Society has an obligation to treat everyone equally under the law. That's not "equal after taking into account your psychiatric disorder" it's "equal according to objective standards." An example of an objective standard is "you were born with a penis, therefore society will categorize you as a man regardless of how you feel about yourself." If your feelings about yourself prevent you from acting in accord with how society perceives you then you don't get to participate in society. Adults don't get to play in under-12 sports leagues, regardless of how much they feel like children. Individual preferences are subordinate to the rule of law.
The idea that you can be fundamentally wrong about something that 50% of the world is, and it won’t affect how your civilization writes and enforces laws and operates in general, is absolute buffoonish moron stuff.
Nothing like a man being “very clever” so he can tell women what they are. If this is the state of modern philosophy I’m happy to stick with Kathleen Stock
You said what women were mattered less than a mantelpiece. A line so misogynistic and revolting I’m astonished you even thought it merited adolescent “look at me, aren’t I edgy” clickbait. Grow up, and stop pandering to narratives that put abusive and violent men in women’s spaces. And forget your “I don’t say that”. You enable those who do
Can we chill with the attempts at ideological point-scoring and engage with the comment. It clearly made the point that the piece said what a “woman” is matters less than a mantelpiece. It didn’t even pretend to hide its misogyny in a cloak of “what genders ‘are’ matters less than a mantelpiece”. It just shows the dangers of thinking you can work up a cogent philosophical case using ChatGPT
"assuming there’s no ambiguity about whether transwomen are biologically male" - Sadly, that's not a safe assumption. There are certainly some transgender people who would argue that transwomen are biologically female, or who would deny any importance to biological sex at all. Society not having a firm answer on "what is a woman?" serves to empower these people and their refusal to accept important biological realities.
Now, will civilization collapse if people fail to accept core biological realities? Maybe not, probably not quickly. But mistakes will happen, and society will get worse. It's certainly more important than some things, including at least 2 of the 3 you listed (E-Sports is economically huge so is genuinely very important to some countries).
It's good that the Supreme Courts of Britain and America have made the rulings that they have on the transgender issues, over the last year. Our society should have clear legal lines, and the biological meaning of sex should clearly dominate in at least some circumstances (such as prisons and sports).
I think Amos you have to realize that this isn't a purely intellectual/semantic question.
If some social theorists are right, many words and concepts sort of exist "inside" social practices, regulating and shaping (and being shaped by) them. For example, "bride", "defendant", "graduate". Some therefore argue that the same applies to "woman". Whatever its ontological status, it primarily acquires significance through our gendered ways of organizing social life. Hence "what is a woman?" was always a question meant to combine reflection with social change, in pretty much the same way gays asking "what is love? what is marriage?" weren't trying to argue that a conceptual analysis of "marriage" allows for two grooms.
If you'd like something more conceptual, I always found the question "what is a female?" a lot more philosophically interesting, with real sub-questions about essences and substances and emergence.
I agree with much of this. But there plainly are people - including many philosophers, sadly - who plainly think it matters for ethics and public policy what a woman is, as a matter of conceptual analysis. As with 'what is marriage?', the more clearheaded thing to do is to divorce the ethical questions that fuels the disagreement from conceptual analysis of the phenomenon under dispute, which is only ever normative relevant when assertion or belief is involved. If people did this, they would realise that what they cared about what the stuff about social change, not what a woman is. I get that 'what is a woman?' is often a trojan horse for <all ethical disputes around gender identity>, but people often do miss the woods for the trees and assume that 'what is a woman?' is one of the important questions.
> Try believing that Curtis Yarvin is an impressive political theorist. See? You can't do it!
In terms of making an impression, the way say destruction from a hurricane may be impressive, I can believe it. But in terms of being admirable or respectable, I cant :)
> The New Hampshire Gardening Quarterly .. (Disclaimer: not a real publication)
Readers may be interested in the New Hampshire Home, which has an impressive gardening section, but is bimestrial rather than quarterly so you may end up with the same gardening content over a whole year after all.
"But in practice, ‘the ethics of belief’ is plausibly mostly a nothing-burger in the gender context, since ethics has to do with what you can freely choose to do, and nearly all beliefs (including about what a woman is, whether Cassandra is a woman, etc.) are outside of your voluntary control."
I'm completely ignorant about this debate but this is interesting to me because on the one hand it seems reasonable (if I can't help but believe something's true, I can't be blamed for believing it) but on the other hand seems to imply some weird tangles. Like, if a sincere racist genuinely believes that committing a hate crime is a right and just thing to do, and they act in accordance with that belief, this view would suggest that they have an ethically neutral belief that resulted in an ethically bad action. But for this to be the case, we'd have to assume that ethical action doesn't entail acting according to one's beliefs, or we would have to assume that it is impossible to sincerely hold bad beliefs. But neither of those seem right to me.
