If you’re a gay teenager with homophobic parents, and there’s a real chance they’d throw you out on the street if they found out you were gay, you should probably lie to them about it. Even in college, if you’re still financially dependent on them, I think it’s okay to lie. The minute you’re no longer financially dependent on them, you should absolutely come out for your sake and the sake of the world. But it’s OK to lie if you need to to keep your education on-track.
In the ordinary course of events, parents are allowed to not support their children in college. So I’m puzzled as to what the principal at work here is meant to be. “It’s ok to deprive people of their autonomy on the basis of a moral belief of theirs, even if this belief doesn’t cause them to undertake any actions that would be considered immoral in the absence of the moral belief”?
Suppose I think that being a communist is immoral. Is it thereby ok for me to found a charity called “Workers Communism”, solicit donations from communists, and then secretly donate them to the US Republican Party?
I would say that it is possible that it may be moral to unconditionally do X or to unconditionally refuse to do X, yet immoral to do X based on conditions. For instance, it may be moral for a politician to vote against a bill, or to vote for the bill, but it would not be moral to vote for or against the bill based on whether I pay him a bribe. Few people would accept the argument “paying him the bribe doesn’t cause him to take any actions that would be immoral in the absence of the bribe”.
I would apply that to parents who will only pay for their child’s college if the child is straight. Just because they could morally pay (period), or morally refuse to pay (period), doesn’t mean that they can morally refuse to pay conditional on the child’s sexuality.
And for the Communist analogy to work you would have to say something like “It is moral to pay a charity, and moral to not pay a charity, but immoral to pay a charity conditional on the charity being for a cause you like”. which comes out as nonsense.
In the ordinary course of events, parents are allowed to not support their children in college.
Separately and unrelatedly to my sibling comment, I note that while parents are certainly “allowed” to do this (in the sense that they have the legal right), many people consider this not a very decent thing to do.
The law seems to agree. State-funded grant programs (in at least some states, certainly including New York at least), as well as federally-funded grants, calculate your eligibility for need-based aid on the assumption that your parents will support you if they are financially able to do so (up to a certain age of the student — I believe NYS puts that cutoff at 27 years of age).
One difference there is that the charity case would be an instance of illegal fraud. I say this, not by way of arguing that anything illegal is thereby immoral, but only to point out that due to the existence of laws against such fraud, the contributors have a reasonable expectation that their money will go to the advertised cause. Because you, the hypothetical charity organizer, know this, secretly donating to a different cause constitutes wilful deception.
On the other hand, there’s no law against taking your parents’ money and spending on anything you like. Your parents have no basis for a reasonable expectation that you won’t do this — none, that is, except the natural degree of trust that accompanies (or should accompany) the parent-child relationship.
But if your parents take a stance that (they may reasonably expect) will undermine or destroy that trust in certain circumstances — circumstances that are not the child’s fault — then the basis for a reasonable expectation of transparency is likewise undermined or destroyed.
In such a case, you, the parent, no longer have any reasonable expectation that your child will be honest with you. As such, when your child is in fact dishonest with you, there is nothing immoral about that.
Parents who, having never noticed any signs of homosexuality in their child, and being aware of the base rates, would seem to have a reasonable expectation that the child be heterosexual.
But they have no right to depend on that expectation, or to hold their child to that expectation.
The point isn’t just that the parents expect their child to be heterosexual; the point is that the parents make it known that they would treat the child poorly if he/she were not heterosexual. The basis for a reasonable expectation of transparency is thereby destroyed regardless of the child’s actual orientation.
Separately and unrelatedly: never having noticed signs of homosexuality is not evidence of heterosexuality if:
a) You don’t have sufficient experience with raising non-heterosexual children to have any basis for personally knowing what the signs are; b) You would expect that, if your child were not heterosexual, he/she would attempt to hide this fact from you.
In such a case (which seems like a good default assumption), P(signs-of-homosexuality | homosexuality) would be very nearly equal to P(signs-of-homosexuality | heterosexuality) [1]; consequently, P(heterosexuality | no signs-of-homosexuality) would be nearly equal to P(heterosexuality) — in other words the lack of evidence would not be evidence of lack.
If we then add a third condition:
c) There exist false positives, i.e. “signs of homosexuality” that can in fact occur in heterosexual individuals, such as, stereotypically, an interest in cooking / ballet / any other “traditionally female” endeavor
Then the evidence provided by said signs is pretty much entirely nil.
