The picture is obnoxious.

iwpoe wrote:

darthbarracuda wrote:

Perhaps

In fact.

Obnoxious.

iwpoe wrote:

darthbarracuda wrote:

Rather, it would seem that there are far more complicated and complex variables involved in the success of a relationship, not merely whether or not it is heterosexual or homosexual. What are the age differences? What is the education of both spouses? What is the annual income? Do they have kids/adopt kids? How compatible are the spouses? It is not that successful homosexual relationships are the weird statistical anomalies, there are plenty of successful homosexual relationships.

I don't deny that. I'm a philosopher and a Marxist of some sort. You think I'm unaware that popular discourse and politics is woefully oversimplified and foolish?

Considering your prior posts I would say that I would have had no knowledge of your awareness of this.

iwpoe wrote:

The challenge is to see what the simplifications mean. They are usually inarticulate stand-ins for more complex intuitions. The fact that you can't see that speaks more to your "armchair" qualifications than any of our metaphysics.

What do you mean by this assertion? I am confused.

iwpoe wrote:

darthbarracuda wrote:

It's not consequentialist per se. I think that Feser is right that the core argument is the perverted faculty argument.

I have difficulty wading through the polemic and rhetoric of Feser and his arrogance. Not to mention that is a one heck of a list to read for a the perverted faculty argument. Can you explain it?

iwpoe wrote:

darthbarracuda wrote:

Is there something "wrong" with the way these men act?

Yes. It's foolish because it harms the soul. Have more wreckless sex if you don't yet understand this.

Oh, do you have first-hand experience?

iwpoe wrote:

darthbarracuda wrote:

Do you, personally, have an issue with how other men live their own personal lives?

I personally have a personal difficulty with their personal persons.

So, in others words, it does not harm you in any way, shape, or form, you just find it icky.

iwpoe wrote:

darthbarracuda wrote:

The fact that you find it unusual, or "icky", does not mean there is anything wrong with it.

Who are you even pretending to quote? Not me. You have no idea how much anal sex, never mind sex in general I've had. If you'd go out more, you might understand the intuitions I'm working with when I counsel caution, and it has absolutely nothing to do with disgust. I've done things many times more "icky" than the average person, gay or not, and your school-marm finger wagging at me for being uptight is ridiculous.

Indeed, I have total comtempt for this stereotypical namby-pamby politically correct liberal shite you're trying to burden me with. As a Marxist I'm contemptious of it even harder than these conservatives, since you're the weak albatross around the neck of the left that helps prevent any real political change. Go buy some more rainbow mugs at your local coffee shop and pretend you're changing lives- leftist LARPer. If you present me in terms of a ridiculous stereotype again, we're going to have stronger words. You have no idea about me.

ROFL What a straw man!
 

iwpoe wrote:

I think he thought he was going to walk into a forum with a bunch of dime-store wannabe Catholic moralists. I've been moderating forums for nearly 2 decades.

Tell me more about your war stories.

iwpoe wrote:

It's like he thinks I never heard the ole' "You think gays are gross, and that's the only problem you really have." chessnut. I heard it when I was an atheist and a half-ass liberal just like him. I didn't like it as a criticism when I was 15, and I don't like it now. It's lazy. I'm not even a practicing theist, never mind uptight.

First of all, I'm not a liberal nor am I am atheist nor am I fifteen nor do I try to be lazy.

Second, I have not seen any arguments defending natural law theory except for appeals to the mob and the fact that you personally find it to be reprehensible.
 

iwpoe wrote:

I'm not a natural lawyer, nor is Daniel, nor are many of us. Why would I defend it? I get the idea, and I agree with some aspects of natural law, but I'm closer to a virtue ethicist than a natural lawyer.

And I don't find it personally reprehensible. I find it to be characteristically prone to certain vices. The idea that I should be unconcerned with the vices of others just as I am with mine is the real lack of "compassion" between the two of us.

