From our favorite Right Wing Authoritarian, Barry Arrington:
6. A man’s body is designed to be complimentary with a woman’s body and vice versa. All of the confusion about whether same-sex relations are licit would be swept away in an instant if everyone acknowledged this obvious truth.
Is it possible to forgive a man in our modern world for saying such bigoted things? Isn’t Barry just as bad as his white christian forebearers who said that it was obvious that Africans were better off in slavery in America, in the protection of their careful owners? Obvious truth? Hmm, not like christians have a good record with the concept of truth …
Of course it IS NOT OBVIOUS that gendered bodies are “designed” to be “complimentary”. Jayzuz, Barry, talk about assuming your conclusion before you begin your argument.
But given his design delusion, is it possible that Barry could have any genuine question as to “whether same-sex relations are licit”– or is the only possible interpretation of his words that he is pushing his filthy anti-equality propaganda? Even though he must know better. After all, if his god Designer did indeed design us, then OBVIOUSLY it designed those of us humans who love/have romantic/sexual attraction to the same gender.
NB: I am not anywhere on the LBGTQ spectrum (well, no more so than the rest of you), so I’m not mad at Barry because he’s harming me personally. But, yeah, anti-gay hate is one of my hot-button issues, and I want to know how much to despise him for this particular example. Do I have to be a better christian than he is, and forgive him for being an arse because there is some relative-innocent interpretation of the nonsense he writes?
Have you considered asking for help to get over your obsession with Jerry Coyne?
There were two accidents. In the first accident, a truck hit a fire hydrant on a very hot day, nobody was hurt and everyone in the neighborhood enjoyed the cool fountain.
In the second accident two children were crushed to death and the driver is in a coma.
Some accidents produce goods (pleasures or what you will), others produce bads (pain, etc.). Some produce both. There is no “divine reason” that pleasures are good and pains are bad–they just are.
Et voila!
I typed “Chinese story man” and google suggested “Chinese story man son horse”.
Story illustrates your point perfectly, I think.
That makes no sense at all. I can’t even be bothered to explicate all the different ways in which this is mistaken.
That’s a big claim. Please evidence your universally exhaustive epistemic access.
What’s rational about being unable to distinguish between right and wrong unless you are told by your God what it is? That’s the alternative you are offering.
Didi God work out His views on right and wrong rationally or were they decided on a whim? If they were decided on a whim or the toss of a coin, of what value can they be? If they were worked out rationally then what is to prevent us, as (occasionally) rational creatures, from doing the same?
And if the universe is the consequence of a purpose conceived in the mind of some creator, so what? Other than such a Creator would be a great deal more powerful and knowledgeable than ourselves, what makes its purpose any more ‘valid’ than one that we might conceive for ourselves?
SeverskyP35,
I might be mistaken, but I’m pretty sure phoodoo is working off of natural law theory, not divine command theory. Divine command theory is easily rebuffed by Euthrypho’s Dilemma. That’s why Plato and Aristotle developed natural law theory. And it’s a much harder view to refute.
Its supported by my knowledge.
Anyways did you read the link. it confirms what i say. It only mentions a special case of rams. This makes the case that homosexulauty does not actually exist amongst animals. The single case can be dismissed for other motivations of the rams. Say power struggles in creatures who RAM each others heads.
The link cleartly agrees with common observation that homosexuality does not remain in creatures. it only gives a special case. Yet relative to how many creatures there are this special case make my case. Rams probably are consumed by struggles of dominance. I suspect none are exclusive to their own sex but simply caiught in a time of struggle.
still the link says homosexuality is rare. though they are all willing bisexuals.
why would this link help your case???
Actually the real problem here is that you have been told what we believe, and now that you have discovered that what you were told isn’t actually true, you’re all confused and angry that the world isn’t so simple any more with “good guys” and semi-psychotic, nihilistic, devil-worshipping anti-christians.
This obviously does not compute with what you’ve grown up with and been told your entire life, so you come here to lash out at us.
