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PerseusWizardry  1yr ago (text post)   3420 thread views

Does my Philosophy of Sexuality Professor Have a Point? (It's a mandatory gen-ed)

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tl;dr no.

We are obligated not to racially select our friends, even if this is motivated by a preference for a certain race of friends.

I can't think of any reason at all to accept this premise; this is not how friendship works. While it is presumably possible to go about making friends deliberately, in general I would expect this to be much less effective, and result in much less satisfying friendships, than simply being open to the possibility of friendship and allowing such a relationship to emerge organically. If you're placing something (e.g. "social justice," whatever that means) about your friendships above your own feelings about friendship, you are distorting the very idea of friendship.

So, uh... your philosophy professor is off to a rather dismal start.

If we are obligated not to racially select our friends, we're obligated not to racially select our romantic and sexual partners.

Again, why would anyone accept this premise? The selection criteria for friends and romantic partners don't perfectly overlap; for one thing, most people don't select friends based on who they find sexually attractive (indeed, being sexually attracted to your friends may at times undermine friendship).

Conclusion A does follow--this is a basic modus ponens with the major and minor premises swapped--but the premises are total shit. Neither friendship nor romantic relationships, as I understand them, can be plausibly described in this way.

And somehow it gets worse.

If we're obligated not to racially select our friends, romantic, or sexual partners, this is because race is an immutable characteristic. So, we're also obligated not to select our partners based on any other immutable characteristics.

This is not a premise, this is a whole argument on its own, and not a good one. Where did "immutable characteristic" come from? This was just smuggled in like so much Drano-cut heroin. This isn't the same professor who denies that race is an immutable characteristic, is it? Because if so, damn. If not, maybe you should introduce these two and ask them to argue it out for you.

And then "obligations against judgment based on immutable characteristic X must also create obligations against judgment based on any immutable characteristic Y?" The fuck? This is so far off the logic rails it's not even philosophy anymore, it's creative writing. American Airlines absolutely cannot forbid immutably black pilots from flying their planes, and yet American Airlines can absolutely forbid immutably blind pilots from doing so.

A) I feel like I have a moral obligation not to racially discriminate in friendship

You shouldn't feel this way, because no such moral obligation exists. Rather, this is a weird way of saying that you probably often have a moral obligation to refrain from pre-judging people on the basis of their skin color.

Wouldn't it be incumbent on you to repress or replace that disgust reaction if doing so was within your power?

Why? It might be a good idea, for numerous practical reasons. But I can't think of any reason why you would owe it to anyone to put effort into reconditioning your own emotional responses, unless those responses were directly leading to further direct harms in violation of other moral duties owed.

Desert doesn't solve any of this. No one "deserves" to be your friend or sexual partner. Friendship and romance just aren't that kind of thing.

Note that everything I've said is compatible with the claim that the world would be better if people were less choosy about who they accepted as friends and lovers. Maybe that is true. But one common problem with moral theorists is how quickly they lose sight of the idea that there might be (I would argue: that there is) a range of permissible actions which are neither optimal, nor compulsory, nor forbidden.

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