. Do animals get angry and does blame play a role? — Tom Storm

I would say yes, the higher mammals can ‘scold’ another they are friendly with for violating an expectation.

Let me ask you this: do you think you personally can get rid of the ALL of the following feelings in response to the actions of others?

I take expression of blame to include: irritation, annoyance, disapproval, condemnation, feeling insulted, taking umbrage, resentment, exasperation, impatience, hatred, ire, outrage, contempt, righteous or moral indignation, ‘adaptive’ anger, perceiving the other as deliberately thoughtless, lazy, disresectful, cruel, culpable, prideful, perverse, corrupt, tyrannical, inconsiderate, deliberately oppressive, repressive or unfair, a miscreant, insulting, rude, racist, anti-semitic, homophobic, misogynistic, seeing the other as a willful perpetuator of social injustice or injustice in general, as committing a moral wrong, disrespectful, disgraceful, greedy, evil, sinful, criminal, narcissistic.

Anger and blame achieve the establishment of boundaries and rules, in different settings, in social situations. The cause is secondary, it is separate. Even if you got rid of blame, we'd only see a change in tone while the same punishment is being delivered — Judaka

Would we still call it punishment if we believed that the other’s motives were not only in their own interests but in the interest of those they allegedly ‘wronged’? And furthermore, that we agree that given the level
of their understanding at the time they took action, their actions were indeed the best they could
possibly do? In other words, dont we only want to punish when we believe the ‘guilty’ party knew or should have known better?

For instance, this:

The common people, whose convictions are the result of emotional impulse and not rational inquiry, will always be vulnerable to vicious, hateful Demagoguery — Michael Sol

Notice that here we have a combination of irrational emotion and willful evil that form the recipe of righteous anger.

Would you punish a child who locked a nose-bleeding friend in the closet because she was told by another child that a bloody nose is a deadly contagion that can wipe out a whole community?
Or would you teach them what they would like to know anyway?
Do we punish individuals who ostracize deviants because the medicinal folk ways they grew up with i. their very traditional cultures tell them the deviants are
evil? And if we do, isn’t it. asked o. the assumption. they should have known better?

I would argue the cause of blameful rules isnt secondary, it is the primary instigator for the rules and what motivates us recognize that they have been violated. Anger begins with surprise and disappointment. It is a puzzlement. Without this puzzlement and disappointment there is no anger and no blame.

I think most crime shows impairment in decision making, — Judaka

That’s a form of blame, the attribution of irrationality to another. If we believe that one’s motives can be swayed in irrational directions, then our anger tells us we may be able to away them back into the fold. Derk Pereboom’s blame skepticism makes a similar argument, leading to a pared down notion of blame.

I think anger satisfies an emotional need and I believe many of us seethe in hatreds and bigotries already and we are always on the look out for events or cues to activate these emotions. I come to this from work I have undertaken with violent offenders over the years. If this is not relevant please let me know. — Tom Storm

The thing is , people play around with the word anger, because it has a negative connotation of violence , lack of control , irrationality and self-aggrandizement.Nobody want to admit that they get angry a lot.
They tell us we can eliminate anger, control it , suppress it, substitute in its place compassion and forgiveness. But none of these arguments gets to the heart of the matter , which isnt the expression of anger per se but blame.
None of the authors who suggest a substitute for anger
believe we can get rid of blame. In fact, I would argue that their philosophies are absolutely dependent on a notion of blame at their very core.

For instance, Gendlin, a phenomenological psychologist allied with Merleau-Ponty, considers anger to be potentially adaptive. He says that one must attempt to reassess, reinterpret, elaborate the angering experience via felt awareness not in order to eliminate the feeling of anger but so that one's anger becomes “fresh, expansive, active, constructive, and varies with changes in the situation”. “Anger may help handle the situation because it may make the other change or back away. Anger can also help the situation because it may break it entirely and thus give you new circumstances.” “ Anger is healthy, while resentment and hate are detrimental to the organism.”

The social constructionist Ken Gergen writes that anger has a valid role to play in social co- ordination “There are certain times and places in which anger is the most effective move in the dance.”

Merleau-Ponty scholar John Russon(2020) offers:

“Anger can be unjustified, to be sure, and in that case it enacts a fundamentally distorted portrayal of the other. But anger can also be justified, and in that case it can be the only frame of mind in which the vicious and hateful reality of the other is truly recognized.” (The Place of Love).

Robert Solomon (1977), champion of the view that emotions are central to meaning and significance in human life, says that anger can be ‘right'.

