RE: Supreme Court Same Sex Marriage Argumet
July 1, 2015 at 2:57 pm
(This post was last modified: July 1, 2015 at 3:00 pm by Aristocatt.)
(June 30, 2015 at 5:28 pm)Anima Wrote:(June 30, 2015 at 2:20 pm)Aristocatt Wrote: So are you now saying:
Homosexuality is wrong because they are worse human beings because they don't want to procreate by having sex. This is wrong because if 99% of the world were to die off, all the medical facilities, and all the power in the world were destroyed, if we had too many homosexuals that were unwilling to have sex with someone else to keep the population going, then we might go extinct.
(1)From a social and biological argument you could say this. As the social value of even an utterly useless person in nearly any other regard at least lies in their potential to create offspring of value. The biological value of organism lies in their ability to procreate (it is the reason why we are male and female, as well as why the great majority of organisms on this planet live just long enough to procreate).
(2)From a moral standpoint the argument would be more in accordance with the teleological purpose of the act. While it may readily be argued that any number of activities may be done for purposes not in accordance with their teleological purpose (sex for pleasure, perversion, torture, authoritative dominance, etcetera) we would say be better suited to argue that an act may be determined in terms of its teleological end (meaning if the end itself is bad the act is bad) and then arguing if the means by which the end is accomplished is of a moral quality. Generally we may state if an act fails to satisfy the former than the latter does not matter. If it satisfies the former than any particular actor may be said to act immorally if they fail at the latter.
I'll get to the second part of this post a little later. I hold that your social/biological argument is incoherent.
Here's how it works:
You provided an instance where having too many homosexuals may be bad, and it was based on their inability to want to make babies by having sex. This is because with too high a proportion of homosexuals, we may be unable to avoid extinction in the event of an unnamed calamity. Furthermore, because they do not want to make babies the "natural" way, we shouldn't expect them to step up and make babies in the event of a calamity. As for how grounded in reality it is, I won't bother to argue. This is mainly because I want to use the insanity of the assertion to my advantage below.
This means that, as long as we are being impartial, if I can provide an example where the ability to want to make babies through sex would cause the extinction of our race, then I have by the same vein of logic showed you that heterosexuality is also wrong.
Global warming will do a fine job as an example. As of right now, the population explosion of our species is expected to increase our energy use. The expectation that a number of these nations will pull themselves out of poverty, thus consuming even more energy per capita adds to this population concern. The real concern here is that scientists are aware of a "tipping point" where we will be unable to effectively manage the climate as it continues to warm in the long term. This in turn could lead to a climate that is actually unsuitable for human life. If this were to happen, slowly we could eventually die out. Had we only had homosexuals walking the earth today, or at some earlier point before the tipping point was reached, we could have averted this tragedy, and we also could have left the option of procreation available by means of IVF treatment. It doesn't matter if we can kill of billions off humans, because we don't know where the tipping point is, so we don't know when we should institute such a genocide. In order to support massive genocide on this premise, people are going to need more than "what if" scenarios, and so I posit that such a possibility, is not only possibly not going to occur, but also unlikely to occur, if not impossible.
Heterosexuality is bad, and we should not be encouraging it.
The conclusion of this argument however does not show why your argument is incoherent. It requires we go a step further.
We actually never claimed that hetero or homo sexuality were wrong. We claimed that they were a subset of two different types of people. Those of us that enjoy making babies by having sex. And those of us that do not enjoy making babies by having sex.
However everyone falls into either those two categories, or a third one I while get to momentarily.
Let's assume everyone falls into those to categories, and that all it takes to condemn type of person as bad is to show that that kind of person could cause extinction. If everyone falls into those two categories, then everyone is bad, since both categories of individual can cause extinction. However when we say that extinction is bad, we are also saying that the continued existence of that species is good.
So I ask you, how can an entire species be provably bad, but at the same time, their continued existence be good?
Finally I get to the third option. You might say, "wait, what if someone is indifferent to either option presented above"? My response to this, is indifference towards something still manifests as a preference for one or the other in reality. Either the indifferent are or are not having kids. This is important, because if we look at the two insane possibilities we have both presented, we would say that the indifferent are not able to save our world in my example, since the world ends before we realize it has ended, however they do have the ability to save the world, without relying on the homosexuals to do something they may not want to do, in your example. In this vein if we were to compare the goodnes of a type of human based on these three classifications, we might say indifference>homosexuality>heterosexuality, recognizing that a healthy balance between the three is the best way to prevent calamity.
So on the one hand we have to accept an incoherent theory, and on the other hand, we accept what everyone on this forum knew already, which is that a balance of different kinds of individuals with regards to sexual orientations is healthy for society.