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Ok but skepticism about the natural course of reproduction is almost the sine qua non of progressivism(and there are no non-progressive leftists today, or very few). Progressivism was all about eugenics, originally- and it continues to be about birth control and transhumanism.
This seems to tie into a deeper division in the west, that of a telos, whereby creatures(defined broadly as 'part of the material universe') have their purpose not set by themselves. The right in the west basically believes in this; continuing itself is a telos of human life. The left in the west broadly doesn't; the purpose of human life is to do whatever it wants. There's a theistic/nontheistic division but which comes first? My philosophical commitment to the idea of a telos comes from my theism but there are many whose theism was derived from their belief in telos. In turn this ties into the commitments to stability and continuity vs individualism and self growth.
Under a 'your purpose is to do what you want' framework obviously that can't be wrong, because it's subjective. Yes, most leftists would be skeptical of a young woman claiming she wants to take care of babies and bake, but that's what false consciousness is about- it's not wrong to want that, she's just wrong about what she wants. It's an epicycle, not a real course correction. Contrast a framework which believes in telos- if what you want is to 'advocate' then you are wrong for writing off just being normal. You 'make a difference in the world' by fulfilling your appointed task, which probably isn't something particularly notable.
There's far less charitable ways to phrase these things, obviously. But the core of conservatism is this idea that, yeah, you kinda just have to, circumstances beyond your control have spoken. See the trans debate- the core of the conservative objection is 'drop your pants in front of a mirror- you see a penis? Yeah, it means you have to be male. It doesn't matter if you're sure you'd rather be a girl. Sometimes you have to do the things you have to do.'. It's why normiecons don't get conspicuously upset about child support laws even when they suck for individual men 'supporting their kids is what dads do. Suck it up, it's your job.' or think that unwanted pregnancies don't justify an abortion 'yeah, moms put their child's needs before their own wants. Get over it, that's what you are now.'.
I support the dictatorship of the universe. No good comes from defying it. Progressives simply think it's unfair that being male means being male- after all, you didn't get to pick. That's why they're so obsessed with consent all the time.
You really think the average trucker in Iowa opposes the pronoun people because of this "telos" stuff? He just says "that's a man in a dress" and leaves it at that. As do I. Just as a matter of political strategy, maybe it's a good idea to try and seem more normal and less weird than the people surgically mutilating their genitals.
Couldn't you say that abortion bans and child support laws, rather than the absence of those things, violate the dictatorship of the universe? There is none of that in the animal kingdom, if a young animal can't secure voluntary provisioning from adults, it doesn't get to live. If you really take this ideology seriously, you don't get Ned Flanders, you get the Roman Empire, where there were no child support laws and infanticide was regarded as a private family matter. I don't go as far as Roman Empire morality, I think slavery is wrong, but I'm probably closer to it than 80% of Roman Statue accounts, which is why they don't like me and call me a lib.
I share your intuition that no good comes from defying human nature - which is precisely what abortion bans and child support laws do. Abortion bans are dysgenic in effect, fostering low intelligence, criminality, and low-investment parenting. Likewise, child support laws replace the natural order, in which women had to carefully choose (and work to attract) responsible mates with one in which they are "freed" from the necessity to do this, ultimately leading to more low-investment parenting. Think about all these NBA players paying child support to multiple women. The kids at least receive money, but they will probably wind up replicating the culture and genetics of their parents. The sons will share the same impulse to low-em and leave-em, while probably not having NBA-level salaries.
Yes, but as the poster you're replying to pointed out, he wouldn't say it that way. He believes in human "nature" and that human beings have different "purposes" or roles depending on their nature (i.e. a teleogical belief). But he doesn't know what "telos" is, so he would just say:
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I’ve always seen the left as very much about hedonistic urges. The idea being that freedom means freedom to do whatever you want, and that anyone or anything that restricts your ability to live out whatever hedonistic urges a person has.
Anti-natalist ideas fit perfectly well, as having a child introduces obligations, personal, financial, and emotional. A parent is simply not as free to act on hedonistic desires because the child needs things. You can’t just travel on a whim, as you need to arrange for how exactly you accommodate the little child. You can’t spend your last dime on yourself, you need to buy formula.
This is still a telos. It’s just not your telos.
The conservative telos tends to be duty. It’s told in lots of different ways I suppose, but the general idea is that you might have a technical right to do as you please, but it’s not always good to do so unless you deal with all the duties you have. If you don’t keep up your end things fall apart fairly quickly.
