more in their own biological children. Now that’s actually pretty huge because as they note, same sex couples absent a prior sex change cannot both be the biological parents of any one child. So this is already actually a red flag that putting kids in a same sex environment where they’re with zero or one biological parent is likely to do some damage. Now, I understand children cannot always be with their two biological parents, but Rosenfeld is not saying this is irrelevant.
He’s pretty explicitly saying, no, this is very relevant. Third, the large majority of children, same-sex couples from the 2000 census were children from prior heterosexual relationships. In other words, they live with mom or dad, but mom or dad divorced and now they live with a new partner. But notice here the critique is on the one hand, well they’re with non-biological parents or on the other hand, well, they’re with a divorced parent who’s remarried. Now that’s relevant because as I’m going to point out in a little bit in response to Cade, those are the two ways that you’re likely to end up in a gay home is parental divorce or adoption. And if you say both of those are bad for kids, it seems like you’re making a pretty good argument against same sex parenting. But it turns out Rosenfeld isn’t telling the whole truth. So that was in the demography journal and I think three years later there was a follow-up by Douglas Allen, Catherine Ock and Joseph Price looking at literally the exact same data.
They took the same body of census data and what they found is that the original study, the Rosenfeld one used a sample in which the children are number one biologically related to the household head. And number two in which the children and parents have been living at the same address for the past five years. So they’re only looking at kind of stable relationships in which a kid is with one biological parent as they know Rosenfeld is right to recognize that there are potential confounders here. All of those things, as I said a second ago, can make life more complicated when you have divorce, when you have dad leaving mom to go date another guy or vice versa, or when you’re adopted into a family, you’re not biologically related to either parent, any of those things. Those things are all complicated, they’re messy. But if you control for those, if you eliminate those cases from the census data, you’re actually getting rid of most cases as the follow-up study points out, there’s two problems with this.
Number one, those two factors might actually be really relevant in that same sex. And opposite sex couples might be in different positions relative to their kids. For instance, the odds that both parents are biologically mom and dad of the child, it was clearly higher in a heterosexual marriage. And the other reason this is a problem is that if you get rid of all of those cases where these complicating factors, you’re getting rid of most of the real life cases, you’ve reduced the sample size by 55%. So sure, if you only take the cases you regard as like the cream of the crop, same-sex couples, then you can make them look pretty good, but you’re not actually giving a representative sample. You’ve gotten rid of most of the cases that we find in the census data. Now, I didn’t have access to all of this during my conversation with Cade, but I did point out this same problem that these confounders are really relevant to how we think about kids’ success or failure living with two people of the same sex.
You said something like if we account for all relevant factors, kids do just as well if not better in a same sex family. But you isolated the two factors that would produce a child in this situation which were adoption and divorce because they’re not biologically being born into a situation with two dads or two moms. So they’re either getting there because of divorce and remarriage or because of IVF or because of adoption. And all of those are tremendously hard on kids. What if you just take your thumbs off the scale, leave that 55% in even though they’ve got messy real life circumstances and just compare how are real life same sex and opposite sex kids performing in the census data? Now admittedly, this is from 2000, but this is the stuff that Cornell is pointing to as evidence that it’s equal outcomes. Is it really?
Well, if you don’t screen out 55% of the cases, you’ve got a sample size of 1.6 million. This is massive. This is great and it’s completely fair. You’re not screening for your preferred preferential group. You’re just taking what we find in the census data and what we find is alarming. Namely, we find that the children of heterosexual married couples outperformed by 35% on the one rubric that Rosenfeld is looking at. That is a huge difference. And in journal article meant to tell us that they perform basically the same is actually a statistically significant quite large difference. In fact, even if you look at heterosexual cohabitating couples, remember one of the excuses was, well, maybe it’s because gay people can’t get married at the time that you’re looking at the data. Well, if you just compare heterosexual couples who aren’t married, we find that even their kids are outperforming by 15%.
