The natural law argument against same-sex behaviour (as I understand it) is that homosexual acts contravene the telos of the human sexual faculty since they don’t lead to procreation and are therefore immoral. Why can’t one simply respond to this by saying that gay people are a unique class of human beings in that the telos of their sexual faculty is oriented towards well.. same-sex behavior? In other words why cant one posit that the “form” of a gay person is different from that of a straight person and thus their telos?
That doesn't seem like a particularly good argument, it seems like it would open you up to questions about why various kinds of behaviour we take to be wrong are not expressions of a particular telos of a particular sort of human being.
A better argument would not create these ad hoc telos' but rather stick to universalism, and to say that human sexuality has many ends, in the same way that our hands have many ends, of which pleasure is one, and that there is no need for all ends to be fulfilled in one act, in the same way with our hands, so there is no problem with non reproductive sex.
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Is it not a good case against the original argument because it likewise has an ad hoc telos on the basis it did not universalize, though? It is showing the folly of that approach, as
a particular telos of a particular sort of human being.
is seemingly also open to questioning for a particular telos of a particular sort of being more generally. If all beings have a universal telos, we may follow the line of reasoning you provided. If all beings do not have a universal telos, both the person wishing to claim there exists a particular telos for the subset of beings which are humans and the person wishing to claim there exists a telos for the subset of beings which are homosexual humans seems to have the same problem in formalism. The only way around this I can conceive is the claim that only humans have a telos such that the set of humans is coterminous with the set of beings, but that seems tantamount to claiming zoophilia is masturbation as animals are then owed no more consideration than objects.
Would identifying the telos of homosexuality — with the gay uncle theory for example — close this argument to those problematic questions?
I am confused. In Anthropology homosexuality is a thing. It's natural. Various tribal civilizations are recorded as accepting it and the largest tribe still standing that didn't conform to the rest of the world, the Bugis, have 5 genders.
I am colorblind. If I die and don't procreate, the genes that made me continue on through my parent,(in anthropology, also related members of my tribe) and siblings. You don't need to procreate for your life to have had a positive impact on the survival of others.
Colorblindness, I bring up, because it is genetic and doesn't affect your survival enough to be a problem, which might be how homosexuality continued on. Another explanation is that, in a time without modern medicine, having two fully-developed people without any of their own kids that will operate as parents is useful, when so many parents will die early.
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There seems to be a little confusion between Plato's ethics and Aristotle's. The natural law theory in the history of ethics is generally the progeny of Aristotle, who did not believe Plato's ethical forms were real, or at least explanatory in any real way.
In his treatment of this distinction, Alasdair MacIntyre puts it:
One root of Plato's mistake here is his confusion of the kinds of justification which is in place in geometry with that which is in place in matters of conduct. To treat justice and good as the names of forms is to miss at once one essential feature of justice and goodness, namely that they characterize not what is but what ought to be. Sometimes what ought to be is, but more often not. ("A Short History of Ethics", ch. 5)
Aristotle argued against this geometric justification in order to assert teleology (natural law theory). It is important to note that in the Greek treatment of "good" as a concept, it was a very practical term for them, and required an understanding of social institutions. It could have been argued that there was a "good general," in that he performed well the tasks of a general. So when they discuss the "good man," they are not talking of morals and ethics in the way we typically discuss them today, as a more essentialist "goodness," but more that the good man fulfills the role of a man better than others.
Later, natural law theory became appropriated by Christian writers like St. Thomas Aquinas, by combining the teleological theory, which had very little actual grounding, with the grounding of the theological basis for ethics. So natural law, at least in this case, would be indistinguishable from the "thou shalts" of the Bible. But in Aquinas' works on ethics, natural law is not really the extent of morality, but the unchangeable foundation, which is why the Christian writers considered it to be necessary to ground it in an unchangeable nature (God). Aquinas extends ethics into other realms which have further ethical structures, like politics, law, clergy, and the like, each having their own subset of ethical requirements that are not totally based on natural law, but still cannot contradict it, as they also were not totally distinct.
So at least in traditional natural law theory as it has been developed, it would not make sense to claim that homosexuality is its own telos because 1) it does not add anything to what it means to fulfill the role of man. That is, it adds nothing to society, whereas having children does. So it would constitute a net negative in Aristotle's thinking. But as Catholicism has developed the theory, they have argued against procreation being the only telos of sex, and have included pleasure and closeness. With that said, even then, homosexuality would not be its own telos because it is not actually different from the other two reasons for sex, and in terms of natural law, does not produce a benefit to society or fulfill the role of manhood. One could argue, as the evolutionary psychologists do, that homosexuality is a sort of spandrel connected to other societally beneficial things. But this would nonetheless not be an argument for homosexuality itself fulfilling natural law, but that something else does, and homosexuality is just a hitchhiker on that other thing. 2) it does not make sense to just proclaim a telos. Although this was what Aristotle did, the criticism of him is that he essentially was just justifying his culture's norms. And so if we just declare a telos to justify our culture's norms, we are falling into the same trap. That's why natural law theory developed into a theological theory. It needed a grounding. So if there is a grounding for the natural law that homosexual people have the telos you are referring to, then that is a different story. But just declaring it to justify one's own opinions is not a proper way of dealing with natural law.
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