“ Anger, for example, is not just a burst of venom, and it is not as such sinful, nor is it necessarily a “negative” emotion. It can be “righteous,” and it can sometimes be right.”

What I am suggesting is that we can get rid of the concept of blame, but only when. we stop thinking of motive and intent as potentially arbitrary , capricious , vulnerable to bodily-emotive and social conditioning and shaping.

I dont know any philosopher or psychologist who follows me here , except perhaps George Kelly , and I may be misreading him. The closest to my position are Derrida, Heidegger and Gendlin.

Yes, I think a key attribute of anger and blame is that if can feel so righteous and satisfying and can provide purpose and structure to people's lives - a narrative built around a grievance can bring forth a worldview and one can feel 'blameless' and perhaps even 'sacred' in this process. I — Tom Storm

Do you think that anger and blame are also the only way we can think of to improve certain situations where the other acts in ways that appear capricious and ‘wayward’ to us, such that our anger tells us we can ‘ knock some sense’ back into them?

The question , then, is whether there is a way of looking at human motives such that what is good for
each of us when we make a choice is never meant to be in deliberate conflict with the desires of
others( unless of course we feel they need to be punished). I suggest the only way to understand motive
this way is as a form of anticipatory sense making that intrinsically takes others into consideration , given that they are a crucial element of our sense making. We blame when we attribute the ‘waywardness’ to the other’s actions, rather than in our inadequate construction of them.

The idea here is that motive can never be wayward, and therefore blame is always a failure of our own understanding.

And I reject this view. First of all, I don't use free-will philosophically to argue about why guilt, blame, and punishment is a just view. Humans are psychologically predisposed to recognize these 3 elements. So, I use the psychological framework to make a statement about moral agency. — L'éléphant

My view on blame is a further development of the approaches of Heidegger and Derrida. Neither of them are determinists, nor are they free-will advocates.
I would simply suggest that the history of blame is directly correlated with a progressive philosophical and psychological understanding. The more fundamentalist the view of human nature, the harsher the blame that is considered justified. Enlightenment free will philosophy, while rejecting religious fundamentalism, shares with religious thinking of its era the assumption of an atomized autonomous subject that controls what it wills. This view doesnt understand the reciprocal interconnection between individual will and the social system in which it is embedded, leading to a profoundly arbitrary view of freedom.

For Strawson, the recognition of freedom is the cause and basis of resentment (roughly blame in the sense of the OP). For Joshs the recognition of freedom is the basis of 'thinking beyond' blame. Same observation - opposite conclusions. Something interesting going on here. — Cuthbert

Strawson’s analysis here is too abstract and general to take into account what we already know about the changing blame behaviors and notions of fairness and justice that have taken place over the course of recent cultural history.

To the extent that recent approaches have taken the sting out of blame it is because they have rethought the traditional religious and Enlightenment ideas of freedom of will’. Derk Pereboom’s and Galen Strawson’s rejection of free will desert-based blame in favor of determinism is one example, postmodernism’s social construction of blame is another., and Derrida and Heidegger’s deconstruction of presence is yet another.

You haven't addressed my points as far as I can tell. Doesn't the cat have its own life,nature and attributes, which contribute to constituting anyone's perception of it? — Janus

I’m going to be lazy and hide behind the following quotes. Let me know if they answer your question.

Ratcliffe says:

“The unquestioned givenness of the objective world that is constitutive of scientific descriptions cannot capture the way in which the given is disclosed by a meaning-giving background. Thus, if anything, it is the transcendental, meaning-giving account that has ontological priority over an objective/causal description.”

Zahavi concurs with Ratcliffe:

“Ultimately, what we call “reality” is so deeply suffused with mind- and language-dependent structures that it is altogether impossible to make a neat distinction between those parts of our beliefs that reflect the world “in itself” and those parts of our beliefs that simply express “our
conceptual contribution.” The very idea that our cognition should be nothing but a re-presentation of something mind-independent consequently has to be abandoned.”

this one is not capricious or random -- it has a root cause. — L'éléphant

But mental illness understood as a pathology is another name for randomness. The cause is arbitrary.

They don't aimlessly wander around separated from their minds and decision-making. — L'éléphant

But you haven’t articulated this decision-making in terms
of how it differs from a morally ‘correct’ decision-making. What cause some to do what is incorrect? Why are some self-centered and self-absorbed but not others? Is it a certain randomness or arbitrariness that lurks within each of us?

In any case, I think it's a bit misleading to call Husserl's later philosophy "transcendental idealism", given that he denies "things in themselves", as I've understood the topic. But, feel free to correct it. — Manuel

No transcendental idealism, transcendental subjectivity, which not an idealism.

