One of my friends from secondary school (roughly equivalent to high school, I think) recently came out as gay. He is an obnoxious and horribly immoral person. It has
nothing to do with the fact that he's gay; he just happens to be a dick. The other gay guys I know are generally nice, although as Scarecrow pointed out there's no real reason I would know any individual to be gay or not.
Now let's do this by the book.
Starting from the beginning, ancient Mesopotamian ethics appear to value fulfilling your duty to society over hedonistic pleasures. One could interpret this as forbidding homosexuality because it tends not to result in childbirth, and having children is part of keeping any society going. On the other hand, drawing a distinction between being gay or straight is a relatively recent invention. It is entirely likely that the average Mesopotamian man would have been having bisexual sex all over the place, as the Greeks did, and so having gay sex and bearing children may not have been mutually exclusive activities. Gay sex certainly wasn't explicitly banned in and of itself. It is worth noting that I have read exactly one article on Mesopotamian society/ethics and am in no way an expert, but nevertheless I'm chalking this down as
+1 for the good guys.
Ancient Egyptian society was incestuous and polygamous but considered masturbation a sin. Having not found a direct reference to homosexuality I'm going to move swiftly on.
Early Indian ethics appear to be a hybrid of utilitarianism and something like Aquinas' natural law, both of which we will cover in due course. The relevant emphasis is on progeny = good, infertility = bad, which I'm afraid is going to assign a
-1 to anyone practising exclusive homosexuality. Of course, very few people follow that system today. Most modern Indian morality is Hindu-based, revolving around the concepts of karma and dharma. Karma is the principle that introducing evil into the world makes the world a worse place and will, on average, reduce your own quality of life. It is a much more sensible idea than the mystical crap you see on My Name is Earl, and gives a solid
+1 to any activity which brings people happiness without hurting anyone. Dharma is more legalistic but does not mention homosexuality explicitly. It is generally considered to be a non-issue for Hindus. Having said that, the Karma Sutra states that homosexual sex "is to be engaged in and enjoyed for its own sake as one of the arts," which I think gives it
+3.
I mentioned the Greeks somewhere up there. Aristotle's ethics were based on virtue theory - the idea that instead of focusing on individual actions you should focus on being a good person, and then the good actions will come naturally. Exhibit A here will be
Bayard Rustin, who apparently is the guy that got Martin Luther King Jr to stop being violent. I think you'll have to be pretty damn homophobic to argue that gays tend to be less virtuous people then the rest of the population, leaving aside the homosexuality itself. This shows that homosexuality is not wrong,
giving them a +1.
Let's skip ahead to St Thomas Aquinas, because this shit is taking ages. The argument goes something along the lines of "Things have an obvious purpose. God made things. Therefore God decided on the purpose of things. Therefore God wills that things fulfil their purposes. Therefore to subvert the purpose of things is to go against the will of God. Since God is good, God wills good, and anything which goes against God's will is therefore evil." Give him the benefit of the doubt on the denying-the-antecedent fallacy - I probably worded it badly. So, the purpose of the penis is procreating and therefore any use of the penis which could not lead to sex must be immoral. This is also the basis of the Catholic's ban on contraception.
-1 from the homosexual camp. But, is the purpose of the penis so obviously procreation? Seems to be a pleasure organ to me. And I think someone in this thread already mentioned how good it feels to take it in the rear. Evidently there is some dual-purpose shit going on here. If, as I am led to believe, you can get pleasure from anal then it can only be because God wants you to stick things in there.
+1 for divinely-sanctioned buttsecks.
I think the bisexuals are coming out on top at the moment.
Two or three centuries later we get a drive-by from Hobbes saying that we should do whatever the fuck the king is telling us to do. Since homosexuality is legal in all of our countries (please excuse me if you're late to the debate, Ugandans), this is
+1 for team free-love.