So no, there actually appears to be a quite serious disparity in the educational outcomes, which again are just one small sliver of the life outcome kind of differences. The authors conclude together these findings are strikingly different from those of the original study, and the differences are large enough to be noteworthy with respect to normal school progress. Children residing in same-sex households can be distinguished statistically from those in traditional married homes and in heterosexual cohabitating households. This isn’t just like a blip in the data. This is a statistically significant conclusion looking at 1.6 million cases. That’s huge. Now you might say in fairness, well, we have scant data on a lot of this stuff because we don’t have multiple generations of huge numbers of people being raised in same-sex households, so it’s hard to isolate the variables and all of that. I don’t agree with all of that, which is why Cornell shouldn’t be lying through its teeth about the outcomes being the same.
But it also is worth pointing out that moms and dads aren’t the same. And we’ve had moms and dads for a long time, and there’s actually a wealth of studies that point to moms and dads not being the same, which should tell us that two moms and two dads aren’t the same as a mom and a dad, right? It follows logically that even if you don’t have same sex couples, if you know the difference between moms and dads, you can point to there being some difference in outcomes. I’m just going to give you one slightly provocative example from the 2014 issue of the pediatrics journal called Parental Death During Childhood and Subsequent School Performance. I will not even attempt to explain why this is. What they find is not only unsurprisingly that kids perform a lot worse in school if a parent has died, but they specifically perform a lot worse if their dad has died, they perform badly but not as badly if their mom has died.
This is true for girls and for boys. This is true regardless of the age of parental death and so on. Now, I don’t make any grand theory as to why that is, but only observe that we see very clearly in the data if we didn’t have the intuition to figure this out on our own, that moms and dads are not the same. They don’t provide the same thing for kids, and that kids benefit from having a mom and a dad in a way that even the most generous, loving, same sex couple can’t possibly provide for their kids. So that leaves one last dimension to this and really again, there’s much more in the conversation, but I wanted to just highlight these kind of aspects because one of the arguments that Cade raises is this idea of intrinsic evils. He’s against this idea. So I want to ask, are there moral absolutes? And he makes a couple of arguments that appear to be against it. So first he says this,
Cade:
But it seems like the Catholic church has these absolute stances on these intrinsic evils that make it unable to actually engage with the dialogue that’s happening. And so if natural law was a framework in which we looked for true flourishing of human persons would make sense to engage in these issues and have disagreement, it would make sense to engage in these issues and have nuance and have particular cases. But if I came to the table with a framework that says everything before I enter this discussion is these clear cut issues, there’s intrinsic evils. And then if there is gray area, it seems counterintuitive to have a framework that gives black and white statements give gray statements.
Joe:
I’d say two things. Number one, I think it’s unreasonable to say you’re going to discount from the conversation someone who comes in believing that there are moral absolutes like we should never torture, we should never rape, we should never kill. And number two, I don’t think there’s any hypocrisy or confusion about saying some things are absolute issues of right and wrong and other things. I think that’s completely perfectly coherent. And so I ended up a little later in the conversation a couple minutes later in the conversation pressing Cade on this a little bit. So at the beginning when you were talking about intrinsic evils, is it your stance that there should be absolutely no absolutes or is it okay that some things like say torture or murder are always in everywhere wrong regardless of situations? I know from a utilitarian standpoint, they’re going to have to say rape might be okay, torture might be okay, murder might be okay if the situation calls for it. And those might not be a lot of situations, but I would just say I don’t think you have to be religious. If somebody says, I’m usually against rape that you’re like, I don’t want to spend time with you, you sound like a moral monster. I don’t want to find out what your exception clause is for that. I guess is your stance that it’s like putting a thumb on the scale to say that there are moral black and white issues?
Cade:
I would put it this way. In so far as I’ve looked into various ethical frameworks, the one that makes the most sense to me is a motives. It seems to explain the data points around morality the best, which the crash course for the audience is that when it comes to moral decisions, I wouldn’t use the term truth, not because there isn’t objective realities to it or objective harms, but that I define truth as predictive utilities. So it is really only in an empirical sense. So is it true that murder is wrong isn’t a sentence that I would use? I would say I have never seen a society in which allowing murder leads to flourishing and doesn’t lead to absolute harm. And I don’t know a society in which I would ever conceive of that being a possibility that I would allow from a legal perspective.
