Practical Ethics: Representing Others
Shortly, I’m going to a national conference as a representative of a local organisation. Part of the programme of the conference includes voting on various motions. Typically these are things like “This organisation thinks that war is bad”. This time one of the motions concerns the relative standing of civil partnerships compared to civil marriages.
Pretty much, when I saw the motion, I assumed that everyone would be in favour of equalising the standings between same sex and different sex partnerships. I think it’s the only moral and ethical position to take and completely fail to see any legitimate reason why people would feel differently.
So far, I’ve had two responses from people on the committee that runs the local organisation. The first was ambivalent and said that if they were going they would abstain. The second was opposed, and stated that marriage and civil partnerships are fundamentally different. (By the way, none of these people are a members of a conservative religion.)
Originally, when I wrote this post, I was going to pose it as an ethical dilemma - should I be representing the local organisation’s views, or should I follow my own conscience. Trouble is, even if everyone else in the committee opposes the motion, there’s no way that I can vote against it. That would be just wrong. I feel the same way about abstaining.
I’m going to talk to some friendly people on the committee, and see what they say. I’m normally a big fan of consensus politics, but not when it violates my principles.
What would you do?
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33 Responses to “Practical Ethics: Representing Others”
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What do you mean by “equalizing the standing”? Do you mean giving civil partnerships all the same legal rights as civil marriages or requiring civil partnerships to be called marriages? My understanding was that the former already exists in the UK. Am I wrong about that? In any event, the first is obviously defensible and the second obviously has no moral content (i.e. agreeing, disagreeing, or abstaining are all morally equivalent, since it makes no actual difference what the thing is called).
I first became aware that gays wanted some form of civil partnerhip back in, I think, 1991. I immediately supported it if they actually wanted it, but at the same time I was a bit bemused. Heterosexuals have had government recognition of marriage for thousands of years and it hasn’t been that great for us. I was always a little puzzled why they wouldn’t want to form their own contracts instead. I’m still a bit bewildered about that, but whatever floats your boat, I guess.
In England, marriage ceremonies can legally be carried out at registry offices, licensed premises, registered places of worship, and CofE churches.
Civil partnership ceremonies can only legally be carried out at registry offices and licensed premises, not in any place of worship. I think they should be the same (I’m not too fussed which way it goes). There are other (mostly technical) differences between civil partnerships and marriages.
I would strongly prefer there to be no distinction between same sex and different sex legal partnerships. I think that saying that same sex legal partnerships should be treated fundamentally differently in law to heterosexual legal partnerships is wrong.
Sometimes what you call something is important - I think that making a distinction is not good, but if it helped get the legislation in place and we can change the name later, that’s ok. Means to an end, I guess. Desperately wanting same sex marriages not to be called marriages seems a bit weird to me and aiming for separate and equal rarely ends up equal.
The best way of equalizing the standing imo would be to abolish the institution of marriage, imho.
The question of whether you can represent a group whilst following your conscience is an interesting one. I would raise the issue with the group, explaining how strongly I felt and that I could not abstein or vote against, and offer to resign from my position as the committee’s representative if the others felt so strongly about it too. On an issue less important than this one I would put the views of the others on the committee over my own and vote the “wrong” way.
“Should I be representing the local organisation’s views, or should I follow my own conscience?”
Depends on the capacity in which you attend the national conference.
If your role is to act as a delegate, representing the views of the local branch to the national conference, then you have to find out how your branch feels, and speak and vote accordingly at the conference. If you don’t feel able to do that, don’t take on the delegate role. Let someone else go to the conference.
On the other hand, if your role is to provide leadership, to bring your own insights and experiences to bear in shaping the policy and direction of the organisation, and you’ve been chosen for your role precisely because your branch values your insights and experiences, and trusts your judgment and instincts, then you should speak and vote for the position that you think the national organisation should adopt.
I doubt that you get to decide which of these two roles you fill; the constitution or culture of the organisation should indicate one or the other.
So, in short, make your best honest assessment of what it is you are called to do, decide if you can do it, do it if you can, or resign your role if you can’t..
