Nature is a Traitor
What happens when we turn to the natural world for answers?
By Eliza Melville
Last month, the world was abuzz over new research suggesting that there is no “gay gene.” Specifically, scientists found that there are several genes that may influence same-sex desire. “Influence” is the important word here, because they certainly do not “cause” homosexuality — they are one factor among many. For many, this is a moral slam-dunk — but against whom? For the anti-gay camp, it vindicates the idea that homosexuality is a choice and therefore changeable. For everyone else, it’s proof that people really were born this way — even if only in part.
We’ve known for a while that heterosexuality isn’t the only game in town for other animals, and that same-sex relations are natural if not ubiquitous in basically all other species. But there’s finally proof there’s at least some biological basis in Homo sapiens, too. Now, we can put to rest probably the longest running moral case against gay sex and relationships — and the one your relatives spout every holiday meal — “only heterosexual attraction is natural!” Well, that’s not true, so suck on that, Uncle Jeff!
But while Uncle Jeff is wrong, you probably are too. If we look more closely at the debate surrounding gay genes and gay animals, both make functionally the same claim: if X is natural, X is good. Does that mean if a behavior is conclusively proved to be unnatural that we’re all ready to shun it?
Should we be more morally cool with the idea of consuming your mate after sex just because “it’s natural,” and female spiders really dig it?
The Trouble with Fallacies
Fallacies are logical shortcuts that land you with shoddy, nonsensical arguments. This particular bit of sketchy thinking — that nature=morality — is known as the “naturalistic fallacy.” British philosopher G.E. Moore first coined this term in 1903, when he observed that the claim “it is natural” couldn’t possibly and under any circumstances entail the claim, “it is morally good.” How could it? Just because something does happen in the world doesn’t mean it should happen.
After all, nobody faults a spider for killing and eating her mate. But if you tried transposing that arachnid norm into the world of homo sapiens it wouldn’t go too well, as we tend to frown upon post-coital cannibalism.
Despite the fact that we don’t try to import the natural laws of spiders into human laws, we often try to weasel equally dubious claims about the natural world into conversations about human existence — as demonstrated by the “is homosexuality natural?” debate. We pick and choose natural behaviors that justify our worldview: the brow-beating of apes, the monogamy of swans, or the sexual orientation of our genes. Of course, there’s lots of things that are “natural” that we conveniently ignore, like sleeping outside or dying of typhus.
But the problem isn’t just that the justification is nonsensical. No. Just when you think nature is on your side, suddenly it will betray you.
Take the argument, “it’s natural for humans to eat meat, and thus, it’s morally permissible.” This could be turned backwards in three trillion ways, like “it is natural for tigers, alligators, and bacteria to eat humans, thus, it’s morally permissible.” Of course, not too many people believe tigers or flesh-eating bacteria should inherit the earth. But, technically, both arguments use the exact same criteria. In this line of thinking, wouldn’t they be equally true?
A Naturalistic Fallacy Is Born
The naturalistic fallacy began as a wee babe with the concept of natural law, traveling to the 21st century by way of some Greeks (speaking of same-sex love), a Catholic priest, and a bunch of disgruntled European dudes.
Natural law is the belief that nature is underpinned by relatively unchanging truths, and that those truths have implications for how things ought to be. The Greek philosopher Aristotle used the idea that all natural things strive to fulfill their purpose — the way a pine seed strives to become a tree — to argue that human morality meant using our purpose (reason) to flourish and lead morally thoughtful lives.
Skip ahead a thousand years to the Catholics, and you’ll find Sir Thomas Aquinas radicalizing Aristotle’s natural law argument to make the O.G. anti-homosexual argument, writing that it “isn’t natural because sex is to produce children.”
But you’re probably most familiar with this argument in the form of the “state of nature” arguments which are ubiquitous in civics and political science classes. In the 17th and 18th centuries, it was all the rage for political philosophers like Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith to base arguments around an imagined “state of nature,” or the way humans act naturally, before society.
One common form of this argument goes like this: before “civilization,” humans were intelligent, completely free beings with the desire to do good. This image is hard to square with the reality: that humans didn’t really have time to be free or good or all that smart, since they were mostly just fighting for their lives in the most competitive, violent existence you can imagine (basically New Jersey Housewives meets Jurassic Park).
Obviously, the “natural=good” argument can’t be applied at this stage of the argument, or you’d have to say that it’s good to be totally free in nature, and just as morally cool if caveman Bob clobbers you ’cause he wants your awesome loincloth.
So instead, philosophers did some mental gymnastics to equate the moral and the natural: they picked out just a couple of “natural” human traits, said some were morally good (like freedom), and said the not-so-great traits (like competition) weren’t totally bad, provided we had a political system to channel and curb those behaviors (like Hobbes’s Leviathan). Once they could rationalize all civil and social activities via the nature-morality relation, et voila! And like a flesh-eating bacteria, that philosophy spread.. To this day, every politics class, news channel writing room, and twitter sphere debate seems to use nature to justify ethical action and beliefs.