So are there absolutes? There are situations in which I can’t think of a counter example that we would allow for a particular thing to happen. And I think those are remote circumstances because so we can have objective science objective, whether that’s societal levels on self-reported mental health outcomes, we can talk about cortisol levels, we can talk about the rates, the increase or decrease of things that we don’t want to happen in society all the same when it comes to both overall ethical questions and more particularly legislation on let’s say gay marriage. I think that it’s negotiated and that we have to look at the data and ultimately work in the dialectic of the people that we’re talking to rather than claim there’s this moral law written out there that we have to decipher from the stars. I dunno if that answered the court
Joe:
C question. I think it does sound like you’re saying we can’t just say murder is wrong. It would be like astrology. But it sounds like you can’t think offhand of cases in which it would be. Okay. I can think of cases offhand in which people have thought it would be okay on utilitarian grounds because killing a small group of people might save the lives of more people in treating people in a less and human way. I mean, even taking a less extreme example. So 1986, William Buckley had an article in the New York Times, I believe it was, or New York Times review of books, New York Review of Books, whatever that’s called in which he argued AIDS was a brand new thing at the time. He argued everyone with AIDS needed to be forcibly tattooed so that people could see who had aids. And so just creating a second class kind of tier.
And the idea there was to stop the spread of a deadly disease that at the time had no known cure. And it seemed like we were very far from developing a cure. And so you can imagine a more extreme version of that proposal where anyone diagnosed with AIDS is just some rarely murdered, not out of a hatred of them, but to public health reasons. Or you could do this with Covid. You could do this with any number of things where you say, well, if everyone in 2019 who was diagnosed with covid was just killed, that would’ve saved more lives in the long run. If it’s something where we just have to figure out with a calculator, how much pleasure, how much pain is this causing and kind of do the utilitarian calculation, then it’s not clear that we could say out the gate that is abhorrent and wrong. But I think everyone has a natural and immediate reaction that there’s something revolting about that even if you can make the numbers look like you’re going to save lives in the long run.
Cade:
And that’s where I think a lot of when it comes to these particular questions, the phrase that I tend to use is I want to live in a world in which blank, in this case, I want to live in a world in which people have a right to their life in that society cannot, out of a sense of panic or fear decide that somebody because of an unknown disease that we don’t know how it spreads, we don’t know how it affects, can make a decision like that. So there’s both ethical considerations in vacuum type situations where let’s, as you brought up the trolley problem, I find to be an interesting one in a vacuum if we know all the inputs, but we also have to recognize our epistemic limitations in a society, especially from a legislative side or what we allow as a society. And that’s where I find the most fruitful dialogue.
Joe:
So there’s a couple things going on there. Obviously you can tell probably a utilitarian bent, this idea that truth isn’t what’s true. It’s useful, it’s what the utility part. And so we don’t speak of things as true or false but useful or unuseful. And so a thing is true, and as much as it’s useful, I think that’s alarming and repudiation of truth as such, the placebo effect is an obvious case where something can be a lie and be useful. So once we say actually lies are true because they’re helpful, they’re useful, we no longer have a meaningful sense of what lying is. But second is this idea of emom. Now many of you’re not going to be familiar with that. I’m going to again, kind of do the crash course thing. AJ Iyer is one of the major figures in this. His claim was that moral claims don’t respond to anything that could be considered true or false.
So again, very similar to what we just heard. Instead they just show that we approve or disapprove of it. And this has been disparagingly boo hurrah theory of ethical claims. And if I say murder is wrong, I just mean boo murder and that if, I mean helping the poor is good, I just mean hooray helping the poor. Now, on a surface you might say, well yeah, I do boo murder, I do hurrah helping the poor. What’s wrong with that? I’m going to point you to a brilliant husband and wife team, Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Gee, and they did some of the best work in virtue ethics as well, especially Elizabeth Anscombe. And we’re going to get to her at the very end. But I’m going to turn first to Peter Geech because he attacks emom and shows that it’s just nonsensical, that the claims that Oxford Moralists like IR are making are just literally not true.