You’re right to question me on this, I skipped over a relevant option — even if you can’t directly choose what to believe, presumably you can make lots of choices that impact the formation of your belief. (In the case of the racist, you might think he’s chosen to expose himself to various influences, neglected to consider non-racist explanations for the patterns he thinks he observes, etc.) In this way, you might have indirect moral responsibility for your beliefs, in the same way that you might have indirect moral responsibility for the beliefs of people you influence.
On the puzzle you drew out, how do feel about the following: distinguish between subjective rightness and objective rightness, where subjective rightness is “the right thing to do given what you think you know”, and objective rightness is “the right thing to do full stop”. For example, suppose — through no fault of your own — that you’ve been subjected to racist brainwashing, such that you faultlessly (but falsely believe) that 99% of people who belong to racial group X are violent. As a result, quite reasonably, you run away and shout for help the first time you see a member of X. To me, it seems like the correct diagnosis is that you’ve done what’s subjectively right but objectively wrong, and that your degree of blameworthiness only has to do with the former, but what you should aim to conform with is the latter.
I buy the idea of indirect moral responsibility for one's own beliefs--I think that's a striking and elegant way to put it.
With regard to the subjective and objective rightness idea: I can understand the distinction you're making, but it only really makes sense to me if one is viewing a situation from the outside with a clear ability to distinguish between objective and subjective right and wrong (which implies a clear and certain knowledge of what's objectively right, which of course nobody has). But I think when we're actually in morally important situations, it's even more difficult to make this distinction.
I wonder whether you’d find the distinction an easier sell when it’s about prudence instead of morality.
Suppose you are drinking tea, which—to the best of your knowledge—is okay to drink. Suppose, in fact, that I have poisoned the tea. I want to say: it’s subjectively prudent to drink the tea, but objectively imprudent to drink the tea.
If you find the distinction an easier sell when it’s comes to prudence, it might just be that you’re more skeptical that there are facts about what’s right or wrong than about what’s healthy for you. (It might also, as you say, be that moral truths are harder to know: but surely, regardless of whether anyone knows what the right thing to do is in situation x, if there is a moral fact of the matter, then there is a truth *to be known*, even if it is unknown/unknowable by us. In that case, even if we don’t know *what is objectively vs subjectively right*, we can still grasp that there is a distinction out there, just as there’s a distinction between the known and the unknown even if, by definition, we don’t know precisely which things are unknown.)
Prudence isn't an easier sell, exactly, because the notion of prudence assumes a commonly held notion of what's good. "Prudent" just means "effectively attains some desired goal." To suppose that something could be objectively prudent would be to assume a universally desired goal.
So if I am suicidal and want to die as quickly as possible, it might be subjectively imprudent for me to drink what I believe to be a healthy cup of tea. But if the cup of tea has been poisoned, would drinking the tea be objectively prudent or imprudent? It depends on whether, from an objective point of view, death is desirable. I personally happen to think that in nearly every case life is more desirable than death, but it is very difficult to prove this to the satisfaction of a suicidal person.
I accept your idea that moral truths are possible even if they're not knowable. But I don't see how the acknowledgment of potential truths which are unknown can help to regulate conduct, which is after all (I think) the point of thinking about morals.
Got it. There’s no need to know what other people actually think, objective truth doesn’t matter anyway, and nothing is connected to anything else. That’s how you’d like the world to work?
"you might think your duty is to make sure that transwomen feeling accepted doesn’t come at the expense of biological women feeling uncomfortable or unsafe, to campaign against the admission of transwomen to women’s only spaces, etc., which you can do even if you can’t help believing that transwomen are technically women."
You can object to someone stroking a penis, or even just the presence of a penis, in the women's locker room without first determining whether the person the penis is attached to is a man or a woman.
See, you can’t. Because this debate isn’t just in your head, there’s a large coercive element. If you object, you might get sued or just have a large group of activists screaming threats outside your business. You’re assuming that teaching kids to lie on demand is healthy and that reality is secondary to some kind of social cohesion. You’re training every adult the same, and that it’s logically wrong to speak the truth because white lies hurt less.
Your suppositions are full of false premises. The entire article is misleading, based on a central false assumption that the worst that can come out of telling people what they want to hear is a minor internal struggle over honesty, when that coerced dishonesty has been used to aggressively invade female spaces and aggressively lobby to make those white lies be taught as fact to small children. And that stops being a white lie when a mentally ill person, even child, tells themselves they are a woman based on the combined forced white lies of every adult authority figure they know, leading to unnecessary surgery, loss of sexual function and deletion from the gene pool years before those kids have the facilities (that they are never taught anyway) to logically decide if they really believe this dishonesty, or are believing as they were incredibly aggressively taught.
