Patient - Centered Deontology and Rule Utilitarianism in the Gay Marriage Debate (1290 words)

Gay marriage
In 3-4 pages discuss the underlying ethical issues at stake. While present laws should be briefly explained, your paper needs to be about the ethicality of the issue. You need to make sure you consider it from (at least) both consequentialist and deontological perspectives.

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Introduction
The purpose of this paper is to briefly survey the ethical issues which underlie and underwrite the issue of gay marriage. The discussion will examine the role of both deontological and consequentialist ethical theory; both patient-centered and agent-centered deontological ideas will be applied, while rule utilitarianism will represent consequentialism. The discussion will be organized by the stances from which the issue is important, with the stance of gay couples taken up first, followed by the “ethical” perspective of opponents of gay marriage. Finally, while the purpose of this paper is expressly not to argue for one position over another, intellectual honesty demands the disclosure of my support for the universal legality of gay marriage – it is with this in mind that the paper concludes by pushing back against a traditionalist, anti-gay-marriage rule utilitarian argument.
Stances, ethical theories, and an argument
A useful way to organize discussion of the ethical issues underlying the debate over gay marriage is in terms of the stances from which evaluation and judgment may take place. And one way to think of these stances is in terms of stakeholders – who has interests in whether or not gay marriage is...