Q&A: Questions
Originally published:
This is an English translation (via GPT-5.4). Read the original Hebrew version.
Questions
Question
1) Is it possible to morally forbid gay marriage / male homosexual relations / a homosexual orientation because of the categorical imperative?
2) When I say, "A Jew is someone whose mother is Jewish," is that a circular argument? If so, how can a Jew be defined well?
Answer
- I don’t understand: because we don’t want a universal law that everyone should be gay? And what does it mean to forbid an orientation? Are you serious?
- It’s not circular but recursive. You just need to add an initial condition that Sarah was Jewish. Think of the mathematical definition of a natural number: 1 is a natural number. Every successor of a natural number is also a natural number.
Discussion on Answer
If the whole world were engaged in medicine, it would collapse. The same is true of selling falafel. Does that mean it is forbidden to be a doctor or a falafel seller? A simplistic application of the categorical imperative leads to nonsense.
You can formulate the universal rule that anyone who is attracted to men should have relations with men. That is a universal rule, and everything is fine. Nothing collapses.
With your permission, I see that the questioner didn’t respond regarding the first question, so I’d like to ask about it too 🙂
On the face of it, if men had relations only with men and women only with women, then humanity would not continue to exist, and that’s something we wouldn’t want. So according to the categorical imperative, that would be something not worthy of being done. Maybe there’s a difference between the period before the development of surrogacy, etc., and the present period? I don’t know… I trust the Rabbi, as usual, to sort this out for me.
And as for forbidding an orientation, that really is puzzling. But if a person has a tendency to steal, one can say that he has a tendency toward an immoral act (not his fault, of course). So maybe one can also say that someone who has a homosexual orientation has a tendency toward an immoral act?