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David Livingstone Smith, Ph.D., professor of philosophy, recently wrote a blog that was published by the Philosophy Talk website. Titled “The Unnatural is the Political,” the blog argues that one sense of the unnatural carries great political potency.

Writes Smith, “… the concept of the natural gets used to justify the social order, and the concept of the unnatural fuels efforts to punish or destroy those who deviate from it.” He poses the example of the claim that it is unnatural for women to prefer high-powered careers over motherhood. “When people say such things, they’re not claiming that women can’t pursue such careers. Instead they’re saying that there’s something deviant or wrong—something contrary to female nature – something unnatural about it,” writes Smith. He points to miscegenation and homosexuality as other concepts that historically have undermined socially entrenched conceptions of the natural order.

Smith warns that “tarring people with the brush of unnaturalness can have very serious, in fact deadly, consequences.” He further cautions that there exists “an even more sinister conception of the unnatural.” Smith explains: In any system of categories there are things – in this case people – who don’t wholly fit into any of the boxes. It’s not that they’re out of place, it’s that they don’t even have a place. Such people implicitly call the whole system – the whole conception of a society – into question… They pose what the philosopher Noel Carroll calls a cognitive threat”  and will be “marked for destruction or shunted off to the margins of society – in the past, exile, and in the present, prison.”

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