Are you saying that heterosexuals ought to, or at least may, realise their real nature, whereas homosexuals ought not realise their really defective nature?

A defect is a privation of the full nature that a being has. A homosexual and heterosexual, e.g., male both have the same, full nature of maleness (which is in their substantial form); but, in matter, the homosexual has some sort of privation that is inhibited the full realization of that form materially. In contrast, your question presupposes that there is such a thing as a real ‘defective nature’ in the sense of a defective form; and that is not possible (under my view at least).

By analogy, a person born without their limbs still have the full nature of a human (in virtue of their form) but it was not realized properly in matter—the matter that received it did not receive it properly. This can be caused by all sorts of external factors; like if, e.g., the mother was a drug addict and that messed up the development process.

Are you saying that the menopause is a defect, or old age is a defect?

No. Menopause is natural for women, but, although I am no doctor, I am fairly confident that women usually get it in their 40s. I was assuming, and this just an assumption, that something happened to your wife for her to be completely through menopause at 25...that seems young to me. However, this is an aspect of her and your personal life: I don’t want to be disrespectful and you don’t need to share with me about it.

My problem is you make these declarations of what is a defect and what is a real nature but you never tell me how you tell what's what, so that I can do the same

The methodological approach is to empirically investigate what is essential to a given thing, such that it would no longer be that thing without it, and that would be a part of its nature. E.g., you are no longer talking about a human, in nature, if you are talking about a being that doesn’t include rationality. This doesn’t mean every human has to be capable of exercising proper intellect; but what this is essential to the human nature.

The essence of a chair is something which can be sat on. Hence you can have two chairs that are arranged in completely exclusive ways and still be both chairs; and they could be made out of completely different materials and still be chairs. Their form of a chair is still there—embodied in its power to be sat on. It is about looking at the teleology in a thing.

My problem with this is that I don't think, e.g., Nietzsche is validly critiquing Christianity by giving a psychoanalytic of the development of humanity over time. He never gives any coherent reasons that God doesn't exist, that morality doesn't exist without God existing, that morality is just socio-psychological, etc. Instead, you actively presupposes it throughout his works. His geneology of morals is a good read, but it doesn't even attempt to do ethics.

You can reduce ethics to pyscho-sociological inquiry unless you are a moral anti-realist. Are you a moral anti-realist?

This is a significant issue because you are not providing an alternative ethical theory to contend with nor are you contending with Aristo-Thomism by giving a genesis to Thomistic or modern conservative thought. It could be simultaneously true that natural law theory is true and humans discovered it with evil motives.

Likewise, you are trying to give a genesis of conservatives as a group and then trying to lump me in that general depiction. You simply don't have any reasons to believe I am bigoted, prejudiced, etc. even IF you had good reasons to believe there are a lot of bigoted, prejudiced conservatives out there. You are conversing with me and my ideas here: not on a debate stage where you address the crowd and make general remarks.

Let's just move forward. You say I am failing to recognize the difference between sex and gender: what is sex and what is gender under your view?

"Schizophrenics are mentally ill" is not a substantive claim, it proceeds from the definition of "schizophrenic". To know the word is to know that "mental illness" and "schizophrenia" stand in a genus - species relationship. It offers nothing new to the competent language user. — hypericin

Now you are claiming that a unsubstantive claim is one that is contained, deductively, in the definition of something; and this kind of claim is not bigoted.

1. That is not what bigotry refers to. It is an obstinate attachment to an unreasonable belief.

2. Definitions are subjective. By your logic, when transgenderism was considered, by definition, to be a mental illness called general dysphoria it would not have been bigoted for me to believe it. However, since they changed to definition to fit liberal agendas I am not somehow a bigot for using a different definition. Bigotry requires that I am holding on to my belief that transgenderism is a mental illness stubbornly, which means I am being closed-minded and acting in bad faith. You haven't demonstrated any of that.

3. If society decided to redefine schizophrenia so that it is not by definition a mental illness for suit a political agenda; then you, by your logic, would bigoted if you still believed it was.

The OP isn't about drag shows and that only came up because people were derailing the conversation to try yo get me to say something that is homophobic, bigoted, etc.

Like I said:

1. We have solid evidence that multiple people notified Jamal about the thread in hopes of getting it banned and some were actively suggesting, like Banno, to censor it.

2. No one contended directly with the OP: it is about gender theory—not ethics about sexuality.

3. RogueAI was trying to bait me into agreeing with Nazism to illegitimatize my position.

4. Multiple people decided I was a bigot for thinking that transgenderism is a mental illness and continued to push that claim even after being corrected on the definition of bigotry.

5. They continued to mischaracterize my views even after I clarified them. For example, most initial responders made claims that I support forced experimentation (or 'curing') of homosexuals and transgender.

This is only important insofar as it demonstrates that at least some of the leftists on here are not being intellectual virtuous; which I think everyone should be exhibiting—especially on a philosophy forum.

With that being said, the discussion has started to tame itself and is now getting more charitable and closer to actually discussing the OP; so I have high hopes that I will be able to have productive conversations with people who are sticking with the thread.

Yes, absolutely. Where would you like to start?

Yes, I am also responsible for allowing an evil to happen; but what I am saying is it is permissible under certain conditions. It is permissible, likewise, God to allow evil; but it never permissible for Him to do evil. That's what they were missing. It seems like under your view it is not permissible for God to allow evil—why?

I responded to this:

What a terrible argument. A woman wearing a dress is not like a triangle's having three sides. There are no triangles that do not have three sides, but there are women in trousers.

With:

I don’t think you are appreciate fully what I said. When a woman wears a dress it isn’t itself a part of their gender: it is the symbol which represents their expression of their sex (i.e., the symbol that represents their gender). You can separate the dress-wearing from femaleness, but you can’t separate the feminine expression of femaleness that it represents from the sex (femaleness) that it represents. That’s the part that is virtually distinct.

You responded with:

Muddled. You are here confusing the biological category with its social expression. Here's an idea: lets' seperate the biological category from its social expression - to make this clear, we cpoudl call the former "sex", and the latter "gender"... that will avoid the circularity of “Feminine expression is inseparable from femaleness → therefore feminine expression must reflect biological sex.”

I responded with:

CC: @RogueAI, @hypericin, @unenlightened, @Tom Storm, @Leontiskos, @Moliere

Let’s go with your semantics to demonstrate my point, because semantics here doesn’t matter (philosophically). The social expression, the gender, of sex is not itself ontologically tied to sex: it is an epistemic symbolism of society’s understanding of the ontological reality of sex and its tendencies. Gender, in this sense, is just society’s beliefs about sex and its tendencies.