Thank you for stating once again what it is you have been told and you have believed your entire life.
You’ve stated this many times before, there’s no need to keep repeating it. We already know all about the kind of propaganda you’re constantly force-fed about us.
Oh but, “life only exists because an omnipotent magic man existing in the absense of a physical brain made it. That mind says some things are bad and other things are good – so we should just uncritically do what that mind says without thinking about why” – is so much better.
No thank you. I actually do prefer to reason together about what we think a good society should be like over taking absolutist orders from imaginary divine dictators about who should or should not be hated. I’m sorry that I’m simply not as full of hate as you are, phoodoo. I can’t bring myself to just blindly hate on other people just because it says so in an old book.
Says the guy who’s entire worldview is based on just shutting off the mind and blindly following other men’s interpretations of old texts written by long dead men.
I’ll take your “moron” over being a mindless sheep any day.
That only tells us that you have managed to convince yourself. It provides no evidence that would persuade us.
Most else of what you have written in your last two comments amounts to a feeble attempt to dismiss the evidence against your view.
Fair enough. I was just making the point, which KN subsequently made more eloquently, that a group simply claiming rights was insufficient.
This is OT, but I thought about our exchange on metaphysics of properties and quantum objects when I read this popular report of a recent quantum experiment which claims scientists separated a particle from one of its physical properties.
Thanks for that interesting article. I appreciated someone taking the natural law arguments seriously enough to provide a detailed refutation.
When I read these types of papers, I wonder how the abstract philosophical arguments they provide fit into explanation of how the moral consensus of a society changes. I suspect they are not that important.
Instead, I think one could argue that such change is not based on such detailed arguments but simply on a recognition of a broader scope for equality becoming the dominant view.
If so, and given politics is the driver for such changes, I would ask if there a pattern in the history of changes. Is the politics top down or bottom up? In other words, do societies views of the morality of homosexual relations change due to many social activists asserting the equality of LGBT relationships in popular media and through a series of small political acts? Or is it driven by a few leaders making compelling but straightforward arguments for equality.
In Canada, we had Trudeau declaring “the state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation” almost 50 years ago. Was he leading a change or recognizing one that had occurred?
Or look at the regressive changes in Russia regarding LGBT relationships. What is driving them?
I assume this topic must be a research area in some field, although I have not seen it addressed in the tiny amount philosophy of practical ethics material I have looked at.
Didn’t really understand that, but thanks. Incidentally, on another forum I frequent somebody just posted this: http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2014/07/sing-me-a-song-of-hyperobjects-starting-over-with-humans-and-other-creatures-in-the-21st-century-ce.html#more
Seems to me like a weird willingness to be beguiled by “surface grammar,” but I don’t really understand most of that either….
IIRC, Tolstoy’s _War and Peace_ spends a lot of time on those very questions (well, not about gay rights, but about social and political changes generally).
Soooo long, though.
Bravo!
*returns from short break*
Hi phoodoo
I see your comment and that you have quoted something (at least you have put in quote marks) and attributed to “a moron”. It doesn’t make any sense and I was curious as to the attribution. Google search does not find anything. Can you identify the author or is it merely your attempt at parody?
ETA
I see you later acknowledge it as a bad parody.
Assuming the BBC popularization is approximately accurate,the article I linked seems to be saying that properties can be separated from the objects that instantiate them. I’m sure the only way to understand it completely is in the math, so that means that if you want to do metaphysics of properties at the quantum level of reality, you probably have to be a physicist as well as a philosopher.
On the hyper-objects stuff: 3 quarks is in my Feedly and so I noticed that one too. I cannot comment on the philosophy, but this paragraph in the review made me think that the attempt to use quantum science is in the same league as the argument that “Ever since Einstein, we’ve know moral relativism must be true”.
No it doesn’t:
““About 10% of rams (males) refuse to mate with ewes (females) but do readily mate with other rams.”
But of course your own conjecture trumps people doing research. This is the fundy mindset in a microcosm, dogmatic, unmoved by evidence.