The more consistent version of that is that it's imposing obligations on the child. The "childfree" strain of thought you describe is much more common than the "philosophical antinatalist" one, but I think they're worth distinguishing.
Under the lens of "obligation", the parents are forcing an entire lifetime of choices and tradeoffs onto their new child, while the more neurotic of the obligation-thinkers would hesitate to extend an invitation to someone because it creates the obligation to respond (even if it's to decline!).
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I see classical liberalism, or libertarianism, as being very much about better everything. It creates more wealth, allows you to live you to live a hedonistic lifestyle, and also creates the strongest families and communities, because voluntary association is the key to building those things. When you use force to compel people into situations they don't want to be in, that's what produces the low-trust, every-man-for-himself world that these communitarians say they're fighting. Rent control leads to hatred between landlords and tenants. Classrooms become chaotic when you force kids who don't want to be there to attend.* I saw the culmination of this on DSL recently, with someone arguing that once we get artificial wombs we should force women who want abortions to transfer the fetuses into them and bill them and father for the cost, the same way the state goes after men for child support:
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,13608.msg668940.html#msg668940
Just think about how low-trust and low-class that is. So when you hear things like "the conservative telos tends to be duty," it's all well and good when it's people voluntarily adopting a socially conservative lifestyle. When you force that on people you get this low-class low-trust Jerry Springer paternity lawsuit world. It is not going any place that you want to be.
*I understand there's a reason mandatory schooling exists, but we should acknowledge the downside.
So you’ve successfully argued that many people are not virtuous, in the sense of wanting to do good. But that is ultimately irrelevant for the framework, why is it better for people to do bad than it is for people to do good by force?
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It is true that forced duty can backfire and create resentment. In fact, I think my own repudiation of the progressive left's control of our institutions made me doubt all structure for a time due to me seeing how structure was weaponized against me. However, as my intuitions and experiences evolve, so does the realization that structure is necessary, and that to always err on the side of freedom over any structure removes all durability from society.
A "culture" that prizes individualism above all else will eventually treat its own moral frameworks and shared norms as arbitrary and/or oppressive. The meaning of words, morals, etc. are challenged and end up being replaced or evolve at a rate that doesn't allow the members within this "culture" to adapt to or internalize. The obvious strength of liberalism is the freedom it allows and pushes for, but the not-so-obvious weakness is that it offers no internal mechanism to preserve that freedom or the culture that allowed to exist in the first place. Over time, this pursuit of individuality erodes the foundations that made "free" expression possible, which results in the ultimate irony of Liberalism unintentionally serving as the driving force behind a new structured (and sometimes more oppressive) system replacing the old one.
I'm no advocate for a hyper-structured or authoritarian society. That being said, a society with no sense of shared purpose, no accepted moral vocabulary, no uniting telos, is one that drifts toward decadence. Liberalism, in its purest form, ends in fragmentation. Fragmented societies typically don't do well.
I feel very much the same. Hedonism is problematic because it means that the cultural, social, and economic commons get raided rather quickly as people choose to defect every single time they can get away with it. Such societies tend to end up being very low trust very quickly as people learn they can’t depend on others to keep themselves from overusing welfare systems, cheating the system, creating moral chaos, bribing people, etc. when you realize that you get screwed by people maximizing their hedonistic score at your expense.
I tend to favor the Confucian approach of seeing things in terms of relationships. If I owe something to you, in return it’s just expected that you likewise owe something to me. A parent owes a child safety and provision, so it just makes sense that the child ought to obey his parents.
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Perhaps I'm misreading you, but voluntary associations and state power aren't all there is. It's true that state power often tries to replace, or even actively attacks, voluntary associations. But it often acts the same way toward natural bonds which impose duty.
I'd argue that child support in 21st-century America is more often an effort to replace natural duty by state power than it is an effort to enforce that duty. But when the state does try to backstop natural (or even long-established social) institutions, it has the option to do so with a much lighter hand than when it tries to replace them.
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This is a good summary, but speaking as a transhumanist and progressive my objections to teleology are - obviously - more complicated than "simply thinking it's unfair".
Basically, I think there's a kind of motte-and-bailey inherent in political discourse that purports to be telos-based. Your argument draws its rhetorical force from its tautological conclusion. Reality is going to be reality whether we like it or not - the dictatorship of the universe is absolute - if you have a penis then you can't wish it away. But, by definition, nothing which humans can achieve, nothing we can physically implement, is ever going to be in defiance of "the dictatorship of the universe". Gender reassignment surgery doesn't break the laws of physics. If I have a penis I "have to be male" as a biological trait - in the logical sense of "have to" - but that has no bearing on whether I "have to" wear a suit and tie rather than a skirt, which I clearly can physically do.