A natural tendency of the particular sex that has a procreative nature (like male and female as opposed to an asexual being) would not be identical to the social expressions: it would be the ontologically upshot of the sex. Society could get its symbols completely wrong about those tendencies and natural behaviors of the given sex and this would have no affect on the reality of those tendencies and would just mean that this particular society got it all wrong. These tendencies, grounded in sex, are what would be called masculinity for males and femininity for females for humans. Someone can mimick each to their liking, but they have a real basis in sex and its natural tendencies.

The sex, as you call it, and the tendencies due to that sex are virtually but not really distinct. If you have a being, no matter how imperfectly instantiated, that is of sex M then they will have tendencies T<M> which will naturally flow, no matter how inhibited or malnourished, from that type of being M. You cannot have a man, in nature, in form, who doesn’t have masculinity flowing from that nature (no matter how imperfectly: yes, this includes super-feminine men!); just as trilaterality and triangularity cannot be found in existence separate from one another.

Can we agree on this (notwithstanding the semantic disputes)???

To which you killed the conversation with:

No. You just moved your goal post. You still want gender to be "an epistemic symbolism of society’s understanding of the ontological reality of sex and its tendencies", and so grounded in your "ontological reality" and not in social reality. You still want trousers to be like the three sides of a triangle, the "symbol of an ontological reality".

I tried to reformulate it to your schema to further the convo and you never contended with it in any substantial sense. The above is the track record: these are the facts of our discourse on the actual OP. The rest is loosely related.

You quoted us as if we are the same person. I didn't say it was a substantive post, and I am pretty sure Leontiskos was being sarcastic (although I could be wrong).

To be fair, I do think you tried in good faith to contend with my view a little bit there; but then it stopped for some reason.

I don't think it is unreasonable to note that virtually no one contended with the OP; and still haven't. You still haven't contended with the revised version I asked you to.

Here's my critique in outline.

1. Aristotelian essences are hollow.
2. There is a usable and interesting distinction to be made between biological sex and socially inaugurated gender.
3. You account of Aristotelian ethics is shallow. Other Aristotelian theorists, such as Nussbaum, do not reach the conservative conclusions of your account.
4. In claiming that certain gender traits are biologically determined, you move form an is to an ought, a logical error.
5. I hold that the stance you take concerning issues such as sexuality and abortion to be immoral.

1. We never had a discussion substantively about nominalism vs. essence realism.
2. You never gave an account of what that is; and did not contend with my outlining of it in your terms that I gave to try to forward the conversation.
3. I've never heard of Nussbaum, and you've never provided any reasons that we could discuss of why it is shallow.
4. We did discuss this a bit: that's fair. However, you seem to think that you are contending immanently with the OP when you noting Hume's Guillotine; but I don't see how it does. Like I said, we can discuss this in detail and I already asked you (to of no answer) what grounds the objectivity of ethics for you as a non-naturalist. Non-naturalism can't account for moral objectivism: it only accounts for moral cognitivism.
5. Well this isn't directly relevant to the OP and begs the question. We can discuss this though.

I am more than happy to continue our discussion if you want to discuss any of these.

Oh, then maybe I misunderstood @Jamal; or perhaps I misunderstood the term. I thought they were giving an psychological account of why I am coming up with the Aristotelian account of gender because they wanted to provide a metacritique of the genesis of my views.

Fair enough, and I appreciate that Moliere :heart:

I hope we can have a fruitful dialogue. I think we need to start with what each other means by 'sex' and 'gender'. You said it isn't just a social construct, so I am curious to see how you use them then.

This is the part I'm disagreeing with. Not Nazi-ism, but rather that homosexuality is on par with schizophrenia. They are not the same or even analogous.

I do this on the basis of hedonism. The happiness of the person is what's important.

Even if hedonism is true—viz., a person’s hedonic happiness is all that matters—it does not follow that homosexuality as a sexual orientation is not a defect of the human species. I understand it could increase hedonic happiness for a person by engaging in their sexual desires; but this says nothing about whether it is a defect.

For example, not having my legs since birth might, in hindsight, bring me a lot of hedonic happiness through the tribulations I overcame with the condition: does that mean that me being born without my legs is not a defect?

I think you are conflating how a defect can influence our (hedonic) happiness or, more generally, psychology with the defect itself.

None of the acts listed are degenerate acts. They have not "lost the physical, mental, or moral qualities considered normal and desirable; showing evidence of decline"

I am not saying you are quoting me out of context for disagreeing with that; I’m saying that the original comment being leveraged here by everyone didn’t even claim that homosexuality from degenerate and my comment later that did did not claim that homosexuality simpliciter is degenerate. Degeneracy is about moral decline; and badness is not identical to immorality.

I agree with you that under your view you shouldn’t see anything wrong with homosexuality and, consequently, it can’t be degenerate even though it is still a defect at best or a mental illness at worst. Defectiveness is not the same as degeneracy.

 For the OP, though, my simple counter-argument is you set up a false dichotomy because we can think of gender and sex in neither the Aristotelian nor as a psychological construct.

Fair enough: what do you believe sex and gender are? Let’s start there and see if we can make some headway.

But if there is some other position between Essence realism and nominalism, perhaps one that doesn't even try to find the essence of things...

Yes, but that’s just logically impossible for it to succeed as a third position. That’s like saying “there is some other position to take about this block being yellow or not yellow, perhaps one that doesn’t even try to figure out if it is yellow to begin with…”. That’s not a valid third option to topic.

 The Kinsey report shows that there's a lot more to human sexuality than your normative conception based on heterosexuality suggests. I don't think people having sex differently violates any sort of grand norm that a person should be striving towards because of the gender of their soul. Rather the reports of self-satisfaction are far more persuasive to me than comparisons to a big picture ethic on the nature of man and what men ought to be to be truly eudemon.

This doesn’t demonstrate that it is morally permissible; all that demonstrates is that people have sex in many different ways and enjoy it (superficially).

 Not of a personality expressing its subjectivity, but of an event that effects the person telling the story and the person listening to the story in order to elucidate who we are in the world given what's happened.

If it is their expressions throughout time that they are describing, then it is a history of their personality unfolding.

but surely you can see that there's more to our possible ways of thinking about sex than as a psychological theory of personality archetypes or immortal souls?

I understand that; but what I was saying is that IF gender is just a social construct then it is just about personality types. History about people’s sexuality would just be, as a social expression, an expression of their personality.

The reality I deny is of essences, but not because that dissolves the world around us into inchoate unrelated bits without meaning or even knowledge as much as the philosopher's knowledge on such things.

I think nominalism is an untenable theory IMHO.

It's my intent to point out hedonism is as a kind of difference whereby we'd reach the same conclusion: i.e. if your metaphysic leads to thinking about men and women like a medieval priest then I'm afraid I think that you're wrong factually and ethically, as you do of I.

