Toni Gibea
Abstract
Three million Romanians signed a petition to organize a referendum in order to specify in the Constitution that a family should be formed only through the consensual marriage between a wife and a husband, not two spouses, as the Constitution states at this moment. This fuelled in the media an intense discussion that relied mainly on intuitively evaluating the subject-matter. The objective of this article is to advance a proposal for an empirical study where Romanians’ moral intuitions regarding same-sex couple rights (partnership rights, adoption, marital rights so on and so forth) could be rationally taken into account in a debate. In order to achieve this goal, I argue in the second section how intuitions can be rationally taken into account in experimental ethics by systematically examining them within designed experiments or empirical studies. I will then briefly summarize the already existing data on same-sex couple rights from other countries and illustrate how it might also be used in Romania’s case. The fourth section contains a brief proposal of an empirical study composed of an experimental task (it varies the words “marriage” and “partnership” and the parenting right) and two correlational tasks (sensitivity to disgust and trust).