This issue won't die because it is perfect for making everyone feel like they are taking crazy pills, to use Will Ferrell's memorable phrase. Some people can accept that under some vague intuitive understanding trans women could be women, and some people believe that as sincerely as they believe that no woman is fat or looks a day over 29, and just say they believe it to be nice, while some people don't understand at all why some people are insisting that trans women really are women by the only reasonable definition, and simply can't understand what is going in this discussion as anything other than O'Brien asking Winston how many fingers he is holding up if the party says it is five.
When people react strongly against this, what you are seeing is a defense against gaslighting. Perhaps their gaslighting detector is miscalibrated and their reaction is unnecessary and even counterproductive in this case, but I don't wish for a world where people have no such defenses.
And I don't think this matter should be irrelevant to the ethics of white lies in general. White lies may or may not benefit those whose feelings they intend to save, and they may be harmless to those who are in on them and understand that everyone is just participating in a white lie, but to those not in on it they can be psychologically distressing. (Why is everyone saying that when it make no sense? Am I the crazy one???)
Part of the issue is that doing white lies on the internet is in this regard worse than doing so IRL because it is much easier in the latter case for others to be on it, because they can check in with you privately if they are wondering if they are going crazy and you can acknowledge you were just saying that to be nice, but on the internet there is not another separate context in which to acknowledge to all the strangers who have heard you what you are doing; you simply must consistently maintain it or there's no point in ever maintaining it at all.
And we should not miss the distinction between telling a white lie yourself, and insisting that everyone tell that white lie because it is the truth and you'd be a terrible person not to agree. Because the prescriptivists aren't only found on the gender critical side of the discussion but on the pro-trans side as well. This has never been a discussion about whether there should be one more way to use the word woman; it is a discussion about whether there is only one acceptable way to use it and that way is the way that most people can't make any sense of. (Note this is not to say that everyone engaging in trans inclusive language is doing so as a white lie. Though many do think of it this way some have some sort of intuitive meaning in mind where they are telling the truth. It is not remotely clear which category OP is in, and for my point the distinction is irrelevant because the effect on others is the same.)
Look, I am not one of the linguistic prescriptivists. I don't care what trans people call themselves and am happy to use whatever name they prefer, and also I don't care which sort of trans person I end up sharing public bathrooms with. But I am finding that I do care a bit about vexatious efforts to destabilize others' ability to parse the world in terms of concepts that make sense to them. It is certainly not the entire ethical question here, but it is ethically relevant for the same reasons that gaslighting is unethical, and I think it is important for understanding the politics here because the way we discuss trans issues does in fact make people feel crazy and that is a big part of why people are so obsessed with issues like trans women in women's sports so far out of proportion to their seeming real world impact.
think there is a nuanced middle ground here. woman and female have two different definitions. one indicates gender and one indicates biological sex. there would not be two distinct words for them if there was not nuance in meaning
one is a social construct and one is an undeniable fact about nature as a dyad pair?
that means we should strive for equality between sexes
that means trans individuals absolutely have a right to exist, be accepted and tolerated in society as we can accept that gender is a social construct that can be adjusted
the issue I have is the lefties claiming the righteous moral ground that so deeply conflicts with how we exist and evolve in the universe
sincerely trying to engage in discourse from an independent perspective
On the one hand everyone on some level knows this but on the other it kind of gives the whole game away or sidesteps the issue entirely. If we acknowledge there is biological sex, might we for some purposes care about it more than gender? If we acknowledge gender is a social construct, might we question why we care about it at all and why we couldn't stop constructing it? Why do we need to know that about anyone, especially if we don't even have any shared understanding of what the genders mean? But the whole point is we must stop caring about biological sex; it is irrelevant to everything, and we must see in its stead gender even though it gives us nothing to see, it exists only because we need something to distract and displace the part of our brain that evolved to see sex. The evasiveness is a fundamental indispensable part of the position.
Even the most ardent defender of trans ideology knows that there’s a difference, or the term “trans” wouldn’t exist. They also use that term and make that distinction whenever it suits their purpose, ie trans women are more marginalized and subject to violence so deserve more protection. We are expected to know which “women” will be offended if we don’t ask their pronouns and which women will be deeply offended if we essentially ask them how long they’ve been a woman.
The aggravating thing about trans discourse is that we are expected to recognize that difference and then pretend we can’t see it. The requirements of this belief system are deeply unequal and Byzantine, but declaring you won’t play is deemed deeply bigoted. All people should be treated with dignity and respect, but nobody gets to dictate our beliefs or insist we accept lies as fact.