I fail to see how "If you'd been meant to wear dresses and be referred to using the phonemes /ʃi/, you'd have ovaries" is different from "if God had wished for Man to fly, He'd have given him wings". Only the hopelessly insane would today argue that flying a plane is immoral due to not extending from Homo sapiens's innate qualities. Why should transgender be any different?
I'm not going to go into the semantics game of gender. It is a trap that has consumed too much time for ultimately no purpose.
Sex is far more important: and indelible in which the exceptions make the rule in nature. The male anglerfish is a male anglerfish. Evolution has shaped him to end his life as a vestigal set of gonads, his face permanently melded into his mate's flesh. It is a horrible fate, but that is what nature dictates his life and function to be. A transgender human is more capable, for human beings in general are more capable, but all humans are animals and must obey what nature has endowed them with.
A MtF lacks the qualia of female-ness... womanhood is not acquired, but innate. As a 4chan shitpost brilliantly in my memory states: the state of being is inachievable by any level of becoming. They may claim to have been born a woman and assigned male, but they have the sex organs of a male: the body of a male. Their conception of what a woman is no different than their conception of what a transcendent posthuman intelligence would be. Or what an anglerfish imagines a man to be: fundamentally limited by the limitations of their bodies.
In other words: women don't have to think about passing, and neither do men, because by nature they are effortlessly what their birth sex is as their gender, to the point where the two terms are identical. It is only the trans perspective that insists on a duality!
Even if the technology were perfect: if it were a machine that turned XY to XX, they would still not be a woman. They would be a man who has become a woman through scientific miracle. The transgender demand is not 'I can do what a woman can do' but 'I was always, in essence, woman in nature, in defiance of my biology'. That is the contentious part. In the modern day, the best they can do is 'you are a man who is trying to become a woman, and failing'. And, in spite of that failure, demanding the special privileges of those who are women anyway.
To contrast, human flight has obvious and inevitable consequence for those who do not respect the natural law: that we lack a righting instinct to pull out of death spirals, that we are susceptible to horizon illusions that kill many pilots, etc... it is not comparable. That is the price we pay for heavier than air flight. Transness would be to insist to the universe that you be treated like a swan.
But see, I don't think it is, or rather it's not the only contentious part. It might be the sole sticking point for a few idiosyncratic philosophers on Internet forums, but it isn't the objection in the real world. I think the conservative position, and in particular the argument from telos, is very much "you shouldn't cut your breasts off, inject yourself with testosterone, and change your name to Jonathan", not just "by all means do all those things if you want, but in an important philosophical and semantic sense, they still won't make you a man, sorry". I don't think most conservatives, let alone tradcaths, would suddenly be fine with transition if MTFs gave up on any "woman" talk and, say, went back to calling themselves queens, or indeed (if that's still smuggling too much spurious femininity in there) started calling themselves fnarglebargles.
The ontological impossibility of becoming truly indistinguishable from a biological member of the sex towards which you wish to transition cannot in itself be a compelling reason not to transition, any more than "you'll never be a bird" is a compelling reason not to build a plane. The telos framework which argues otherwise is smuggling in more assumptions than the physical impossibility of ignoring the universe. I'm not saying there's no philosophical background behind those additional assumptions, but I do think they're a lot less intuitively compelling than "you can't ignore the physical universe" and it's disingenuous to hide them behind the can't-ignore-reality thing. Hence the motte and bailey accusation.
If MtFs transitioned but didn't call themselves female or otherwise associate themselves with femininity, then why did they transition? This scenario would mean that they're physically altering their bodies to crudely resemble women while vehemently denying that they're doing so for any reason having to do with women--their chosen method of surgical self-expression just happens to be sorta based on physical attributes of women. Nobody would believe them if they claim it has nothing to do with women because that would be a really weird coincidence. And most conservatives (and most people) would look askance at someone surgically reducing the function of their body for no articulable reason whatsoever, which this would be.
Well, for a start, they might think it feels good, and/or makes them attractive. You may be interested in parts of this Ozy post, though it's not making this argument:
Indeed, even today there are people who seek hormone therapy without shooting for a binary transition - starting with various non-binary/genderfluid types. I know many vaguely nonbinary transmasculines who are happy going by "he" or "they" but don't break off in hives at being "she"-ed. (As a matter of fact, Ozy is one.) Those people would still seek breast reduction and testosterone injections even in a world where there was no concept of social transition and they remained classified as women, which they'd be basically fine with so long as they got to be very butch women.
