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PerseusWizardry  1yr ago (text post)   3424 thread views

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

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Excuse my ignorance of how the humanities work, but is this any more than a thought experiment or mental exercise? The premises seem wildly arbitrary to the point where I'd uncharitably call this pure sophistry. What is this good for?

How familiar are you with academic philosophy?

There is a long history of debate over the exact nature of the source and justification of premises for moral arguments (and philosophical arguments more broadly). Plenty of philosophers have voiced concerns similar to yours: we need to start from some set of premises, but we don’t want them to be arbitrary either.

Is your concern here with the style of argumentation itself, or just these particular premises?

My concern is mostly with my lack of understanding, really. At least I assume I simply don't get it; very subjectively it just sounds like propaganda to me. The premises and the conclusions strike me as ideologically motivated, and the argumentation seems like a logical fig leaf used to tie the two together. But I figure I can't just dismiss it that easily without even understanding how these kinds of things are meant to work.

Applied ethics (the branch of philosophy that deals with evaluating whether specific actions are right or wrong), as practiced in contemporary western academia, is mainly just a propaganda factory for the ruling ideology. So your assessment is correct.

There’s a lot more to philosophy than just this sort of thing, though.

I suppose that the idea here is to work backwards: given that the argument is correct and that the premises imply the conclusion, it is inconsistent to accept the premises and reject the conclusion. So if you do reject the conclusion (as most people do), then the reader is challenged to either reject one or more of the premises, or to find a fault in the argument that makes the implication not hold. This is a standard case of working backward from moral intuitions to check that the foundations make any sense.

This argument with these premises is a trap because it may not be socially permissible for someone, especially a student, to make an appropriate counter-argument.

100% agree. If OP has to write an essay about this argument for class, he should just agree with his professor. Don’t be a hero. Support the regime in public, network with like-minded people in private.

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