>there would not be two distinct words for them if there was not nuance in meaning
Colossal leap of logic there. For the vast majority of the history of the word "woman", it was understood as simply a means of compressing the information contained in the three-word phrase "adult female human".
You can do this with anything. Instead of saying "car", I could say "four-wheeled automobile powered by an internal combustion engine". "Four-wheeled automobile powered by internal combustion engine" is a distinct word from "car", which by your logic implies that there is "nuance in meaning" and that therefore it isn't strictly synonymous with "car".
But that isn't the case: "four-wheeled automobile powered by an internal combustion engine" is essentially the same thing as "car". In fact, it's a DEFINITION of the word "car". It's not like "woman" and "adult female human" were two terms in common parlance for centuries: rather, the latter is a definition of the former, and only arose in popularity when trans activists made it necessary to clarify precisely what the term "woman" meant because they were trying to redefine it.
There is this concept of "expressive individualism", where you hold certain truths about yourself, and want other people to confirm it. This is the essence of the question.
This is not some modern snowflake idea, Hegel already said that self-knowledge develops in the mirror of how other people see us. Such confirmations matter.
The issue is rather that we are now in a stage of the extreme case of "the personal is the political". This is basically presented as a political issue, it is not, it is a matter of social customs or norms, more or less. When we consider matters like this political, we lose sight of real politics.
That is how I would interpret your view - "bathroom rules" are closer to real politics (it could be a law or something)
Assumptions that form the foundation stones of perception and all societies, ever, truly do matter. It is fine to challenge those assumptions but saying that they do not matter is a very detached thing to say. Your argument fails to appeal to me on every level you submit but I appreciate the attempt.
Generally agree with this, but one way to push back: whether trans women should be allowed into women's spaces, etc., plausibly turns on whether trans women should be allowed to occupy the social role of "woman", since it is these practices of gender separation that articulate that social role in modern liberal societies (traditional societies generally have more ways to articulate the man role and the woman role, obviously). There's a variety of considerations bearing on the latter question, including whether the benefits to trans women for being let in to the woman role outweigh the alleged costs to cis women, but also whether trans women *really are* women. (One might think that even though real definitions =/= legal definitions, there are serious social or ideological costs to affirming a legal definition of x that is out of step with the real definition of x. Not civilizational collapse, etc., but some decay of the internal rationale of the social roles and associated practices sustaining the functioning of the civilization.)
I happen to think that the concept of *woman* and the associated social role can be extended to include trans women without serious threat to the stability of this concept + role (and without overriding damage to the interests of cis women), but it's at least not obvious that this is the case (i.e., it would take some argument to defend this view) and I imagine this is probably the sticking point for gender-critical types and trans-resistant conservatives.
Oh, goodie, another "what is a woman" debate in which no one is asking the most (and only) fruitful question: what's with the WHAT? The most natural way to pose this question is "WHO is a woman" (c.f. "who is a Jew?"), is it not?
When you ask "what is a woman?" you're also asserting that a woman is a "what." Personally, I find that quite dehumanizing, and pretty much every other woman feels the same way.
Some analogous questions: "What is a farmer?", "What is a teenager?", "What is a human being?" In none of these cases is the question dehumanizing in virtue of asking "What?" not "Who?". This is because these questions are about the meaning of the relevant *concept*, not about what particular people satisfy the conditions for falling under the concept. The same goes for the question "What is a woman?": it's asking in the first instance for the meaning of the concept *woman*, not about which particular people fall under that concept.
The example of "What/Who is a Jew?" is actually apt for illustrating this distinction, I think. The natural answer to the question "What is a Jew?" is something like "a (matrilineal) descendant of the Hebrews or a convert to the religion associated with the descendants of the Hebrews", whereas the natural answer to the question "Who is a Jew?" is something like "anyone whose mother is a Jew or who converts to Judaism". This is because the former question is asking about the meaning of the concept *Jew*, whereas the latter concept is asking about who counts as a member of the category delineated by that concept. (And the legal definition of "Jew" for the purposes of the Law of Return is different still, and thus fixes different boundaries for membership in that category.)
>It doesn’t really matter whether transwomen are women or not
Ok then you should have no issue whatsoever if society perseveres in its longstanding tradition of considering them not to be women, correct?
Depends on how they're treated, which unlike the metaphysics of gender, does matter
Society has an obligation to treat everyone equally under the law. That's not "equal after taking into account your psychiatric disorder" it's "equal according to objective standards." An example of an objective standard is "you were born with a penis, therefore society will categorize you as a man regardless of how you feel about yourself." If your feelings about yourself prevent you from acting in accord with how society perceives you then you don't get to participate in society. Adults don't get to play in under-12 sports leagues, regardless of how much they feel like children. Individual preferences are subordinate to the rule of law.
