When Intuitions Collide

Disgust at homosexuality is evidence against virtue ethics

1.

Simon Laird

Made Me Mad

Look, I like the guy a lot. He’s an entertaining writer, has good opinions about jocks, and comments on this blog a fair bit. Actually, he comments enough that my friend must have clicked onto his profile, because when I mentioned Laird off-hand in chemistry class, he turned to me and asked, “Oh, is that the guy who hates fat people a lot?”

“Yes!” I said. “Yes it is.”

When I wrote an article that made the (very reasonable, very demure) assertion that a morally-aligned superintelligence would be justified in killing us all to maximize shrimp welfare, Laird responded:

Wild Animal Suffering Debunks Utilitarianism

I even got a shout-out by name:

Utilitarian Ari Shtein has pointed out that the Utilitarian view on shrimp implies that a superintelligence with the correct moral priorities would exterminate humanity—and Shtein endorses this.

Exterminating humanity is not morally good. It is evil.

He and I already had a little back-and-forth about the shrimp. This is not about that. This is about the gays.

Laird wrote this post yesterday:

"It's Disgusting" is a Perfectly Fine Objection to Homosexuality

And so it’s time to turn the tables.

If my analysis of utilitarianism’s extremes is evidence against my theory, then his analysis of homosexuality on virtue ethics is evidence against his.

Booyah.

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2. Let’s Talk About Intuition, Baby

There’s a view of moral epistemology called intuitionism. It claims that basic moral propositions are self-evident, or at the very least that our snap intuitive judgments of them are trustworthy.

This view is true. How do I know it’s true? Because it seems intuitive, we’re moving on now.

It seems like Laird is claiming that disgust is a kind of moral intuition, and a pretty fundamental one at that:

Homosexuality is disgusting. That’s not an opinion, it’s an objective fact that homosexuality triggers the human disgust reflex, at least for most men. Everyone who has at least a cursory familiarity with history or with their fellow human beings already knows that.

“Most men.”

Is “most” enough to call this a legitimate, self-evident proposition? I can tell you now: I really don’t love the idea of two men going at it, but I don’t find it intuitively wrong in the way I find murder wrong.

Well, Laird would probably argue at this point that I’m screening my moral intuitions through various biases: I’m succumbing to social pressure, confirming my existing belief in free-lovin’ utilitarianism, and so on.

And he cites a study to back up the idea that disgust toward homosexuality is deeply wired-in:

O’Handley, Blair and Hoskin measured the stress response (as measured by the presence of alpha-amylase in a saliva sample) of 120 men in response to certain images. They found that the men experienced the same stress response to images of two men kissing as to “universally disgusting images” such as maggots.

This isn’t an artifact of bigotry either:

The researchers found no relationship between levels of “sexual prejudice” and levels of stress response. When shown images of two men kissing, the stress response of the men with low levels of “sexual prejudice” was about the same as the stress response of the men with high levels of “sexual prejudice” which indicates that liberal men who claim not to find homosexuality disgusting may just be lying.

Lying! Me?? Never.

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3. If Loving Gay Sex Is Wrong, I Don’t Want to Be Right

Of course, Laird’s leaving out a set of people who aren’t so disgusted by gay sex—namely, the people having it!

Presumably, a gay man’s vision of eudaimonia—an ultimately virtuous existence—involves quite a bit of gay sex! Just like Laird’s eudaimonia involves lots of optimally-orgasmic hetero sex, as well as some weed, a hair of LSD, and absolutely no Diet Coke.

Is there any way to tell these views apart, or judge which is right from the outside? Not really!

Virtue ethics has a big, stinking relativism problem. Intuitions about what’s beautiful and what’s disgusting—what’s virtuous and what’s regressive—are frighteningly contingent. A gay man loves gay sex, but Laird hates it. Laird hates cheesecake, but I love it.

I want you inside me.

The easy response to all this is whataboutism, or what fancypants philosophers call a tu quoque.¹

Sure, virtue ethicists have to deal with the unreliability and variability of moral intuitions—but so does everyone else! A utilitarian has to deal with the fact that, while felt experience seems obviously, overridingly morally relevant to him, certain

Amos Wollen

s have an obsession with not lying!

Is there any good way to adjudicate a debate like that from the outside?

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4. My Intuitions Are Metaethical; Yours Are Object-Level

Know Your Meme

It’s a lot more feasible to judge between differing views that claim “[x] matters” than differing views that claim “[x] is good.”