Richardthughes,
I wonder if perhaps Byers doesn’t understand the difference between (1) “there are species in which some individuals mate exclusively with same-sex individuals” and (2) “there are species in which all individuals mate exclusively with same-sex individuals.”
Perhaps he’s trying to argue that there aren’t any species that are exclusively or largely homosexual, or that there aren’t any species in which homosexuality is “the norm”. This is why he doesn’t seem to appreciate the fact that there are species in which there are some individuals that are exclusively homosexual.
phoodoo,
I don’t think you understand anything at all about my worldview, because you’ve never asked me ‘what would you recommend that I read in order to understand better where you’re coming from?’
If you had, I would have recommend John Dewey’s Experience and Nature. It’s a masterpiece of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics. In my estimation, Dewey shows precisely how a humanistic ethics is fully compatible with a Darwinian approach to biology.
I would look there, rather than to the blathering blustering of currently-popular science writers and their detractors, for a naturalism worth defending.
BruceS,
I’m inclined to believe that ‘progressive’ changes are bottom-up and ‘regressive’ changes are top-down. But that’s just an “intuition” on my part; I don’t have a good argument for it.
Richardthughes,
I read the link. It stressed the rams as a special case. Yet otherwise it was a conclusion creatures didn’t stay homosexual. They just are all bisexual.
The ram case is not different most likely. So other options to explain the observations as i said.
In fact its obvious no creature will not be bisexual. So if there was gay creatures that would be unique. There are no non bisexual creatures. Not a single cow I ever saw would refuse. its impossible for exclusive gay ones even if they leaned that way. One would never know.
Robert Byers,
Robert. You are wrong. You are completely wrong. The article does not say that other than the rams there are no exclusively homosexual individuals in any species. Nor does your attempt to exclude them – ‘maybe it’s a dominance thing’ – have any support. You just want it to be so.
Nor, incidentally, is any homosexual in the human species necessarily exclusively so. So if ‘bisexuality’ is the issue, strict homosexuality is far rarer in humans than bisexuality (as defined by you). Some have never and would never have an opposite-sex partner, but many have and would. Conversely, many ‘truly’ straight people have resorted to homosexual sex – in prison, for example. I doubt I could contemplate it myself, but I know that it happens, and your black-and-white view of both the human and the ‘natural’ worlds is at odds with the facts. Sexuality is a continuum.
Anyway – what are you trying to say? If one were to agree, for the sake of argument, that the natural world was completely devoid of homosexuality, what difference would that make to how one viewed human sexuality, and the rights afforded to those of different orientation to yourself?
What is the religious significance of the alleged omnipresence of bisexuality among all species on your view, Robert?
But Kantian,
It was you who alternated the pronouns of me and us, when you began saying that no one on this board has the worldview of pure naturalism, then switched this to not being your view.
I am aware that your view is not indicative of many on this forum, but for those who do hold that life is a result of pure cosmic accidents, the only honest conclusion is that morals are pointless illusions. If you care about how others feel, it is only a side effect of the bad collection of mistakes which makes up your dna.
Now I am fully aware that the materialists here fervently deny this, because it is so damning to their arguments, but its so obviously so.
I haven’t read Dewey, but as the essence of Darwinian evolution is a meaningless collection of accidents, discussing how this creates real ethics is a pointless exercise. You are simply saying, life is meaningless, but it feels meaningful to me, so I can see why we need ethics.
Meaning and purpose either exists within our own minds, or it is independent of our minds . I happen to believe it is outside of our minds, and not just self created, but for those who just accept it as simply the chemicals in our heads, I don’t buy any rationalizing which vaults it to a higher plane.
To naturalists morals are the same as the desire to scratch an itch. They are both just results of your perceptions, if you want to scratch go ahead, if you don’t fine. Neither is more precious.
Not true, as far as I understand evolution. The generation of variation is stochastic but the selection process, environmental design, as I like to call it, is not.
Alan, that is a totally meaningless distinction. So what if you believe selection is not stochastic, how does that change the fundamental meaninglesnesss of this collection of accidents? They are still just accidents.