Wow, this seems like a truly tiny distinction. Churches should clearly be allowed to perform marriages if they so desired. If you’re going to require churches which perform marriages for opposite-sex couples to also perform marriages for same-sex couples, this seems obviously wrong to me.
I note that in the United States, polls show that the majority of people are fine with giving same sex partnerships the exact same rights and benefits as opposite sex marriages, but a majority are also opposed to calling them marriages. I assume they use the same logic as you do (”sometimes what you call something is important”), though I find this distinction baffling myself. But given the political reality, it seems clear to me that same-sex couples should push for what they can get that is politically feasible now and worry about what they’re called later.
The slippery slope argument (”aiming for separate and equal rarely ends up equal”) is invalid, so I don’t give it much weight.
I think we essentially agree:
It’s (apparently) not clear to everyone, and is not actually the case in the UK - as in churches cannot legally perform same sex marriages. I agree that they clearly should be allowed to, at least one person that I’m going to represent seems to think that they clearly shouldn’t be allowed to.
Yes, I think in the UK, we’re in the fortunate position of having the basics in place, and now we should be doing the later bit. It’s not as important as the original legislation, but that doesn’t mean it’s not at all important.
You’ve gotten some good advice here. I think you should let the group know how you feel, and find out what they believe your role is. Once you’ve found out what they’re expectations are, you will be able to search your own conscience and decide if you can fulfill that role.
Oh, but I did forget you’ve got the whole state religion thing going there, don’t you, which actually muddies up the waters considerably? (I assume the government has to decide what the Church of England as a whole is going to do.) That’s a dumb system; you should disestablish the Church of England and then everybody can go about their business. This neatly slices the Gordian knot and you can all reach a consensus on this. Otherwise you have the obvious lunacy of an almost entirely secular population deciding what it is the church will do.
In a way I agree with the churches: “marriage” should be their responsibility, but should also be entirely meaningless in law. The State should offer civil unions and only civil unions, and really that should just be a contract - no special license or ceremony.
The issue on which you are voting is insignificant to the question at hand, and can only serve to cloud the answer.
As a representative of the organization, you have a duty to present the organization’s position, even if it conflicts with your own. If the ethics of the organization are significantly different from your own, to the point where you feel you cannot morally represent the organization’s position, you should seriously consider resigning as a representative of that organization.
It doesn’t sound as if this issue is a significant concern to your organization, considering that three members of the committee have three radically different positions on the issue. From where I’m sitting, your only real options are to either abstain, or push the issue, making it a fundamental part of the organization and representing the position expressed.
Now, to address the marriage/civil union issue: I can understand making a legal distinction between individuals and households. There is no easy way to assign costs and benefits of community property, children, etc. among the individuals in a household, so treating the entire household as a single entity makes a lot of sense. That said, I fail to see how a governing body can offer benefits to one household while denying them to another, based solely on the “protected class” - age, race, creed, color, national origin, religion, or sex - of the individuals in that household.
Thanks for all your suggestions. I will of course bring it up with the committee before I attend. It would be easier if more members gave their opinions, and also if I had a clearer direction as to how I’m supposed to vote when they all disagree (which they do on other issues where I can actually see the arguments on both sides).
@Andrew:
While I was googling to see whether anyone had ever given a reason for civil partnerships being (marginally) different in the law, I found a ridiculous amount of webspace devoted to Anglicans getting over excited about the change in the law - notably nothing from Catholics, Methodists, the Salvation Army, Muslims,…
I normally don’t care that the Church of England is established, but I forget that they (in the form of Bishops in the House of Lords) actually get a small say in which legislation is passed. I think I’m now in favour of disestablishing the Church of England, because they shouldn’t get a say.
@rivalarrival:
You’re right that the issue is not relevant to the question. This has caught me somewhat blind-sided as I’ve had no occasion before to think that the rest of the organisation (on balance) disagreed with me on anything that I consider a moral issue - essentially I guess I don’t consider my morals to be that far from the norm amongst this group of people.
History shows that state establishment of religion is both bad for the state and bad for the religion. On the bright side, to a secular way of thinking, perhaps establishment isn’t so bad. I’m certain this is a good part of the reason why the Church of England is as entirely useless as it is. I wouldn’t worry too much about the Bishops. Most Church of England Bishops are “modernists,” which is to say atheists.
