A Problem in Modern Ethics: Being an Inquiry into the Phenomenon of Sexual Inversion, Addressed Especially to Medical Psychologists and JuristsSymonds, John Addington
Philosophy
A Problem in Modern Ethics: Being an Inquiry into the Phenomenon of Sexual Inversion, Addressed Especially to Medical Psychologists and Jurists
Symonds, John Addington
Homosexuality
From the point of view of morality and law, he argues, it does not
signify whether we regard the sexual inversion of an Urning as morbid or
as natural. He has become what he is in the dawn and first emergence of
emotional existence. You may contend, that he derives perverted
instincts from his ancestry, that he is the subject of a psychical
disorder, that from the cradle he is predestined by atavism or disease
to misery. I maintain that he is one of nature's sports, a creature
healthy and well organised, evolved in her superb indifference to
aberrations from the normal type. We need not quarrel over our
solutions of the problem. The fact that he is there, among us, and that
he constitutes an ever-present factor in our social system, has to be
faced. How are we to deal with him? Has society the right to punish
individuals sent into the world with homosexual instincts? Putting the
question at its lowest point, admitting that these persons are the
victims of congenital morbidity, ought they to be treated as criminals?
It is established that their appetites, being innate, are _to them_ at
least natural and undepraved; the common appetites, being excluded from
their sexual scheme, are _to them_ unnatural and abhorrent. Ought not
such beings, instead of being hunted down and persecuted by legal
bloodhounds, to be regarded with pitying solicitude as among the most
unfortunate of human beings, doomed as they are to inextinguishable
longings and life-long deprivation of that which is the chief prize of
man's existence on this planet, a reciprocated love? As your laws at
present stand, you include all cases of sexual inversion under the one
domination of crime. You make exceptions in some special instances, and
treat the men involved as lunatics. But the Urning is neither criminal
nor insane. He is only less fortunate than you are, through an accident
of birth, which is at present obscure to our imperfect science of sexual
determination.
So far Ulrichs is justified in his pleading. When it has been admitted
that sexual inversion is usually a fact of congenital diathesis, the
criminal law stands in no logical relation to the phenomenon. It is
monstrous to punish people as wilfully wicked because, having been born
with the same organs and the same appetites as their neighbours, they
are doomed to suffer under the frightful disability of not being able to
use their organs or to gratify their appetites in the ordinary way.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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