WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
WandererintheWilderness
2hr ago
The very introduction of "suffering" seems to me to evidence a degree of confusion between consequentialism and utilitarianism; consequentialism needn't have anything to do with pleasure, suffering, or whatever else. A paperclip maximizer is a consequentialist, so long as it believes that it should take whatever actions maximize paperclip amount in the long term (up to and including destroying paperclips while its human handlers are watching, so as to demonstrate its supposed human-friendliness), rather than only engage in actions with directly create paperclips. There is no contradiction between being a consequentialist, and believing that the ethical course of action requires us to destroy civilization and cause untold suffering in the process; it all depends what consequences you're looking at.
WandererintheWilderness
2hr ago
By your definition, ethics are practically nonexistent in the real world, and belong only to rare outliers.
Well, I wouldn't say that. In the first place, I think there are a number of ethical lines that most ordinary people would rather die than cross or see crossed, they just mostly don't come up. For example, I believe that the vast majority of people I encounter in my day-to-day life, including on this forum, would rather lay down their own lives rather than allow a toddler to be brutally raped. Also and as a separate matter, I think there are even more ethical lines which people believe in their conscience they should defend unto death, even if, in practice, they might falter; ethical lines where if they fell short of defending them with everything they've got, they'd feel guilty afterwards.
They are not the the mass phenomenon that drives immigration policy in the West.
Agreed.
WandererintheWilderness
2hr ago
even if it causes maximal suffering for everyone in every situation all the time, with no positive side-effects, as long as the ethics were followed properly, that is better than if the ethics weren't followed properly and resulted in prosperity and less suffering, with no negative side-effects
I think you are confusing consequentialism with utilitarianism. Consequentialism judges ends rather than means, but it does not require 'gross hedonic product' to be the only criterion by which to compare outcomes. We might say, for example, that as one of many discrete terminal values, we want the number of starving children in the world to be 0. A policy designed to achieve this end by any means necessary, up to and including the end of Western civilization as we know it, would still be a policy driven by consequentualism (i.e. a policy that is judged on outcomes, rather than the virtuousness of the means used to achieve them).
WandererintheWilderness
2hr ago
In theory. Terms and condition apply, of course - starting with the fact that it might cause me discomfort to refer to Jenner as male, and if that discomfort is equal to or greater than your discomfort at hearing them referred to as male. For example, I might have trans people in my life who would be saddened if they could not trust that I always respect trans people's chosen names, and not want to be keeping secrets from them. At the end of the day, if hearing the words "Caitlin Jenner" irritates you more than the ability to have a mutually-honest conversation about Jenner would please you, we round back to the fact that we are probably not two people who stand to derive much happiness from discussing Jenner with one another, and should probably talk about something else if we talk at all.
(In the event, of course, I think Mottizens, by virtue of participating in the Motte, declare themselves to be people who would prefer to confront political and ideological disagreements head-on, at least within the context of the Motte. And generally I think true friendships require that sort of mutual-preference-for-the-other-guy to be honest, which is why the topic-avoidance strategy is most relevant to contexts where people are forced to interact regardless of personal inclinations, such as coworkers.)
WandererintheWilderness
4hr ago
I despair at this fixation on ethics as an overriding necessity. Is Western Civilization really so despicable that we must destroy it rather than adjust our ethics? Are our ethics really so supremely perfect, so outright sacred, that they brook no improvement?
You seem to be jumping here from one argument to the other. "Before we burn everything down in pursuit of them, are we really sure that our understanding of ethics is correct?" is a different, and in my view, more valid point than "What good are ethics in general if they don't produce good material outcomes?", as you have it elsewhere in the post. Ethics, in my view, are meaningless if they are not, in fact, a statement of ideals worth dying for, of lines so dark that it is better to die than to cross them. Ethics are not a guide to material success, they are a distinct, orthogonal reward axis for human behavior relative to material success - otherwise The Prince would be a great work of moral philosophy. Saying that you are against morality if its precepts sometimes lead to self-sacrificial behavior and reap only scorn of your children's children is as much as to say that you don't believe in morality. Morality is what you get eaten by lions in Caesar's circus about.
Now again, I'm sympathetic to the other point. I don't actually think that ethics require us to burn down Western Civilization, as a matter of fact. But if they did this would not be an indictment of ethics as a concept.