On your dilemma, I believe you have to vote your conscience. If nothing else, it will send the message that “this organization” is divided.
@Andrew Stevens: It doesn’t matter if the bishops are atheists: they are invested in the institution of the CofE.
@Andrew:
I certainly don’t think that being established has benefited the Church of England lately, and I’m aware that most bishops in the UK are modernists, but I still don’t think that CofE bishops should have a say in legislation in my country.
CofE bishops having a say is not quite as anomalous as it seems, when you consider the general make-up of the House of Lords. Apart from a smallish rump elected by the now-unseated hereditary peers, it consists of political appointees with a life tenure. They get appointed either because of their political careers (retired politicians, basically) or because of non-political involvement in public affairs or public life – very often reflected in holding office in bodies like trade unions, professional bodies, charities, universities, cultural institutions. If we view the churches as social institutions, it’s not at all unreasonable for some senior churchmen to be included.
The difference, of course, is that the inclusion of the CofE bishops is automatic, whereas the inclusion of those involved in any other area of public life or who achieve positions of leadership in any other institution depends ultimately on a political decision. But it could be argued that automatic inclusion is preferable, and should indeed be extended beyond the CofE to a range of other bodies of significance in public life.
On one view the constitution of the House of Lords is basically silly. But, given that, the inclusion of CofE bishops is slightly less silly than the rest of it, and the principle of non-political representation for non-political bodies could be extended, rather than abolished.
If you think including bishops makes sense (or is slightly less silly than the rest of it - and I’d like to see it abolished, personally), surely leaders of other denominations and other religions and other groups within other religions should be included, too?
I think it’s important that no institution should be able to discriminate in the provision of services against people because of their sexuality. Even were the ceremony of marriage to be separated from the institution, I would still be in favour of legislation to stop churches denying provision of the ceremony because of someone’s (or presumably two people’s!) sexuality.
I think they should be able to deny the ceremony on other grounds - eg if some churches only wanted to do ceremonies for their own members, that would be fine by me. But as the only criteria for membership of a CofE church is residence in a geographical area, this would entitle any person to a ceremony in a CofE church.
I imagine that allowing legally valid same sex ceremonies in places of worship would annoy the Church of England, although they currently don’t have to allow couples where one member is divorced to get married in the church, so I can’t quite see what their problem would be.
The right to get married within your local Church of England parish church, is a specific legal right stemming from the days when that was the only way to be married for most people. Being married within the Church of England doesn’t actually give you membership in the Church, nor does it entitle you to any other church provision, although very few ministers or priests would refuse to conduct a funeral or provide pastoral care if asked.
Tim f is not proposing that churches should be allowed to celebrate same-sex marriages. I think there is little doubt that, if the UK ever recognises same-sex marriages in the full sense, churches will be allowed to celebrate them.
Tim f’s suggestion, as I understand it, is that churches – not just the CofE – should be required to provide same-sex marriage ceremonies.
I happen to believe that churches ought to provide same-sex marriage ceremonies, but it is certainly not the business of the state to compel them to. Freedom of religious belief and practice is an important freedom, not least for atheists, who have their own history of repression and discrimination at the hands of the state. If the state can tell the CofE what to believe or practice on any religious or ethical question, then it can tell tim f too. Is that really what he wants?
I was saying that the CoE should be required to provide same-sex marriage ceremonies - but only to the same groups of people who they would provide different-sex marriages to. They (or any other religious group) shouldn’t be allowed to discriminate. If they feel so strongly about it they can stop providing different-sex marriage ceremonies too.
Other service-providers aren’t allowed to discriminate, after all.
And the state CAN tell the CofE what to practice on lots of ethical questions - if murder was part of a CofE sacrament then then they would not be allowed to do it. An example more grounded in reality because it’s a custom that some people practise - FGM is against the law and thus people who think it’s ethical aren’t allowed to carry it out. Either we’re serious about discrimination on the basis of sexuality being against the law or we’re not. Freedom of religious belief and practice cannot be unbounded or it will result in some kind of libertarian nightmare.
