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:

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. The procreative function of romantic relationships is too weak to justify a claim that homosexuality is a vice per se. To be sure, it might be better if, if one wanted, one could have children with one's spouse, 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

As long as we’re indulging in theological issues regarding the issue of marriage between men and women, maybe it ought not be forgotten that the English term “woman” etymologically can well be interpreted as stemming from the “wif” (wife) + (of) “mann” (a person/human being). So interpreted this semantics rings true to Genesis addressing Eve to be born from the rib of Adam, with only the latter being endowed with the Lord’s breath (anima, i.e. soul)—such that the women, Eve, is not soul-endowed (a theme recent enough to have been addressed even by Virginia Wolff); and such that women are thereby not fully developed “persons/human beings”. This interpretation also coheres fluidly with the historic Abrahamic notion of wives, and women in general, being the living property of men, second maybe to cattle and other domesticated beasts. Whether in monogamy or in polygamy (harems and such) makes no difference on this count.

This to bring to light that historically in many an Abrahamic tradition, wives were seen not as equals in personhood but as means, a vessel or vehicle, for men to reproduce their bloodline. And, in this specific light, for two men to copulate was an abomination on multiple levels, not just that of inability to reproduce one or the other’s bloodline.

But moreover, I also want to draw strong attention to the fact that marriage has not historically been about what we currently most commonly deem it to be: two people in romantic love, which entails agape for each other, who desire to so remain bound for the remainder of their lives and, in so remaining, who then hold the possibility of being functional—else proper, fitting, or good—caretakers for the children that might thereby result. Instead, historically, marriage was first and foremost about the property, territory, networking, and the general wealth of two cohorts, of two families, becoming entwined and thereby converged. Yes, offspring were important, but far more due to their instrumental value in further propagating this very same convergence of wealth. This by contrast to their being of mostly intrinsic value for the parents which thereby value their children as smaller, yet to be fully developed, fellow equals of human worth. (Quite obviously, I’m here addressing historical generalities and not absolutes.)

Hence, the notion that the primary purpose of marriage is, or has historically been, to reproduce is a bit of joke in light of the surplus of evidence that presents itself.

I’ll just end with this:

Homosexuals, just like Shakers, can well adopt those children that were unwanted by their own parents—this if they so desire to have children of their own. God knows there are far too many unwanted children in this world. And as has been evidenced time and time again, being raised by two gay men or two gay women does not in any way convert the naturally inborn sexual inclinations of the child come their adulthood. But maybe more importantly, if gay folk want to be monogamous for the remainder of their lives, then let them so be via marriage. They ought not be condemned to forced promiscuity or else celibacy or else in any other way punished for their monogamy-aiming aspirations (such as via lack of corresponding legal rights)—however implicit this proclamation might be.

As to pedophiles, it’s a far more heated subject, at least for me, than your posts make it appear. This because the issue too easily converges with that of child molestation and child sex trafficking (currently on the rise in the West). I do get many of the nuances (not all pedophiles are child molesters nor vice versa, etc.) but, to my ears, to casually place “homosexuals” and “pedophiles” into the same sentence or paragraph via comparisons is grossly unesthetic, to here keep thing superficial.

I do have more to say, but, as you've mentioned, all this tends to depart from what it seems we both take to be sincere philosophical questions and topics. And I’m not overly interested in debating non-philosophical issues at the current time.

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

Indeed, I did. Somewhere away from mere tradition and the Grand Ethic we might find the piecemeal improvement of individual human lives.

To provide the context for this mega-post, let's look at MacIntyre's diagnosis of modern moral debate:

The most striking feature of contemporary moral utterance is that so much of it is used to express disagreements; and the most striking feature of the debates in which these disagreements are expressed is their interminable character. I do not mean by this just that such debates go on and on and on—although they do—but also that they apparently can find no terminus. There seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement in our culture. — MacIntyre

Every one of the arguments is logically valid or can be easily expanded so as to be made so; the conclusions do indeed follow from the premises. But the rival premises are such that we possess no rational way of weighing the claims of one as against another. For each premise employs some quite different normative or evaluative concept from the others, so that the claims made upon us are of quite different kinds. — MacIntyre

If this is the case for all moral debate, are we all condemned to engagement in eristic, i.e., rhetoric with the sole aim of winning, a practice which is unphilosophical or even irrational? In other words, is this discussion necessarily just a fight rather than a shared quest for truth?

