17
Teleology: Biologically Reductive?
Alasdair MacIntyre defines a functional concept as the purpose or function characteristically
expected of a thing to serve. 56 For example, we ought to expect a watch to keep time, since the contours
and mechanisms within the watch work towards this end. 57 The watch may be said to be a bad or
broken watch, if it cannot keep time. If the watch cannot be fixed, there is a sense in which it ceases to
be a watch. The human body carries such functional concepts in a like manner. Thus, it appears that
sexual difference in the human body aims towards the procreation of children, since the genitals are
ordered structurally towards this end. For example, the penis has an elongated, penetrating morphology
and the vagina a canal-like structure, the physiology of which aids the traveling of sperm through the
uterus and towards the fallopian tubes. 58 The respective tissues of male and female genitals aim
towards a clear act: procreation. This act is only possible by the functional concepts present in the
genitals, a striving towards the end of procreation. All other organs and organ systems throughout the
human body display functional concepts, such as the circulatory system and the pulmonary system,
which respectively circulate blood and oxygenate blood. Much like a clock that cannot keep time, an
organ without a functional concept ceases to be an organ entirely. If we apply this to the human body as
a whole, when the organs throughout the body stop functioning, the person is dead.
It seems to me that the problem here is not that the popular understanding of gender
completely rejects functional concepts; rather, the popular understanding of gender believes that
asserting a primary functional concept somehow excludes the possibility of a secondary function being
met in the organ or organ system. For example, Francis J. Catania writes, “Roughgarden argues that a
careful account of the variety of sexual practices among nonhuman animals casts doubt on the theory
56
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981). 58.
Ibid.
58
For a simple, yet concise, account of how the male and female genitals cooperate to unite their respective
gametes in order to procreate a child see, Alexander Pruss, One Body: An Essay in Christian Sexual Ethics (Notre
Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), 135.
57