Where to go from there?

Let’s start with what you mean by sex and gender; and then we can get into hedonism vs. aristotelianism afterwards.

Polyphonic. It's erotic, friendly, filial, and small. We can do anything we want with love. The particularities of a love will depend upon the lovers.

What’s its definition though: you just used the word to describe it. I need to know what you mean by it; because you mean it totally differently than the traditional usage. Is it to will the good of something for its own sake where the good of that something is just what it desires (or gives it pleasure)?

In all the back and forth, I forgot that you and Leontiskos never did answer my question about abortion and the pregnant 12 year old who was raped by her father.

Sorry, I am queued up with all the responses. I thought I already answered this; but to answer: it is immoral. Again, directly intentionally killing an innocent person is always murder and murder is always wrong. However, in your consequentialistic view none of this would be true. This is why I asked you (I think?) what equation, as a consequentialist, you are deploying to evaluate what the best outcome is.

Obviously, she should not be forced to carry the rapist's baby to term, right?

I understand the emotional-intuition we tend to have that she should be allowed to have an abortion; and I don’t think it is entirely misplaced: it arises out of good empathy for the tragic situation the poor girl is in. However, the ends do not justify the means; and, of course, I am saying that knowing you reject that as a consequentialist.

Part of that is simply because Bob Ross misunderstood the Overton window of TPF and did not anticipate the manner in which his posts would be received. If he were to go back in time he would probably understand his audience differently and write somewhat different posts. For example, going back in time, he might have anticipated the objection from some that what he really wants is coercive conversion therapy for all homosexuals. — Leontiskos

Definitely agree. I was genuinely interested to converse about modern gender theory contrasted to mine; and no one even attempted to do that.

Do you think an eristic is a legitimate way to discover truth? I don't see how that isn't just an attempted psychoanalysis of the one forwarding the argument as opposed to contending with the argument itself.

The vast majority of the people responding to me have been trying to get the thread censored. Some reported it to the moderators to get removed; some notified the moderators without formally reporting to incentivize them to remove it; and some outright, like @Banno, said that they wish this was getting censored.

The fact of the matter is that no one from the opposition, expect perhaps @Jamal, has even tried to contend with the OP; instead, they tried to get it banned and then, when that failed, tried to trip me up with labels to try and get me to cancel myself. No, e.g., I am not a supporter of Nazism.

I didn't make any argument like that. I am not sure where you got this from: many people, including myself, have outlined clearly what you said and why it leads to absurd conclusions that you wouldn't accept.

Again, this is not a gotcha moment. I think this is a rather meaningless topic to debate right now.

How do I tell the difference between natural and non-natural?

By determining if it is in accord or disaccord with the nature of the being in question. It is contrary to the nature of a lion for it eat plants; it is in its nature to eat meat.

Is the sex act a joyful act or a painful duty?

When properly done, sex is a beautiful act of love and pleasure; so this is a false dilemma.

 Is the sex I have with my 25 year post-menopausal wife degenerate, sinful, inferior, because she is not going to get pregnant?

No, it is not.

 And if not, then why is the sex of a homosexual so different?

Homosexuality as a sexual orientation is not itself degenerate: I am not sure why you are assuming I believe that. Homosexuality as an act or behavior is because it wills in accord with what is bad for a human. You having sex with your wife is an attempt at realizing your and her nature—irregardless if your nature’s are defective or inhibited in some sort of way. Think of it this way: is a kid who is born without the ability to feel pain thereby immoral? Of course not! Is it a defect? Absolutely. If we could cure it, would we? Absolutely. Is the kid doing anything wrong by willing in ways that are not contrary to their natural ends in an effort to realize their nature even though they are incapable of realizing the aspect of their nature that is sensible [in relation to their lack of feeling of pain]? Of course not. Would the kid be doing something wrong if they tried to maim themselves? Of course: that’s contrary to their natural ends.

What distinguishes real nature from fake/ersatz/inferior/degenerate/perverse/ nature?

A real nature is innate in the being of the being in question: it is intrinsic. A fake nature could refer to many different things; like someone understanding the nature of a being incorrectly or a nature that is merely conceptual (in the case of nominalism).

@hypericin, I find that you are digging in ten toes deep on a hill that no one wants you to die on. Your justification for my views on transgenderism for being bigoted are internally incoherent in your own beliefs. Perhaps, would you care to re-word your claim in a way that is internally coherent?

Likewise, you still, hypericin, have not attempted to critique the OP. What are your thoughts on the contents of the OP itself?

I don't see how these comments help forward the conversation.

Jamal, I truly appreciate you engaging with the topic; albeit incredibly mediated from the OP. I genuinely hope that we can have a productive and respectful conversation. Let’s dive in.

I am going to address the main points, as I see it, that you made; and feel free to let me know if I missed anything crucial.

Eristic vs. Rational Discourse

You provided an interesting, brief treatise on dialectics that aim at sophistry (eristic) vs. truth (rational knowledge) and analogized it to our dispute in ethics and metaphysics. You seem to think, and correct me if I am wrong, that two completely antithetical or exclusive theories cannot be rationally resolved; and, consequently, we must rely on ‘metacritique’—viz., critique of the ‘genesis’ beyond the ‘validity—to decipher which one a person should hold as true. To me, this is false for the following reasons:

1. The genesis of an idea is historical and, consequently, (inter-)subjective and, consequently, cannot provide any influence on the truth or falsity of a proposition (or theory). A genesis, including yours of mine (which I will get to later), at best, exposes the (social or individual) psychology at play in developing the idea—it uncovers the motives...not the truth...of the idea.

2. The kinds of theories you are describing are just ones that are logically consistent and internally coherent; but epistemically we evaluate theories on much more than that. The main two you seemed to have missed is external coherence and parsimony.

I submit to you, that we use internal coherence and logical consistency to determine if the given theory meets the prerequisites to be sound; and then we move forward comparing how well it (1) fits the relevant data needing to be explained, (2) how parsimonious it is at explaining it, and (3) how well it coheres with the prioritized (external) knowledge we have of the rest of the world.

With all due respect, what your ‘genesis’ exposition did was collapse ethics into psychology—a fatal Nietzschien mistake IMHO.

Question-Begging

Your criteria for evaluating ethical frameworks used to demonstrate that your ethical framework is better was circular:

a moral framework is better if it is more comprehensive, coherent, and leads to a more humane society

(emphasis added)

The word ‘humane’ is a morally-loaded term; and as we see at the end, you end up presupposing the truth of your ethical theory to prove it:

3. It leads to a more humane society: no loving couples are told by authorities that what they're doing is a privation of goodness or that they are sick in the head.