The answer, I think, is not exactly. MacIntyre in that second paragraph is referring back to his examples, which show a tendency in our culture, perhaps not a necessity. I think we can argue rationally for the superiority of our premises, but with the aim of persuasion, i.e., of winning the battle.

Traditionally, going back to Socrates, you're either seeking truth or trying to win. But why not both? In the case of this discussion I think I can produce an argument with a dual function: (a) to be read by those who share my premises (e.g., that homosexuality is not immoral, degenerate, or mentally or otherwise defective), it strengthens our shared understanding or explores how we can understand these moral positions better; and (b) to be read by wavering opponents and fence-sitters, it is simultaneously a public demonstration of our moral framework's superiority to that of the Christian conservatives.

Regarding (b), this superiority isn't a matter of preference, but rather of rational justification: a moral framework is better if it is more comprehensive, coherent, and leads to a more humane society. I hope to show that Bob's framework fails on all three counts.

So...

The natural ends of a sex organ, as a sex organ, is to procreate; which is exemplified by its shape, functions (e.g., ejaculation, erections, etc. for a penis), and its evolutionary and biological relation to the opposite (supplementary) sex organ of the opposite sex. — Bob Ross

I was giving you an example to demonstrate that it is bad. Badness is the privation of goodness; and goodness is the equality of a being’s essence and esse. Rightness and wrongness are about behaving in accord or disaccord with what is good (respectively). If you don’t agree with me that it is a privation of the design (or ‘function’) of the human sex organs to be put in places they are designed to go, all else being equal, then we need to hash that out first. — Bob Ross

(My bold)

So one side says anal sex violates the natural ends of both organs and is therefore a privation of goodness, and the other says no, it doesn't and it isn't (maybe they point out that singing is not a violation of the natural end of the mouth). Who is right? What would it mean to "hash it out"?

Wouldn’t you agree that being homosexual or transgender is a result of socio-psychological disorders or/and biological developmental issues? Do you really believe that a perfectly healthy (psychologically and biologically) human that grows up on an environment perfectly conducive to human flourishing would end up with the desire to have sex with the same sex? Do you think a part of our biological programming is to insert a sex organ into an organ designed to defecate? — Bob Ross

Pointing out the weakness or fallaciousness of these comments would be uncharitable (everyone ought to get some leeway when it comes to rhetoric)---were they not so revealing. Assuming that MacIntyre's diagnosis is about right and that engaging Bob on his own terms would be yet another of those interminable debates, we're each free to engage in metacritique, examining the opponent's ideas in terms of their genesis, while ignoring their validity (the latter is uninteresting: if non-procreative sex is immoral/bad/unnatural, we'll grant you all the rest).

I mean, we could critique the position immanently by pushing its concepts to breaking point. For example, if all non-procreative sex acts are degenerate and morally corrupt, then heterosexual anal sex, oral sex, and even kissing and touching, are degenerate and morally corrupt. That diverges sufficiently from human experience that it strikes one as preposterous. But if only some of those acts are bad, why? Why isn't kissing a violation of the natural end of the mouth and a privation of goodness? And if some non-procreative sex acts are morally ok if they provide a context for procreation or if they are the same kind of act as procreation, then what justifies the privileging of this kind of act over another? It must be something separate from biological function. (It is, of course, the prior commitment to conservative Christian morality.)

But ultimately there's little benefit in hashing out the telos of the rectum. The proponents of Thomist natural law no doubt have many elegant and logically consistent responses to all of the objections above, and we get another instance of interminable moral debate that doesn't touch what I think is interesting and important, namely the genesis and the social meaning of the ideas.

Homosexuality is defective: it can be defective biologically and/or socio-psychologically. Heterosexuality is defective sometimes socio-psychologically.

Homosexuality is always defective because, at a minimum, it involves an unnatural attraction to the same sex which is a privation of their human nature (and usually of no real fault of their own); whereas heterosexuality is not per se because, at a minimum, it involves the natural attraction to the opposite sex.

Now, heterosexuality can be defective if the person is engaging in opposite-sex attraction and/or actions that are sexually degenerate; but this will always be the result of environmental or/and psychological (self) conditioning. The underlying attraction is not bad: it's the lack of disciple, lack of habit towards using that attraction properly, and (usually) uncontrollable urges towards depriving sexual acts. — Bob Ross

So I'll now do a metacritique which attempts to expose the genesis of Bob's ideas. Note that I'm not addressing the OP so much as other comments made in this thread, so if I focus on homosexuality instead of transgenderism, that's why. If that counts as off-topic, I'm dreadfully sorry.

I'm going to make use of a concept from Adorno's philosophy: the non-identical.