The "what-if" failure of insight on our part, as you proposed, has been studied for ages and ages -- backed by scholarly and medical studies. We aren't wrong in limiting the freedom of those who cause us harms. There's no more excuse that we might be short-sighted and not seeing the forest because of the trees. — L'éléphant

I’m more interested in the philosophy and psychology of motivation. I understand your stance. What I would like to know is how you articulate the nature of wrong-doing and evil in terms of the capriciousness of straying from the path of righteousness. Tell me more about what makes such straying possible. Is it a kind of randomness? Is it an irrationality?

You know that forgiveness does not deter transgressions against people by evil people. The law does. People who commit heinous crimes and crimes of opportunity don't have conscience, and there are plenty of them around. — L'éléphant

So evil and lack of conscience can be understood as a kind of arbitrariness , irrationality or capriciousness at the heart of intention and motivation, right? People are tempted, they stray from the ‘right’ path, but we don’t know why, or we assume there is no reason.
That’s my claim, that this arbitrariness is an assumption we make about ‘evil-doers’. But what if this simply reflects a failure of insight on our part? What if ‘evil-doers’ believe they are just, and their failure isn’t one of moral intent but of insight?

Heidegger more radical than Husserl? I wonder if you would say a few words about this. — Astrophel

Husserl’s notion of intentionality fragments the holistic weave of our frame of intelligibility into separated elements.

“It could be shown from the phenomenon of care as the basic structure of Dasein that what phenomenology took to be intentionality and how it took it is fragmentary, a phenomenon regarded merely from the outside. But what is meant by intentionality-the bare and isolated directing-itself-towards-must still be set back into the unified basic structure of being-ahead-of-itself-in-already-being-involved-in. This alone is the authentic phenomenon which corresponds to what inauthentically and only in an isolated direction is meant by intentionality.”

are you saying that aside from skipping anger, should we also skip punishment or desert to the person who caused harm? — L'éléphant

Yes, punishment presupposes blame and anger.
In punishment, the angered wants to teach the guilty party a lesson, remind them, shame them, make them feel
the guilt they inexplicably failed to feel as a result of their regressive actions. Why do we say the criminal should suffer what the victim suffered, get a `taste of their own medicine’? If they really know the ethical rigor of what was lost to us in our disappointed suffering, we think, then they may see the error of their ways and return to what we believe they knew all along. Our hostility
wants to provoke the other’s pain only in order to gain the opportunity to ask "How do YOU like it?" and hear them empathetically link their pain with ours by linking their thinking more intimately with ours.

But since we don’t know why they violated our expectation of them, why and how they failed to
do what our blameful anger tells us they `should have’ according to our prior estimation of their relation to us, this guilt-inducing process is tentative, unsure.

Even if we succeed in getting the blameful other to atone and re-establish their previous intimacy with us, we understand them no better than we did prior to their hostility-generating action, and thus our hostility provides an inadequate solution to our puzzlement and anxiety. All we have learned from the episode is that they other is potentially untrustworthy, unpredictable. The
ineffectiveness of this approach can be seen in the fact that even if contempt succeeds in getting the perpetrator to mend their ways, an adequate understanding of his or her puzzling motives has not been achieved. The very success of the contempt delays the pursuit of a
permeable construction within which the other’s apparently arbitrary disappointing deviation
from what one expected of them can be seen as a necessary, adaptive elaboration of their way of
construing their role in the relationship.

When confronted with behavior of another that is comprehensively different from our own, a mystery to us, and especially when it disturbs us, we need to bridge the gap between ourselves and the other not by attributing the problem to the other’s being at the mercy of capriciously wayward motives which we may hope to re-shape, but by striving to subsume the other’s outlook within a revised version of our own system.

in any moral assessment of a situation, there are always two sides -- the person causing harm and the person who suffered the harm. I've heard of people who forgave their attackers -- that is, they've come to terms with their anger and found closure by talking to their attackers directly and forgiving them (in court or prison of course). — L'éléphant

Here’s my view of forgiveness:

Transcending anger by revising one’s construction of the event means arriving at an explanation that does not require the other’s contrition, which only serves to appease the blameful person rather than enlighten him. Forgiveness and turning the other cheek only make sense in the context of blame, which implies a belief in the potential arbitrariness and capriciousness of human motives. Seeking the other’s atonement does not reflect an effective understanding of the original insult.

