Abstract
Opponents of homosexuality sometimes argue that if homosexual sex is morally permissible then so are bestiality and necrophilia. A variant of this argument claims that if gay marriage should be permitted then humans should be permitted to marry non-human animals. These arguments are typically dismissed by those who think that there is nothing wrong with homosexuality and that gay marriage ought to be legally permitted. David Benatar argues that these arguments should be taken less seriously by the sexual conservatives who advance them, and more seriously by the sexual liberals against whom they are advanced. This is because sexual conservatives have all the necessary theoretical resources to distinguish homosexuality from bestiality and necrophilia. Sexual liberals have none of those resources.
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Notes
- 1.
At the time of writing, these places include, but are not limited to, Brunei, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. “Death penalty for homosexuality,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_penalty_for_homosexuality (Accessed 25 July 2019).
- 2.
For example, this argument was advanced in an amicus brief by the states of Alabama, South Carolina, and Utah to the United States Supreme Court in the case of Lawrence v Texas. The authors of the brief were writing in support of a Texas anti-sodomy law. There are also many jurisdictions that include prohibitions on bestiality and sodomy in the same sections of the penal code, thereby suggesting some kind of equivalence. See Lucas Paoli Itaborahy and Jingshu Zhu, State-Sponsored Homophobia: A world survey of laws: Criminalisation, protection and recognition of same-sex love, Eighth Edition, International Lesbian Gay Bisexual Trans and Intersex Association, May 2013.
- 3.
Another way to understand the argument is as a reductio ad absurdum. In that case, we could take something like the following form:
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1.
Assume that there is nothing wrong with homosexuality.
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2.
If there is nothing wrong with homosexuality, then there is nothing wrong with bestiality and necrophilia.
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But there is something wrong with bestiality and necrophilia.
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Therefore, the original assumption must be incorrect and there is something wrong with homosexuality.
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1.
- 4.
Bill O’Reilly is among those who has advanced this argument. Andrew Walzer, “O’Reilly’s Ark: Gay marriage could lead to goat, duck, dolphin, and turtle marriage,” Media Matters for America, 12 May 2009, https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2009/05/12/oreillys-ark-gay-marriage-could-lead-to-goat-du/150069 (Accessed 25 July 2019).
- 5.
There is a possible view intermediate between the significance view and the casual view. On this weakened significance view, a necessary condition for sex to be morally permissible is that it be the expression of at least mutual affection or friendship, which is a lower bar than mutual romantic love. This view would render more homosexual and heterosexual sex permissible and would rule out both bestiality and necrophilia. However, it too would not permit truly casual sex. (There are costs to accepting this view over the significance view. For example, unlike the significance view, it may not be able to rule out all pedophilia. See David Benatar, “Two views of sexual ethics: Promiscuity, Pedophilia, and Rape,” Public Affairs Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 3, July 2002, pp. 191–201).
- 6.
I differentiated these two views in “Two views of sexual ethics: Promiscuity, Pedophilia, and Rape,” Public Affairs Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 3, July 2002, pp. 191–201. In that paper, I did not spell out the implications of these two views for either bestiality or necrophilia.
- 7.
I say “perhaps” only to acknowledge the view of some that there are no post-mortem interests and that we cannot either harm or wrong the dead.
- 8.
This is the view of Peter Singer, for example. See Peter Singer, “Heavy Petting,” Prospect, 20 April 2001, https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/heavypetting (Accessed 23 July 2019).
- 9.
The claim here is not that those espousing the significance view must reject necrophilia. Instead, the claim is that they can. They would have to reject necrophilia if the expression of mutual romantic love must be synchronic. However, if the expression of mutual romantic love were permitted to be diachronic, then some necrophilia could be permissible according to the significance view.
- 10.
We are sometimes even justified in seriously harming others (without their consent), whether or not they are competent. Sometimes, for example, we are justified in taking self-defensive action that may harm an innocent bystander. However, I leave aside such cases because sex that is harmful to an animal is very unlikely to be among such instances.
- 11.
For example, those who combine the significance view of sex with the view that sex is integral to an ideal marriage might argue that only marriages which could meet the significance condition ought to be recognized. This would preclude inter-species marriages but would permit many homosexual ones.
- 12.
By “species-neutral capacity,” I obviously do not mean a capacity that members of all species have. Instead, it is a capacity that makes no reference to species. It may still be the case that only members of one (or some) species have a species-neutral capacity.
- 13.
Understanding marriage as a temporally extended contractual relationship also explains why the second version of the argument would be even more ridiculous if it were to allege a slippery slope from gay marriage to marriage by a living person to a corpse. There cannot be a (two-way) relationship with a corpse. Moreover, unless corpses are embalmed, they do not last for very long, thereby precluding the possibility of a temporally extended marriage.
- 14.
I am grateful to David Boonin for his comments on this chapter.
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Benatar, D. (2022). Homosexuality, Bestiality, and Necrophilia. In: Boonin, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Sexual Ethics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87786-6_13
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