He escaped the
death penalty, but
was robbed of his life
The positive
power of
the death knock
In my favourite place,
we were locked in
by 6.30pm
Rear Window
The night ploughs on. The moment I finish my drink, someone replaces it with a new one. The moment I find myself alone, someone steps in to ask if I’m all right. Conversation meanders haphazardly. People come and go. Various arguments are started, or continued, or resolved. A second guitarist joins in the music, then a Boran player, then a flautist. The singing starts. Tables are cleared away, and finally there’s dancing.
In the small hours of the morning, I walk back to the hostel with two men I’ve never seen before. The clouds and the lack of street lights make the night so dark that we fall into puddles, ditches and each other. Inverie has one long road down which run beat-up vehicles, their lights shattered and bonnets held on with pieces of string, but even in daylight you can count the cars passing each hour on one hand.
Walking down a pitch-black road, talking about relationships with a couple of strangers, I start to wonder how much of Inverie’s overwhelming friendliness is due to the absence of cars. Is the curse of cars not just that we don’t have the silence to think, or the wilderness to be alone, but also that, faced with endless possibilities of being elsewhere, we stop being accessible to the people beside us?
Kate Davidson
From SR 2003
The Cafe
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They think I’m
metaphysically confused.
I have news for them
Eileen Reid
Increasingly, I find political and moral discussions tedious when I can predict the stance of the interlocutors. In this respect the Catholic Church’s contribution to the discussion of the government’s proposal to recognise same-sex marriage is very boring: the same litany of tired arguments marshalled to support a tired and extreme conservatism (if such a thing exists).
Of course the Catholic Church regards its stance as a venerable, eternal, and universal stability in the face of turbulent contingency. But this week, in anticipation of the charge that the church is a social and cultural dinosaur, extremely conservative it certainly is. But not necessarily boring. A distinct line of attack on same-sex marriage has been bruited on the airwaves (Keith O’Brien) and in the Catholic press.
We can ignore the cardinal’s unintelligent ramblings about human rights and slavery. The main objection to same-sex marriage, say the Catholic intellectuals, is not moral but metaphysical. It is metaphysically obtuse, apparently, to think that a marriage can obtain between people of the same sex. People supporting same-sex marriage are metaphysically confused. Well, no one calls me metaphysically confused and gets a way with it.
Hear the words of Friar Alexander Lucie-Smith (Catholic Herald, 5 March) as he seeks to subvert the ‘philosophical underpinnings’ of the proposed change to the law. This law, he says, is an attempt to ‘redefine reality’. But, he goes on, certain things lie beyond our powers – like the laws of gravity, the second law of thermodynamics, the law of supply and demand – and government legislation is powerless to change these aspects of reality.
The proposed change to the law is as daft as trying to outlaw death. It just can’t be done. And the reason for the government’s error, he says, is that it has failed to recognise the metaphysical distinction between natural states of affairs and human conventions. It treats marriage as though it were a human convention, goes the charge, when in fact it is as much a part of the natural order as Dalton’s law of constant proportions.
‘Marriage as currently understood was not invented by any government, but precedes the invention of government; it is surely the oldest institution there is; now a government seems to believe that it has the power to redefine marriage – but how can it?’
Well, let me tell you how. This Catholic argument relies on the very important distinction between mind-independent and mind-dependent states of affairs. Some states of affairs obtain whether we humans recognise them or not because their existence in no way depends on us. The laws of physics, chemistry and biology are good examples of such mind-independent states of affairs. But there is much that exists which is not mind-independent.
The £10 note in my purse is real enough, but the note is not a mind-independent entity. Something counts as a £10 note only because we have decided to count certain pieces of paper with certain markings as £10 notes. The same thing goes for, say, goals in football, the colour of traffic lights, the handshake. Such things exist because humans have set up conventions which fix the criteria for something counting as a goal, what colour ‘means’ go, a greeting.
In the language used by the church, mind-independent things are ‘natural’ and fully real, while mind-dependent things are human conventions. And the distinction is very important. It is important because we control mind-dependent things – we can change the rules of football if we choose, and we can change the currency of our country if we choose – while our power does not extend to mind-independent things.
The point is that marriage is clearly not natural, despite what the church says. ‘But marriage is the oldest institution there is.’ Right. That is exactly what marriage is – an ‘institution’, and institutions are conventional.
To which category does marriage belong? Is it natural and mind-independent, or is it a human convention and mind-dependent? The church maintains that it is the former, and this is why the government is not at liberty to change the laws regarding marriage. But just a little reflection shows that this cannot be right. Marriage is entirely conventional, and so it does lie within our powers to redefine it should we choose to do so.
What is entirely natural is the coupling of males and females that naturally results in the generation of children. This is just so much biological, mind-independent fact. Does this mean that marriage is ‘natural’ in the requisite sense? No it doesn’t, because only certain couplings of males and females count as marriage. There are many couplings of males and females that decidedly do not count as marriage, even though from a biological point of view there is nothing to distinguish them from married couples.
A man and woman are joined in holy matrimony only if they go through a ceremony carried out by recognised authorities. But a ceremony is not a natural process like osmosis but a conventional practice. Metaphysically it is this ceremony that distinguishes the married couple from the cohabiting couple. The point is that marriage is clearly not natural, despite what the church says. ‘But marriage is the oldest institution there is.’ Right. That is exactly what marriage is – an ‘institution’, and institutions are conventional.
‘But you are arguing as though the only law is Positive Law. But Positive Law is legitimate only if it is in agreement with Natural Law, and marriage between people of the same sex is against Natural Law’, says Lucie-Smith.
But we have to ask what sense of ‘natural’ is being used here. It cannot mean ‘occurs as a matter of mind-independent biological fact’, because homosexual relations are part of the behavioural repertoire of most sexually reproducing species, as any biologist will tell you. On this reading of ‘natural’ same-sex marriages would be as natural as heterosexual marriages. (If anything is unnatural in this sense it is celibacy) Clearly that is not what the Catholic church intends. So ‘natural’ might mean something like ‘as God ordained’. But this won’t do either if the cardinal means to engage with secular society, which he obviously does.
In fact, the Catholic church has been equivocating on the term ‘natural’ throughout this debate, and for centuries. Marriage between a man and a woman is ‘natural’ only in the sense that we are entirely used to marriage being between a man and a woman. It is a very old practice, and it fits with our expectations of how our lives might be organised. But this sense of ‘natural’ does not require mind-independence, and things which are natural in this loose sense can be changed by us if we choose to do so.
It is worth noting that we have changed our understanding of such ‘natural’ categories in the past. Consider the notion of ‘citizenship’. A citizen with full rights is someone who has the right to participate in the political decision-making of their country. But in Ancient Greece only propertied males of a certain class were allowed to vote because it was part of the definition of ‘citizen’ to be a propertied male. The Romans under the Republic expanded the franchise to include all free males (although not on an equal basis), but it did not include women and slaves. And again, this struck them as entirely natural in the loose, Catholic sense.
It was not until the 20th century that we finally extended the franchise to woman. The definition of citizenship has changed. And we now, rightly, regard this extension of the definition of ‘citizenship’ as entirely natural, again in this loose sense of the term. The point is that a similar redefining of marriage to include same-sex relationships is perfectly respectable from a metaphysical point of view, and will one day come to seem entirely natural. If anyone is being metaphysically obtuse in this debate, it is Friar Lucie-Smith and the cardinal.