If, rather than getting angry or condemning another who wrongs me, I respond with loving forgiveness, my absolution of the other presupposes my anger and blame toward them. I can only forgive the other’s trespass to the extent that I recognize a sign of contrition or confession on their part. Ideals of so-called unconditional forgiveness, of turning the other cheek, loving one's oppressor, could also be understood as conditional in various ways. In the absence of the other's willingness to atone, I may forgive evil when I believe that there are special or extenuating circumstances which will allow me to view the perpetrator as less culpable (the sinner knows not what he does). I can say the other was blinded or deluded, led astray. My offer of grace is then subtly hostile, both an embrace and a slap. I hold forth the carrot of my love as a lure, hoping thereby to uncloud the other's conscience so as to enable them to discover their
culpability. In opening my arms, I hope the prodigal son will return chastised, suddenly aware of a need to be forgiven. Even when there is held little chance that the sinner will openly acknowledge his sin, I may hope that my outrage connects with a seed of regret and contrition
buried deep within the other, as if my `unconditional' forgiveness is an acknowledgment of God's or the subliminal conscience of the other's apologizing in the name of the sinner.

And if I'm not mistaken, I believe Husserl thought something similar about Heidegger after Being and Time was published, in the sense that he thought Heidegger was kind of psychologizing phenomenology. I think they're focusing different aspects of a similar project. — Manuel

More specifically, he thought Heidegger was turning phenomenology into an anthropology, by which he meant that Heidegger was stuck in the natural attitude, rather than going all the way with the transcendental reduction.
I dont think Husserl understood what Heidegger was aiming at. Heidegger’s work was as transcendental as Husserl’s ( not in the Kantian sense) but more radically so.

too. I think being in the world rests of nothing but water, and we all are trying walk. — Astrophel

Maybe we should follow Wittgenstein’s suggestion.

“We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk; so we need friction. Back to the rough ground.”

Do you think other people owe it to you to accept you and comprehend you? — baker

They owe it to themselves to understand themselves, because failing to do so will cause unhappiness both in isolation and with others. This requires recognizing the bond between personal growth and overarching styles and themes of perception.

On the contrary, I think it's possible to think beyond anger and blame entirely, but we can only do this by giving up the aims that anger and blame serve, ie. wealth and power. — baker

Do you mean only the wealthy and powerful have anger and blame, or that the anger and blame the rest of us experience is somehow manipulated by the wealthy and powerful? What do you think motivates power?Is there a drive for power? Does greed motivate wealth?

Affect is part of us, part of our awareness, connection and collaboration with the world. It refers to an ongoing distribution of attention and effort. When what we experience appears to be a ‘lack of affect’, it translates to insufficient attention and/or effort directed towards a particular aspect of experience, rather than a generalised lack. — Possibility

I suggest affect isnt an inner response to an outer world. Words like attention and effort split off the subject’s ‘inner’ workings from the world, but affective meaning, relevance and mattering are the direct way that world affects us.

What makes attention possible? Husserl argues that it isn’t just the effort of shining a spotlight on something already there, it is a creative act, the making of something.

“Attention is one of the chief themes of modern psychology. Nowhere does the predominantly sensualistic [empiricist] character of modern psychology show itself more strikingly than in the treatment of this theme, for not even the essential connection between attention and intentionality--this fundamental fact: that attention of every sort is nothing else than a fundamental species of intentive modifications-- has ever, to my knowledge, been emphasized before.” “Dazed by the confusion between object and mental content, one forgets that the objects of which we are ‘conscious', are not simply in consciousness as in a box, so that they can merely be found in it and snatched at in it; but that they are first constituted as being what they are for us, and as what they count as for us, in varying forms of objective intention...One forgets that.... an intending, or reference is present, that aims at an object, a consciousness is present that is the consciousness of this object. The mere existence of a content in the psychic interplay is, however, not at all this being-meant or being-referred-to. This first arises when this content is ‘noticed', such notice being a look directed towards it, a presentation of it. To define the presentation of a content as the mere fact of its being experienced, and in consequence to give the name ‘presentations' to all experienced contents, is one of the worst conceptual distortions known to philosophy.”

Depression can appear to be a force restraining us, but it, too, may be more accurately described as an ineffective distribution of attention and effort. — Possibility

Or perhaps it is better understood as a way in which the world appears relevant to us in our darkness. In other words, not some
inner constraint on engagement with the world , but a way of being situated in the world that is neither simply due to inner nor outer causes.

But there also recognizable commonalities like colour, sex and so on, which, even though they too may be different for each of, the fact of their existence is arguably independent of any subjective act of constitution. — Janus

These features that you mention are all considered by Husserl to be relative and contingent. They could be otherwise than they are, so it makes no sense to claim their reality as existing somewhere apart from their appearance in the way they appear to a subject. .And most fundamentally, they appear only once in time as what they to the subject, never to be captured identically again.