What makes a humane society? You are presupposing here, in effect, that, in conclusion, your theory is better, liberalism, because it makes a better society. You then, and throughout the entirety of your thinking, assumed the concepts at play in liberal thought to convey your point. E.g., you used ‘love’ in a hyper-individualistic, non-traditional way; and you assumed that it is better for society to have the ‘authorities’ ‘butt-out’ of people’s lives as much as possible—both of which are tenants of classical liberalism.

More importantly, though, I want to be clear that I have not advocated for an authoritarian regime, like big brother, that forces people not to do sexual evils. Not once have I said that. In fact, I think Christianity entails that people need the ability, the leeway, so long as it is not gravely bad for them, to do evil to themselves. E.g., gluttony is evil but I actually think it is evil to force someone not to be a glutton. I just think there is a point where it may be too detrimental to their own good (e.g., Cindy should not have the option to do heroine even if we knew she won't harm anyone else by doing it, being 'objectively suicidal' should not be honored with suicide assistance, people castrating themselves to try to be the other gender should not be affirmed, etc.). The grave issue with liberalism is that it presupposes freedom of indifference and not freedom for excellence; and this is why we see it pushing for what is good as merely what coincides with what a person wants. True liberalism should support furries, medical affirmation care for transgenders, suicide assistance, euthanasia, providing people with hard drugs if they want it, helping people maim themselves if they want to, letting people sell their bodies for money, let people enter sex indentured servitude if its their kink, etc. Liberalism is hyper-libertarianism.

So, to be clear, you are partially arguing against a straw man of my position here. Nothing about the Aristotelian thought I gave necessitates that Chinese-style authoritarianism is the best political structure; or that we should force homosexuals not to have sex. In fact, I think that would be immoral to do.

Natural Law Theory: Based or Absurd?

Kissing, holding-hands, and the like are not sexual acts—they are intimate acts (with sometimes sexual undertones); and are a part of the natural ends of the human body. We use lips for many things—not just one. What your argument here suggests is that any intimacy outside of sex must be contrary to the natural ends of non-sex organs; and I don’t see how that is true. Which leads me to:

But if only some of those acts are bad, why?

In order for an act with a natural faculty to be immoral, it has to be contrary to the ends of that faculty such that it inhibits the said faculty from fulfilling them. Consequently, singing, kissing, cutting one’s hair, cutting one’s fingernails, getting an ear piercing, etc. are not immoral because they are not contrary to the ends of the respective faculties in this way.

Anal sex, for example, on the other hand, inhibits the anus from fulfilling its ends of (1) holding in poop and (2) excreting it. Anal sex does, in fact, although the organ can repair itself to some extent, loosen up the anus organ. Even liberal studies usually admit this to the extent that they suggest to people to do exercises to strengthen the pelvis area to help keep the anus healthy (to counter-act the anal sex they are having). Which leads me to:

The mention of "an organ designed to defecate" pretends to be a scientific or common-sense observation but is really a public performance of disgust, an attempt to bypass rationality by invoking a visceral reaction to justify exclusion.

This seems like an attempt to ignore the obvious fact that the anus is designed to defecate by ad hominem attacking me: you are essentially saying “hey, guys, let’s ignore the fact he’s right about this one part because he really is just prejudiced and trying to give a bad-faithed public performance”. This is the kind of rhetoric on this forum that saddens me; because I am out here trying to have good faith conversations with people.

Likewise, you are absolutely right that heterosexual anal, oral, and touching (such as masturbatory) sex is immoral—I only see this as a bullet to bite from the perspective of liberal thought.

identity thinking

Am I correct in thinking that your ‘identity thinking’ critique is that all concepts and ontological identities are forms of coercion? Do you accept that there are real identities (like a triangle really as opposed to only conceptually being a three sided shape)? Are they all coercive and immoral in your view?

he must reduce the whole person to the act he finds disgusting to justify a coercive impulse to force everyone into his chosen norm of being. No attempt is made to understand the lived experience of gay or transgender people, to listen to their voices, to appreciate their diverse experiences of love and intimacy. That's all pre-emptively obliterated under the force of the categories of degenerate, defective, violation of nature, and so on, and the total person is reduced to the function of sex organs, the context of the act ignored in the act of imposing the category of non-procreative act.
…
And it's in comments like those that Bob is most forceful and genuine, which again indicates that the genesis of Bob's arguments is not in reason, but in prejudicial feeling, an aspect of a certain kind of ideology.

To demonstrate good faith in my desire to have a productive conversation with you, I am going to overlook the fact that you reduced my entire metaphysics to a baseless ad hominem attack on my character and psychology; but I do need to clear my name. I am not ad hoc rationalizing a feeling of disgust for homosexuals; I am not prejudiced towards homosexuals; and I am not trying to use the terms like ‘defective’, ‘violation of nature’, etc. to pre-emptively obliterate anything (although I grant that the term 'degeneracy', although it truly does apply to what I was saying, is a provocative term that I would not use when talking to a member of the LGBTQ+ community). You know nothing about my personal life…..nothing, Jamal.

One last thing I wanted to cover:

Despite the Aristotelian clothing, Bob doesn't properly engage or inhabit any tradition at all, if we understand a tradition along with MacIntyre as a "historically extended, socially embodied argument".

MacIntyre accepts the vast majority of my view. He’s an Aristotelian too and a Christian; so I don’t understand why you would think that he would think I am not following a tradition when I am using Aristo-Thomism. Aristo-thomism is a long-standing tradition in the Latin, Dominican Scholastics.

To be honest, this thread is revealing itself as liberals being incapable of discussing an alternative gender theory. Virtually no one has even quoted or tried to contend with the OP so far: instead, they are trying to cancel me.

Even you are trying to entice the moderators to censor this thread and have explicated you would censor it if you had the power.

The term "natural" needs to be defined here

I just meant natural in the sense that it is something in accord with the substantial form of the being in question. I am thinking of natural law theory here, but in a simpler sense for the sake of the discussion. Technically one needs to evaluate the natures as ordered by God to do ethics properly.

At any rate, I think the question of "naturalness" in the first sense is a total non sequitur that several posters in this thread seem to be getting led off track by

Agreed. I clarified my terminology but they don’t seem to want to engage in good faith.

Surely they are "natural" in terms of being ubiquitous and present in brutes as well, and in all human societies, but that seems irrelevant to their goodness.

Yes, but it is not in human nature, per human substantial form, to have those vices and issues: those are caused from the disordering of the soul and body—in other words, through privation of the realization of their nature.