But even beyond the fallaciousness, there’s a pretty major problem with state of nature arguments: they don’t actually start from nature (that is, a neutral observation of some unchanging “nature”). Instead, they take traits of humans from within society and naturalize them by projecting them back onto some imagined natural place.
So, in addition to being logically bogus, the naturalistic fallacy relies on a really bad understanding of what nature is, how it works, and how decidedly unfit it is to ground much at all, let alone morality.
Nature As Paradox
So, how exactly are we misconstruing nature when we make claims like, “Gay sex is natural and thus morally acceptable”? Well for starters, in order for nature to ground morality, it has to be governed by basically fixed, unchanging, and natural principles. And, surprise, it isn’t.
If there is one thing that defines nature, it’s pretty much its complete inability to stay the same. From large scale changes like mass extinctions and ice ages to the comparatively lightning quick evolutionary developments within species and ecosystems, very little has remained constant in biological life since its inception.
And even when the rules aren’t changing around us, there’s still another problem: all the ways we understand the world are fundamentally influenced by our social and ideological beliefs. The best scientists know this and try to use this power for good. But, the truth is, we’re just really good at confusing our filtered view of nature for the real thing.
I’d bet that most of your life, you’ve been told males of any species are naturally aggressive and competitive, that they’re the ones who control families and win the right to sex the females. (Of course, this ignores the fact that hyenas, whales, elephants, bees, ants and countless other species are largely matriarchal.) Still, you could argue that because our closest relatives — gorillas, baboons, and chimpanzees — are all run by agro-dudes, then so should the world. But, you’d be making a classic naturalistic fallacy, equating the way things are in nature for the way they should be.
That wouldn’t be the only problem with this argument. Because to even make this claim in the first place, scientists had to both ignore tons of facts and pretty badly misinterpret others. Today, scientists are reopening the case of male sexual aggression through the lens of female preference and choice. Rather than males “winning” female bodies, it turns out female gorillas might pick their mates based on their care-taking rather than chest-beating skills. And scientists are even rethinking human evolution, since existing models are based on chimpanzees — characterized by meat eating, male bonding, male aggression against females — and willfully ignore our other closest relative, bonobos, whose societies are matriarchal, largely vegetarian, cooperation focused, and to our earlier topic: incredibly gay. Female bonobos, specifically, regularly copulate with other females for social bonding or just pleasure. And before you argue that we, like the Bonobo, should practice free love, you should note: that is another common naturalistic fallacy.
But maybe we can use nature, not as a tool for understanding what is morally acceptable, but for acknowledging what is inevitable? No such luck. For instance: competition is a basic biological drive, and thus nature is fundamentally competitive. How can we possibly escape it? But even that idea isn’t “natural,” so to speak. Darwin drew and built on it from the capitalistic economic theories of philosopher Adam Smith. So, it’s mighty hard to argue that competition is okay because it’s natural, if in fact, competition actually became understood as natural by applying human social and economic principles to the biological world.
What’s more, there’s increasing scientific evidence that it might be cooperation, not competition, that drives evolution. But, honestly, it’s probably both. It’s just that whichever trait you emphasize or treat as dominant likely depends on the other intuitions and senses you have about the world. Because, in reality, it’s those basic feelings and intuitions that we’re really fighting about when we grasp at naturalistic and fallacious straws.
Morality Beyond “Nature”
So, let’s return to gay genetics for a minute. We all know that not one of the many articles about lesbian bonobos or genetic queerness is going to convince Uncle Jeff that same-sex love is okay. Why? Because he doesn’t really give a damn about what’s natural. And it turns out, maybe none of us really do. If humans were the one and only “unnatural” practitioners of same-sex love, even its advocates wouldn’t be swayed. So if we can’t turn to nature, where do we turn?
According to thinkers like David Hume, William James, and Audre Lorde, there’s no way morality could come from nature or be deduced from reason. Instead, things seem to go the other way around: our intuitions, feelings, and emotions about what is right and wrong prompt us to come up with complex, sometimes fallacious arguments to justify what really amounts to gut instincts. It’s not reason or nature, it’s we animals — humans, dolphins, chimps, and other social beings — who have a sense of right and wrong.
This doesn’t mean that you’re every inkling of moral disgust or panic, love and joy, dictate right and wrong. Critical thinking shouldn’t disappear altogether. But instead of being the thing that determines morals, it just becomes a tool for working through and evaluating our intuitions.
So, what is the moral of this story about same-sex love and the naturalist fallacy? Is it that there are no morals, or that there is no nature? Of course not. The moral is that in order to be moral, we have to take way fewer logical shortcuts and a lot more responsibility for our feelings, intuitions, and beliefs. If we believe it is wrong to burn the amazon or wear white after Labor Day, those choices are ultimately on us — not god, society, or nature. Though it might sound terrifying, maybe the conversations we need to have should happen at the intimate level of our deepest sentiments. Cause just maybe, being animals who feel ethics in our guts, not just our heads, is what that makes us moral beings after all.