The idea that you can be fundamentally wrong about something that 50% of the world is, and it won’t affect how your civilization writes and enforces laws and operates in general, is absolute buffoonish moron stuff.
Nothing like a man being “very clever” so he can tell women what they are. If this is the state of modern philosophy I’m happy to stick with Kathleen Stock
You will notice that I didn’t say anything about what women are.
You said what women were mattered less than a mantelpiece. A line so misogynistic and revolting I’m astonished you even thought it merited adolescent “look at me, aren’t I edgy” clickbait. Grow up, and stop pandering to narratives that put abusive and violent men in women’s spaces. And forget your “I don’t say that”. You enable those who do
Conceptual analysis mattering less than a mantlepiece ≠ women mattering less than a mantlepiece, obviously.
Can we chill with the woke right stuff and engage with the points? The post obviously doesn't say women themselves matter less than a mantelpiece
Can we chill with the attempts at ideological point-scoring and engage with the comment. It clearly made the point that the piece said what a “woman” is matters less than a mantelpiece. It didn’t even pretend to hide its misogyny in a cloak of “what genders ‘are’ matters less than a mantelpiece”. It just shows the dangers of thinking you can work up a cogent philosophical case using ChatGPT
“Can we chill with the attempts at ideological point-scoring”
*accuses article w/ opposing ideology of being written by ChatGPT*
Yes.
"assuming there’s no ambiguity about whether transwomen are biologically male" - Sadly, that's not a safe assumption. There are certainly some transgender people who would argue that transwomen are biologically female, or who would deny any importance to biological sex at all. Society not having a firm answer on "what is a woman?" serves to empower these people and their refusal to accept important biological realities.
Now, will civilization collapse if people fail to accept core biological realities? Maybe not, probably not quickly. But mistakes will happen, and society will get worse. It's certainly more important than some things, including at least 2 of the 3 you listed (E-Sports is economically huge so is genuinely very important to some countries).
It's good that the Supreme Courts of Britain and America have made the rulings that they have on the transgender issues, over the last year. Our society should have clear legal lines, and the biological meaning of sex should clearly dominate in at least some circumstances (such as prisons and sports).
I think Amos you have to realize that this isn't a purely intellectual/semantic question.
If some social theorists are right, many words and concepts sort of exist "inside" social practices, regulating and shaping (and being shaped by) them. For example, "bride", "defendant", "graduate". Some therefore argue that the same applies to "woman". Whatever its ontological status, it primarily acquires significance through our gendered ways of organizing social life. Hence "what is a woman?" was always a question meant to combine reflection with social change, in pretty much the same way gays asking "what is love? what is marriage?" weren't trying to argue that a conceptual analysis of "marriage" allows for two grooms.
If you'd like something more conceptual, I always found the question "what is a female?" a lot more philosophically interesting, with real sub-questions about essences and substances and emergence.
I agree with much of this. But there plainly are people - including many philosophers, sadly - who plainly think it matters for ethics and public policy what a woman is, as a matter of conceptual analysis. As with 'what is marriage?', the more clearheaded thing to do is to divorce the ethical questions that fuels the disagreement from conceptual analysis of the phenomenon under dispute, which is only ever normative relevant when assertion or belief is involved. If people did this, they would realise that what they cared about what the stuff about social change, not what a woman is. I get that 'what is a woman?' is often a trojan horse for <all ethical disputes around gender identity>, but people often do miss the woods for the trees and assume that 'what is a woman?' is one of the important questions.
> Try believing that Curtis Yarvin is an impressive political theorist. See? You can't do it!
In terms of making an impression, the way say destruction from a hurricane may be impressive, I can believe it. But in terms of being admirable or respectable, I cant :)
> The New Hampshire Gardening Quarterly .. (Disclaimer: not a real publication)
Readers may be interested in the New Hampshire Home, which has an impressive gardening section, but is bimestrial rather than quarterly so you may end up with the same gardening content over a whole year after all.
"But in practice, ‘the ethics of belief’ is plausibly mostly a nothing-burger in the gender context, since ethics has to do with what you can freely choose to do, and nearly all beliefs (including about what a woman is, whether Cassandra is a woman, etc.) are outside of your voluntary control."
I'm completely ignorant about this debate but this is interesting to me because on the one hand it seems reasonable (if I can't help but believe something's true, I can't be blamed for believing it) but on the other hand seems to imply some weird tangles. Like, if a sincere racist genuinely believes that committing a hate crime is a right and just thing to do, and they act in accordance with that belief, this view would suggest that they have an ethically neutral belief that resulted in an ethically bad action. But for this to be the case, we'd have to assume that ethical action doesn't entail acting according to one's beliefs, or we would have to assume that it is impossible to sincerely hold bad beliefs. But neither of those seem right to me.
