ABSTRACT
Classical philosophy occasionally gets into the courts. In a recent article relating to her testimony and that of others on a referendum in the State o f Colorado Martha Nussbaum has revised her court room comments on the accounts of homosexuality that can be extracted from a number of Greek philosophers. Perhaps the most difficult texts she discusses are those from Plato’s Phaedrus and Law s where Plato claims that homosexual intercourse is (at least usually) ‘contrary to nature’.1 Nussbaum’s views on the interpreta tion of these texts are cast in the form of a direct rebuttal o f the courtroom opinions and published comment o f the Oxford legal philo sopher John Finnis.2 Finnis concluded that Plato (especially in the Phaedrus and Laws) regarded ‘homosexual conduct as intrinsically shameful, immoral and indeed depraved or depraving’ (1055). Against this Nussbaum determined that ‘there is no evidence ... that Plato regarded same-sex conduct as morally worse than other forms of sexual conduct’. Finnis’ position is the more vulnerable to Nussbaum’s attack because he unwisely tried to assimilate Plato’s view to his own theories about marriage, instead of contenting himself with the more modest claim that Plato’s dialogues contain certain foreshadowings o f those theories-a matter to which I shall
XM. Nussbaum, 'Platonic Love and Colorado Law: The Relevance of Ancient Greek Norms to Modern Sexual Controversies’, Virginia Law Review 80 (1994) 1515-1651 (hereafter 'Nussbaum’).
