Ignorance, Dunning-Kruger, & Trans Rights

Goodness me. Areomagazine has an “article” up by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay that takes itself far more seriously than it deserves. The intro and premises can be found in the opening paragraph:

The rights and social inclusion of trans people is a heated topic right now and, as usual in our present atmosphere, the most extreme views take center stage and completely polarize the issue. On the one hand, we have extreme social conservatives and gender critical radical feminists who claim that trans identity is a delusion and that the good of society depends on opposing it at every turn. On the other, we have extreme trans activists who claim not only that trans people straightforwardly are the gender they experience themselves to be but that everyone else must be compelled to accept this, use corresponding language, and be fully inclusive of trans people in their choice of sexual partners.

What the hell?

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On The Corner: Intersectionality and Existence of Privilege

Siggy, over at A Trivial Knot, has a new post up with some interesting things to say about Privilege Theory and its successes and limitations as a lens through which to examine certain social dynamics.

One line in particular resonated with me, not for how I view Privilege Theory, but for how I view Intersectionality. It starts when Siggy asks how to evaluate a theoretical framework like privilege or intersectionality:

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Talk About a Mediocre Ethicist

In the last post all about me, I mentioned that it might be possible for any mediocre ethicist to outdo anything I have accomplished. Recently I read all too many articles published by the Christian Courier, all of which, strangely, list Wayne Jackson as their author.

And? I stand corrected. I have found a Black Swan: at least one mediocre ethicist has no hope of outdoing me.

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A Moral Caricature: Deontology

How do you make your moral decisions? I’m not asking which things you think are good and which things you think are bad. I’m asking what factors do you consider, and what is the process by which you consider them, when you are trying to figure  out what is right or wrong, good or bad?

The online comic Strong Female Protagonist stars a superhero like many others in a story unlike many others. For those who remember Concrete, SFP reminds me more of that book than any other super hero comic I know. Recently, the main character had to make some decisions that any real person would spend some time second guessing. She wondered if she made the right choices. She wondered if she could even be called a hero. And yet, she wasn’t certain that choosing anything else would have been any better. All this is good. All this is appropriate characterization. But these thoughts are thoughts that in other comics would have been dealt with, if at all, in a dramatic moment. Either the hero would mull ethics immediately after a battle while in the midst of unignorable devastation caused by the battle, or the ethics would be glossed over until the middle of the next big battle, when suddenly the hero would seize up and the drama wouldn’t be so much about the goodness of the character as the timing of the character breaking free of the paralysis.

But Strong Female Protagonist is not a typical super hero story. Our Hero ends up wrestling with these questions in the park, speaking to an old professor she ran into by happenstance. One of the themes you’ll see explored here on Pervert Justice will be meta-ethics: how do we make decisions about what is good and what is bad? The creators of SFP did an excellent job with the hero/professor conversation and so I thought I’d take the opportunity afforded by this story to begin a discussion on meta-ethics.

We’ll start just with this one story-page to get a glimpse of a number of major considerations one encounters when attempting to consciously craft a meta-ethics that works with one’s own values and perspectives and experiences. On this page, the hero’s old professor (black hair) is drawn coat-on to represent one side of an ethical debate while the professor is drawn coat-off to represent the other side of the same debate. Our Hero is drawn in the middle of this debate, focussed on listening:

A Page from Strong Female Protagonist where our hero listens to one professor play-act both sides of the Deontology vs Consequentialism debate.

This is one of the first questions we must solve in meta-ethics: will we consider results alone? Or will we consider other factors? Note that consequentialism and especially Utilitarianism (one instance of consequentialism) are not the only systems of ethical decision making that consider the results (or the ends) of an action. Deontology, which is made up of those ethical systems that prioritize following rules or adhering to duties, is frequently asserted to be a system of following rules instead of considering consequences. This, however, is a caricature. Not only are consequences considered at various points in deontic reasoning, but an appeal to consequences is frequently a justification for imposing duties in the first place.

How else would you describe the first argument on the page?

CoatOn: If the ends justify the means, then all is permitted! In the name of the Greater Good we may commit any atrocity we like.

CoatOn is arguing for considering factors other than results, but the argument is that if we fail to examine the means and not merely the results, then we will end up with bad results. This is a Deontic position, a position that ethics is best described as a set of duties and the relationship of individual decisions/actions to those duties. Yet it is not blind to consequences. Rather it asserts that we will get better consequences if we begin our ethical decision making already constrained by certain duties. These duties are different in different deontic systems. In some an important duty/value (often the most important duty/value) is obedience to some authority, typically a god. But not all deontic ethical systems are religious and not all religious ethical systems are deontic.

Consequentialism is typically seen in contrast to deontology. There are other ethical decision making systems to consider, but the most frequently debated today reside in one of these two camps. For now, it’s enough to distinguish deontology from consequentialism and to understand that deontologists don’t ignore consequences, but rather have a belief (sometimes presuppositional) that the best ethical decision making is a process that considers more than consequences alone.

Modeling Gender & Sex Without a False Middle

There have been many attempts to create a model that simplifies gender, sex, and sexuality enough to easily communicate important concepts without either simplifying it so much that the concepts are lost altogether. Now that we know something about social models, let’s look at a model I shared some time back on Pharyngula’s (now obsolete) Thunderdome.

The model came up in response to the suggestion of the Genderbread Person as a teaching model. As I noted then in other words, the metaphor is not the concept, so all models will fail to communicate some aspects important to a concept. The question is whether there is a better metaphor available. As a teacher or someone attempting to articulate a concept, the responsibility is still on you to know the limits of the metaphor and be able to address questions, ambiguities, and extensions. If you aren’t aware of a metaphor’s limits and able to address them longhand, using any model is risky. If you are, any model is adequate, but the models that minimize those longhand conversations are better than ones that only somewhat reduce them.

It’s with this in mind that (many years ago) I abandoned the Genderbread Person and adopted a different model, one that permits a shorthand visual model to combat multiple myths at the same time.

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The Metaphor is not the Concept

Over the course of this blog, we’ll be talking quite a bit about social theories and theory making. These theories have some similarities to scientific theories, but also some differences, so it’s worth stepping back for a moment and contemplating them. In particular, I think it’s productive to reinforce the idea that the theory is not the concept.

What is a theory? In these circles, in these uses, a theory is similar to scientific theory. It is a model used to discuss a concept or body of facts. Unlike scientific theories, social and critical theories reach their best when they explain a large body of observations and are contradicted by no repeatable, empirical observations, but they remain “theories” when they have not yet reached this pinnacle. Science has a separate category, hypotheses, for unconfirmed but educated speculations whose merits are debated in an academic community. Social critics? Not so much.

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