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:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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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:
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.
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.
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).
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'.
In Judaism, generally pretty much anything goes between married man and woman. Including many types of non-procreative sex, provided it does not become a habit and replaces procreative one, and not done with explicit intent to avoid procreation at all (so condoms will be frowned upon, for example). Of course, Orthodox Judaism does not allow male-male sexual relations (it's kinda unclear on female-female ones, I don't think there's an explicit prohibition but I am not entirely sure). Judaic language of course does not use terms like "natural" - one should do what The Lord said one should do, and "natural" doesn't come into it.
Obilgatory link to the Talmudic discussion of whether it is permissible for a man to insert his own penis into his own anus
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