34 THE ELEMENTS OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY People on both sides have strong feelings. Michele Bachmann, a four-term Republican congresswoman from Minnesota, once told a conservative audience, "If you're involved in the gay and lesbian lifestyle, it's bondage. It is personal bondage, personal despair, and personal enslavement." In saying this, she probably meant that gays are "slaves" to their desires; they are living in the bonds of sin. Bachmann and her husband offer troubled gays a way to break free from their alleged chains; their Christian Counseling Cen- ter in Minnesota offers "Reparative Therapy" as a "cure" for homosexuality. Bachmann is an evangelical Lutheran. The Catholic view may be more nuanced, but it agrees that gay sex is wrong. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, gays "do not choose their homosexual condition" and "must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided." Nonetheless, "homosexual acts are intrinsi- cally disordered" and "under no circumstances can they be approved." Therefore, if gays want to be virtuous, then they must resist their desires. What attitude should we take? We might think that gay relations are immoral, or we might find them acceptable. But there is a third alternative. We might believe: People have different opinions, but where morality is concerned, there are no "facts," and no one is "right." People just feel differently about things, and that's all there is to it This is the basic idea behind Ethical Subjectivism. Ethical Sub- jectivism is the theory that our moral opinions are based on our feelings and nothing more. As David Hume put it, moral- ity is a matter of "sentiment" rather than "reason." According to this theory, there is no such thing as right or wrong. It is a fact that some people are gay and that some people are straight; but it is not a fact that being gay is morally better or morally worse than being straight. Of course, Ethical Subjectivism is not merely an idea about same-sex relations. It applies to all moral matters. To take a different example, it is a fact that over half a million abortions are performed in the United States each year. SUBJECTIVISM IN ETHICS However, according to Ethical Subjectivism, it is not a fact that this is morally acceptable or morally wrong. When pro- life activists call abortion "murder," they are merely expressing their outrage. And when pro-choice activists say that a woman should have the right to choose, they are merely letting us know how they feel. 3.2. The Linguistic Turn What's startling about Ethical Subjectivism is its view of moral value. If ethics has no objective basis, then morality is all just opinion, and our sense that some things are "really right or "really" wrong is just an illusion. However, most of the moral philosophers who developed this theory did not focus on its implications for value. Toward the end of the 19th century, pro- fessional philosophy took a "linguistic turn," as philosophers began to work almost exclusively on questions of language and meaning. This trend lasted until around 1970. Ethical Sub jectivism was developed in that time-period by philosophers who asked questions such as these: What do people mean when they use words like "good" and "bad"? What are moral debates about, if not about whose opinion is (really) correct? And what is the purpose of moral language? With questions like those in mind, philosophers proposed various versions of the theory, Simple Subjectivism. The simplest version is this: When a per- son says that something is morally good or bad, this means that he or she approves of that thing, or disapproves of it, and noth- ing more. In other words: "X is morally acceptable "X is right" "X is good" "X ought to be done" And similarly: "X is morally unacceptable" "X is wrong" "X is bad" "X ought not to be done all mean: "I (the speaker) approve of X" all mean: "I (the speaker) disapprove of X* Subjectivism in Ethics Take any [vicious] action. . . . Willful murder, for instance. Examine it in all lights, and see if you can find that matter of fact, or real existence, which you call vice. . . . You can never find it, till you turn your reflection into your own breast, and find a sentiment of [disapproval], which arises in you, toward this action. Here is a matter of fact; but 'tis the object of feeling, not reason. DAVID HUME, A TREATISE OF HUMAN NATURE (1739-1740) 3.1. The Basic Idea of Ethical Subjectivism In 2001 there was a mayoral election in New York, and when it came time for the city's Gay Pride Day parade, every single Democratic and Republican candidate showed up to march. Matt Foreman, the director of a gay rights organiza- tion, described all the candidates as "good on our issues." He said, "In other parts of the country, the positions taken here would be extremely unpopular, if not deadly, at the polls." The national Republican Party apparently agrees; for decades, it has opposed the gay rights movement. What do people around the country actually think? Since 2001, the Gallup Poll has been asking Americans their per- sonal opinions about gay and lesbian relations. In 2001, 53% of Americans considered gay relations to be "morally wrong," with only 40% considering them "morally acceptable." By 2014, these numbers had changed dramatically: 58% called gay relations "morally acceptable," and only 38% deemed them "morally wrong. 33