site banner
PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1033 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for January 21, 2026

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

1
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Interesting site:

https://www.philosophyexperiments.com/health/Default.aspx

It asks you 30 agree/disagree questions on a variety of "philosophical" topics, and then outputs a score calculating the inherent "tension" or cognitive dissonance in your answers.

The average score is 27% out of 100%, I score a pleasant 7%, but only because:

There are no objective moral standards; moral judgements are merely an expression of the values of particular cultures And also that: Acts of genocide stand as a testament to man's ability to do great evil

The tension between these two beliefs is that, on the one hand, you are saying that morality is just a matter of culture and convention, but on the other, you are prepared to condemn acts of genocide as 'evil'. But what does it mean to say 'genocide is evil'? To reconcile the tension, you could say that all you mean is that to say 'genocide is evil' is to express the values of your particular culture. It does not mean that genocide is evil for all cultures and for all times. However, are you really happy to say, for example, that the massacre of the Tutsi people in 1994 by the Hutu dominated Rwandan Army was evil from the point of view of your culture but not evil from the point of view of the Rwandan Army, and what is more, that there is no sense in which one moral judgement is superior to the other? If moral judgements really are 'merely the expression of the values of a particular culture', then how are the values which reject genocide and torture at all superior to those which don ot

I'm using a common-sense or consensus definition of evil, and I don't think this is an actual contradiction. So I'm pleased to say I have zero philosophical dissonance? Who knows.

I took the gay bait. I went ahead and said homo = wrong and unnatural and let it tell me what contradiction that implied. They hit me with "you say homosexuality is wrong because it's unnatural, yet you say medicine is good, which is also unnatural. Hmmm?"

As someone who came of age during the gay marriage debates, I can say I hadn't come across this particular argument presented so crudely before. They probably knew they were begging for eye-rolls picking a (recently) controversial example like that.

Also like someone mentioned below, I thought being confronted with the Problem of Evil was cute.

you say homosexuality is wrong because it's unnatural, yet you say medicine is good, which is also unnatural. Hmmm?

The first "unnatural" means "certain things work not in a way that they usually work and supposed to be working", the second "unnatural" means "not as it would be happening in a world where humans do not exist or do not act in a particular way". So the trick is mixing up these two definitions and presenting it as "contradiction".

In fact, if anything, it's agreement more than a contradiction. Nature as such does not have any purposes or morals or values. Nature does not care whether humans are alive or dead, happy or in horrible pain. Nature just is. However, people do have values and goals. Staying alive and healthy is one of those values, and medicine helps that. Thus, medicine, while "unnatural", is good.

Homosexuality happens when natural mechanisms of sexual attraction do not work as they should for the purposes they were intended - namely, reproducing the species and propagate the genes. This would make it "unnatural" in a certain sense. Now, if we value those mechanisms and the cultural adornments of it that were created in a particular culture, we must derive that homosexuality is "wrong". If we say we don't care too much about whether a particular person participates in reproducing the species and propagation of their own genes, we would call it value-neutral, neither good nor bad. Possibly there exists a set of values - e.g. one positing humans are evil and must not propagate - which would see it as "good". But neither would have any contradiction with the medicine example. "Unnatural" thing could be good or bad, depending on whether or not our values compel us to go along or depart from the ways that would otherwise "naturally" happen.

Homosexuality happens when natural mechanisms of sexual attraction do not work as they should for the purposes they were intended - namely, reproducing the species and propagate the genes.

However, as even Freud realised, this argument proves too much, as it implies that any sexual activity not carried out for purposes of procreation is just as "perverted" as homosexual intercourse. This includes numerous heterosexual activities which are widely considered "vanilla" (PiV sex with condoms, sex then pulling out, fellatio to the point of orgasm and so on).

numerous heterosexual activities which are widely considered "vanilla" (PiV sex with condoms, sex then pulling out, fellatio to the point of orgasm and so on)

While in a post sexual revolution western world these things are considered vanilla, the largest religious organisation of the world in its official teaching still condemns all these things (even if its members don't always adhere to those official teachings). I reckon most philosophically literate people who agree to "homosexuality is wrong because it is unnatural" also condemn contraception. I guess there are a lot of Evangelicals today who think homosexuality is sinful and have less of a problem with contraception. This is actually a relatively novel phenomenon; all Protestants rejected contraception up till ~100 years ago or something. Luther and Calvin for instance strongly condemn any form of contraception in their commentaries on Genesis 38:9-10. I suspect the Evangelicals who have a looser attitude towards contraception and such while also condemning homosexuality (implicitly) subscribe to some sort of Divine Command Theory, rather than the Aristotelian Natural Law theory that is prominent in Catholic ethical teachings, and its the latter that tends to give us language about it being "unnatural", at least in a philosophical context. So I think for most people interested in philosophy the purported contradiction really does result from equivocating different meanings of the word 'natural'.

PiV sex with condoms, sex then pulling out, fellatio to the point of orgasm and so on

Perverted, all of it.

The argument doesn't prove too much. People have gotten overly used to perversity.

Out of curiosity, have you never had sex with protection?

I didn't exclude myself from "people".

That said, the above argument is easier for me to make because I genuinely do enjoy PiV sex for the purpose of procreation the most, and everything else is just..."sure, dear, we can mix it up.".

Got it, thanks for clarifying.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats