Andrew Fraser and Queensland Same Sex Unions
Image via Wikipedia
Image via Wikipedia
Image via WikipediaAndrew Fraser introduced same sex unions into the Queensland parliament because he said it was "the right thing to do." It is not uncommon to hear people insist on the constructed arbitrariness of moral values and yet denounce certain human actions as wrong because they violate human rights. In this case the perceived oppression of homosexuals in the Queensland community. That such a self-contradictory absurdity seems to be widespread and tends to escape the notice of its protagonists suggests both that it is deeply rooted and that it fulfills an important function. Its latter half depends on smuggling or the importation of unacknowledged premises and convictions from normative religious worldviews that protagonists like Fraser have discarded, and which are inadmissible on Fraser's own naturalist terms. If rape or murder is wrong, then all moral values are not arbitrary, and therefore there must be a reason why they are not; and if all moral values are arbitrary, then there and can be nothing wrong with with rape, murder, homosexuality, civil unions or anything else, regardless of what laws happen to be in place.
Similarly, either human rights are real and therefore there is something to violate; or they are constructed fictions based on false beliefs, and therefore no wrong is or can be done when they are allegedly violated.
The incoherence of suc a pervasive sensibility - moral values are arbitrary but some actions are wrong and some are right as defined by Fraser, derives from unawareness of the historical genealogy of two desires that are contradictorily combined.
The first seeks to maximize individual autonomy to determine the good according to one's own preferences (hence the advocacy for arbitrariness). But the second endeavors to uphold human rights (like homosexuality) as a safeguard against the horrific things human beings can do to one another depending on their preferences (hence the insistence on nonarbitrariness).
The first desire is the long term product of a rejection of teleological virtue ethics, the second a residue of the belief that human beings are created in God's image and likeness.
Their combination depends for its appeal on a skepticism that goes only so far but no further. Fraser needs to get rid of a God who acts in history, who makes moral demands and renders eternal judgements consonant with a teleological and divinely created human nature. Otherwise human beings would no longer be the neo-Protagorean measure of all things, and the ideologically foundational modern commitment to the automonous, unencumbered self would be threatened.
But one equally cannot permit humans actions that are consistent with the scientific findings that human beings are nothing more than biological matter-energy. Otherwise human beings would be ultimately no different from amoebae or algae, in Stephen Hawking's words "just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet," and one could act accordingly depending on one's preferences and desires.
So God's souls must go, but rights must stay; skepticism must be embraced with a carefully calibrated inculturated arbitrariness.
Any intellectually warranted defense of rights requires a view of human beings that transcends what can be disclosed through the method of science. One can insist of homosexual rights, but there is no reason to think that these rights are more than useful fictions if one believes that metaphysical naturalism is true. In this case there are no grounds for believing there is anything to violate, whatever might happen to be legal or illegal. If we restrict ourselves to the findings of natural sciences, then feeding the poor or selling girls into slavery are morally equivalent.
So I ask again, on what basis does Fraser insist that same sex civil unions "are the right thing to do?"
There are no gay rights! Given the findings of science plus the assumptions of naturalism, any intellectually justifiability for an ethics of "this is the right thing to do" vanishes. There is simply no empirically verifiable basis for them at all. Therfore, Fraser may mean " right thing to do" for my re-election?
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