“Certainly the world that is in being for me, the world about which I have always had ideas and spoken about meaningfully, has meaning and is accepted as valid by me because of my own apperceptive performances because of these experiences that run their course and are combined precisely in those performances—as well as other functions of consciousness, such as thinking.
But is it not a piece of foolishness to suppose that world has being because of some performance of mine? Clearly, I must make my formulation more precise. In my Ego there is formed, from out of the proper sources of transcendental passivity and activity, my “representation of the world, ” my “picture of the world, ” whereas outside of me, naturally enough, there is the world itself.

But is this really a good way of putting it? Does this talk about outer and inner, if it makes any sense at all, receive its meaning from anywhere else than from my formation and my preservation of meaning? Should I forget that the totality of everything that I can ever think of as in being resides within the universal realm of consciousness, within my realm, that of the Ego, and indeed within what is for me real or possible?” (Phenomenology and Anthropology)

“The attempt to conceive the universe of true being as
something lying outside the universe of possible consciousness, possible knowledge, possible evidence, the two being related to one another merely externally by a rigid law, is nonsensical. If transcendental subjectivity is the universe of possible sense, then an outside is precisely nonsense.”

Sometimes movement consists of more than just where effort is directed, but where it isn’t, or where it’s redirected from. Same with attention.

Consider change as a localised 3D relation of energy, effort as a localised 4D relation of energy, and affect as localised 5D relation of energy. It’s a matter of perspective. — Possibility

For Husserl affect is directed both from the subject side of an intentional experience and from the object side. The object exerts an attractive pull on the subject and the subject turns toward the object. We notice the object when it stands out from a field, and draws our attention. From the side of the subject there is an affective pull also, a drive or striving to know the object better, that is , to anticipate its future appearances.

From both the objective and subjective sides, what is key for Husserl is that the affective meaningfulness of an experience is linked to how similar we can perceive it to be with respect to previous experience. So affect isnt simply a neutral or mechanical
energy, it is inextricably linked with the relevance of objects for a subject. Fundamentally, the way that I am affected by the world is a function of its relevance to me, and it’s relevance is a function of my ability to assimilate it on some basis of similarity and recognizability.

The involvement of an inter-subjective aspect would only be possible on account of agreement. If the cat were not a certain way: tabby, ginger, male, female, etc,. there would be no possibility of inter-subjective agreement. — Janus

But the cat is a certain way for me differently that it is for others. Each has their own perspectives on a changing experience. For me to expereince this changing flow of senses as ‘this cat’ is already for me to form an abstraction, an idealization, a single unitary ‘this’ out of what is only ever experienced as this changing flow. My own experience of this flow as a unified object is an idealization, since my actual experience of the ‘thing’ never completely fulfills this identity.

Then for me to take into account the similar but distinct perspectives on the ‘same’( it isnt actually the identical but only the similar phenomenon for them as it is for me) cat that other experience is to form an empirical
object out of it. It is empirical when we form a richer , intersubjectivitely shared idealization and claim that it is an empirical object that is the same for all of us, which we are simply seeing different aspects of.

“ Each individual, as a subject of possible experiences, has his experiences, his aspects, his perceptual interconnections, his alteration of validity, his corrections, etc.; and each particular social group has its communal aspects, etc. Here again, properly speaking, each individual has his experienced things, that is, if we understand by this what in particular is valid for him, what is seen by him and, through the seeing, is experienced as straightforwardly existing and being-such. But each individual "knows" himself to be living within the horizon of his fellow human beings, with whom he can enter into sometimes actual, sometimes potential contact, as they also can do (as he likewise knows) in actual and potential living together. He knows that he and his fellows, in their actual contact, are related to the same experienced things in such a way that each individual has different aspects, different sides, perspectives, etc., of them but that in each case these are taken from the same total system of multiplicities of which each individual is constantly conscious (in the actual experience of the same thing) as the horizon of possible experience of this thing.

