Moral Dilemmas—An Introduction

Abstract

Moral Dilemmas—An Introduction George Kateb (bio) we should be struck by the title of our panel, "moral dilemmas." At first sight it should seem odd that discussion of a particular disease lends itself to worry about moral dilemmas. After all, we usually expect that the only issue about a disease is medical: how to treat it. But as we know all too keenly, AIDS is no ordinary disease; it is not even an ordinary fatal disease. It is, rather, a disease that is contracted because of two kinds of intense pleasure: sex and drugs. This fact, by itself, would guarantee that society would take either a puritanical or a prurient interest in the disease and thus infect discussion of it with all sorts of nonmedical considerations. Whenever pleasures figure, one can also be sure that religious ideologists will take their pleasure in denouncing pleasure, and find an even greater pleasure in the fact that pleasures of a certain sort can lead to premature death. The height of religious inanity was reached by a Catholic spokesman, who said (as quoted by Robert Suro in the New York Times), that the church could not condone the public provision of condoms because the greatest physical harm is less important than the smallest moral harm. (This inanity, by the way, has its sources in the past, and can count Cardinal Newman as one of its authorities.) Not all the religions reach this height, but many climb quite far. The subject of AIDS, if it does nothing else, exposes the intimate connection between religion and sex (to leave aside drugs). There is something almost uncanny in the devious ways by which religion despises sex, guards it, inflames it, contorts it, sullies it, and sanctifies it. In some moods one may think that sex is all that religion is about. [End Page 431] The matter is yet more complicated. Because of a quirk of fortune, AIDS, in the West, turns out to have struck two groups that society dislikes and despises, male homosexuals and heroin addicts. The moral dilemmas arise because those who suffer from the disease see that even when some people in society want to understand the disease in order to help them, others, in their religious or nonreligious puritanical or prurient hostility, want to use the procedures needed to study AIDS and help those sick from it as devices of humiliation and punishment. The sick and those who may one day become sick are driven to cooperate with those who want to help them, and driven also to resist them. The sick are in a dilemma and so are those who want to help them. Our three papers sensitively explore the main dilemma as well as other aspects of this torn situation. I would just like to point out moments in the three papers that may repay further thinking. David Richards provides an eloquent defense of the constitutional right of homosexuals to express their sexual nature without fear of legal or social punishment. The basis of his position is the idea of human dignity, the basis of all rights, including privacy. In the course of establishing his argument, he may, however, give too large a role to "authentic feelings of affection, attachment, and mutual love." Richards's model relationship is the faithful loving couple, whether heterosexual or homosexual. His standards may be too strict. Eros is not worshiped only by faithful and loving couples. There are desires that cannot be slaked monogamously; indeed, that cannot be slaked at all, because their object is symbolic or phantasmal. Yet they are human desires, intrinsic to countless personalities, and deserve constitutional protection just as much as monogamously satisfiable desires. Not all personal integrity is monogamous. The human dignity of some people is quite compatible with, say, casual sex, or so-called promiscuity. Despite the overall decent good sense of Anthony Quinton's paper, it has one chilling moment, and one hasty generalization. The chill is at the beginning, when he says that "I, like most of my reflective [End Page 432] compatriots except for Locke, do not really believe in rights in the abstract … but only in legal rights and, in a more qualified fashion...