For example, it’s fairly easy to argue that something like “pain matters” is a universal intuition. People with conditions like pain asymbolia are really the exception that proves the rule. Their lives—if they can manage to live well and long, like Jo Cameron has—seem utterly blissful. They’re probably the only people in the world who could feel intuitively that pain is morally irrelevant—but only because they have no experience of it. The rest of us take our hands off hot stoves and avoid pinpricks—they’re just self-evidently unpleasant things.

I’ll admit that similar arguments exist for the idea that “honesty matters” or, generally, that “virtue matters.” We all feel intuitively that these ideas seem right.

In the end, everyone stands on vaguely similar metaethical grounding. I mean, these normative theories wouldn’t exist if their basic principles didn’t make some sense—so how do we adjudicate between them?

Experiments!

Thought experiments, to be precise.

We can ask questions like, “should you kill five people or one?” or “is gay sex cool?” and see how each theory performs.

Utilitarianism (hedonistic utilitarianism, to be precise) has easy answers in line with its one, big, principled intuition—that positive felt experience is good, and negative bad—so you kill one person, let men have sex with each other, and move on.

But, as Laird’s post inadvertently demonstrates, virtue ethicists have a lot more trouble. See, “virtue” is pretty ill-defined. Certainly it gestures at a few things—love, beauty, honor, and so on—but sometimes these things conflict, and often we each understand them pretty differently.

Laird understands gay sex to be disgusting and dishonorable, but a gay man thinks it’s beautiful and loving. Such an object-level conflict of intuitions is good evidence that your theory isn’t really all that useful.

Utilitarianism appeals to intuition once, at the meta-level, then lets you conduct a dispassionate and universalized analysis of the real world. But virtue ethics forces you to constantly reference your intuitions—and quibble endlessly with anyone who has slightly different ones.

Remember, intuitionism works best for basic moral propositions. If you find yourself using it to decide on every moral proposition, you’re not actually working with a normative theory—you’re just doing random crap.

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Addendum. Is Even Non-Moral Disgust a Good Reason to Oppose Gay Rights?

Maybe!

Laird writes that,

even if you don’t accept the validity of moral disgust as an argument against incest or homosexuality, the sense of physical disgust alone is enough to reject much of “gay rights.” You do not generally have a right to act in public in ways that will disgust large numbers of your fellow citizens. You are not allowed to poop in public parks. You are not allowed to eat with your feet at restaurants. By the same token, it would be perfectly reasonable to restrict public displays of homosexuality.

Amos Wollen comments, asking:

Do you think we’re ever obligated to try not to think certain thoughts and suppress certain feelings, or do you think we’re just not so obligated in this case?

Laird waffles (in a good and intellectually honest way):

I’m reflexively suspicious about claims that you’re obligated not to think certain thoughts; I think those claims are the favorite tools of brainwashers. On the other hand, it seems wrong to deeply indulge certain thoughts, e.g. feelings of hatred against your family. Maybe you have a moral obligation not to indulge certain thoughts of immoral actions, but you do NOT have a moral obligation to suppress fundamental instincts such as lust, desire for money, disgust at gross things, etc.?

I’m not sure what to think of this myself. I wrote at the beginning that my feelings of disgust toward homosexuality don’t seem terribly strong. I don’t like to watch two men kissing on TV, and I certainly don’t like watching a gay sex scene, but it’s not terribly costly for me to avoid those experiences on an individual basis.

Prohibitions against excessive PDA also seem fairly reasonable to me, though I would think they should mostly extend to heterosexual people as well. I don’t want to see a man and woman having sex on a park bench either!

But, again, I can’t really say that I’m disgusted when I see a man sit in another’s lap (do gay guys do that?). It seems mostly like we should just let people be.

Pride parades might be an exception to this principle? But I’m the kind of guy who’d let the Nazis march in Skokie, and that sort of display is far more disgusting to me than one of homosexuality. Let people be!

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Appendix. Should Freedom of Expression Extend to Right-Coded Beliefs?

Laird also writes in his reply to Wollen’s comment:

My point is that mainstream left-leaning people seem to be logically inconsistent on this issue. I have met many people who think you should be liberated to express your inner feelings publicly, but when it comes to “homophobia” and other right-wing coded feelings, they suddenly say “no not those feelings.”

I would encourage anyone who holds homophobic feelings not to go call gay people a bunch of slurs, but I’m ok with them speaking against gay rights in a public forum. I’ve written tangentially to this effect before:

It’s probably net-good to have more ideas out in the marketplace—I’m willing to be a fully-consistent “express your inner feelings publicly” libtard.

1. Do not ask me to pronounce it… ‘2 cookie’, maybe?

I want you both inside me, at the same time.