I disagree with this. I think what the Christian conservative use of neo-Aristotelian ideas of essence shows is that teleological frameworks are powerful and thus open to abuse. It's what makes them philosophically substantive, in contrast to the emotivism criticized by MacIntyre. — Jamal

Fair enough. I've had a similar conversation with some Thomists sover the years.

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. — Bob Ross

I don’t believe one can be appropriately loving to someone whose identity one denies and considers perversion. I don’t think there’s anyway we can resolve this one. The gap comes before your use of Aristotle - it’s between your version of theism and my version of atheism. All we can do ultimately to attempt to settle this is vote in a way that best supports our views.

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.

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.

MacIntyre argues that all modern moral philosophies that drop teleology have ended up here, without always knowing it. And the problem is that emotivism cannot provide any rational justification for moral claims, expressing only preferences. It is not open to abuse because it makes no substantive claims that can be abused.

The notion of essence in neo-Aristotelianism, on the other hand, makes meaty claims about human nature and flourishing, so it gives us a framework for rational moral debate, one that unfortunately can be weaponized by bad actors. You might say that it is neo-Aristotelianism's richness that is the problem. — Jamal

Something I listened to recently, and which is also related to ' post on rationalistic morality in a different thread:

MacIntyre at first responded to Anscombe's call to provide an adequate account of human flourishing by developing a theory of virtue that rejected what he called "Aristotle's metaphysical biology." MacIntyre soon came to see, however, that he was wrong, and this on two levels. First, although there is much in Aristotle's biology that is outmoded, MacIntyre came to see that any adequate account of human virtue must be based on some account of our animality: human virtues are the virtues of a specific type of animal, and our theories of virtue must take this animality into account. Secondly, an adequate portrait of human flourishing must recognize that there are principles within us that are ordered toward this flourishing as toward their proper end. There is a dynamic given-ness to nature that we are called to discover and to respect, on the cognitive level and on the level of the spiritual desires of the will and our passions. Indeed, MacIntyre will affirm that the incoherence of contemporary culture is largely a result of its rejection of this causality. As MacIntyre explains in the prologue of the third edition to After Virtue, his subsequent reading of Aquinas had lead him to deepen his understanding of this aspect of human nature. And this is a quote from MacIntyre, "I had now learned from Aquinas that my attempt to provide an account of the human good purely in social terms—in terms of practices, traditions, and the narrative unity of human lives—was bound to be inadequate until I had provided it with a metaphysical grounding."

MacIntyre was nonetheless still committed to giving a non-rationalistic account of how we come to know these metaphysical principles and live according to them. Thus, he adds, "It is only because human beings have an end toward which they are directed by reason of their specific nature that practices, traditions, and the like are able to function as they do." What MacIntyre means here is that it is precisely because we are metaphysically ordered to flourishing on the level of the principles of intellect and will that A) communities of virtue that promote this flourishing are possible, and that B) barbarous communities that are ignorant of the true nature of human flourishing can also arise. Because this orientation exists on the level of principle, we can wrongly apply these principles and teach others to do so as well. Thus, like Nietzsche, MacIntyre offers a genealogy of the Enlightenment's failure. Unlike Nietzsche, who only discerns a path for the solitary hero, MacIntyre sees that nature offers another path—like Ms. Anscombe—a path for communities of virtue that, by promoting practices within a narrative of human fulfillment developed from within a tradition of inquiry, offer hope for an increasingly dark world. — Fr. Michael Sherwin, OP, Christian Virtue in America's Nietzschean Wasteland: Thomistic Reflections, 29:05

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.

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.

it would ideally be good to find a cure for these kinds of conditions analogous to finding a cure for schizophrenia. — Bob Ross

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. Medically speaking there's nothing wrong with homosexuality, and even something right because it can bring someone happiness. But schizophrenia can result in stress and unhapiness.

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. — Bob Ross

I don't think I'm quoting you out of context because I'm disagreeing with your assertion at the end as clearly as possible: 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"

The reason for the skipped quotes is because those were the bits after reading the thread that I thought most relevant to my reply. 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.

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 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. — Bob Ross

I'd say this is similar to your opening -- you prop your position on the incredulity of the conseuqences of an imagined other. 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...

I'd say that the theory is worse than useless because it's also leading you to believe false things about sexuality on the basis of the philosophical theory rather than on the facts.