What does the fact that some accidents don’t make it and get thrown out have to do with anything? It doesn’t affect the philosophical ramifications at all.
How do you know this? Have you discussed this with many naturalists? I consider myself a pragmatist but I don’t think your analysis of naturalists (I assume you are referring to atheists and agnostics) is necessarily right. I don’t scratch my nether regions or pick my nose in public because I consider it impolite. I don’t murder people I don’t like because it is an agreed ethic in the society within which I choose to live and ignoring this ethic would have severe consequences for me.
I was addressing the point that you made, that evolution is entirely stochastic. If you now concede that it is not, fine.
As you have not developed your philosophical argument, I can’t comment on what ramifications you have in mind.
No Alan, I don’t concede your point at all. Darwinian evolution is a collection of accidents. So what if some accidents don’t last, its still just a collection of accidents! That changes nothing.
Some accidents don’t make it in your scenario. Ok. That’s like saying, not many foods are blue. Its meaningless.
Alan Fox,
The ethics you describe all exist in your own head-and your worldview acknowledges this.
The ethics I believe in exist outside of my mind, that is the difference. You believe your brain is fooling you into finding truth, I believe that truth exists whether I do or not.
How do you know?
Alan Fox,
How do I know what? How do I know that if you believe life is Darwinian (a collection of accidents) then its not logically possible for ethics to be anything other than constructs of your subjective experience?
Because in a world without experiences outside of our brains where else could they be?
The argument from personal incredulity!
Sorry, phoodoo, I’m due out for the rest of the day. Further responses from me will have to wait. As to “how do you know”, I was referring to ethics. I don’t think there’s a rational basis for ethics but that doesn’t prevent ethics being socially desirable for pragmatic reasons.
phoodoo,
You may believe in objective morality, but is your belief justified? What’s your evidence?
I think that’s a false dichotomy, because it equivocates on some key issues.
Owen Flanagan’s “ethics as human ecology” argues that there are facts about what is and what is not conducive to human flourishing, and those facts aren’t dependent on what any particular person believes about them. But if there were no human beings at all, then there wouldn’t be any facts about our flourishing. In just the same way, there would be no biological facts if there were no living things.
The word “accident” is also problematic, because it conflates “contingent” and “highly unlikely”. I think that the emergence of life in this universe, given the laws of physics, is extremely likely — though I balk at ‘inevitable’. That’s consistent with regarding it as ‘contingent’, in the sense of ‘not being logically necessary’ and also with ‘not being intentionally planned in advance of its emergence’.
I think that there are extremely good reasons for rejecting both scientific naturalism and any sort of supernaturalism.
Scientific naturalism cannot explain intentionality, subjectivity, rationality, agency, normativity, meaning, purpose, and value. But supernaturalism also cannot explain them precisely because it treats them as metaphysically basic.
(No theory which treats X as metaphysically basic can be an explanation of X, because to explain X is to explain X in terms of Y, where Y is more metaphysically than X.)
The best option, as I see it, is some version of non-scientific naturalism or “liberal naturalism”, as briefly presented here.
Hanna makes two extremely important points:
and that, in light of the explanatory inadequacy of both scientific naturalism and supernaturalism/dualism, we ought to say that
The main issue on which Hanna and I disagree is that I think the prospects are very good for putting “liberal naturalism” on an empirical basis by following through on the science of complexity theory that has been developed by Prigogine, Kaufman, and others. So while we have excellent metaphysical reasons for rejecting materialistic or mechanistic naturalism, I think we also have good empirical reasons for thinking that the universe as described by science is as our metaphysics tells us it must be.
That’s good news, because metaphysics answers to science just as much as science answers to metaphysics.
Allan Miller,
I was only addressing a biological point. We are just souls and don’t have a sexual identity from Gods creation of our soul. That is of the biological world.
