To this I would add: we are also coming to believe that our emotions matter more than other factors.

Which may be a function of relying more on external factors for survival (if we are choosing our partners based more on feelings and less on practical compatibilities and moral concerns).

I agree that the question resides on at least two levels, the theoretical and the practical, or the philosophical and the political. I’m not as sanguine as you are, though, about bracketing off the theoretical aspect. Take for example the animal rights movement. It’s less prominent in the U.S. than in Europe, but still it serves as a good illustration. Many of its leaders think that humans are essentially no different than any other animal; thus we hear charges of “speciesism.” That issue is a practical problem that reverts very quickly to an ultimate question: what does it mean to be human?

In many respects the gay rights controversy also moves very quickly toward ultimates: what does it mean to be male and female? Is that answer based in some timeless essence of humanness, some stable human nature, or is it a moving target such as naturalistic evolution conceives all species to be?

I’m still thinking through all this in light of what you said in comment #6.

Any resolution will be legitimate only if and to the extent it makes no assumptions about ultimate questions.

Each side in the animal-rights question rests on fundamental assumptions: either humans are essentially different from animals or they are not. Each side in the gay-rights controversy rests on fundamental assumptions, too: either marriage involves some timeless essence or inherent nature, or else it does not.

Still you are right: practical politics happens on a practical level, and we need to recognize the fact of reasonable pluralism in our democracies. We can’t wait for agreement on these fundamental questions before we make our policy decisions, so we have to do what we have to do. I believe our system is designed well enough for the purpose. If we can’t come to agreement on ultimate questions, at least we have successfully come to agreement on how to set law and policy in spite of our disagreements. I pray it will remain so.

You are quite right, but the reasons go back long before the Sexual Revolution. For a long time now, eight or nine generations, we have seen functions that were previously those of the family or clan, justice (in Scotland, the heritable jurisdictions were abolished in 1747, in the wake of the Jacobite Rebellion), production and consumption (with the Industrial Revolution), education and health (beginning in Victorian times), increasingly entrusted to external authorities. To this, religion could be added: people had accepted or rejected the Reformation, in its Episcopalian and Presbyterian varieties, not as individuals, but by clans.

In France, as Robert Neuberger told the Pécresse Commission, “the model has long been the peasant family, structured around a patriarch and expanding from hearth to hearth. Children were raised within an expanded group and not by two parents.” In reality, that model scarcely survived the First World War. Until 1870, the suffrage had been confined to heads of households; universal male suffrage ended the rôle of the family, as a political unit.

It is precisely this privatization of the family, shorn of its former power, that led to the Victorian and Edwardian cult of domesticity: the family as a refuge from an increasingly impersonal outer world.

Note that the same change occurred in Roman Society; it was when the Empire robbed the family of its political significance that the notion of both paternal and maternal kinship arose, beginning with Augustus.

I have worked in the field of environmental laws and regulations for 27 years. One of the most basic principles embodied in those laws is that new proposals must be examined for their potential impact on existing living systems, because of the real risk that changes could have irreparable negative consequences.

Yet many of the same people who are most vociferous about preserving the natural environment from unthinking modifications by mankind’s artificial creations are also the same people who want to create a wild experiment with the species called Homo Sapiens, without any real idea of what the consequences will be for the healthy survival of the species and its culture.

The idea of unlimited abortion and government limitations on raising children (as in China) has created a vast experiment in which the world is going to find out what happens when millions of men have no prospect of having a marriage and a family. The possibilities of national and international chaos and violence are very real.

The experiment of allowing two men or two women to have the same legal relationship that is shared by a married wife and husband has only begun, but the advocates of SSM, including Obama, are bulling ahead, without any concern for how the experiment might turn out, even though it involves the fundamental unit of society, the family, which creates and regenerates society. They are of the same bent as the communists and other totalitarians who intentionally have tried to destroy the power of both parents and churches to affect the moral and intellectual development of children. They are unwilling to wait to see how the experiment pans out in Europe, where demographic implosion among native Europeans is already opening the way for Al Islam to occupy the nations it could never conquer by force of arms. They have more regard for the survival of spotted owls and pygmy rabbits than they do for the survival of their own species and civilization. They are rabid in their insistence that the current temperature range must not be allowed to vary by 1 degree, but blithely ignore the destruction of the human culture developed painstakingly over thousands of years.