You’re right to question me on this, I skipped over a relevant option — even if you can’t directly choose what to believe, presumably you can make lots of choices that impact the formation of your belief. (In the case of the racist, you might think he’s chosen to expose himself to various influences, neglected to consider non-racist explanations for the patterns he thinks he observes, etc.) In this way, you might have indirect moral responsibility for your beliefs, in the same way that you might have indirect moral responsibility for the beliefs of people you influence.
On the puzzle you drew out, how do feel about the following: distinguish between subjective rightness and objective rightness, where subjective rightness is “the right thing to do given what you think you know”, and objective rightness is “the right thing to do full stop”. For example, suppose — through no fault of your own — that you’ve been subjected to racist brainwashing, such that you faultlessly (but falsely believe) that 99% of people who belong to racial group X are violent. As a result, quite reasonably, you run away and shout for help the first time you see a member of X. To me, it seems like the correct diagnosis is that you’ve done what’s subjectively right but objectively wrong, and that your degree of blameworthiness only has to do with the former, but what you should aim to conform with is the latter.
I buy the idea of indirect moral responsibility for one's own beliefs--I think that's a striking and elegant way to put it.
With regard to the subjective and objective rightness idea: I can understand the distinction you're making, but it only really makes sense to me if one is viewing a situation from the outside with a clear ability to distinguish between objective and subjective right and wrong (which implies a clear and certain knowledge of what's objectively right, which of course nobody has). But I think when we're actually in morally important situations, it's even more difficult to make this distinction.
I wonder whether you’d find the distinction an easier sell when it’s about prudence instead of morality.
Suppose you are drinking tea, which—to the best of your knowledge—is okay to drink. Suppose, in fact, that I have poisoned the tea. I want to say: it’s subjectively prudent to drink the tea, but objectively imprudent to drink the tea.
If you find the distinction an easier sell when it’s comes to prudence, it might just be that you’re more skeptical that there are facts about what’s right or wrong than about what’s healthy for you. (It might also, as you say, be that moral truths are harder to know: but surely, regardless of whether anyone knows what the right thing to do is in situation x, if there is a moral fact of the matter, then there is a truth *to be known*, even if it is unknown/unknowable by us. In that case, even if we don’t know *what is objectively vs subjectively right*, we can still grasp that there is a distinction out there, just as there’s a distinction between the known and the unknown even if, by definition, we don’t know precisely which things are unknown.)
Prudence isn't an easier sell, exactly, because the notion of prudence assumes a commonly held notion of what's good. "Prudent" just means "effectively attains some desired goal." To suppose that something could be objectively prudent would be to assume a universally desired goal.
So if I am suicidal and want to die as quickly as possible, it might be subjectively imprudent for me to drink what I believe to be a healthy cup of tea. But if the cup of tea has been poisoned, would drinking the tea be objectively prudent or imprudent? It depends on whether, from an objective point of view, death is desirable. I personally happen to think that in nearly every case life is more desirable than death, but it is very difficult to prove this to the satisfaction of a suicidal person.
I accept your idea that moral truths are possible even if they're not knowable. But I don't see how the acknowledgment of potential truths which are unknown can help to regulate conduct, which is after all (I think) the point of thinking about morals.
Got it. There’s no need to know what other people actually think, objective truth doesn’t matter anyway, and nothing is connected to anything else. That’s how you’d like the world to work?
It’s fun to think as you’re told!
What do you think I think that I have been told to think?
A bunch of sophistry? That it’s somehow logical for 100 people to internalize a lie than for one person to recognize the truth?
This seems to be a widespread confusion about my post.
I don’t believe in a bunch of sophistry, as some are claiming, but rather that which is true.
You systematically boiled an incredibly complex issue which addresses telling most of America how to think into a distaste for white lies.
“Mommy, why is that man stroking his penis in our locker room?”
“Honey, that’s a woman. Not considering this act of flagrant sexual abuse a white lie might lead to mommy losing her job.”
"you might think your duty is to make sure that transwomen feeling accepted doesn’t come at the expense of biological women feeling uncomfortable or unsafe, to campaign against the admission of transwomen to women’s only spaces, etc., which you can do even if you can’t help believing that transwomen are technically women."
You can object to someone stroking a penis, or even just the presence of a penis, in the women's locker room without first determining whether the person the penis is attached to is a man or a woman.
See, you can’t. Because this debate isn’t just in your head, there’s a large coercive element. If you object, you might get sued or just have a large group of activists screaming threats outside your business. You’re assuming that teaching kids to lie on demand is healthy and that reality is secondary to some kind of social cohesion. You’re training every adult the same, and that it’s logically wrong to speak the truth because white lies hurt less.
