Why is that a problem? That the soul is genderless and we are stuck in a gendered body.

I'm still having trouble seeing the importance of categorizing the soul as you describe. Why do you feel the need to call one type male and the other type female? In other words, what kind of problem arises if the gender of the soul is ignored or misdiagnosed?

So to reiterate, you consider the body a sort of mirror or window to be able to view the soul, and that an opposing position to you is that male and female are merely words.

So if that's your opposing position, then your definition for male and female is both about the body and the soul.

I believe you did choose a particularly difficult subject, but at the same time I think that is exactly why an understanding would be that much more rewarding and satisfying. I suggest we all leave assumptions about one another's knowledge unsaid and just try to understand.

Can I try restating your view and see if you agree?
You don't disagree that there are two biological genders, male and female. These have their appropriate characteristics to some degree, like penis and such for the male, and breasts, curves and such for the female.

Then there are what you refer to as the abstract male and female souls. This is what everyone is having trouble grasping. It doesn't sound like you are categorizing souls by the body it inhibits, where the body determines the type of soul or the right soul is always with the right body. It sounds like instead you are asserting that, they can be mixed up, hence a need to consider trans people.

When you say male and female souls, do you believe these souls are inherently better off in their "appropriate" bodies? If so, when you say female souls have breasts, does that mean that soul needs a body with the corresponding breasts? If not, what is the significance of this and why don't male souls have this?

Hello I'm currently a senior mechanical engineering student. This thread interested me because I have my own gripes about the ethics courses. Maybe we can discuss particular topics from the perspective of the teacher and the student.

The short answer to your first question seems to be yes, based on this reading here:

MILLIKEN, J. Aristotle’s Aesthetic Ethics. Southern Journal of Philosophy, [s. l.], v. 44, n. 2, p. 319–339, 2006. DOI 10.1111/j.2041-6962.2006.tb00104.x. Disponível em: https://search-ebscohost-com.libaccess.sjlibrary.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=21698483&site=ehost-live&scope=site . Acesso em: 17 mar. 2021.

I haven't read the entire thing, but it seems that Aristotle believed that moral excellence has a sense of beauty much like beautiful music. Not exactly artistic beauty, but like how an athlete may inspire a sense of beauty through an excellent performance, a virtuous person doing the morally righteous can as well. Asking on r/philosophy on reddit might be more helpful for research inquires like this.

My kneejerk reaction to this proposal of ethics is that, I intuitively see it be accompanied by a realization of disgust for the ugly. I have concerns for it because I believe the reaction of people for disgust is eradication, as opposed to something like avoidance for fear. Hitler, as notorious a germaphobe can get, attempted to eradicate the people who drew about this sense of disgust. Note that I'm definitely not an expert on the life of Hitler. With that said, my understanding is that he believed, perhaps in with a similar aesthetic ethics approach, that genocide of the Jewish people, who he believed were inherently evil, was the righteous course of action.

Not to understate the importance of ethics, I believe ethics doesn't really have a place in Engineering or the sciences for that matter, at least without addressing its relation to the philosophy of science. To my knowledge, the philosophy of science primarily deals with how knowledge is gained and analyzed, and rarely concerns itself with ethics. If they do, it's usually in a collision between the two, for example about unethical behavior in order to further scientific knowledge. I see Engineering as the application of science to create, and so Engineering also has an innate problem when trying to incorporate ethics. If I were a teacher, I would consider separating the ethics from engineering, and just try to challenge all students to be able to critically think for themselves what might be "good or bad."

Thank you for the warm welcome. Glad to have found this place.

The tree that would grow to heaven must send its roots to hell.

—Frederick Nietzsche

I've taken a liking to this metaphor, and working off of it, perhaps we can describe pessimism and optimism: optimism with little pessimism is like a tall tree with short roots, which will eventually fall down spectacularly in a storm. Pessimism with little optimism is like a short tree with many roots, safe and stable but perhaps lacking the light it needs to maintain itself properly.

I'll start by defining pessimism and optimism as a lenience or bias towards hopeful or despairing thinking and defining hope and despair as a subjective interpretation of some uncertainty. Because you can't hold hope or despair on subjects made certain, you cannot be pessimistic or optimistic about certainties either.

I think pessimism and optimism is a way for us to categorically organize uncertainty quickly. in daily life, it is not realistic to consider every future possibility in every situation, for example. Instead what we can do, is consider an extremely pessimistic view and an extremely optimistic view, one at a time. Once we have created those two views, we can ballpark the actual future to be somewhere in-between them. (This isn't the only way to organize uncertain information, merely one way.)

People also have a biological tendency to gravitate their attention towards "bad" things than "good" things. Which may explain why philosophers might start from pessimistic views. They just have an easier time thinking of the bad things first. Additionally, philosophy is complex (and uncertain) enough that I wouldn't be surprised if they just get stuck trying to form an accurate pessimistic view, and we never get to creating an optimistic view.

In conclusion, pessimism is the best starting point for thinking generally just because we gravitate easier to it instinctively. However you probably are just hurting yourself if you are only pessimistically thinking about something you will never finish thinking about.