As such:
This feels like a strawman. My proposed gnarglebargles don't pretend that it's a coincidence that transition makes them outwardly resemble the other sex in some ways. They would just give up on the semantic debate, and admit that their lifestyle still leaves them closer to very committed crossdressers than to the sex they emulate. Compare furries, who don't need to pretend that their aesthetic is completely unrelated to dogs to acknowledge that they have little in common with real dogs, and generally don't want to be exactly like real dogs anyway.
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I mean, to start with, you’re mixing up motte and Bailey here- ‘only females wear skirts’ is very much a fact of our culture, and not a fact of nature, in a way that ‘only females breastfeed’ is the opposite. Leaving aside that skirts are generally designed for a woman’s body and not a man’s and so some adjustments might need to be made(but they clearly can be, see eg kilts), you wearing one would simply be odd, not female. Gender roles are a cultural universal but many of their specific expressions are not.
If God had intended for you to present and be seen as a woman, he’d have given you ovaries. That’s the actual statement. And as a teleological matter it’s straightforwardly true- it is simply impossible for you to get pregnant, large health improvements or further development will not enable you to get pregnant, you have xy chromosomes, etc. Your disagreement is too fundamental to be resolved on the level of ‘changing your gender can fit with your telos’. You don’t agree with the concept of a telos. And now we’re at the postulate level. Sure, I can write a ten thousand word essay- if I had the time- about why the balance of the evidence favors the existence of the Christian God as described in the Bible and expounded by the Catholic Church. But it is, fundamentally, impossible to falsify the statement ‘there is no God or higher purpose’- although my statement, ‘God is real, came to earth 2,000 years ago, and founded an institution which is incapable of erring from His will, which continues to provide knowledge based off of His intellect’ is falsifiable(not falsified, however).
I didn't mean to imply otherwise. As I said here, my point is that appealing to phrases like "the dictatorship of the universe" and "look in the mirror" fail to make the concept of a telos in its full Christian sense compelling. They're rhetorical smoke and mirrors. The desirability of following one's telos in the theological sense doesn't follow from the blunt fact of the impossibility of ignoring one's material circumstances.
To put it another way, I think "biological males can't get pregnant" cannot get you to "therefore they shouldn't get genital surgery and change their names even if they want to" any more than "humans are not swans" can get you to "therefore they shouldn't become airplane pilots", no matter how loudly it is repeated.
Is too. At least if by God we mean "an omnipotent omnibenevolent being" as opposed to an entity that's one but not the other. Still, let's not get into that.
I'm not sure which theological/philosophical tradition uses the word "omnibenevolent" when describing God, but it's not mine. It kind of implies that a theist believes that he is "well-behaved," which is a category error. God is good, in that he is "actual" - to say that X is good is to say that it has succeeded in being in some way. A pencil is a good pencil when it is able to draw, is sharp, long enough to be held easily in a hand, etc. God is good in that sense. God is not good in the sense of being accountable to others for duties and obligations that he performs admirably.
I was specifically talking about Catholics, since I was arguing with one. I grant that they don't seem to use the term "omnibenevolent". They do routinely say "God is good", though, in such a way as to imply we ought to look to God as a moral paragon and do what He says. 'By "God is Good" we just mean 'God is Actual'" doesn't pass the sniff test, as it seems to imply that Satan is a "good" Satan so long as he is able to tempt and torture, his hooves are duly cloven, he is able to strike terror into the hearts of men with the merest glance, etc. but you certainly don't see the Church teaching that "Satan is Good" (let alone implying that this is grounds to do what Satan says).
The telos of the devils is not to tempt, torture, and frighten men- like the other angels, their telos is to serve and glorify God. Lucifer’s ‘non Serviam’ makes him a bad angel, for which he will be tortured like the other damned and tempts men because misery loves company.
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I am specifically a Catholic, so great.
I would recommend reading Brian Davies "The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil" for a study on this topic. Catholics do not believe saying "God is Good" is tantamount to saying "God is well-behaved."
Satan is not good, his nature is to be an angelic messenger in constant adoration of God and serving humanity. He is not living up to his nature at all. He is a very bad example of an Angel.