Your suppositions are full of false premises. The entire article is misleading, based on a central false assumption that the worst that can come out of telling people what they want to hear is a minor internal struggle over honesty, when that coerced dishonesty has been used to aggressively invade female spaces and aggressively lobby to make those white lies be taught as fact to small children. And that stops being a white lie when a mentally ill person, even child, tells themselves they are a woman based on the combined forced white lies of every adult authority figure they know, leading to unnecessary surgery, loss of sexual function and deletion from the gene pool years before those kids have the facilities (that they are never taught anyway) to logically decide if they really believe this dishonesty, or are believing as they were incredibly aggressively taught.
This issue won't die because it is perfect for making everyone feel like they are taking crazy pills, to use Will Ferrell's memorable phrase. Some people can accept that under some vague intuitive understanding trans women could be women, and some people believe that as sincerely as they believe that no woman is fat or looks a day over 29, and just say they believe it to be nice, while some people don't understand at all why some people are insisting that trans women really are women by the only reasonable definition, and simply can't understand what is going in this discussion as anything other than O'Brien asking Winston how many fingers he is holding up if the party says it is five.
When people react strongly against this, what you are seeing is a defense against gaslighting. Perhaps their gaslighting detector is miscalibrated and their reaction is unnecessary and even counterproductive in this case, but I don't wish for a world where people have no such defenses.
And I don't think this matter should be irrelevant to the ethics of white lies in general. White lies may or may not benefit those whose feelings they intend to save, and they may be harmless to those who are in on them and understand that everyone is just participating in a white lie, but to those not in on it they can be psychologically distressing. (Why is everyone saying that when it make no sense? Am I the crazy one???)
Part of the issue is that doing white lies on the internet is in this regard worse than doing so IRL because it is much easier in the latter case for others to be on it, because they can check in with you privately if they are wondering if they are going crazy and you can acknowledge you were just saying that to be nice, but on the internet there is not another separate context in which to acknowledge to all the strangers who have heard you what you are doing; you simply must consistently maintain it or there's no point in ever maintaining it at all.
And we should not miss the distinction between telling a white lie yourself, and insisting that everyone tell that white lie because it is the truth and you'd be a terrible person not to agree. Because the prescriptivists aren't only found on the gender critical side of the discussion but on the pro-trans side as well. This has never been a discussion about whether there should be one more way to use the word woman; it is a discussion about whether there is only one acceptable way to use it and that way is the way that most people can't make any sense of. (Note this is not to say that everyone engaging in trans inclusive language is doing so as a white lie. Though many do think of it this way some have some sort of intuitive meaning in mind where they are telling the truth. It is not remotely clear which category OP is in, and for my point the distinction is irrelevant because the effect on others is the same.)
Look, I am not one of the linguistic prescriptivists. I don't care what trans people call themselves and am happy to use whatever name they prefer, and also I don't care which sort of trans person I end up sharing public bathrooms with. But I am finding that I do care a bit about vexatious efforts to destabilize others' ability to parse the world in terms of concepts that make sense to them. It is certainly not the entire ethical question here, but it is ethically relevant for the same reasons that gaslighting is unethical, and I think it is important for understanding the politics here because the way we discuss trans issues does in fact make people feel crazy and that is a big part of why people are so obsessed with issues like trans women in women's sports so far out of proportion to their seeming real world impact.
I don’t know. Willingly diluting and confusing meaning for feels, no matter how well intentioned, has actual consequences.
woman <> adult human female
think there is a nuanced middle ground here. woman and female have two different definitions. one indicates gender and one indicates biological sex. there would not be two distinct words for them if there was not nuance in meaning
one is a social construct and one is an undeniable fact about nature as a dyad pair?
that means we should strive for equality between sexes
that means trans individuals absolutely have a right to exist, be accepted and tolerated in society as we can accept that gender is a social construct that can be adjusted
the issue I have is the lefties claiming the righteous moral ground that so deeply conflicts with how we exist and evolve in the universe
sincerely trying to engage in discourse from an independent perspective
On the one hand everyone on some level knows this but on the other it kind of gives the whole game away or sidesteps the issue entirely. If we acknowledge there is biological sex, might we for some purposes care about it more than gender? If we acknowledge gender is a social construct, might we question why we care about it at all and why we couldn't stop constructing it? Why do we need to know that about anyone, especially if we don't even have any shared understanding of what the genders mean? But the whole point is we must stop caring about biological sex; it is irrelevant to everything, and we must see in its stead gender even though it gives us nothing to see, it exists only because we need something to distract and displace the part of our brain that evolved to see sex. The evasiveness is a fundamental indispensable part of the position.