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. — Bob Ross

I think you're going to have to pick a side and stick to it here. Aristotelianism, and Epicureanism for that matter which is what I rely upon more in thinking about ethics naturally, is well known for blending factual and normative accounts as if they are not at odds with one another. That is if the OP is about gender theory and whether it's true and you're discussing an Aristotelian alternative then you are also talking about norms, in which case the ethical claims aren't at odds with the factual.

The other way to do this would be to take up Hume's fork and discuss things in terms of strictly description -- but then the Kinsey report demonstrates that your theory is false. People get up to all kinds of sexual acts without calling them degenerate, and that "degenerate" is a normative concept so you'd have to reject Hume's fork and go back to thinking about norms with facts and the curious practical reasonings associated with it.

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. — Bob Ross

No, it's a history. 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.

Now you've put forward one way to talk about "who you are" through Aristotle -- 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?

History is more attentive to the particulars than psychology, for one. The concern isn't to find some overarching psyche that explains human behavior but to understand where we came from and where we're going and rethink where we came from and where we're going and re-understand where we are. The subject of a history needn't be one person or even a group of people. A history on queerness need not only include people who self-identify as queers, for instance. It'd depend upon the theoretical device the given historian or storyteller wanted to use.

That is it doesn't reach for this overarching theory whereby we have strict categories where we can say yes/no in all circumstances. Perspective is important.

That's not to say that there's no reality, though. 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.

To answer your question, your ethical claim here presupposes a flawed understanding of harm, rightness, wrongness, badness, and goodness. — Bob Ross

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?

What is love under your view? — Bob Ross

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.

It's a relationship and an attachment and an instinct and a point of fulfillment.

To your point here:

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'd say that love requires a relationship such that we can support our will for one another, but that relying upon goodwill alone to define the strange mixture that is love is pale to love. The goodwill isn't from afar, is what I mean: it's not a general respect and desire for the wellbeing of others just because they happen to be human. That I'd call respect, whereas love is a relationship between individuals with names.

MacIntyre argues that all modern moral philosophies that drop teleology have ended up here, without always knowing it. And the problem is that emotivism cannot provide any rational justification for moral claims, expressing only preferences. It is not open to abuse because it makes no substantive claims that can be abused. — Jamal

I guess @Banno would probably point to something like Nussbaum’s capability framework as a more useful approach.

I was an emotivist for some time. And I tended to view the art of rational justification as a kind of game; something we do within certain conversational contexts. The source of most of our beliefs is emotional or affective, with reasoning supplied post hoc to make them appear coherent or justified or part of theism's plan. I think emotivism may be returning. Perhaps it would be beneficial if people stopped debating right and wrong and instead understood themselves as having an aesthetic, affective relationship to the world. :wink:

The solution, arguably, is not to discard neo-Aristotelian ideas of essence, but to show how it can be used well, setting out a more humane, and more inclusive teleology—like one that shows how the telos of a human being is fulfilled in relationships of love and mutual flourishing, which can take many forms. I want to say that abandoning the concept of human nature and purpose because it's open to misuse is to surrender the very ground on which we can build a progressive vision of the good life. — Jamal

So, does this make you a foundationalist? Do you think, for instance, Rorty’s neopragmatic view of morality is limited because it doesn’t rely on objective moral truths or universal principles? If all things are socially constructed, contingent conversations, then why do anything in particular?

What is sophistical about the argument I made? — Bob Ross

"According to the results of my philosophy all Chinese are mentally disabled. But this can't be bigotry... If it were, so would calling the mentally disabled, mentally disabled! Nyuk nyuk nyuk!"

Can you see why this doesn't fly? You are comparing your spurious diagnosis to a tautology. Whatever bigotry might be contained in your diagnosis, it will not be found in a tautology. Citing a tautology does nothing.

But at this point, aren't we relying on more theological points? It's hard for me to see how this can be a purely philosophical argument. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Is the opposed view "purely philosophical"? This is one of the double standards at play in such issues, and like the slavery question in my thread, "Beyond the Pale," the double standard is most obvious when it comes to deciding the burden of proof. The anti-metaphysicalists tend to say, "Well if you can't demonstrate your position via purely philosophical arguments, then I guess my position wins by default" (i.e. such a person accepts no onus to provide arguments for their own position, and one manifestation of this within this thread is the emotivism).

The modern egalitarianism that secularity has become so reliant upon is deeply religious, as the historian Tom Holland and others have shown in detail. The struggle between modern egalitarianism and traditional Judeo-Christian morality is basically an internecine conflict about how to weigh different "theological" premises (such as the equal treatment owed in virtue of the imago dei).