The examples you cite are not examples of people having two families (at least not in the sense of today’s situation), but rather exactly the opposite: situations in which families cannot be joined into a single family tree without conflict are resolved by rules designed to clarify THIS family has priority, and THOSE relatives do not.

Whereas what the sexual revolution brought in is a situation where the child is shuttled back and forth between two families that are viewed as both equal yet distinct from each other – which is not only new, but unstable (and therefore likely to be resolved soon, or so I hope).

It’s much easier to cause suffering to your fellow man if you can pass the buck to a semantic abstraction and pretend that’s not what you’re doing. It is, though.

I don’t know about anyone else, but what I care about is, first of all, the rights of the child.

Gay marriage requires changing the rules of adoption such that instead of adoption being focused on the needs of the child, adoption necessarily must prioritize the needs of the parents over the needs and the well-being of the child – enabling situations where the parents’ needs are to be met at the expense of the child.

Because the two are at odds: for gay parents to be granted the rights they want requires that children lose the rights they currently enjoy.

Notice I do not accuse you of adopting the position you adopt because you must hate children and enjoy causing them suffering. I believe the argument must be settled on the merits of the case, not on arguments where people ascribe false motives to other people. That seems slanderous to me.

I also care about issues of religious freedom, and freedom of belief; the questions of integrity (the integrity of the family as well as the integrity of institutions); and a host of other concerns.

You misrepresent me when you suggest that my real concern is not what I say it is, but is really a desire to cause suffering to others. If you are going to make an accusation like that, you should really support it with evidence.

I’m sorry to be so slow responding to your comment #44 a few days ago. I’ve been operating on limited Internet access over the past few days, and mostly using a mobile phone when I have had access. While I was able to participate in some other discussions, there was a limit to what I could do. Thank you for your patience.

You say we can “take human dignity as a starting point.” I’m sympathetic with that to a degree, for there is a brute fact-ness to human worth and dignity that no other system of thought can take away from us. The problem I have with it is the same that I have had with a parallel fact about the human experience, our universal knowledge of moral reality. There really is such a thing as right and wrong, just as there really is such a thing as human dignity.

But there is disagreement on that. Some atheistic materialists (Michael Ruse, Paul and Patricia Churchland, and others) take it that all conceptions of moral reality are illusory. Others including Sam Harris and Mary Midgley go with human intuition and experience, and from that data they conclude (rightly) that moral reality is real. Midgley’s view of it is considerably more adept and interesting than Harris’s, in my opinion; nevertheless she runs into a problem: her conclusions concerning moral reality conflict with other related premises she holds concerning what humans are. (Whether Mary Midgley’s view are exactly those of atheistic materialism I do not know, but her premises concerning human origins in The Ethical Primate are equivalent to those that atheistic materialists would accept.)

The same difficulty holds in the case of human value and dignity. We know that humans as such have dignity and worth. We could take that as a starting point, as you said in comment #44. The problem is that it’s not the starting point: human dignity is not some eternal existent, so it must have come from somewhere. If humans are just physical beings, however, it’s hard to see where this dignity came from. Monod, Skinner, and Peter Singer have seen that difficulty and have concluded that there is no such thing as human dignity, our experience of it is illusory (Singer says this indirectly). I think they’re drawing correct conclusions from their premises, even as I wonder how they can deny their own experience of being human in the process.

You wrote,

One kind of theory of justice would want to ground this idea in a more basic account of human nature so as to explain and account for this dignity or inherent value in more basic terms. I take it this is what you’d like to see, and as I said I’m not entirely unsympathetic.