Even the most ardent defender of trans ideology knows that there’s a difference, or the term “trans” wouldn’t exist. They also use that term and make that distinction whenever it suits their purpose, ie trans women are more marginalized and subject to violence so deserve more protection. We are expected to know which “women” will be offended if we don’t ask their pronouns and which women will be deeply offended if we essentially ask them how long they’ve been a woman.
The aggravating thing about trans discourse is that we are expected to recognize that difference and then pretend we can’t see it. The requirements of this belief system are deeply unequal and Byzantine, but declaring you won’t play is deemed deeply bigoted. All people should be treated with dignity and respect, but nobody gets to dictate our beliefs or insist we accept lies as fact.
>there would not be two distinct words for them if there was not nuance in meaning
Colossal leap of logic there. For the vast majority of the history of the word "woman", it was understood as simply a means of compressing the information contained in the three-word phrase "adult female human".
You can do this with anything. Instead of saying "car", I could say "four-wheeled automobile powered by an internal combustion engine". "Four-wheeled automobile powered by internal combustion engine" is a distinct word from "car", which by your logic implies that there is "nuance in meaning" and that therefore it isn't strictly synonymous with "car".
But that isn't the case: "four-wheeled automobile powered by an internal combustion engine" is essentially the same thing as "car". In fact, it's a DEFINITION of the word "car". It's not like "woman" and "adult female human" were two terms in common parlance for centuries: rather, the latter is a definition of the former, and only arose in popularity when trans activists made it necessary to clarify precisely what the term "woman" meant because they were trying to redefine it.
There is this concept of "expressive individualism", where you hold certain truths about yourself, and want other people to confirm it. This is the essence of the question.
This is not some modern snowflake idea, Hegel already said that self-knowledge develops in the mirror of how other people see us. Such confirmations matter.
The issue is rather that we are now in a stage of the extreme case of "the personal is the political". This is basically presented as a political issue, it is not, it is a matter of social customs or norms, more or less. When we consider matters like this political, we lose sight of real politics.
That is how I would interpret your view - "bathroom rules" are closer to real politics (it could be a law or something)
Assumptions that form the foundation stones of perception and all societies, ever, truly do matter. It is fine to challenge those assumptions but saying that they do not matter is a very detached thing to say. Your argument fails to appeal to me on every level you submit but I appreciate the attempt.
Generally agree with this, but one way to push back: whether trans women should be allowed into women's spaces, etc., plausibly turns on whether trans women should be allowed to occupy the social role of "woman", since it is these practices of gender separation that articulate that social role in modern liberal societies (traditional societies generally have more ways to articulate the man role and the woman role, obviously). There's a variety of considerations bearing on the latter question, including whether the benefits to trans women for being let in to the woman role outweigh the alleged costs to cis women, but also whether trans women *really are* women. (One might think that even though real definitions =/= legal definitions, there are serious social or ideological costs to affirming a legal definition of x that is out of step with the real definition of x. Not civilizational collapse, etc., but some decay of the internal rationale of the social roles and associated practices sustaining the functioning of the civilization.)
I happen to think that the concept of *woman* and the associated social role can be extended to include trans women without serious threat to the stability of this concept + role (and without overriding damage to the interests of cis women), but it's at least not obvious that this is the case (i.e., it would take some argument to defend this view) and I imagine this is probably the sticking point for gender-critical types and trans-resistant conservatives.
Oh, goodie, another "what is a woman" debate in which no one is asking the most (and only) fruitful question: what's with the WHAT? The most natural way to pose this question is "WHO is a woman" (c.f. "who is a Jew?"), is it not?
When you ask "what is a woman?" you're also asserting that a woman is a "what." Personally, I find that quite dehumanizing, and pretty much every other woman feels the same way.
Some analogous questions: "What is a farmer?", "What is a teenager?", "What is a human being?" In none of these cases is the question dehumanizing in virtue of asking "What?" not "Who?". This is because these questions are about the meaning of the relevant *concept*, not about what particular people satisfy the conditions for falling under the concept. The same goes for the question "What is a woman?": it's asking in the first instance for the meaning of the concept *woman*, not about which particular people fall under that concept.
The example of "What/Who is a Jew?" is actually apt for illustrating this distinction, I think. The natural answer to the question "What is a Jew?" is something like "a (matrilineal) descendant of the Hebrews or a convert to the religion associated with the descendants of the Hebrews", whereas the natural answer to the question "Who is a Jew?" is something like "anyone whose mother is a Jew or who converts to Judaism". This is because the former question is asking about the meaning of the concept *Jew*, whereas the latter concept is asking about who counts as a member of the category delineated by that concept. (And the legal definition of "Jew" for the purposes of the Law of Return is different still, and thus fixes different boundaries for membership in that category.)
"What is a man?" doesn't see as much mileage, because men understandably don't feel threatened by the presence of a "trans man" in a male-only space.