Now I’m going to warn you this whole essay is a little technical. I’m going to do my best to make it as straightforward as I can. So the question is, what do we mean when we say something is good? Are we describing it or are we commending it? Are we saying yay or are we saying something about it? And the Oxford, more or less people like a J ire are going to say, it’s just commendation. That’s a good book means hooray book. Or I recommend that book or choose that book. Now Geet is going to respond, no, this just literally is not true. And the reason it’s not true is that good always has a primarily descriptive force. He points out, he gives a lot of funny examples in the essay, which is one of the reasons I like it. Somebody who doesn’t care to pens about cricket but fully understood how the game worked.
And he says it’s not an impossible proposition, could supply a purely descriptive sense for the phrase good batting wicket regardless of the taste of the cricket fans. So when you say that’s a good batting wicked, you’re not saying I like that. You’re not even saying cricket fans like that. You’re just saying it is objectively good. It succeeds at what it’s meant to be. And then he gives some more provocative examples. If you say someone is a good burglar or a good cutthroat, you’re not saying they’re morally good clearly and you’re not commending them. He says, you can imagine cases where you might commend someone as a cutthroat or a burglar, but such circumstances are rare and cannot give the primary sense of the descriptions. Obviously if you say somebody is really good at committing crimes, you’re not saying hooray crime, you’re doing something else. You’re describing that the nature of what it is they’re doing, they succeed at that nature.
Now, it might be an evil thing, manmade natures like being a cutthroat or burglar can be evil. And so to be good at it is actually really bad. We would say in nature, the things God has created to succeed as a man, as a fish, as whatever are good. But nevertheless you can make sense of that hopefully. So if you have two clocks, one of them is beautiful, ornate, extremely expensive, doesn’t tell time the other one, just like the one you got at target and it works perfectly, you might prefer the first one, but the second one is a good clock and the way the first one isn’t because you know what a clock is, then you realize that telling time is part of its nature, it’s part of its telos, and it has achieved that and the way that beautiful decorative wall piece.
And so once you realize that that good is descriptive, not command, you’re not saying hooray, target clock when you say it’s a good clock in a way the other one isn’t. GGE concludes he doesn’t give the target example, but he would agree with it. He says it ought to be clear that calling a thing a good A does not influence choice unless the one who’s choosing happens to want an A. So if you want a cutthroat, if you want a burglar, if you want a clock, well then knowing this is a good one tells you to get it. But that just saying it’s a good X, Y, Z doesn’t immediately tell you, I support this and I think you should support it. So that’s just the ethical theory of emom is built on a false theory of language, which is a big problem that it’s not true that when we say something is good or bad or good or evil, we’re just saying hooray or boo.
That’s just not what it means in any language when we do that. But then Gee’s wife, Elizabeth Anscombe has really the kill shot here in her work. Modern moral philosophy. I really highly recommend both on good and evil by geech and especially modern moral philosophy by anscombe, you can get both of these online. She makes the point that the problem with any theory that looks at just the consequences and the results, it’s not just that, then you become subject with the next study that comes out could upend your entire philosophy. There’s something even deeper because you can’t say anything is inherently evil. And she puts it like this. She says, if someone really thinks in advance that it is open to question whether such an action is procuring the judicial execution of the innocent should be quite excluded from consideration. I do not want to argue with him.
He shows a corrupt mind. What that means is this, you can imagine a world in which, so let’s say you live in a neighborhood or a state or a country in which the crime rate is high, and you could, for deterrent reasons, judicially execute the innocent and it would almost certainly lead to a lot of utility. It would deter crime. It might save more innocent lives than it even takes. But if you can’t say at the outset, I don’t need to run the numbers to know that it is wrong to intentionally murder innocent people as a judicial system, then you’re not doing moral philosophy. Whatever you’re doing, you’re showing yourself to have a corrupt mind. That’s her argument. And so we should watch out for what was at the time of Anscombe and is still today a lot of the mainstream philosophical systems like Consequentialism Emom where you do end up not being able to say there are intrinsic evils. The point there is not to be ruthless, indoctrinate and oppressed people’s freedom. The point is, it’s a foundational thing that you should know from reason that there are some things that ought never to be done, no matter how good the result you hope to get from it happens to be. Okay. There’s much more that we talked about. So the last thing I want to suggest to you, if you want to see more about this I, I’m going to link right here to the full debate with Cade for Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer, God bless you.