Let’s say that apples and oranges have equal value and equal rights. Does that mean we should call an apple and an orange two apples? Or two oranges?
@tim f:
I found religious freedom and protection from discrimination by religions to be a difficult matter. I agree that the CofE - like everyone else - shouldn’t discriminate but I’m not sure the extent to which I wish to compel them.
If they were compelled, and so stopped providing legally recognised marriages then I wouldn’t have a problem with that.
@L. Miller:
I’ll take that (assumed) analogy. Apples and oranges don’t have equal rights. There are only apples and apples, and some apples are (in law) more equal than others, and that’s wrong. After all, they’re all apples.
Is this really a big issue in England? The number of religious gay people who want to get married in a church must be quite tiny. Don’t get me wrong; here in America, I commonly meet religious gays. I have a friend who is devout Eastern Orthodox, quite open about his homosexuality, but lives a completely chaste lifestyle because he believes homosexual behavior is a sin. (He is looking for a like-minded gay partner, but obviously hasn’t had much luck yet.) I have another friend who is gay and a devotee of Pat Robertson (though he isn’t chaste). But that’s here in America and the vast majority of gays even in America are entirely secular. I assume the gay population in England must be massively secular.
The entire population is massively secular, so no this isn’t a massive issue, but it isn’t an issue. It probably only inconveniences a few people, but it inconveniences them for no good reason. If asked I would say that it was wrong and should be changed, but I’m not advocating a march on Downing Street.
I also think that the principle issue is one of equality. Most people who are opposed to allowing same sex couples religious weddings do so, because they feel that same sex is different (it wouldn’t occur in their church unless the law compelled rather than allowed them to anyway). I say, they are wrong, it’s not that different.
Ah well, some of the comments here like Tim F’s, where he is proposing compelling churches to marry gays, strikes me as just being a lot of bullying of an unpopular minority (religious people). Obviously, I can’t approve of that. This would just force some churches to go underground and cause schisms and I don’t see anybody profiting from that.
I’m not (necessarily) proposing compelling churches to marry gays, I’m proposing compelling them not to discriminate! There can be a difference. As plonkee points out, if they just stopped providing legally recognised marriages then the issue would be resolved anyway.
Say for example that churches could not hold legally-recognised marriage ceremonies - they could host commitment ceremonies but these were not legally binding. I would argue that morally they ought to extend them to all people of whatever sexuality, but clearly it would not be practical to try and compel a congregation to turn up to witness a public commitment ceremony of a gay couple (and I shouldn’t imagine that’s what most couples would want, either). Plus, once you take the legal significance away they wouldn’t have to be married by a priest/vicar etc, the person “officiating” (if that role was even needed) could just be an ordinary person.
Personally I think this way of doing things would be truer to the Christian faith anyway. Hypothetically, if I was ever to get “married” I would not get married under the law but do some kind of public commitment thing in front of a few friends.
But if churches continue to be permitted to offer legally-recognised marriages (which is a privilege not granted to every religion) , then I think a condition of this should be that they have to respect the values of wider society, ie equality between homosexual and heterosexual people. They are asking for wider society to sanction their practice by legally recognising it, after all. I think it’s a stretch to categorise that as bullying. If we don’t insist on it I think we are saying that equality doesn’t really matter.
You have to explain what right the church has to insist that the whole of society endorses (not just permits, but endorses) their way of people committing to each other if it violates an important value that society holds.
Your view, then, is that the government should not legally recognize marriages held in churches? This seems perfectly consistent and a fine solution to your dilemma. But isn’t this close to the case already? I don’t know anything about Britain, but in America, what is recognized is the document with valid witnesses (and religious officiators, like judges, are allowed to be the officiating witnesses). No law requires any sort of ceremony. (My wife and I got married with no ceremony at all, with exactly three witnesses as required by law, the judge and two friends.) So it seems like the obvious solution is to take away the ability of religious officiators to witness such a document and put that instead into the hands of some government official. Then churches can hold whatever ceremony they want for whomever they want. Problem solved.