Yes. It's not nice to start beef with people about their beliefs when they've explicitly stated that they don't want to have an argument about those beliefs, and people shouldn't do it, especially in the workplace. (In theory, attempting to persuade a person with harmful beliefs could be worth the discomfort to them if you think it has a genuine chance of convincing them to change their minds; but people systematically overestimate how likely they are to persuade people, never mind people who've already said they don't want to argue the point.)
Of course, to the extent that it causes you discomfort for the worker to misgender Jenner in your earshot, the optimal equilibrium is for you to communicate that fact to him, and for both of you to avoid discussing Jenner at the office altogether, or, if bringing them up becomes absolutely necessary for some reason, to default to their last name and avoid gendered language. If such a gentleman's-agreement is in place, your coworker would be breaking the non-aggression pact slightly by letting a "Bruce" slip through, and you might therefore be justified in retaliating with a mild criticism to reestablish balance; but even then you should be careful not to escalate, and it's often better to just let it go by unless it becomes a pattern and you start to suspect that your coworker is trying to boil the frog. This framework has served me very well at extended family dinners re: the trans issue, and it's the time-honored way to handle value differences between coworkers in general: don't talk politics at the office, don't talk religion at the office, generally don't start arguments with people minding their own business and avoid doing things that might provoke others into starting arguments with you.
Right, so when you said the following, it was not entirely accurate: (…) The real goal
I don't think the passage you quoted actually conflicts with your restatement; they're different facets of the same thing. See also the nuance about whose "real goal" we are talking about. Trans activists' primary goal is a specific subset of the broader goal of anti-sexists. But your restatement sounds fair enough on the merits.
Well according to the principle of "treat people how they want to be treated," it would be inappropriate for anyone to criticize this worker who referred to Bruce Jenner as a "he."
That depends on what you mean by "inappropriate". In a hyper-analytical sense, you can, in theory, try to calculate how ethical it is to make any statement at all in conversation based on whether it will heighten or lower other participants' happiness, but I am not so much of a utilitarian as to think "ethical microtransactions" of this kind are useful to keep track of. The mild emotional inconvenience of a good-faith disagreement does not meet the threshold necessary to even start talking about morality, and is, in the grand scheme of things, trumped by other concerns like the society-wide benefits of free speech, and most people's preference for people to be honest when talking with them rather than insincerely walking on eggshells all the time. Criticizing the worker would be no more or less "inappropriate" than the fact that you're criticizing me right now, or that I'm criticizing you; neither of us is acting unethically, because I think we both prefer to live in a world where disagreements can be discussed openly in good faith.
In your view, would trans activists be okay with this situation?
Well, not as such, but neither would many old-school feminists. I suppose an unstated background assumption of my worldview, here, is that generally speaking it is bad to treat human beings differently due to their biological sex except in contexts where genitalia are directly relevant, eg sex itself. In this trans activist's optimal scenario, therefore, the widespread adoption of trans-style definitions of "man" and "woman" should be part and parcel of (indeed, it should be a footnote to!) a gradual shift into of a properly non-sexist, indeed a properly sex-blind society, a culture where, by default, nobody cares what you've got in your pants any more than they care about the shape of your earlobes. (With any luck, this shift will be expedited by a Singularity that makes old-school physical bodies themselves optional, but we'll see.)
Accordingly, I would regard a widespread adoption of 'X24' and 'X25' as unfortunate because it would constitute a backslide in that respect, not so much because of how it would reflect on trans issues in particular. Outside of a dating context, "this person has a vagina" should not be a fact on the forefront of anyone's mind any more than "this person is Asian" or "this person is left-handed"; it is deeply unpleasant that our culture trains people to mentally divide human beings into Vagina-Havers and Penis-Havers as the two foremost boxes, with anything else as parallel subcategories. Introducing new euphemisms for Penis-Havers and Vagina-Havers would reopen that Pandora's-box and risk reintroducing all those petty, demeaning sex-based biases to people's default way of perceiving the world around them.
can we agree (…)
Broadly, yes; I'm rather big on free speech. By the same token, of course, if there are people in that office who disagree with the worker on how it is appropriate to refer to Jenner, I do think they retain a right to criticize him however they like. But certainly I don't think the worker should get disciplined for it, whether by the employer or by the state.
WandererintheWilderness
23hr ago
My mistake on skimming and missing that bit. (Though I'm wondering about the impersonal "the court heard". From who? Does Watkin deny saying it?)