Identity thinking is the reduction of things to instances or specimens of an abstract category, thus failing to capture or coercively suppressing the thing's singularness and its actuality. What the categorial concept either fails to capture or suppresses is called the non-identical.

In the Negative Dialectics reading group I included the following as an item in a list that answered the question, what's so bad about identity thinking?:

Stereotyping and prejudice: Individuals are treated merely as representatives of group identities — race, nationality, religion, sexual orientation — and their unique features are ignored. Individuals are collapsed into presumed essences. — Jamal

Bob's arguments constitute a textbook case of this identity thinking: 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.

This is not accidental. It is the symptom of real conflict, suffering and domination. The genesis of this particular discourse is not in Aristotle or even Saint Thomas, but in the specific social trauma of the contemporary culture war. It is the response of a fundamentalist ideology, whose proponents have long since been unable to assume cultural dominance, to the threat of pluralism. It may even represent the assertiveness of a revitalized Christian right that now hopes to get over this marginalization. Coercive identity thinking is a form of psychosocial compensation: it seeks to resolve through forcible categorization the social anxiety produced by a world it cannot control.

As it happens, even the categories of trans person, gay man, etc., are examples of identity thinking and therefore have this coercive potential, if we forget that individuals are more than that. So Adorno wouldn't deny that categorization is necessary even just to think; what he alerted us to is the constant risk of coercion built into reason.

But that's the point. Bob represents an identity thinking of the coercive kind. The censorious impulse on display in Bob's more careless comments reveals that he is not presenting the result of a disinterested contemplation of organs and sexual practices. Rather, his arguments work to impose, to force, and to control, according to those impulses. But I don't want to reduce this to psychology: in its reliance on pathologization and its anachronistic demand for public priority---it demands priority over all other frameworks despite the fact that it's pre-modern and decontextualized---the argument functions politically, regardless of any personal motives: to impose a social hierarchy by cancelling rival ways of life.

It is clearest in his least philosophical comments. Note the language: "disorder," "defect," "degeneracy," and "privation". It's a tactical move that translates a social and political question about which forms of life our society should recognize into a clinical one about how we diagnose and cure this illness. This allows the argument to present itself as compassionate (always the protestation "I don't hate them, I just want to help them") while its function is to negate the legitimacy of certain ways of being.

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.

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. 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".

This takes me back to my first comment in the discussion.

My thoughts are that all you're doing is cloaking bigotry with philosophy to give it the appearance of intellectual depth, as part of a hateful and destructive reactionary political and religious movement. — Jamal

I admit that this was immoderate, in the personal nature of the attack. But I want it to be understood as a description of the ideological function of Bob's comments, rather than a personal accusation. In more detail, this function is the anachronistic use of Thomist Aristotelianism as the respectable-looking outward appearance for an attack on pluralism, an attempt to use the language of timeless nature to delegitimize a rival social vision and re-establish a lost cultural dominance---and along the way, to exclude, stigmatize, and pathologize people on the basis of aspects of their identity and of the private, consensual relationships in which they find human connection, and which produce no demonstrable public harm.

To all the wavering opponents and fence-sitters: I hope I've gone some way towards demonstrating the superiority of my premises. The way it breaks down is that respect for the rights of gay and trans people and the refusal to accept that they are, merely according to those identities, degenerate, immoral, or defective---this moral framework is superior to Bob's premises because it is...

1. More comprehensive: it accounts for the full range of human experiences of love, pleasure, and intimacy.

2. More coherent: it avoids arbitrarily picking one biological function as the sacred one, while damning all the others to hell.

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.

Lastly...

I am saying a particular kind of sex act is wrong if it is contrary to the natural ends and teleology of a human. I think this even holds in atheistic views that are forms of moral naturalism like Filippe Foote’s ‘natural goodness’. — Bob Ross

Odd that Bob managed to misgender Philippa Foot. :razz:

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. — Leontiskos

That's a fair point. I don't think there is an obvious "default." As I pointed out, a number of traditions move towards seeing all sexual relations as, at best, unnecessary, and so one could argue that all that is required is that marriage is itself justified.

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." — Leontiskos

Sure, but I here just thinking through the traditional response "out loud." Traditionally, it has not been considered a "misordered love" to marry someone of the opposite sex who is sterile, or for elderly people to marry, no?