If one attends to the distinction between things as "originally one's own" and as "empathized" from others, in respect to the how of the manners of appearance, and if one attends to the possibility of discrepancies between one's own and empathized views, then what one actually experiences originaliter as a perceptual thing is transformed, for each of us, into a mere "representation of" ["Vorstellung von"], "appearance of/' the one objectively existing thing. From the synthesis these have taken on precisely the new sense "appearance of," and as such they are henceforth valid. 'The" thing itself is actually that which no one experiences as really seen, since it is always in motion, always, and for everyone, a unity for consciousness of the openly endless multiplicity of changing experiences and experienced things, one's own and those of others.” (Husserl, Crisis Of European Sciences)

Whether Husserl goes "beyond" Kant, is a matter of taste. Fair or not, we haven't really moved beyond the framework made popular by Kant. — Manuel

It depends on how general you mean this statement to be. In a very general sense, Kant didn’t really move beyond the framework make popular by Descartes. I would argue that Husserl moved at least as far from Kant as Kant did from Descartes, especially regarding his concept of time.

The cat looks the way it looks to anybody that looks at it (either tabby, ginger, tortoise-shell, male or female, relatively large or small, and so on), so the way it looks cannot be constructed by my mind, even though it is mediated by the kind of mind and sensory setup I have. — Janus

From a phenomenological standpoint, the cat looks the way it does as a function of a subjective constituting process that also involves an intersubjective aspect. To say it is constituted does not mean ‘invented’ out of whole cloth by a subjectivity. Rather, there is an indissociable interaction between subjective and objective poles of the perception.

True. But in order to have the conversation, the shit is going have to be published somewhere. Where do you prefer? — frank

Newsweek. They’re the go-to source for political mud- wrestling between left and right.

There are people who deserve to be shamed, hounded, and made permanently miserable by all, as a matter of civil good. — StreetlightX

I wonder which category of blame this fits into?
It sounds a lot more like Pereboom’s desert blame than his rational deterministic blame.

Pereboom rejects blame as moral responsibility because he claims that “what we do and the way we are is ultimately the result of factors beyond our control, whether that be determinism, chance, or luck, and because of this agents are never morally responsible in the sense needed to justify certain kinds of desert-based judgments, attitudes, or treatments—such as resentment, indignation, moral anger, backward-looking blame, and retributive punishment.”

“In the basic form of desert, someone who has done wrong for bad reasons deserves to be blamed and perhaps punished just because he has done wrong for those reasons, and someone who has performed a morally exemplary action for good reasons deserves credit, praise, and perhaps reward just because she has performed that action for those reasons (Feinberg 1970; Pereboom 2001, 2014; Scanlon 2013). This backward-looking sense is closely linked with the reactive attitudes of indignation, moral resentment, and guilt, and on the positive side, with gratitude (Strawson 1962); arguably because these attitudes presuppose that their targets are morally responsible in the basic desert sense.”

"I woke up last December in a hospital bed and before even glancing toward my lap, the room spinning from anesthesia and my lungs partially collapsed from four and a half hours on surgical ventilation and hundreds — plural — of stitches and a 40-square-inch hole in my thigh where I’d been skinned down to the muscle, I could suddenly feel, in a way I could never have fathomed, that this was what being alive was." — Andrew4Handel

Just shows you what lengths people will go to to find self-acceptance in a culture where the concept of psychological gender is still uncomprehended. I’m glad you at least comprehend the distinction between biological sex and gender. You will help to one day make such surgeries unnecessary. Because, of course, that’s the only thing that’s really going to stop it.

I wanted to add my model of basic anger to the OP, to show its link to blame .

Let us say that I have been hurt and disappointed by someone I care deeply about, and as a result I become angry with them. They now approach me and say “ I know I let you down. I was wrong and I'm sorry“ (regardless of whether I prompted them or not). One could say that the other's sense of their guilt and culpability is the mirror image of my anger. The essence of the anger-culpability binary here is the two parties coping , as victim and perpetrator, with their
perception of an arbitrary lapse in values, a socially catalyzed drift in commitment to the relationship on the part of the one , and the recognition of this caprice by the other.
Let us then suppose that the hurt party believes that the always present possibility of the other's straying, succumbing to, being overcome by alienating valuative motives, is an expression of human motivation in general as dependent on arbitrary bodily and intersocial determinants. This being the case , it would not be unreasonable for the hurt individual to formulate the hopeful notion that the blameful, that is, capricious, behavior of the other can be coaxed back to
something close to its original alignment, so that the relationship's intimacy can be restored. The hopeful quality of the anger, then , is driven by a belief in the random malleability of human motives. I am going to call this hopeful intervention ‘adaptive anger'.
It begins with an experience of invalidation (hurt and disappointment) and ends with the consequent hopeful intervention (adaptive anger).

The conflictual relationship scenario I sketched
above was intended to capture what I believe to be a fundamental tenet of any philosophical or
psychological approach that is founded on the belief in the irreducibility of blame.