The irony in this case is that the modern view is much more religious than the traditional view, and this can be glimpsed by noting that non-Christian cultures are not internally tempted by the positions that the West is now staking out. Egalitarianism is not a conclusion of natural reason. A culture guided by natural reason does not come to the conclusion, for example, that men and women are of equal athletic ability and should compete in the same sports leagues.

but it hardly follows from this that it is somehow wrong to marry some who is sterile when one could marry someone who is fertile, etc. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Isn't this a bit like what you argue against in posts like <this one>? You seem to be saying something like, "Well it would be better, but it's not morally obligatory."

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. — Bob Ross

How do I tell the difference between natural and non-natural? Or how do you tell it? Is the sex act a joyful act or a painful duty? Is the sex I have with my 25 year post-menopausal wife degenerate, sinful, inferior, because she is not going to get pregnant? And if not, then why is the sex of a homosexual so different? What distinguishes real nature from fake/ersatz/inferior/degenerate/perverse/ nature?

Can you see why this doesn't fly? — hypericin

Why doesn't it fly?

1. Supposition: It is bigotry to call an entire class of people mentally ill
2. Mental illnesses are categories based on classes of people
3. Therefore, anyone who believes in mental illness is a bigot (reductio ad absurdum)

The argument is surely valid. For example, if we say that the entire class of people with schizophrenia are mentally ill, then according to (1) we must be a bigot. (The vacuous case where one calls the class of mentally ill people mentally ill is not necessary in order to secure (3).)

The problem is with your claim in (1). Bigotry involves a mode of behavior or belief, and therefore cannot be identified by merely pointing to a behavior or belief. For example, if bigotry is defined as "obstinate attachment to a belief," then the holding of a material position can never be sufficient for bigotry. This is because obstinacy is a mode of belief, and no belief is inherently obstinate. If "calling an entire class of people mentally ill" were intrinsically bigoted, then the DSM-5 would be a book chock full of bigotry.

The word "bigotry" is being used in this thread merely as a slur, in order to undermine a person's reputation so that their claims might be found less persuasive. The reason it backfires with @Bob Ross is because we all know him. He is not obstinate. He changes his mind often, adding edits to his OPs or writing new threads where he disagrees with former positions. It is a credit that such a slur has trouble "sticking" to him.

Perhaps the prima facie objection to labeling homosexuality a mental illness has to do with the fact that mental illness tends to justify coercive action, and coercive action is seen as inappropriate with respect to sexual orientation. But not all mental illnesses justify coercive action. Depression, for example, generally does not.

I think what the Christian conservative use of neo-Aristotelian ideas of essence shows is that teleological frameworks are powerful and thus open to abuse. — Jamal

This seems to me to touch on my questioning of the veracity of Bob's Neo-Aristotelianism . My vague recollections of Aristotle do not much cohere with the reactionary and authoritarian direction that our Aristotelian friends hereabouts seem to share.

So it may well be that I am mistakenly blaming Aristotle for the errors of @Bob Ross, @Leontiskos and perhaps @Count Timothy von Icarus.

What is admirable in MacIntyre is the critique of emotivism, a suspicion of abstract moral theorising and especially the embedding of ethics in a social context. But I'm sceptical as to teleological accounts that link what it supposedly is to be human to what we ought do - although I might be convinced - grounding "ought" in teleology appears to be a category mistake. And the turn to "traditional" values is just too convenient.

The core of my disparagement of Aristotelian essentialism is the hollowness of "that which makes a thing what it is, and not another thing". It doesn't appear to do any work, and to presuppose a referential approach to language that I hold to be demonstrably false.

There is indeed an unresolved tension in my thinking, in an admiration for both Anscombe and Foot (to whom Macintyre owes a great debt) together with a more progressive attitude than either. I do not accept the authoritarianism of Anscombe, nor the emphasis on tradition in Foot. I'll add Rawls and Nussbaum to the mix, and I think we might translate Aristotelian ethics into a modern, inclusive agenda. I'd hope that we might proceed without a "thick" ethics of tradition or evolutionary constraint, and proceed instead with a "thin" ethics of autonomy, dignity, and realised capabilities. Small steps over grand themes.

Excellent post, Jamal. I hope you succeed in shaking up the conversation here.

- A substantive post. :up: