Good thoughts

This is because every moral argument offered by religious leaders is an argument from authority. That is, their arguments are not based on evidence or ethical reasoning, but on their holy texts. However, a moral argument, if it has merit, must stand on its own feet. There are two principles which, in moral debates, can be accepted as universally self-evident.

Indeed, every major religion has some version of the first of these two principles, which is known as The Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The second principle is: An action is judged to be moral or immoral if it makes other persons better off or worse off. If a believer rejects these principles, then they have already proved their incapacity for moral logic.

So let us apply these principles to four issues generally condemned by all religious leaders in Trinidad and Tobago as immoral: homosexuality, prostitution, illegal drugs, and abortion. The believers’ position is this: all these acts are inherently immoral; and, if a society gives legal sanction or tolerance to any of these acts, that society will collapse.

The second assertion is easily refuted. There are many societies which both tolerate and give legal sanction to some or all of these acts. Most of these societies are in Western Europe. None has collapsed or appears likely to. Indeed, these societies are the most peaceful and prosperous on the planet. They have low crime and poverty rates, high levels of health care and education, and low levels of official corruption.

These are surely more significant measures of social morality than, say, sexual perversion.

The second point is directly connected to moral thinking. It is quite true that any society requires a moral framework to hold it together. Therefore, the empirical fact that societies like Norway, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands are stable implies that they are applying a better moral standard than that of religious nations. This view gains credence when we examine the other end of the scale, and discover that societies with the highest rates of religiosity — Nigeria, Uganda, Philippines, Zimbabwe, Bangladesh — also have very high rates of violence, bigotry, wealth disparities, and corruption.

Let us now tackle the believers’ first assertion — that homosexuality, prostitution, legalised drugs, and abortion are incontrovertibly immoral. Applying the first principle of moral thought, we must conclude that laws which discriminate against homosexuals contradict the Golden Rule.

By not granting equal rights to homosexuals, as the ironically-titled Equal Opportunities Act explicitly does not, we treat homosexuals in a way we would not like to be treated if we were, say, dark-skinned or didn’t believe in Zeus or had a liking for honey-roasted maggots. In respect to the second principle, homosexual acts between consenting adults do not harm others as murder and rape obviously do. That is why the latter acts are justifiably illegal, but laws against sodomy cannot be.

The same reasoning applies equally to prostitution. In principle, the State should not prevent a woman trading sex for money, since she should have absolute rights over her own body. The real moral question here is that of coercion — whether the women are forced into the profession by other people or by circumstances.

But legalising prostitution would make it easier to deal with such issues, which is why the opposition to legalisation by devout persons is immoral. This is the thinking behind Sweden’s law, which allows women to sell sex but makes it illegal for men to solicit it. Sweden also has the lowest rate of prostitution in Europe.

Decriminalising drugs such as marijuana and cocaine is also a moral decision. If there are good arguments to keep these drugs illegal, then those arguments must apply with even greater force to tobacco and alcohol which, when abused, are respectively more addictive and more potent in their effects. But this is not the relevant moral principle here.

The relevant principle is that the State should not police private behaviour unless such behaviour harms the social body. Drug addiction mostly harms the user, while too much State power harms citizens. But there can be little doubt that criminalising these drugs has had deleterious effects on the society as a whole. If cocaine were legalised, for example, we could eliminate much police corruption, most gang murders, and certain economic distortions in one fell swoop.

We come now to the most controversial issue: abortion. In the three other issues, a fundamental argument is that the State should not tell people what they can or cannot do with their bodies. This argument is also used by pro-choice advocates, but the anti-abortion camp argues that there is another body involved: that of the foetus. However, the crux of the argument is this: for a body to have rights, it must belong to a person. The foetus may be human, biologically speaking, but it is not a person. A person is a member of a social group, and only a person can have rights.

Concomitantly, to even begin to have those rights, a person must develop consciousness. The foetus, however, does not show brainwave patterns that reflect consciousness of any sort until after 30 weeks of development - well into the seventh month. Ergo, abortions before that cannot be truthfully called murder, and virtually no abortions are performed after the second trimester. So, given the burden legal abortions would lift off women, it is immoral to stand against it.

There is no religious leader in this country who can refute any of the above arguments. But none of them will argue in favour of any of the stated positions since they, like Prime Minister Patrick Manning, are more concerned with self-serving politics than with what is best for Trinidad and Tobago. E-mail: kbaldeosiugh@hotmail.com Web site:

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