Yeah, that’d do, although ultimately I’d like to see marriage abolished completely. I’m in a bit of a minority there though, I think.
Marriage can’t be abolished short of totalitarian terror (marriage predates written history, probably by an enormous margin), but there’s probably a sizable number of people (still a minority) who believe that government shouldn’t bother to recognize it.
Yes, clearly I mean marriage as a legal institution, not as a personal commitment.
The problem with that is that mariage is a social reality, and one which affects people’s lives much more profoundly than most other socially real realationships like, say, employment, or commercial contracts. A government which goes around ignoring social reality is bent on irrelevance.
If I’ve made a public commitment with someone to share my life exclusively with them, I honestly don’t see any reason why the government should ignore the fact, and plenty of reasons why it shouldn’t. If I die without a will, should my property really pass to the second cousin that I’ve never met, rather than to my spouse with whom I share my financial interests? If I become mentally incapacitated, should the state simply disregard my spouise when considering who gets to make personal caree decisions for me? What purpose would be served by such willful blindness to reality?
@Peregrinus:
You raise excellent points. Of course, you should have a will and a power of attorney to cover those things, regardless of the government’s position on marriage.
I find it odd that the (British) government continues to insist that marriage is one of the foundation institutions of our society though. It’s not. I can see that families are important, and committed relationships, but neither of those exist exclusively within marriage. And, where does it leave the rest of us who are single? Are we less important?
Marriage is indeed a foundational institution in society (every society that I know of). The forms differ - polygamy, monogamy, arranged or not, but in all societies marriage is the cornerstone of the family, a vital institution to look after the children. Some starry-eyed idealists like B.F. Skinner and Karl Marx have suggested that we can dispense with marriage and children can be raised by the state instead, but I think it’s safe to say that all of these ideals are doomed to fail.
Families without children are indeed, on average, less important than families (or individuals) with children. I would have thought this was obvious. Perhaps this is why the social conservatives are fighting homosexual marriage - it helps to sever in the public mind the vital connection between marriage and children.
Hi plonkee
Things like next-of-kin rights and inheritance rights are just samples of the consequences which flow from marriage. Sure, they can (largely) be dealt with by specific legal actions like powers of attorney, wills, etc, but why should people be put to the trouble and expense of a wide range of legal actions, some of which (like a power of attorney) require regular review and renewal if they are not to lapse? And if people fail to attend to one of these steps, why should the state pretend they are not married?
The whole point about marriage as a social institution – leave religious questions aside – is that it’s not a purely private matter between the couple concerned. You can I can have all the hot monkey sex we like – this is strictly hypothetical – and it is nobody’s business but ours. But if we marry, we are in effect asking the rest of the world to acknowledge, accept and give effect to our relationship, which has a host of consequences – inheritance and next-of-kin rights, already mentioned, but also rights to maintenance, presumption of paternity with regard to any children the wife may have, recognition of our mutual obligation of financial support n things like the tax code and the social security code. All these things affect other people, sometimes very directly – e.g. the effect of my marriage on the people who would inherit my property if I didn’t marry is obvious. But more generally they have an effect on the community at large.
And they don’t arise because of some moralistic view of what marriage ought to be, but out of hard-headed recognition of what it really is. The legal status of marriage provides a convenient legal framework for addressing the social consequences of the social reality that is marriage. Why dismantle that legal status? Who would be advantaged by doing so? How would society be better off?
Are single people less important? Not at all. Single people have chosen not to marry, and the state should recognise and accept the consequences of their choice, just as it should recognise and accept the consequences of the choice to marry.
There is a legitimate question to be asked about how we identify marriage (for legal purposes). Nowadays we do so exclusively by reference to a marriage ceremony, but this was not always so. In the past there was the concept of common-law marriage, in which a couple who conducted themselves as a married couple and presented themselves as a married couple were, legally, married. We are perhaps beginning to move back towards that, with things like the recognition in the social security code of the reality of cohabitation, and this in turn is probably a response to the rise in the number of family units which are not founded on a formal marriage. Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing is another question – if people choose not to marry, shouldn’t the state accept the choice they have made? – but it’s a quite different issue from the question of whether marriage should be recognised at all.