This is why I think any sort of justification has to rest on a thicker philosophy of sex and anthropology (which personalists do get into in more modern terms).

and we get another instance of interminable moral debate that doesn't touch what I think is interesting and important, namely the genesis and the social meaning of the ideas. — Jamal

This is interesting because this is exactly the sort of critique Rosaria Butterfield, who had been a lesbian professor of queer studies and is now married to a male pastor, levels against modern LGBT categories. That is, they are a sort of coercive identity thinking, particularly when taught at state schools and framed as (relatively) immutable and immune to agency. It makes sense given her background in post-modern and critical theory and new orientation I suppose. You know, something like: "I found my true identity in Christ, despite what the controlling cultural dialectic tried to tell me." To me, this sort of thing always suggest the interminability of post-modern arguments and arguments from psycho-analysis more generally.

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. — Jamal

It's worth noting here that Thomas himself did not think that it was prudent to criminalize all manner of behaviors he considered harmful. For instance, prostitution and gambling. Unless you mean "authorities" in the broadest sense, in which case any society that allows religious freedom will fail at 3, no? So, we will be forced to either tell imams, priests, and rabbis that they cannot speak with their authority on certain issues, or else default on 3.

Nicely written response.

I am reminded of David Bentley Hart's quip on his blog:

among the fundamentalists I include not just the white evangelical fundamentalists, I mean a lot of the Thomists I know. They might not be six day creationists, but they read the Bible as a set of propositional algorithms for constructing social reality. They don’t read it as the inspired occasion of reading that requires interpretation, tact, speculative daring, and the sense that there is the law of love, and the law of the spirit, without which the text slays.

Of course, conservative Christians are often critical of Hart because they disagree with his understanding of the Gospels as a call to inclusion and diversity, not that they would frame it this way... .

What we might need in these discussions are philosophically adroit theists who are not aligned with reactionary, anti-enlightenment projects. Ultimately these debates usually end up as tedious theism-versus-atheism worldview arguments.

philosophically adroit theists who are not aligned with reactionary, anti-enlightenment projects — Tom Storm

By a happy coincidence I am currently reading In Search of Radical Theology: Expositions, Explorations, Exhortations by John D. Caputo.

It is a re-telling of Western theology from the perspective of Heidegger and Derrida - quite a blast of fresh air. Stay tuned ...

I come from a fairly progressive country and the Christian tradition I grew up in here is inclusive and welcoming to gay and trans people - right wing anti-modernist Christianity is less familiar to me. I am not sure if Caputo has written on gay or trans rights, but his history suggests an identification with marginalized oppressed groups.

What is your position on homosexuality and how do you see it in a Christian context?

Hi Tom. I've just started reading this guy Caputo he has written a lot and I think I am going to love him. As far as I can tell so far his is definitely within the liberal tradition and for example has an explicit concern with respect to climate change.

I have some fairly strong conservative leanings. For me the story of the Bible and the kerygma of the "Christ event" is one of the most extraordinary, unexpected, exciting things to ever exist in history.

I also think that liberalism has produced various disasters in ethics - I have strong feelings about abortion, for example.

"Individual autonomy is the highest good" is what I identify as the root of all my disagreements, and the conception of freedom as "freedom from" rather than "freedom for" leads to a culture of relativism, where no objective moral order guides political life.

But on many other issues of the "culture wars" I am much more of a libertarian.

My position on a lot of those issues is: If it does not harm the person or property of a nonconsenting other adult, it should not be prohibited.

My position on homosexuality is basically that.

Now, this libertarian principle is complicated for a Christian - it would, for example, legalize prostitution, I suppose.

So that libertarian principle is not a "Christian context" per se, but perhaps I am being unfair to liberalism, because that kind of libertarian principle could only have ever arisen in a liberal society.

The trans thing I am much less clear about - I am not particularly a fan of trans women playing rugby with the girls, for example, I don't think that's fair.

Wow, you cover a lot of eclectic views there.

The trans thing I am much less clear about - I am not particularly a fan of trans women playing rugby with the girls, for example, I don't think that's fair. — Colo Millz

I don’t support all trans activist demands. But I think the issues of sports, prisons, and toilets are relatively minor and are matters we can negotiate and develop procedural responses to.

I have some fairly strong conservative leanings. For me the story of the Bible and the kerygma of the "Christ event" is one of the most extraordinary, unexpected, exciting things to ever exist in history. — Colo Millz

Why do you choose to believe this story over Islam, Hinduism or Buddhism's extraordinary stories?

