John Corvino responds to David Benkof

David Benkof very thoughtfully invited me to reply to his comments on my "What's Morally Wrong With Homosexuality?" lecture. I appreciate the opportunity.

First, a clarification: Benkof writes that "Corvino's approach to morality is similar to Descartes' approach to reality - one can sit alone in a room and think hard about morality and figure out what's moral and what isn't." Actually, that's about the furthest thing from my approach to morality. I'm an empiricist; my doctoral dissertation was on Hume's moral theory. I don't think we can figure out moral issues without carefully consulting human experience, and in particular, facts about whether actions, traits, and principles are conducive to human flourishing. Indeed, I think the main problem with most critiques of homosexuality is their failure to attend to the real experience of gay and lesbian people.

But Benkof's central argument against me, to put it simply, is the following: God knows what's best, and God says it's wrong, so it's wrong. As he writes, "Now, Corvino could probably sit in his room and come up with lots of reasons that aspects of Judaism are 'immoral' while things Judaism rejects are actually 'moral'…. The problem is, Corvino is not divine."

Let me be clear on something: if an omniscient, omnipotent, omni-benevolent creator of the universe says that homosexuality is immoral, then homosexuality is immoral. Or to put it another way, given a choice between what I say and what God says, by all means go with God.

The problem is, while I am not divine, neither is Benkof. Here I'm reminded of a dialogue I once had with an evangelical Christian friend. Exasperated with my position on homosexuality, she blurted out, "You trust your own fallible mind, but you don’t trust the infallible mind of Christ!"

"And with whose mind am I supposed to trust Christ?" I responded. "My own, fallible one, or some other?"

The point is that belief in an infallible God does not make one infallible. That’s true whether one believes in Christ or Yahweh (or both, or neither). Many people—with widely disparate views—have claimed to know God’s mind, and they can't all be right. As humans, we are fallible. So this is not Corvino versus God; it's Corvino versus Benkof—each one trying to figure out what's right.

As an Orthodox Jew, Benkof takes the Torah to be the inspired word of God. He is correct that I find much there to criticize (as well as much to admire). For instance, I am far more confident in the wrongness of slavery than in the infallibility of the Torah.

But there is room for discussion even among those who treat the text as infallible. For example, when Leviticus states that man shall not lie with a male "as with a woman," is it prohibiting all male homosexual sex or merely penetrative anal intercourse? If the latter, then (contra Benkof) the text does not forbid "virtually all sexual contact between males."

I will leave it to Orthodox Jews to work through such questions from an Orthodox Jewish perspective. From our shared human perspective, however, I think moral questions deserve a more thoughtful treatment than simply "God says so"—beginning with the humility to acknowledge our limitations in discerning God's voice.

Again, I thank David Benkof for his invitation to respond.

Labels: homosexuality, morality

posted by David Benkof at 12:50 AM VOTE

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