On Moral Intuition

A common objection to, say, the right-wing stance against gay marriage is that it's based on nothing but homophobia. Let's set aside for the moment the fact that this is a grossly reductive caricature of what we on the far-right actually believe; the reasoning itself doesn't work because it doesn't really explain anything -- if opposition to gay marriage is wrong because it's mere homophobia, what makes homophobia wrong?

If same-sex attraction is valid because it's natural (where "natural" is understood simply to mean "occurring in nature"), why isn't instinctive revulsion to those attractions valid for the same reason? Certainly not because it's irrational or arational or something, because it has no less rational value than same-sex attraction.

Moral intuitions aren't entirely reliable, largely because they're easily corrupted: for instance, in my youth, I could not for the life of me figure out why Hollywood expected us to disapprove of the consequentialist villain in Swordfish. But it's worth observing, I think, that something like homophobia (that is, an instinctive aversion to homosexual acts, a perception that they are unclean and a perversion of that which is actually natural and good) has emerged in virtually every society that's ever existed, and has often been dominant in them. This is in and of itself an important fact which leftists tend to thoughtlessly gloss over; they're just not interested in why people might object to such behavior.

I imagine the leftist narrative concerning historical homophobia is that it is a religious innovation that in no way corresponds to human nature -- that it was foisted on otherwise ignorant people by a small band of malicious ones -- a benighted feature of traditional society with which we Enlightened citizens of the common republic of man have done away. But if it's the case that people will accept something that has no basis in their natures merely because social authorities bludgeoned it into them, isn't it just as possible that the modern acceptance of homosexuality was borne of such conditioning? Conversely, if people are naturally inclined toward neutrality or even acceptance of homosexuality, why did homophobia linger so long in the West after the temporal authority of the Church was shattered -- and why has nothing but a Herculean intellectual and social effort waged over the course of decades only just now succeeded in making homosexuality palatable to a narrow majority of people in a nation founded explicitly on liberal principles?

I don't think there's really an answer here; modern liberalism is nothing if not a mess of cliches, contradictions, and vapid emoting. Hell, I recently encountered a liberal acquaintance on Facebook arguing with a mutual friend about what he called the "implicit racism" of Tea Party politics, a racism he was gracious enough to assure her did not apply to all or even the majority of people who identify with the Tea Party. But this sounds conspicuously like an endorsement of the notion that there is such a thing as a social consensus that exists as something more than the aggregate of the opinions of every individual in a given group -- a notion that liberals, 50 or 60 years ago, were deriding as meaningless, self-serving nonsense used merely to justify censorship of smut and vulgarity. What's changed in the intervening years? Nothing, except that the modern left is in power now and wasn't then.

Comments

[bgc]

Homophobia is a dishonest and manipulative term on so many levels - but not least because it imputes the incorrect feeling.

My impression is that the mass of people who have strongly negative views on male homosexuality or homosexuals do not experience the emotions of 'hate and fear' so often imputed to them; rather they pity and/or despise/ are revolted by. A different kind of negative feeling altogether. Hate and fear applies to other groups, but surely not to homosexuals.

[Proph]

Yes, I use the term because of the lack of a suitable alternative, although I'm careful always to define it properly as a particular application of the instinctive aversion to the unclean -- a feature of pretty much every moral system in history except the modern one.

I'd suggest a more appropriate word be coined to describe it, but I don't have the knowledge (or, frankly, the interests -- let the left obsess over how to label things while declaring their lack of interest in labels). A quick Googling reveals that at least one person suggests "homometastrophia" would be a more appropriate term, though: http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2011/07/changes-meaning?page=1 (second comment).