On the cultural issues you raised, I do fear there is a bit of mixed messaging here considering the degree to which heterosexual fornication, pornography, etc. has been not only normalized but even glorified in the broader culture, such that it is plastered in advertisements all over the surfaces of our cities and the media is saturated it (acquisitiveness, pleonexia, even more so, such that it is now a virtue of sorts). This is where the cultural presentation of the "natural law" starts to look outwardly incoherent and arbitrary, because the metaphysical grounding becomes submerged and we instead seem to have a sort of arbitrary, voluntarist pronouncement instead. The equivocation on "natural" doesn't help I suppose, nor do the voluntarist undertones of "law" in our current context. I would rebrand it "moral ecology," or "Logos ethics," or something personally.

I couldn’t agree more. The worse part to me is that even people on a philosophy forum are unwilling to engage in a discussion about gender theory: they are behaving uncharitably, disingenuously, combatively, and hatefully. They ignore my post and resort to baselessly associating me with Nazism, bigotry, homophobia, transphobia, etc.

Isn't that definitionally true of any designation for any mental illness?

That’s exactly what I told @hypericin and they said I am being a sophist.

As shocking as it apparently seems to you, there are men and women who have no urge whatsoever to fuck the opposite sex

It is not shocking at all: that is a privation of their nature (usually of no fault of their own). It’s called asexuality.

Does this mean that the preference for bland food flows in an Aristotelian sense from human nature, and therefore my eating habits are wrong, deviant, a kind of mental illness?

Assuming it were a part of the essence of a human to eat bland food, which it isn’t, then this would entail that you are, all else being equal, acting immorally by eating non-bland foods no different than how it is immoral to purposefully eat foods that you know your body can’t digest. It wouldn’t, however, mean that you have a mental illness; and I never suggested that analogously to transgenderism. Transgenderism is a mental illness because it is gender dysphoria: it is the condition where the mind cannot cope with the nature that the “body” has. It is a dissociation disorder that causes serious harm to the patient.

So having a human essence doesn’t mean you must display every typical human trait

Banno, why do you straw man me? You are obviously a very intelligent person; and I think you are being uncharitable in our discussions. I want us to have a productive and interesting conversation to uncover the truth about gender theory (whether you are right, I am right, neither of us, etc.).

I never said that a human in being necessarily exhibits every human trait. In fact, that’s contrary to Aristotelian thought!

Bob takes an essence-like structure (“male nature”) and treats those empirical tendencies as normative obligations.

The idea that what makes a thing what it is (viz., an essence) dictates how that kind of being should behave is a standard Aristotelian view and is essential to moral naturalism.

Bob also equates essence with a set of tendencies or traits.

An essence is not a set of tendencies nor traits. An essence is the whatness, the quiddity, which determines what it is to be this particular kind of thing; a form is an actualizing principle that provides a thing with its essence. The essential properties of a thing are grounded in the essence it has (which is instantiated in its form). The properties in essence are really distinct from them in esse.

I'm not an essentialist, and I tend to see notions of 'male' and 'female' as evolving and changing over time.

To find common ground, we would need to discuss nominalism vs. essence realism. This is the basis for the gender theory I gave.

What matters most is recognising that trans people are here to stay. We need to learn how to live with this reality, not suppress it or label it deviant, just as much of the world has come to accept homosexuality as part of the spectrum of normal human experience.

You can be loving and kind to people while also recognizing that they have an illness that, if you truly love them, you would make reasonable efforts to cure.

There is no real basis in sex is my point of view

If you believe this, then, yes, there would be no such thing as sexual degeneracy or degeneracy of any kind. There would be no such thing as a man, woman, human, dog, cat, etc. … there would be just labels we give things. We wouldn’t be able to have doctors because there is no human nature to study to determine what is healthy; there would be no female vs. male sports because there is not real difference between them; there would be no real shared nature between two chairs or two humans; etc.

Is a false dichotomy. On the basis of queer history -- the lived experience of peopled is recorded in their histories. It's not a personality archetype, and it's not ahistorical. It's rather a third thing.

It’s a history of individual expressions; which are personality types. You describing, by your own admission, a person that lacks a real nature which is expressing their own subjectivity through their queerness. That’s a history of a personality expressing its subjectivity.

love is not a perversion.

What is love under your view?

In liberal thought, love is totally different conceptually than in conservative thought. Love, traditionally, is to will the good of another for its own sake; and the good is relative to its nature. You don’t believe in real natures: so what is love?

I take it that you now accept that your account derives an ought from an is, which is progress, of a sort.

My friend, I never denied this. In fact, I explicitly stated I am a moral naturalist.

Take a look at my present thread

I will take a look when I have time; but, again, just citing a source isn’t an argument. You have to present something to the discussion yourself. Why do you think Hume’s Guillotine is a law of logic? That’s a super niche and widely unrecognized view (which doesn’t mean it is wrong, although I find it improbable).

Yes, the actual world is a possible world. No, existence in the actual world does not entail existence in every possible world.

I didn’t argue this. I argue that a necessary being, by definition, exists in all possible worlds; so it must exist in the real world. You denied this. Do you agree with me that if X is a necessary being then it exists in the real world because it must exist in all possible worlds and the real world is a possible world? If so, then it does follow that if X is a necessary being in a possible world then X exists in all possible worlds and therefore exists in the real world. That’s my point.

No. You just moved your goal post. You still want gender to be "an epistemic symbolism of society’s understanding of the ontological reality of sex and its tendencies", and so grounded in your "ontological reality" and not in social reality. You still want trousers to be like the three sides of a triangle, the "symbol of an ontological reality".

What contention are you giving to what I said? I converted the terms to your terms so we can avoid semantics for now: please give an account of what is wrong with the conceptual analysis I gave so we can further this discussion.

I agree.

There's a difference between how you're treating homosexuals and how we treat schizophrenics.

I didn’t say that they should be equivocated: it was an analogy meant to elucidate the fact that believing there is something bad (or even wrong) with the condition of transgenderism, homosexuality, etc. does not entail that one wants to persecute them for it or doing Nazi atrocities to them. People keep associated me unjustly and disingenuiously with Nazism for merely thinking that it would ideally be good to find a cure for these kinds of conditions analogous to finding a cure for schizophrenia.

I don't think a schizophrenic is "degenerate" for having schizophrenia.

Again, my friend, why do you all quote me out of context? It is like you all want to invent ways to cancel me since you cannot find a way to do it with my what I actually said in the OP or with my responses. I am here for a good-faith conversation to discover the truth about gender theory.

To be clear, I made one comment to a fellow that a part of the liberal agenda is to support (1) sexual degeneracy, (2) homosexuality, and (3) transgenderism. In that comment, I was not referring to 2 or 3 as sexually degenerate, but other acts, broadly speaking, like BDSM. I then clarified to someone that, in truth, I do think that the acts involved in 2 and 3 are sexually degenerate (although I understand that is a provocative term to use that I wouldn’t use when talking to a member of the LGBTQ+).