Kant's view on ethics was that the moral law must be absolute, and so anything which would create a contradiction by being universalised could not be right. It cannot be right to lie, because if everyone lied all the time then truth would have no meaning. It cannot be right to kill, because everyone can't kill everyone - who would kill the last guy? Sodomy seems pretty universalisable to me. It is conceivable that all men could pair off and all women could pair off and there would finally be peace on earth. Might not be
desirable, but that's got nothing to do with Kantian deontology.
+1 to the gays. Oh, Kant also said you shouldn't use people as means to an end, so that means no gay sex just for attention seeking. You gotta want it. You want it bad, don't you baby?
My textbook tells me our next stop is egoism. That's when you do whatever you want to do to make yourself happy. Everyone making themselves happy leads to a happy society overall, in theory. It doesn't take much explanation.
+1 for homosexuals, but
a dodgy +1 for anyone who wants to go around beating the crap out of gay guys.
Skipping over the chapter on contemporary deontology (ie. if a guy turns out to have had aids, was it still right to fuck him?) brings me to W.D. Ross'
prima facie duties. I would like to argue that, taking the existence of other gay people as given, you (as a gay man) have a duty to sex them up.
Someone has to, otherwise they'll get all sexually frustrated, and it might as well be someone who will enjoy it. Think of it as helping a fellow human in need. Of course, your duty of manlove may have to be set aside from time to time if, for instance, your neighbour's house is on fire and their dog needs rescuing, but the mere fact that other duties might come first does not mean the gay sex was anything less than morally mandatory.
+1
The issue of aids does need to be addressed. Does an act become less right if it happens to lead to STDs? By the standards of consequentialist ethics, yes, so there's a +/-1 hanging on whether or not gays are more at risk. Empirical evidence would suggest that yes they are, having a higher rate of some diseases than the rest of the population, however this is not an issue with the act itself - it is an issue with the way the act is performed. Presumably gay people are less worried about pregnancy than straight people, so they are naturally going to be less likely to use a condom. It happens - I know I've neglected condoms in the past when the girl had an implant. However, whether or not it is actually immoral to not use a condom is not the subject of this debate. In a world where condoms are easily obtainable there is nothing intrinsic about gay sex which makes it more or less risky than straight sex. No points awarded either way.
Can ethics be relative, like Jeff said earlier? Obviously we can't have ethics being relative from one person to the next, otherwise we couldn't arrest people for murder. Can it be relative within societies? I would like to argue that it cannot, on the grounds of slavery. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the society known as "USA" banned slavery. If ethics are culturally relative then what grounds did they have for that action? By relativistic ethics, at every stage when slavery allowed it was morally acceptable. Therefore the US would have banned something which was, and always had been, perfectly moral. In more general terms, if we are to have any grounds to work towards cultural change we cannot have culturally relative ethics. Morality is absolute.
That leads me nicely into utilitarianism - whatever generates the greatest balance of pleasure over pain is the right course of action. If we want to prove that something is visible, we point out that we can see it. In the same way, the only proof there can be that something is desirable is that we desire it. J.S. Mill, 1750something bitches. What is right is what is desired is what makes people happy. Gay sex makes people happy and so it is right.
+1 if I'm being unbiased but + all the numbers if I'm allowed to do it right. Crucially, consensual gay sex doesn't make anyone unhappy and therefore cannot be wrong. Sure, there are fanatics like the OP here, but what makes them unhappy is their decision to give a shit about what other people are doing behind closed doors (an actively immoral decision).
Summing up, we have 9 ethical systems up here supporting gay sex, with three bonus points for the karma sutra endorsement. For the homophobes we have two, one of which was an ethic based on helping society survive in early India, and the other was if we let Aquinas have his argument how he wanted it and we don't take it to its logical conclusion.
You might notice I ignored the Bible completely. That is because
no person having a serious discussion takes words on a page for granted without an argument to back them up. Even Thomas Aquinas up there didn't base his arguments on the Bible,
and he was a fucking saint.
tl;dr: Gay sex ftw.