Hence, the notion that the primary purpose of marriage is, or has historically been, to reproduce is a bit of joke in light of the surplus of evidence that presents itself. — javra

I'm not really sure what you mean here. That is precisely how marriage tended to be viewed by philosophers and theologians. Of course, these pre-modern thinkers would probably be the first to agree that "most people" behave contrary to this ideal, but that doesn't amount to evidence that it wasn't the ideal. Also, most people were peasant serfs (and earlier, many were slaves) and so not particularly focused on alliances and amassing generational wealth and prestige.

Homosexuals, just like Shakers, can well adopt those children that were unwanted by their own parents—this if they so desire to have children of their own. God knows there are far too many unwanted children in this world. And as has been evidenced time and time again, being raised by two gay men or two gay women does not in any way convert the naturally inborn sexual inclinations of the child come their adulthood. But maybe more importantly, if gay folk want to be monogamous for the remainder of their lives, then let them so be via marriage. They ought not be condemned to forced promiscuity or else celibacy or else in any other way punished for their monogamy-aiming aspirations (such via lack of corresponding legal rights)—however implicit this proclamation might be. — javra

I'd imagine that many people who view homosexuality as a sort of imperfection could agree with this though, no? My extremely Catholic grandmothers were fine with civil unions, back when that was a thing. It's not like those who see gluttony as defect want to ban fancy food (and here "gluttony" traditionally referred not only to over consumption, but any undue focus on food).

The issue of "condemnation" is interesting though. Leaving aside homosexuality for a moment, there is the whole idea that any notion of gluttony is "fat shaming" or perhaps "consumption shaming." To speak of licentiousness is "slut shaming," etc. There are all "personal choices," and all personal choices are relative to the individual, so long as they do not transgress the limits of liberal autonomy and infringe on others, or so the reasoning seems to go.

I do wonder if the shift in moral language is part of the difficulty here. To say something is "bad" becomes to describe it as possessing a sort of specific "moral evil." But this is hardly what was traditionally meant by gluttony being "evil." It was a misordering of desire, although towards something that is truly desirable, and didn't denote anything "horrific."

So, to 's point, this is perhaps more an issue with liberalism. Liberalism has a strong sense of the "morally bad" as distinct, because everything else is personal choice, and so to say anything is bad, that it "ought not be done" or that it is "not ideal" become a sort of "condemnation."

Of course, this says nothing about whether homosexuality is ideal or not, I only mean to underscore where certain tensions come from.

Now, this libertarian principle is complicated for a Christian - it would, for example, legalize prostitution, I suppose. — Colo Millz

Well, it depends if you accept the liberal anthropology of man as a more or less atomized actor. That is, are such "personal choices" really only effecting the people who make them? Or more to the point, should the law be instructive, so as to lead people (both individually, but also collectively) towards virtue in a positive sense, as an aid to virtue. That's how Saint Thomas thinks of human laws, as aids. However, he also didn't think it made sense to make many vices illegal.

To be honest, it has always seemed bizarre to me that prostitution is illegal, but then all manner of pornography is incredibly easy to access for children. The latter seems to have a far more corrosive and dehumanizing effect, and I think feminist critiques of the porn industry have a lot of bite. Of course, prostitution involves objectification, but pornography seems to take this to another level.

That's a fair point. I don't think there is an obvious "default." — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think the point goes rather deep. Substantive moral argumentation has dried up in the West. This is why, for example, some dismissed @Bob Ross by telling him that he is fallaciously drawing an 'ought' from an 'is'. The problem is that folks in the West are actually no longer capable of offering rational arguments for moral and political positions, and the anti-metaphysical and anti-religious slogans are part and parcel of that incapacity.

What occurs as a result is that one excludes moral and political positions that they don't like with reasons that they fail to apply to themselves. We see positions like the one taken in Beyond the Pale, "His slavery-claims are disallowed because they are not rationally valid," and the unspoken part reads, "...and because my position is the default position I do not need to offer any rationally valid arguments for why slavery should be disallowed." Or as we have seen, the only offering for why one's position should be maintained is because a democratic majority upholds it (and nevermind the question about why slavery was wrong when the majority favored it).

This is obviously the quandary that Anscombe, MacIntyre, et al. were wrestling with, but it really hasn't left us.

Sure, but I here just thinking through the traditional response "out loud." Traditionally, it has not been considered a "misordered love" to marry someone of the opposite sex who is sterile, or for elderly people to marry, no? — Count Timothy von Icarus

We could talk about such things, but given the example you provided, I would simply concede that one should prefer a fertile marriage to a sterile marriage (ceteris paribus). Or using your own language, if it is better to marry a fertile wife than a sterile wife, then it is more choiceworthy to marry a fertile wife.

