Final Paper Proposal - Essay Example

Your Prof’s The Philosophical Underpinnings of the Gay Marriage Debate Society is severely divided on a wide array of issues at the moment, and gay marriage is one of the principle dividing issues. Some states are growing more and more amenable to gay marriage: New Jersey’s legislature, for instance, recently voted to legalize it, while many states are trying to change their constitutions to make gay marriage illegal, pushing in the other direction. I propose a paper that would analyze this question through a variety of different philosophical thinkers: John Stuart Mill, Emmanuel Kant, and Karl Marx.

This paper will less try to argue what each of these individual thinkers would have thought about the rights of gay marriage – the fact that they all lived more than a century ago probably means that they would all have been against it simply due to bias. Rather, it will argue what positions are internally coherent with their stated philosophies, and whether the philosophical traditions they belong to would support or oppose gay marriage. I believe that, even though Karl Marx had spoken out publicly against gay rights, all three of these thinkers propose philosophies that fundamentally support the right of gay marriage.

John Stuart Mill’s liberalism might be the most friendly to the idea. Firstly, he championed the fight against the tyranny of the majority (Mill 24), where majority opinion, bias and hatred controls other parts of the population. The fight against gay marriage is obviously a case of tyranny of the majority. Secondly, he founded the “harm principle” where actions that do not harm others should not be negated by the government. Though some have argued that gay marriage can harm society, the lack of evidence of specific harm would mean it would be protected by the harm principle.

Kant, likewise, would probably support the right of gay people to marriage. One of his foundational works, Groundwork on the Metaphysics of Morals proposes the categorical imperative: that one should behave as one would if behavior became a universal maxim. This will be harder to prove in an essay, but there are many ways of framing the banning of gay marriage that, universalized, would be harmful, such as: relationships not recognized by a particular religion should not be recognized by law or law should be based on religious morality.

Finally, based on Marx’s Communist Manifesto, I believe that he would be against the current fight against gay marriage, on purely pragmatic grounds. Marx was a thinker who focused on class, and noted and fought against attempts by the bourgeoisie to maintain control via distracting narratives (nationalism, or religion, for instance). I believe he would see the current moral uproar as a distraction from the real issues, and he was generally against the morals of the bourgeoisie dictating the morals of society, which I believe is what is occurring in the gay marriage debate.

Works CitedKant, Immanuel. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, and What Is Enlightenment? New York: Liberal Arts, 1959. Print.Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition. Ed. E. J. Hobsbawm. London: Verso, 1998. Print.Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. Ed. David Spitz. New York: Norton, 1975. Print.