My concern is not so much to ground human dignity or value as it is to explain it coherently and without contradicting other related beliefs. This comes back to what I said to you some time ago. You had said,

Any resolution will be legitimate only if and to the extent it makes no assumptions about ultimate questions.

And I answered,

I still contend that the “values and principles we are collectively bound by” cannot be separated from ultimate questions.

Let me amend that now. The one who is willing to bifurcate his or her belief systems can accept the reality of human dignity while holding to materialist views on what it ultimately is to be human. I can’t bring myself to perform that bifurcation of my own beliefs. And I can’t imagine how we could be collectively bound by any shared values and principles if we individually unbind our own values and principles from our own related beliefs.

Everything that exists is single and individual and individual things are denoted with proper names.

How we group these singular things into classes, denoted by common nouns, according to perceived similarities and differences is largely arbitrary. To take my example of the Cheetah, its differences from other members of the cat family are so marked that it forms a distinct genus (of which it is the only extant member), the genus Acynonyx. If our criterion were morphology, we would not classify it as a cat; if our criterion is common descent, then we will. Either way, the features on which our classification is based are real enough

That is why words change their denotation over time or acquire special or technical meanings. “Metal” means one thing to the layman, another to the chemist and another to the astronomer. In the last two cases, so long as we are careful, in considering any proposition, mentally to substitute the definition for the thing defined, no confusion arises. The history of the word “planet” is very instructive; so, in the field of law, is “theft.”

Many modern philosophers have concluded that the objective features of a phenomenon so little constrain the ways it is classified and theorized that these features can be disregarded in trying to understand why a particular classification system or scientific theory has been adopted.

There is no such thing a a “private language” (which would be an oxymoron), nor are the meanings of words purely arbitrary.

However, everything that exists is individual and particular, which is why only proper names can be defined by pointing. What criteria of similarities and differences we use to group individual things into classes, represented by common nouns, is, ultimately, a matter of choice, evidenced by the way in which words can change their meaning over time, or acquire specialised or technical meanings – “metal” means one thing to the layman, another to the chemist and yet another to the astronomer.

The Cheetah, to take my earlier example, is sufficiently unlike all other members of the cat family to form a genus on its own, of which it is the only extant member (Acinonyx) If we relied on morphology, rather than descent, it could well be classified as a separate species.

Many modern philosophers now prefer to speak of “labelling,” rather than “defining,” for “the objective features of a phenomenon so little constrain the ways it is classified and theorized that these features can be disregarded in trying to understand why a particular classification system or scientific theory has been adopted.”

The idea that a person could belong to two families, his father’s and his mother’s is a recent innovation, only made possible with the breakdown of the extended family.

Here in Scotland, it dates from about 1745. If a person could belong to two families, then he could could belong to two septs or clans, which were based on kinship. That would mean that he had two chiefs – a recipe for anarchy.

The Romans allowed two systems: either the wife left her own family and was adopted into her husband’s (in manu mariti), in which case no difficulty arose, or she was not, in which case the child belonged to the father’s family and not to the mother’s. Again, there was no question as to which extended family or Gens he belonged – Remember, in the Comitia Curiata, voting was by Gentess and, of course, no one could belong to two.

So far from being recent, it is as old as the Indo-European race and is found in all its branches, Indian, Persian and European. It can be shown from the evidence of language, in the naming of relations, to have pre-existed all written records.

It’s much easier to cause suffering to your fellow man if you can pass the buck to a semantic abstraction and pretend that’s not what you’re doing. It is, though.

That’s a result of the sexual revolution, and like so many things coming out of that “revolution”, it’s built out of lies.

The mother’s family and the father’s family are in fact one family, as much now as ever.

We adopt this unnatural language to help create an artificial “make-believe” barrier so that we can pretend the father and the mother do not have a familial link between them any more.

But of course they do. They are still one family, however much they pretend (and force their unfortunate relatives to pretend) otherwise.

The fantasy that they can now view themselves as separated, even in cases where children exist, is nothing but denial – an illusory grasping at a sense of control over things that are not in fact within a person’s control (which is why stepfamilies dread weddings).