Tuesday, June 12, 2012

The Secular Bathhouse

Over at the Secular Bathhouse…I mean, Secular Outpost, Jeff Lowder has been crusading for homosexual rights. Most recently he plugged an interview from a source euphemistically called think4yourself.

What’s odd about this is the disconnect between Jeff’s advocacy for homosexual rights and his evolutionary philosophy. He said:


On Darwinian naturalism, the mixture of moral goodness and moral badness we find in Homo sapiens is easy to explain.  The Darwinian naturalist explanation for our overwhelming tendency towards self-centered behavior is obvious. Kin altruism is also easy to explain: behaviors that promote the survival and reproduction of my kin make it more probable that my genes will be inherited by future generations. Non-kin altruism is weaker than kin altruism and also absent more often than kin altruism. Given that kin altruism exists, this pattern or distribution is exactly what we would expect on Darwinian naturalism.


But according to that paradigm, homosexual behavior would be a case of “moral badness,” inasmuch as homosexuality fails to promote the survival and reproduction of the human species, for homosexuals don’t pass along their genes. By the same token, homosexual behavior undermines kin altruism.

Given Jeff’s devotion to evolutionary psychology and the logical implications of evolutionary ethics, shouldn’t he support discriminatory policies against homosexuality?

2 comments:

  1. You'll hear replies about speculation that homosexuality allows homosexuals to care for the young in place of heterosexuals, freeing them up for.. I don't know, more breeding, therefore it's a group selection advantage.

    Really, it's a bad idea to play the 'find the evolutionary advantage of THIS' card, since the sort of guys who do that for a living can find some kind of evolutionary explanation for just about anything.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Some crustaceans are cannibalistic, soooooo...

    ReplyDelete