[1] I omit other orientations for simplification of math, and because it’s most relevant to the provided example. No exclusion intended.
In the ordinary course of events, parents are allowed to not support their children in college. So I’m puzzled as to what the principal at work here is meant to be. “It’s ok to deprive people of their autonomy on the basis of a moral belief of theirs, even if this belief doesn’t cause them to undertake any actions that would be considered immoral in the absence of the moral belief”?
Suppose I think that being a communist is immoral. Is it thereby ok for me to found a charity called “Workers Communism”, solicit donations from communists, and then secretly donate them to the US Republican Party?
I would say that it is possible that it may be moral to unconditionally do X or to unconditionally refuse to do X, yet immoral to do X based on conditions. For instance, it may be moral for a politician to vote against a bill, or to vote for the bill, but it would not be moral to vote for or against the bill based on whether I pay him a bribe. Few people would accept the argument “paying him the bribe doesn’t cause him to take any actions that would be immoral in the absence of the bribe”.
I would apply that to parents who will only pay for their child’s college if the child is straight. Just because they could morally pay (period), or morally refuse to pay (period), doesn’t mean that they can morally refuse to pay conditional on the child’s sexuality.
And for the Communist analogy to work you would have to say something like “It is moral to pay a charity, and moral to not pay a charity, but immoral to pay a charity conditional on the charity being for a cause you like”. which comes out as nonsense.
Separately and unrelatedly to my sibling comment, I note that while parents are certainly “allowed” to do this (in the sense that they have the legal right), many people consider this not a very decent thing to do.
The law seems to agree. State-funded grant programs (in at least some states, certainly including New York at least), as well as federally-funded grants, calculate your eligibility for need-based aid on the assumption that your parents will support you if they are financially able to do so (up to a certain age of the student — I believe NYS puts that cutoff at 27 years of age).
One difference there is that the charity case would be an instance of illegal fraud. I say this, not by way of arguing that anything illegal is thereby immoral, but only to point out that due to the existence of laws against such fraud, the contributors have a reasonable expectation that their money will go to the advertised cause. Because you, the hypothetical charity organizer, know this, secretly donating to a different cause constitutes wilful deception.
On the other hand, there’s no law against taking your parents’ money and spending on anything you like. Your parents have no basis for a reasonable expectation that you won’t do this — none, that is, except the natural degree of trust that accompanies (or should accompany) the parent-child relationship.
But if your parents take a stance that (they may reasonably expect) will undermine or destroy that trust in certain circumstances — circumstances that are not the child’s fault — then the basis for a reasonable expectation of transparency is likewise undermined or destroyed.
In such a case, you, the parent, no longer have any reasonable expectation that your child will be honest with you. As such, when your child is in fact dishonest with you, there is nothing immoral about that.
Parents who, having never noticed any signs of homosexuality in their child, and being aware of the base rates, would seem to have a reasonable expectation that the child be heterosexual.
But they have no right to depend on that expectation, or to hold their child to that expectation.
The point isn’t just that the parents expect their child to be heterosexual; the point is that the parents make it known that they would treat the child poorly if he/she were not heterosexual. The basis for a reasonable expectation of transparency is thereby destroyed regardless of the child’s actual orientation.
Separately and unrelatedly: never having noticed signs of homosexuality is not evidence of heterosexuality if:
a) You don’t have sufficient experience with raising non-heterosexual children to have any basis for personally knowing what the signs are;
b) You would expect that, if your child were not heterosexual, he/she would attempt to hide this fact from you.
In such a case (which seems like a good default assumption), P(signs-of-homosexuality | homosexuality) would be very nearly equal to P(signs-of-homosexuality | heterosexuality) [1]; consequently, P(heterosexuality | no signs-of-homosexuality) would be nearly equal to P(heterosexuality) — in other words the lack of evidence would not be evidence of lack.
If we then add a third condition:
c) There exist false positives, i.e. “signs of homosexuality” that can in fact occur in heterosexual individuals, such as, stereotypically, an interest in cooking / ballet / any other “traditionally female” endeavor
Then the evidence provided by said signs is pretty much entirely nil.
[1] I omit other orientations for simplification of math, and because it’s most relevant to the provided example. No exclusion intended.