The condition is separate from the acts. Homosexuality as a sexual orientation is not a behavior; gender dysphoria is not a behavior. A person that engages in homosexual or transgender acts (like anal sex or sissification for example) are engaging in degenerate acts in the sense of “having lost the physical, mental, or moral qualities considered normal and desirable; showing evidence of decline”. Obviously, this is not an argument against gender theory; and has nothing directly to do with the OP.

You lose me at essence realism

This is the root of our disagreement. You are a nominalist, which has deeper issues. We can discuss those if you would like; but without the basis of essence realism the whole gender theory I gave is useless.

 And, really, if you're not going to be the one doing the act why do you care?

The OP is about gender theory and if it is true. You are making an ethical claim that “if it only harms the individuals consenting to it, then one should mind their own business”; but this isn’t a thread about the ethics of LGBTQ+ behavior: it is a discussion about an aristotelian alternative to modern gender theory.

To answer your question, your ethical claim here presupposes a flawed understanding of harm, rightness, wrongness, badness, and goodness. In fact, I do not know how you can be a moral realist, truly, if you don’t accept moral naturalism. @Banno thinks one can be a non-naturalist, but it doesn’t work at all. Ironically, it collapses into moral cognitivism without an objective basis.

The evidence on mental health towards homosexuals indicates that any sort of conversion program only results in harm. But letting people have sex how they want to doesn't result in harm.

First of all, it obviously harms them to engage in these activities. E.g., anal sex, contrary to popular liberal studies and stats, does harm the anus over time—period. Likewise, ethically, it disorders the soul and body and inhibits the person from living their best life. In your view, which is very liberal, harm is something like ‘immediate physical damage’.

From a hedonist's perspective its your category that designates natural sex that's the sin because it results in harm, whereas the reverse does not.

Heterosexual acts is natural; but even that has to be ordered properly for the good of the people having it. The idea that pleasure (or avoiding pain) is the highest form of good for humans is simply not true; and homosexual acts are not natural just because people do it.

I'm not saying you're a Nazi, I'm saying you're going down an intellectual path of dehumanizing that the Nazi intelegentsia went down to rationalize their actions and support of the regime. If a group of people is naturally defective and deviant, that's just a stone's throw away from subhuman, and once they're subhuman...

My friend, it isn’t a stone throw away; and this is why this is really just a straw man to justify one’s own ideas without contending with their opposition. This same argument applies to all defects which we normally would recognize and try to cure without accepting Nazism; for example, if what counts an idea as a ‘stone throw away’ from Nazism is that the idea implies that ‘a group of people are naturally defective’ in some way, then every person that holds that people with physical deformities is a ‘stone throw away’ from Nazism. What is happening here, with all due respect, is your are inadvertently attacking an obvious straw man.

I'm a consequentialist, so if the fate of the world was at stake and we all die if I unhook myself,

Ok, that makes more sense: you do not believe that “the ends do not justify the means”.

What equation are you using as a consequentialist to evaluate the (im)permissibility of killing the violinist?

So, if closing a wound that's keeping the violinist alive is morally permissible, how could it be impermissible to remove the tubes from my body that are keeping him alive?

Because you are coming at this from the perspective of consequentialism; which makes no regard for evaluating the permissibility of an act but, instead, looks at the consequences and circumstances to determine what to do. In consequentialism, all acts are inherently neutral.

In my view, I am evaluating the intrinsic rightness or wrongness of the act itself first; and then looking to the circumstances if permissible. The difference here is that I am noting an important distinction, completely missing in consequentialistic thought, between something being directly and indirectly intentional.

Ah, but this violates (3). But your position cannot be that abortion is impermissible if the life of the mother is at stake. 

This just begged the question. You just said:

1. Abortion is permissible if the mother’s life is at risk.
2. This mother’s life is at risk.
C: It is permissible for the mother to abort.

As I said before, murder is intrinsically wrong—which isn’t true in your consequentialistic view and necessarily so due to the nature of that family of normative ethical theories—and the ends do not justify the means; consequently, a mother cannot murder someone to save her own life.

In fact, this is standard in society other than with abortion. If my life is on the line, no matter how grave, and I murder someone to save myself I will, in fact, get charged with murder and condemned for it. Consequentialism is not compatible with the modern justice system.

An innocent person in a psychotic rage from an unforeseen drug interaction is certainly "unworthy to be killed", but it's not murder if they get killed in self defense.

There’s two ways to think about self-defense as permissible:

A) What is directly intended is not killing the person but, rather, neutralizing them as a threat (which is distinct from murder); or

B) It is not the killing of an innocent person.

Now, you bring up a good point in this example that this perpetrator is not culpable themselves for the attack (e.g., perhaps they are hallucinating and relative to their perspective they are stopping something grave from happening [although it isn’t really happening that way]); and so they are innocent intuitively. I was challenging the idea that they are to be see as innocent; but we can also go the A route and note that this ‘innocent person’ is a threat to this victim (of no fault of their own) objectively; and so the victim is justified in directly intending to neutralize the threat—even if that has a side effect of killing them.

I do think that is a really good example you gave their that challenges my idea of innocence.

Suppose you've been kidnapped and while you're locked in the dungeon, you've rigged up a booby trap to kill the kidnapper. A heavy weight will fall on him

RogueAI, you are missing the point my friend! Killing the baby in this case is indirectly intentional which, therefore, cannot be murder. Whether or not this is permissible is evaluating fundamentally differently than abortion, with the principle of double effect. In this example you gave, we are evaluating if it is permissible to bring about a bad side effect of killing the baby; whereas in abortion we are evaluating if it is permissible to bring use the death of the baby as a means towards our end.

No I wouldn't. No one uses the term 'natural' to refer to every act of any organism. That would collapse the distinction, in that context of its usage, into triviality; and there's no need to cite the Bible for this. An atheist can accept that the natural vs. non-natural distinction is here referring to what is in the real nature of a thing; and so behavior contrary to it is unnatural.

You stated:

Calling an entire class of people mentally ill couldn't be more bigoted. Try applying that to any other group.

I responded by pointing out that this line of thinking would entail that every classification of a mental illness is bigoted:

Hypericin, my friend, if that is true, then the acknowledgement of any mental illness is bigotry; for every recognition of a mental illness in principle applies to an entire class of people affected. Is that really what you believe?

Which you now responded with:

This is childish sophistry

What is sophistical about the argument I made? Hypericin, this is not a ‘gotcha’ moment: I think we both understand that what you said is not coherent and was a consequence of the way you feel about a person’s rejection of gender theory. Clearly, it is not bigoted to believe that some condition is a mental illness.