So one concludes exclusive homosexuality is only humsn because our sexuality is about identity and not mere biology. So creatures do not have identity tied to their sexuality and so all are bisexual with no problem. None are pure gay because human gays, largely, are rejecting their true identity however seeminly beyond free will.
Yet our sexuality must be more then free will but is prompted by our ‘chemical’ system.
In short God made humans sexuality identity a profound thing touching on our identity as people. sex is to complete our union with the opposite sex for marriage.
animals only have sex for reproduction and pleasure. nothing to do with identity.
So indeed no gays need stay gay however much it seems against free will.
walto,
in a fallen world it just shows that sex for animals is only for reproduction and pleasure.
it doesn’t touch ones profound sense of identity as in humans. We were made to be very separate sex identities. To unite is our destiny. So gay people are rejecting identity and assuming a identity and its not just about sex. Its a deeper conclusion.
So people go all the way in rejection of identity and creatures do not. I am confident there are no gay creatures. All creatures are bisexual willing . nothing genetic is going on with them.
with people just some chemical prompting is the cause of some gay people. Yet they are not really gay.or bisexual.
Robert,
At what age did you make the choice to be heterosexual?
I think you have to take those things one by one.
Start with rationality (and mathematics, which you mention later). Computers can be programmed to reason and to check proofs. So why would you say science cannot explain reason or mathematics? Perhaps you mean evolution cannot explain why people can do math? That’s a standard ID argument, so I hope you don’t mean that. But, in any case, I don’t see why that would be true. Of course, an evolutionary explanation does not mean we can trace the history in detail.
Agency, intentionality, meaning, and purpose are more challenging. But in other threads, you’ve suggested that a naturalistic explanation is possible: e.g. the work of Okrent and your comment to Neil that homoeostasis seems a reasonable start to explaining purpose.
Further, I think the jury is still out on whether we could build an AI embedded in a artificial body, capable of interacting with the world so as to learn and maintain its artificial life; such a being, if possible, would behave as if it had intentionality, agency, purpose. And if we could build it, then one could say we had a scientific explanation for those concepts.
But would such a being have phenomenal consciousness and have a first person viewpoint? That is more challenging still, I think. Of course, asking it does not help unless you reject p-zombies first. But, if we had to understand our own biology and neuroscience enough to build analogous structures in the being, and we asked it and it said yes, then to me that would mean it does have phenomenal consicousness. This does not mean that the experiences of such a being would be the same as ours.
So I think the jury is still out on these issues and they may well be subject to scientific explanation at some level of science.
Of course the fact that such an explanation is possible in principle says very little about how we go about forming our human purposes and values: I would agree that such topics are NOT solely or even mainly part of science.
The style of the Hanna paper you link seems more suitable for the Huffington Post than an academic journal. He makes a lot of bald assertions about the possibilities of metaphysics, like the quoted ones, with little argument to support them. I looked at the NDSS review of his book, which I would charitably call lukewarm at best; so it’s not clear he does a better job of justification there either.
His claim about the constitution of the physical world in the last sentence that I re-quoted looks like (property?) dualism to me, possibly a form of panpsychism. Interestingly enough, a scientific theory of consciousness (Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory) also leads to panpsychism of a sort, so possibly scientific explanation can cover that possibility too!
What is the difference between a “scientific” and an “empirical” basis for naturalism? Although I don’t think either Prigogine’s or Kaufmann’s views are widely accepted by their scientific peers, as far as I know they are both still scientific explanations. They do rely on emergentism of some sort, but I believe, at least for Prigogine, that it is possible to interpret his emergentism as epistemological, not ontological.
I question the implied symmetry in that statement. I agree metaphysics answers to science. I agree there will always be metaphysical questions that science cannot answer. But I think that only philosophically-informed science can determine those limits (I mean the David Albert variety, not the Lawrence Krauss variety, for philosophically-informed science).
I don’t see how the fact that we can build devices that augment and implement logical processes tells us anything one way or the other about whether naturalism can explain rationality. I know it’s a standard ID objection but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad one.