A homosexual man told me that most homosexual men are macho types like heterosexual men. — baker

If you knew more about the gay community, you’d learn that that’s a pose. Whereas for many straight men, a non self-conscious macho comes naturally, it’s more of a deliberate performance for many gay men, such as in the leather community.

I think people are more flexible and more malleable than the official discourse acknowledges them to be — baker

Flexibility and malleability without a self-consistent thread of intelligibility is nothing but chaos and confusion. You seem to believe that things like dispositions and styles are nothing but prisons that hold us back. I admire your desire for personal growth and transformation. We all desire that, but sheer novelty is meaninglessness. Meaningful change can only take place through pre-existing channels of thought that make such change relevant and coherent to us. A life is an evolving theme or style, not a random lurching from one meaning to the next. We are never the same person from one moment to the next, but we continue he to be the same differently.

The people who know you will be able to say that you’ve changed a lot in your life, but they will also be able to say you’re the same person you’ve always been.
That’s your evolving style, gendered and otherwise.
You seem to miss the essential role that style plays in allowing us to venture forward in life.

, people who want to improve thier life are told to "change their mindset", "overcome limiting beliefs" and such, which goes to show that neither personality nor cognitive style are necessarily (deemed) permanent and pervasive. — baker

Personality style has nothing to do with cognitive beliefs, knowledge, rationality, experience. Style is not a content of thought. Can you overcome shyness? Yes, but the underlying disposition is still there. One simply learned to channel it. People on the autism spectrum don’t line to be considered pathological. They prefer to be considered as having a cognitive style. One can say the same of those with Wilson’s syndrome and many other inborn dispositions that give distinct personality profiles. Is autism a belief that one could or should outgrow?

https://youtu.be/JnylM1hI2jc

Beyond that, I think issues of gender/sexual identity are trivial, superficial, transitory, and a waste to invest into. — baker

You re lucky you have the luxury of not having had to grow up a feminine acting gay male who was endlessly reminded by his male and female peers of how non-trival, non-superficial and non time-wasting gender behavior was to them. And it was precisely because they assumed my behavior was merely an arbitrary and silly choice, a learned phenomenon, that they were able to justify their ridicule and bullying to themselves.

We are born with many personality traits that are robust and stable. to recognize them in others is to see their style, the art of their being with you. Recognizing the art of their personality style allows you a greater intimacy with them. Gender behavior is an art of being, and not seeing it deprives both you and others of this intimacy of relation.

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The same holds for the man who identifies as female or the female who identifies as male. To the extent you can accommodate their situation without damaging another's, tell me why you need to intervene. — Hanover

Because doesn’t grasp ( and is perhaps threatened by) the concept that his brain, like every other human , has been perceptually organized from birth along a gender dimension that dictates a ‘certain’ personality’ style. He can likely get the concept of personality traits like temperament, shyness or extraversion being inborn, but he has no category for gender as also a kind of personality trait. It is invisible to him because he has never had the experience of being a make among a community of makes who from his earliest memories sensed that he was different in all sorts of subtle ways, beyond his control, that where somehow all interconnected on the basis of a perceptual-affective style that marked him as more ‘feminine. Harry would argue that these were all socialized, much the way Skinner argued that language was all about s-r associations until Chomsky showed an innate patterning to language. There is an innate patterning to gender also.

What would gender be in a society where there are no clothes, or social roles expected by the sexes? — Harry Hindu

It would be what it is, a robust and stable perceptual-affective style that subtly accompanies all of our behavior. It is what allows dog experts and breeders to quickly recognize make from female dog personality features. The same gender-associated behavior distinctions can be seen in most other mammals, including us. If such powerful, global perceptual-affective effects can be produced between biological males and females, then we already know that there can be all sorts of intermediate forms of gender.

Both you and Michael seem to be saying that trans-genders had brain transplants at birth. Are you both conspiracy theorists? — Harry Hindu

But what about gay men and lesbians? Do you think that they had , if not ‘ brain transplants’, then a gender-determining event prior to birth that makes their brains , in many cases, different than heterosexuals i. terms of a robust and stable perceptual-affective style?
I recognize that whether someone should surgically alter their body as a result of this is a separate question.

Most men, though, are somewhere in the range described by Kinsey, varying in what they fantasize about and what they actually do — Bitter Crank

It’s interesting and perhaps revealing that your description of gender mentions only who one is sexually attracted to, and nothing about what I would consider to be a more central aspect of gender for many in the gay community , which has to do with a global perceptual-affective style, of which sexual attraction is merely one small aspect. For those who dont grasp this , it is incoherent to talk about gayness outside of sexual attraction, and I think that is part of the problem.