Whereas you, on the basis of a very dubious metaphysics

This is question begging; and I would like to note, despite we wanting to converse with you, that you have never once attempted to address the metaphysical claims in the OP.

are diagnosing a group which is not definitionally ill

Are you implying that you think that transgenderism definitionally entails that it is not a mental illness? If so, then what about the definition of transgenderism necessitates that it is not a mental illness?

As mental illness is universally undesirable, you are saying that membership in this group entails being innately less than the general population. That is just bigotry

I never once said that a transgender person is less than human or the “general population”: you are arguing against a straw man here. Likewise, even if I grant your claim, that’s not what bigotry is. Bigotry is an obstinate and stubborn attachment to an unreasonable position.

With all that aside, I would love to discuss with you the OP if you would like to have a productive conversation about gender theory and the alternative Aristotelian one I gave.

The logical law I referenced was Humes' Law - the illicit move from ought to is.

My friend, you have to appreciate that Hume’s Law is not a law of logic. If not, then please give me the logical theory in which it is derivable from or an axiom of; or, better yet, how it is derivable from classical logic.

Moreover, you seem to be insinuating that Humeanism is commonly accepted in metaethics; and I think we both charitably know this is patently false.

But you rejection of possible world semantics is of a par with, say, accepting algebra but rejecting calculus

I reject the possible worlds interpretation of modal logic: I’ve never been inclined to reject all of the operators, axioms, and formulas of it.

But you are in effect claiming that your preferences are built in to the world.

That is true if you are a moral anti-realist, which you aren’t either. Moral realism, both non-naturalism and naturalism, hold, necessarily, that moral judgments are proposition, express something objective, and at least one is true. They do not express something objective if you think that they are preferences.

I am sort of remembering out past conversations about it now: am I correct in remembering that you are just a moral cognitivist and not a moral realist (as described above with the standard three-pronged thesis of moral cognitivism, moral objectivism, and moral non-nihilism)?

That they re physical.

The fact that moral judgments express something objective does not entail that they are grounded in something material (i.e., tangible) nor physical (i.e., mind-independent). Moral properties being natural, likewise, only entails that they are innate to the nature of the thing in question: that doesn’t mean they are physical or material per se. In the case of Aristotelian thought, being hylomorphic, a material being’s form is not material nor truly immaterial (as a separate substance) but, rather, both comprise the substance itself. So if the form of a material being grounds its moral properties then it follows that moral properties are grounded neither in the physical or material as properly understood in modern times.

You do understand that differentiating S5 from S4 requires possible world semantics, don't you?

Can you elaborate? I haven’t brushed up on my modal logic in a while. Most of the operators and formulas I don’t remember disagreeing with: it’s the theory they use to describe it as possible worlds that I quibble with.

Sure, ◇□P → □P is valid in S5, 

Yes, this is a problem; and I think any possible worlds theory of interpretation of modal logic will have to accept S5: I don’t think the previous “versions” are ones we can revert back to.

is not automatically justified. ☐P only entails that P is true in all possible worlds; it does not by itself specify existence in the actual world unless P is an existential proposition. Modal logic distinguishes between truth across possible worlds and existence in the actual world

But isn’t the actual world a possible world in possible world’s theory? I though necessary X entails that X is in every possible world and the actual world is a world that could possibly exist because it does exist: it’s existence proves its possibility under the theory. No?

Here's an idea: lets' seperate the biological category from its social expression - to make this clear, we cpoudl call the former "sex", and the latter "gender"... that will avoid the circularity of “Feminine expression is inseparable from femaleness → therefore feminine expression must reflect biological sex.”

CC: @RogueAI, @hypericin, @unenlightened, @Tom Storm, @Leontiskos, @Moliere

Let’s go with your semantics to demonstrate my point, because semantics here doesn’t matter (philosophically). The social expression, the gender, of sex is not itself ontologically tied to sex: it is an epistemic symbolism of society’s understanding of the ontological reality of sex and its tendencies. Gender, in this sense, is just society’s beliefs about sex and its tendencies.

A natural tendency of the particular sex that has a procreative nature (like male and female as opposed to an asexual being) would not be identical to the social expressions: it would be the ontologically upshot of the sex. Society could get its symbols completely wrong about those tendencies and natural behaviors of the given sex and this would have no affect on the reality of those tendencies and would just mean that this particular society got it all wrong. These tendencies, grounded in sex, are what would be called masculinity for males and femininity for females for humans. Someone can mimick each to their liking, but they have a real basis in sex and its natural tendencies.

The sex, as you call it, and the tendencies due to that sex are virtually but not really distinct. If you have a being, no matter how imperfectly instantiated, that is of sex M then they will have tendencies T<M> which will naturally flow, no matter how inhibited or malnourished, from that type of being M. You cannot have a man, in nature, in form, who doesn’t have masculinity flowing from that nature (no matter how imperfectly: yes, this includes super-feminine men!); just as trilaterality and triangularity cannot be found in existence separate from one another.

Can we agree on this (notwithstanding the semantic disputes)???

Hypericin, my friend, if that is true, then the acknowledgement of any mental illness is bigotry; for every recognition of a mental illness in principle applies to an entire class of people affected. Is that really what you believe?

I am making a very reasonable claim that recognizing something as a mental illness does not entail that one is obstinately or unreasonably or stubbornly attached to a the belief that it is (I.e., is a bigot about it being) a mental illness nor that they hate those who have the illness. This honestly should be a point we can find common ground on.

Now a "bigot" is someone "obstinately attached to a belief or opinion" - like someone who would reject a rule of logic in order to insist that homosexuality was degenerate. Hmm.

I didn’t reject a law of classical logic...unless you are suggesting that everyone needs to accept every theory of logic available—including paraconsistent logic?

Likewise, rejecting modal logic does not mean I am obstinately attached to my beliefs: an obstinate attachment is a stubborn and unreasonable attachment to something—you know that, Banno.

Physics is not ethics.

Moral naturalism doesn’t claim that physics is ethics.

You continue to frame the issue as ontological. That's part of your error.

It is ontologically: it is a question about whether or not essences are real. You cannot sit here and claim that essence realism is about whether or not essences are real and hold that it isn’t ontological. That’s what ontology is: the study of reality (being). I am surprised you are claiming it isn’t ontological: what is it then for you? Epistemic?