As to the more general question, we would need to specify the proposition in question. For example, we might want to talk about the proposition, "A sterile marriage or a sterile sexual act is necessarily illicit." I would say this relies on modal reasoning in the same way that "moral obligation" challenges rely on modal reasoning, and I think there are good Aristotelian answers to be had, but I will postpone the question for now given the complexity of this thread. That's the sort of question that could perhaps benefit from a different thread altogether.

instead, they are trying to cancel me. — Bob Ross

"trying to cancel you" would amount to some sort of moderator action, or people trying to bully you off the website...so far, i haven't seen anyone whatsoever doing that to you. It seems to me that you're having trouble dealing with large volumes of disagreement. The point of philosophy is not for everyone to come to the same conclusion, but to discuss and argue, among making statements about your truth.

Why do you choose to belive this story over Islam, Hinduism or Buddhism's extraordinary stories? — Tom Storm

Well I don't want to proselytize but the classical way of answering that is that I did not choose that particular story, the story chose me.

And as far as Hinduism or Buddhism is concerned I went through periods where those traditions were (they still are) incredibly precious to me. Part of the attraction of Hinduism was that I found the "system" of Advaita to be more or less philosophical and similarly with Mahayana Buddhism, the Madhyamika thinkers like Nagarjuna and Chandrakirti were "philosophical" in that sense also. I found them to be attractive because I could get my mind around them, it wasn't just a matter of blind faith.

To attempt a more sophisticated answer to your original question about "Christian context", I think where I live (in the US) right now what we seem to be witnessing is the elimination of classical liberalism as a viable politics any more, and so what we are left with is the battleground between the two other ideologies, conservatism and leftism. Biden, for example, governed from the left.

In another thread Banno said that what was happening in the US was the "murder" of liberalism. I think honestly we are past that point at this stage, I think what we are looking at is its death-twitches. The wave of woke-ism seems to have crested and is largely over.

I don’t believe one can be appropriately loving to someone whose identity one denies and considers perversion. — Tom Storm

Really? This seems to me one of hte most potent and obvious oddities of humanity. There are plenty of people whos lifestyles I think are damaging (to themselves/those around them or society at large) and I think it s perverse that they defend their life style (funnily enough, plenty of gender theory types run along these lines - I don't suggest that being interested in gender causes one to be immoral, but I do think immoral people tend to be drawn to the more liberal communities abouts). That says absolutely nothing, whatsoever, about how i feel about them as a human.

If someone comes to me, and is visibly on drugs, obviously unable to calm themselves and has a bad time - and this happens three days in a row, I lose no love but i lose patience.

For these reasons, among others, I very much (morally) hope that some weird frankenstein of those thinker's ethical positions never makes it way into the mainstream.

The issue of "condemnation" is interesting though. Leaving aside homosexuality for a moment, there is the whole idea that any notion of gluttony is "fat shaming" or perhaps "consumption shaming." To speak of licentiousness is "slut shaming," etc. There are all "personal choices," and all personal choices are relative to the individual, so long as they do not transgress the limits of liberal autonomy and infringe on others, or so the reasoning seems to go. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Hmm, i definitely agree with this and it seems to illustrate an unwillingness to be morally mature in a person who makes those claims (again, funnily, plenty of gender theory types take that exact bent to anything and everything they can possibly shoehorn a complaint into). However, it seems to me we are free to criticise other's personal choices. I am not homophobic, but if i had some deep-seated issue wit homosexuality (assuming it's not a closeted issue) I don't see why I am somehow morally suppressed from explanation or sharing of my ideas there.

Interesting response, thanks. But I'm still not sure why Christianity was convincing to you.

To attempt a more sophisticated answer to your original question about "Christian context", I think where I live (in the US) right now what we seem to be witnessing is the elimination of classical liberalism as a viable politics any more, and so what we are left with is the battleground between the two other ideologies, conservatism and leftism. Biden, for example, governed from the left. — Colo Millz

I'm not sure “left” and “right” have much meaning these days in politics. Isn’t what we’re living in really corporatism, with huge companies and their owners siphoning up the wealth of the land? I thought Biden was a centrist. Trump isn’t a conservative; he may be an authoritarian, right-wing statist, but he doesn’t seem interested in conserving many traditions. Australia, where I am, is still a liberal and generally progressive country, although we currently have a Labor government that’s somewhat to the right. I don’t think most voters have much understanding or interest in liberalism or of left–right politics; it’s seems to be driven by emotion and how they belvie a party or candidate will affect them financially.