Do angels have free will in Catholicism too? If not, I do not understand how come Satan could defy God without that being a part of his nature. And as far as I recall the Serpent tempted Eve before the Fall, so whatever flaw caused the Serpent to introduce sin into the world could not have come from man's original sin - if indeed it was a flaw.
Yes, although they don’t have thought process or senses. They just know things.
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Angles live in an eternal moment. They do not have time and so do not change. They have free will, in which they make one choice - the choice to serve God or reject God.
Every being that can love has free will. God made angels to love, and so they have that choice - love God or not. Everything they do is a consequence of the single choice they made at the moment of their creation.
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I'm sure that isn't the motte, but I rather think it's the bailey. Or rather, the bailey is "God is Good and therefore, among other qualities, benevolent". And even doctrinally, while I take the point about God necessarily not being accountable to anyone in the way that a human being is accountable for his actions, it seems incoherent to conclude that God is beyond human judgement, while also asking man to sing His praises. Praise is by definition a value judgement. If God isn't an admirable being, then on what basis could the Church recommend that I praise Him, i.e. express admiration? What does it even mean to praise an entity whom I would not be allowed, counterfactually, to criticize?
(Fair enough on the Devil-as-fallen-angel angle. Still - supposing you substitute your preferred nonexistent deity whose nature is destructive and malevolent, then I don't think the logic of Catholic morality can sanely hold that human beings could make no moral judgement of that being if it existed. But I recognize that Catholic theology wasn't really developed to return sane results in frictionless thought experiments that abstract away core tenets of dogma, so maybe it's okay to bite that bullet and say it's irrelevant because that's not the world God made, so it's alright that if Baal existed it would be moral to worship Baal? Still seems off.)
I'll take a look at the Brian Davies book, though going off the title - unwise, I know - I do want to clarify that I'm not talking about the general Problem of Evil here. I'm not convinced it would be immoral for a human being with arbitrary magic powers to create a universe like ours that contained evil - so the conventional Problem of Evil is not necessarily a defeater to "God is morally good". The Catholic God, however, is asserted to have actively performed deeds which I would judge as immoral if performed by a human being of equal power in the same circumstances.
When the Bible says "God is good" it is usually in the Psalms, sometimes in the prophets, and refers to God's faithfulness to His covenant with Israel. God is good = God keeps promises. I would argue that His nature doesn't let Him do anything but keep His promises, so it's not a statement that "God is well-behaved."
The other place we see God is good is when Jesus says, "What do you mean by calling me good? No one is good but God alone." Which you have to admit is cryptic and does not necessarily point to God being well-behaved.
God is adorable, but He is definitely beyond human judgement. We can only adore him and praise him by analogy.
You are assuming that malevolence is a presence instead of a lack. A being that is pure act without any potential cannot be destructive, only creative. Destruction is a privation of the good, not an active existence. Your arguments have lots of assumptions that you have not examined.
And then you go on to say that the theology that is routinely mocked for arguing about friction-less thought experiments like "how many angels can fit on the head of a pin" isn't set up for friction-less thought experiments. :) There is a lot for you to learn if you want to open up a few philosophy books. Good day to you.
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By that reasoning, if God punished people for being kind and generous, he'd still be good.
The word "accountable" here is tricky. Clearly nobody can punish God if he doesn't act appropriately. So in that sense, God isn't accountable. But surely people can come up with conclusions about whether God's acts live up to his principles, and if they don't, conclude that God is acting badly.
I'm not sure I would agree that God has principles. He has a nature, and this nature cannot deceive or be deceived. Would you describe that as a principle that God has to live up to? I wouldn't.
I don't see how. Or rather, I think you need to expand upon the scenario a lot more. What are these people's natures, can God make a creature whose nature is to not be kind/generous, does God punish people or simple refrain from rewarding people?
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When conservatives appeal to a telos they aren't saying that things are against the laws of physics. This isn't even close, I mean have you read the Bible at all? Humans do things that are sinful and bad all the time, so much so thta God sends a flood to basically wipe most of us out.
God gave humans freedom to act as He had, and we can choose to do evil things. That's religion 101, even outside of Abrahamic faiths. The point is that if you continue to miss the mark, you will eventually reap what you sow.
I'm not saying they do. I'm saying that, when arguing that the concept is intuitively correct, they appeal to the tautological inability to do impossible things - to actually rewrite physical reality - and then act like that should generalize to the full theological concept of telos. I think this is rhetorically disingenuous.
Appeal to the tautological impossibility hmm. Can you give me an example? I don’t see the point of appealing to something like that if you think it’s impossible anyway.
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