(1) is blatantly incorrect; the outermost mode determines the overall mode, so it would be possibly necessary → possibly

That’s blatantly not true, my friend! S5 modal logic is the most commonly accepted version of modal logic; and in that theory “possibly necessarily X → necessarily X → X”. In other words, “possibly X” equates to “X exists in at least one possible world”; “necessarily X” equates to “X exists in all possible worlds"; consequently, “possibly necessarily X” equates to “X exists in at least one possible world as necessarily X”; which, in turn, equates to “X exists in at least one possible world such that X a necessary being in it”; which, in turn, equates to “X exists in all possible worlds (since X exists as a necessary being in this possible world)”; which entails that “X must exist in the real world being that it is one of those possible worlds”.

Nor is there a conflation of conceivability with modality. Possible because it is so brief, the reasons given here appear muddled. If you are going to reject an accepted part of modern logic, then you ought provide good, clear reasons.

I gave a clear explanation of an alternative view that is common. Possible worlds are conceivable worlds unless you are suggesting that we have a sound methodology for determining when a world is possible (that I am not aware of).

How odd. So instead you take your own attitudes as being necessarily universal.

That’s not what I said. Moral non-naturalism suffers from being incapable of explaining what the property of goodness refers to exactly because it cannot equate it with a natural property. What is goodness under your view? What ontologically grounds it?

I already have, in the post I already linked.

This gets at your other post:

Before you so quickly give the thumbs up, look at what Leon is saying. I gave reference to a thread that leads to a book and a whole literature that sets out the difference between brute and social facts, which Leon dismissed as "failing to engage with the topic".

I am glad you are engaging in the thread, but you are refusing to explain your theory to me and instead are trying to book-drown me. It is a form of refusing to engage to try to tell someone to “read these 50 books and get back to me, then I’ll respond”. If someone doesn’t understand Aristotelianism and I am conversing with them, there is a difference between me suggesting books for them to read and engaging with them vs. refusing to engage by gate-keeping via trying to force them to read 20 books before I will engage with them.

What a terrible argument. A woman wearing a dress is not like a triangle's having three sides.

I don’t think you are appreciate fully what I said. When a woman wears a dress it isn’t itself a part of their gender: it is the symbol which represents their expression of their sex (i.e., the symbol that represents their gender). You can separate the dress-wearing from femaleness, but you can’t separate the feminine expression of femaleness that it represents from the sex (femaleness) that it represents. That’s the part that is virtually distinct.

Again, you are thinking gender is separable from sex; and this is where your objection really lies here.

It's not baseless. You would oblige others to express only your attitudes. Have a think about why folk might draw this sort of comparison, even if unjustly.

They are drawing it so they can conveniently evade discussing gender theory with me: instead, they find some super vague and unwarranted correlation between viewing transgenderism as a mental illness and horrific deeds done by Nazism and decide to blatantly mischaracterize my views as Nazi. The Nazis were not just viewing transgenderism as an illness to be cured: they were hateful towards them and persecuted them. It is unacceptable to label my view as Nazi. Surely you can see that, right?

 I am allowed to remove tubes that were put into me without my consent

At any cost? With any means?

 Suppose instead of tubes connected to me, the violinist was being kept alive from blood running from an open wound on my side into him. Closing my wound would be an action but is your position that closing my own wound would be morally impermissible if it results in the violinist's death?

That’s a good question. I would say that it would be indirectly intentional because their death would be a (bad) side effect of the means (of closing the wound); and the principle of double effect has to be used to determine its permissibility or impermissibility. This is important because this is disanalogous to abortion: an abortion is where the human in the womb is directly intentionally killed (analogous to shooting the violinist in the head).

I think, in this case, it would be permissible because it is:

1. A good end;
2. There is no other means to facilitate that end;
3. The means is not bad; and
4. The good end outweighs the bad effect.

In the case of abortion, #3 is necessarily false.

This is the difference between, for example, the permissibility of performing a hysterectomy on a pregnant women with terminal cancer to save her from that cancer which will inevitably lead to the human in the womb dying; vs. an abortion where the human in the womb is directly intentionally killed to facilitate the end of upholding the woman’s bodily autonomy.

I'm OK with that. If a psychotic innocent person is trying to kill me, and I directly intentionally kill them in self defense, it's not murder, right?

I would say they are innocent in the sense you mean of ‘not intending to do you harm’ but they are not innocent in the relevant sense of ‘being unworthy of being killed’. This is a really good thought experiment though, as it challenges my idea of innocence.

I would prefer to unplug them and let them die naturally of whatever was killing them before they were hooked up to me, but if shooting them is the only way to do it, it's morally permissible

But, then, you are advocating that murder is permissible in some cases. Wouldn’t you agree that killing them by putting a bullet in their head is murder?

:up:

You are right. I misspoke - my sentence above is wrong. One can presumably use “degenerate” to accurately describe some people’s activities.

No worries! This is what I was trying to get you to see, because all you are doing is begging the question with:

Of course, I would not include gay people or most sexual acts, like fellatio, as you do. Your bar for degeneracy is low. Calling gay people and their preferences morally corrupt or less than human, which “degeneracy” implies, would qualify as bigotry.

Firstly, as I noted to you in a DM, I understand that the term ‘degenerate’ is provocative but it is not bigoted. I usually avoid using it, especially with people from the LGBTQ+ community, because it is provocative; but I do think it is degenerate, bad (as a sexual orientation), and immoral (as an act). I would like to note that I did not use that term in the OP: I used it in a side conversation with a fellow in the thread (about a loosely related but not identical topic).

I mean degenerate in the sense of ~“having lost the physical, mental, or moral qualities considered normal and desirable; showing evidence of decline.” This is standardly true for homosexuality if one believes it is bad and immoral. This does not mean that human beings that have homosexual tendencies are ‘less than human’ in their dignity or that we should persecute them. In fact, this is why I keep using schizophrenia as an analogy: we would never say that schizophrenics have less than human dignity because they are inflicted with a condition that deprives them of realizing aspects of their human nature. Human dignity is grounded in the human nature someone has, which is grounded in their substantial form—their soul, and not how realized they are at that nature. Every human is fully a human; even if they are missing limbs, are disabled, have diseases, are ill, have mental issues, etc. because they fully have the form of a human.

Like I said before, you are presupposing that it is true that homosexual acts are not ‘morally corrupt’; and then based off of that saying it is not degenerate. I understand from your view that makes sense, but in mine it doesn’t because it is immoral (viz., ‘morally corrupt’). What we would need to discuss is why.

I’m not someone who reaches for “degenerate” as a descriptive term in most serious discussions. What consenting adults do is not my business. One might be able to apply the term upon the actions and lives of Trump or Epstein.

I wasn’t using it as a descriptive term in any heavy sense on here either. Somehow someone saw one post I made to one person about an unrelated topic and now we are going down a rabbit hole about ‘degeneracy’. The OP is about gender theory, and makes no reference to degeneracy.