I apologize for assuming you were a natural lawyer. I assumed that since you were defending it you were espousing it.

I find virtue ethics to be redeemable to the individual himself but lacking when it comes to affirmative action and as a universal ethical law, in which case I adopt the negative preference prioritarian model.

I do not have any problem with other people living their lives as they see fit, and this seems to be the issue that separates us. Both virtue ethics and natural law theory propose that living by their normative ethics will lead to the eudaimonic life and by not doing so you are not eudaimonic and therefore doing something immoral.

The trouble I have with this is that the eudaimonia affects the person themselves. It is their problem if they fail to achieve eudaimonia, not ours. We can offer our assistance and our advice but we really shouldn't disparage them for living in a way that does not, in our personal opinion, lead to the eudaimonic life, so long as this does not harm anyone.

We may have this idyllic dream that everyone follows virtues and everyone conforms into these little cookie-cutter models which will allow society to run like a well-oiled machine with no problems, but this is absurd. People are unique and this needs to be respected.

darthbarracuda wrote:

[
My skepticism of objective moral values does not prevent me from voicing my opinion on morality. The lack of any objective morality does not prevent one from arguing and potentially changing someone else's ethical intuitions.

No, but it does mean that you can give no rational argument as to why others should change their arbitrary preferences to mirror yours. You can attempt to 'persuade' in the Rortian sense of using rhetoric to elicit certain emotional reactions in the listener which you hope will lead to certain behavioral reactions, but that isn't rationality as much as animal training (and again no set of behavioral reactions are preferable to another).

 

darthbarracuda wrote:

[So it is consequentialist, then?

If you saw that thread I linked to in my first post then you'll know that my answer will be 'Yes, and too much so for my liking'.

darthbarracuda wrote:

T
The Common Good is not affected by the personal sexual relations of a homosexual couple.

My views on the Common Good are unprintable.

darthbarracuda wrote:

[
If you are going to argue that it is wrong for homosexuals to have relationships because they don't produce children (as DanielCC alluded to), then this is fundamentally a consequentialist argument that needs to be supported: why are children so important?

I concur. The NL justification (as in positive argument for) reproduction is that it leads to more reproduction. Call me odd but the view that sexuality is an endless series of people as means to yet more means is distinctly suspect.

darthbarracuda wrote:

I take it that suffering is a bad thing that is bad insofar as there are entities that can experience it. It is a brute fact that suffering is a negative state of feeling.

Our empathy and our sense of compassion allow us to understand when another person is suffering, and we are moved to help them. This makes the other person feel good, and you feel good. There is no ought involved at all, just a genuine care for the well-being of other people.

Even if we grant suffering is de facto bad for the person experiencing it (which may be tautological) there's no reason to extrapolate that to others' suffering. As with pleasure suffering is phenomenal - if someone feels they are suffering then they are suffering. So if someone should find the fact that X was not agonizingly flailed alive the other night a cause of torment...

We *might* be (we who?) but that doesn't mean we ought to be. Who's to say suffering of others might not make us 'feel good'? We might have a 'genuine care' for making their lives hell.

(Even aside from the extremes of Sadism and malice for malice sake its quite common for people in moments of anger to desire to wound, physically or emotionally, their antagonists - true we normally override this but on your account there's no real reason why we ought to)
 

Last edited by DanielCC (2/06/2016 6:03 am)

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

I think natural law is not an exhaustive moral account, but as far as it goes it seems sound to me. You're certainly correct that one of the most important supports for it is the perverted faculty theory.

With respect to sexual ethics, in any case.

I'm not generally speaking too bothered by natural law accounts; I just think they're impoverished. Sure, maybe I agree that the perverted faculty argument is correct, but why shouldn't we pervert our faculties? Does it lead to psychological distress? God's wrath? What exactly? A broader account of the dynamics of the soul is needed here, but when you start giving such an account it's not clear to me that natural law accounts don't simply drop out altogether or, at least, become rather trivial.