What is so special about sex/gender that people can identify as a sex they are not, but identifying as something else you are not, well that's just crazy? — Harry Hindu

Are you kidding me? If I were to snap my fingers and change your gender-related brain dynamics, you would be astonished at the huge variety of ways in which your perceptual-affective style of processing your world , including but far exceeding sexual attraction, would change in an instant. You would still be you, but a significant aspect of your personality would undergo a shift.

I agree. We need reality and activity in order to experience many kinds of pleasure. Virtual reality and passive experience cannot be enough. — Cuthbert

Except I’m not quite sure what the difference between the virtual and the real is. As far as I can see, if it can change and surprise us, then it’s real, even if it’s virtual.

If a thing is derived from its negativity, from what it is not, then eliminating its antipodes destroys the ground for its definition. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This must be able to explain the fact that we are capable of sustaining more or less continuous please for finite periods of time. During such periods, where are the antipodes and why are they not subverting the unfolding pleasure? All we would need to do in order to preserve the concept of contrast here is allow that the unfolding pleasure changes its character slightly. By doing so, we could ‘keep out’ unpleasant feeling indefinitely.

Conclusion： Experience machines cannot exist. — Howard

I agree they can’t exist, but for slightly different reasons than you have offered. Hedonism isn’t simply the product of a neurohormonally potentiated reflexive system. Pleasure is an achievement, a form of learning and discovery. To produce continuous pleasure is to produce continuous transformative change. This is why the brain adapts to a set dosage of a drug and eventually requires greater concentrations of it to have a pleasurable effect.
Not only is an increase in the amount of a drug or other sort of manipulation necessary over time, but a qualitative change in type of manipulation becomes necessary. Drug users often describe chasing that first high they got from a particular drug the rest of their lives without success. They are never able to duplicate the intensity of the first experience no matter how much of the drug they take. On the contrary, over time
use of the drug increasingly deprives them of experiencing the usual pleasures when not high. The drug is then no longer about pressure but about anesthetizing pain.

So the only sort of ‘machine’ that could successfully render continuous pleasure would be one that is interactive( like the internet for instance). But then we are talking about a subject actively choosing to make use of the machine in such a way as to achieve such hedonic effect, and as you pointed out, hedonism only functions within the context of contrasting textures of feeling. I don’t believe that we necessarily need overt suffering in order to experience pleasure. Rather, I would argue that different colorations of affect are always involved alongside intense pleasure.

I think there are a lot of fake atheists on this forum. I have come across this often. The theistic arguments are so vacuous because they ultimately rely on the acceptance of the supernatural.
There is no evidence at all for anything beyond naturalism. — universeness

Theistic arguments don’tt have to rely on the supernatural, and by the same token, atheistic arguments don’t have to embrace naturalism. Maybe it’s those atheists you’re referring to as ‘fake’.

Evan Thompson(2001) writes:

“Another way to make this point, one which is phenomenological, but also resonates with William James' thought (see Taylor, 1996), is to assert the primacy of the personalistic perspective over the naturalistic perspective. By this I mean that our relating to the world, including when we do science, always takes place within a matrix whose fundamental structure is I-You-It (this is reflected in linguistic communication: I am speaking to You about It) (Patocka, 1998, pp. 9–10).”

Ratcliffe(2002) says:

“The unquestioned givenness of the objective world that is constitutive of scientific descriptions cannot capture the way in which the given is disclosed by a meaning-giving background. Thus, if anything, it is the transcendental, meaning-giving account that has ontological priority over an objective/causal description.”

Zahavi(2008) concurs with Thompson, Varela and Ratcliffe:

“Ultimately, what we call “reality” is so deeply suffused with mind- and language-dependent structures that it is altogether impossible to make a neat distinction between those parts of our beliefs that reflect the world “in itself” and those parts of our beliefs that simply express “our conceptual contribution.” The very idea that our cognition should be nothing but a re-presentation of something mind-independent consequently has to be abandoned.”

Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett treat science ‘scientistically’, that is , as a kind of faith. They operate from an implicit metaphysics of naturalistic rationalism that they don’t recognize as a presupposition, and that leads to the notion that one can defeat theistic arguments by ‘rational’ or ‘empirical’ refutation ( “defeat them badly”).

Every time I watch online debates between theists and atheists, I see the theists defeated badly. — universeness

I spend more of my time on discussion forums such as Quora, where there seems to be a much more enlightened membership — universeness

You think Quora is a better site for philosophical discussion that the philosophy forum? Haven’t heard that one before.