I’m still somewhat on the fence about Okrent, because it’s not entirely clear to me what his work does at the metaphysical level. He vacillates between realism and anti-realism (as do Davidson and Dennett), and it’s irksome to me. He’s certainly right that we cannot naturalize intentionality without a robust naturalistic account of teleology.
Whether natural teleology is consistent with scientific naturalism is an open question. Maybe it is. Hanna seems to think that that we go beyond the limits of science when we invoke natural teleology. I don’t know yet. I see compelling arguments on both sides and don’t have a firmly settled opinion about it yet.
If there is a difference between epistemological emergentism and ontological emergentism, I’d urge the latter over the former. If emergentism is only epistemological, that’s going to be the slippery slope to anti-realism. At any rate it leaves open and unanswered the nature of the real patterns that comprise the ontological ground for making our stances or vocabularies applicable or inapplicable.
I agree that “only philosophically-informed science can determine those limits” of what metaphysical questions science cannot answer. That’s a better way of putting it. Though I also think that scientifically informed metaphysics can tell us something about what kinds of metaphysical questions science can answer, as well. I’m still on the fence about whether metaphysical questions that don’t have scientific answers have any other kind of answer at all.
I’ll grant the “check proofs”. But whether or not computers can reason is contentious.
I thought that might get your attentinon, although my guess was that you’d ask about mathematical creativity, which I would have answered by saying it likely goes beyond rationality to involve an emotional sense of pattern, symmetry, elegance at least.
As for reason versus proof-checking: I am assuming syntax only for reasoning. If you think reasoning must include some kind of meaning for the objects being reasoned about, then I think that would fall under intentionality in the later part of my post.
I’m assuming a syntax only version of rationality. If meaning is also part of what you are including in rationality, that is understanding the meaning of the terms being reasoned about, then I agree it needs more; in particular, an embodied agent for intentionality.
(OT: I’m currently doing a Coursera course on Neuroeconomics which defines human preference in terms of the pattern and intensity of certain groups of neurons. I would guess you might have some problems with that approach!)
I don’t have any problem with how you have worded it above because I take you as saying that these are still open questions and are so subject to ongoing scientific and philosophical exploration.
I read the linked paper by Hanna as saying these were settled issues. That does not seem right to me.
Probably I am misusing the words, but I am taking “epistemological emergentism” to be “weak” emergentism: that is, in principle there is nothing metaphysically new, but we lack the ability in practice to explain the phenomenon without referring to the emergent causes or interactions.
For example, I could see that limitation on our ability to explain as being computational complexity, or inability to capture enough detail about the state of the world, or possibly a limitation due to mathematical chaos.
But I do not see “epistemological emergentism” as requiring there be anything new in the world beyond what could be explain in theory, if not in practice, by physics.
Just to clarify: I am only giving what I think the terms mean; I am not claiming that some of the issues you raise are settled to be “weak” emergentism only.
BruceS,
Yes, I had in mind a meaning-involving conception of rationality, or what Brandom calls “material inference,” as distinct from “formal inference”.
Is the difference between “in principle” and “in practice” a difference that matters in principle or in practice?
Less flippantly, if there’s a real difference in practice, then what’s the point of denying that it obtains in theory?
Wouldn’t a key issue be downward causation?
It’s fine to say that we won’t be able to use the quantum mechanics to explain complex chemical reactions in practice, but that does not mean that there are new types of causes and forces emerging at the level of our chemistry explanations which have to be incorporated into physics.
I have a knock-down argument to show that the same applies to mental causation and brain states, but unfortunately it is too long to fit in the edit box (due to fermatting issues.)
Unless causation itself is a domain- or level-specific concept.
Don’t follow but its not a choice. Its natural due to our identity as one sex and so in relation to the opposite sex. its about the heart. not reproduction agendas.
so only minor chemical breakdowns affect the identity attraction to the opposite sex. yet its impossible for us not to be in truth only attractive to the opposite sex since its a agenda to join with other person and is alike but diffeent.
Animals therefore are all easily bisexual and none homosexual or exclusively normal.