WandererintheWilderness
23hr ago
your claim that rape-by-deception trans people are "creatures of fantasy" i.e. that nothing like this ever happens
I never said that; I said it was "largely a creature of fantasy", i.e. it might happen very occasionally but in statistically insignificant numbers.
WandererintheWilderness
23hr ago
There have been a surprisingly large number of "creatures of fantasy" convicted and imprisoned for rape by deception.
A, Chinese robbers. B, neither of the two articles you link really pattern-matched to the "trap" archetype. Watkin was a social transitioner who frankly looks so clocky that I'm very much inclined to believe her defense that it didn't cross her mind that the guy might not have realized. Which is maybe not best practice, but we're a long way away from the sultry queen who suddenly whips out a penis. As for Newland, I honestly can't tell if she even identifies as male? It sounds like this could genuinely just be a lesbian who engaged in an improbable deception to get in a straight woman's pants. The article never claims that she identified as trans, it merely draws a possible legal analogy from how her case was judged to how this may reflect on trans cases. And either way, we're dealing here with someone who went by a wholly fake name and invented a fake backstory about an accident; the deceit goes well beyond a lack of disclosure even if Newland was indeed a trans man.
I feel absolutely confident that all my trans friends' judgement on these cases would be, respectively, "Watkin was not actually trying to deceive anyone", and "Newland was obviously trying to deceive the victim and the way she did so would constitute rape-by-deception regardless of the genders angle".
In situations where names do imply something factual,
But trans activists' whole thing is to alter cultural and linguistic norms so that "she/her" or "woman" no longer imply anything factual about people's reproductive organs. We want a world where everyone knows that some "women" have penises rather than vaginas. There is no deceptive intent, as there would be in the Michael Jordan example. Moreover, until the linguistic expectation that a "man" necessarily has a penis becomes as universally quaint as using "gay" to mean happy, which I grant might take some decades yet to filter through from the wokest Blue hubs, I am generally in favour of trans people actively making their transness transparent in any context to which sex is relevant. And frankly, so many trans people are (physically or digitally) bedecked in pins and pride flags that we're a solid chunk of the way there already.
please just lay out your argument for why trans people should be treated by society as their preferred gender without reference to your name analogy.
Well, my main reason isn't so much a positive argument as the root preference-utilitarian claim that it is generally morally good to treat people the way they wish to be treated, and that any exceptions to this require a proactive case for why normal rules of courtesy should be suspended. Going along with trans people's preferences constitutes being nice to them; misgendering them constitutes being mean to them. I believe in being nice to people unless there are overwhelming reasons not to, and I've never seen a conservative make a convincing case as to why trans people, as a bloc, should constitute such an exception. (They occasionally make cogent utilitarian arguments about specific situations; I can respect the opposition's view re: the convicted-rapist problem, for example. But that would only justify making exceptions to the general refer-to-trans-people-as-their-preferred-gender rule in those highly specific contexts; it is not an argument for ignoring them all the time.)
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
Well, I don't think it's fair to say I "decline" to describe the "various exceptions" when I outlined a few examples of what that might look like. I do decline to attempt to enumerate them exhaustively, because I think they look more like a literally infinite number of possible context-specific scenarios than like a list of simple rules.
And I'm a little uncomfortable with the "therefore" which gives the whole the appearance of some sort of logical deduction. I brought up the way we treat non-gender-related chosen names as an analogy for how I think we should think of trans people's chosen genders. I do not claim that you can rigorously derive trans rights from the practice of chosen names on its own; it's merely a good reference point for how I, as a pro-trans person, think of the former, which is what the OP was attempting to grok.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
(…) implicitly concede that there may be circumstances under which it's okay (or even preferable) to NOT indulge a trans person's desires in terms of name, pronouns etc.
I don't believe there are any such circumstances, unless you contrive a situation where their "desire in terms of name, pronouns, etc." is unrelated to their actual transness (e.g. a trans man happens to currently be impersonating a specific biological man for nefarious purposes).
Under what circumstances is it NOT clearly correct to call someone by their chosen name?
A variety of unrelated ones, much as there's a variety of unrelated reasons why you wouldn't feed the apparent starving beggar.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
No there wasn't. There really wasn't. You made an unqualified statement, which you now (apparently) concede to be incorrect.
I'm sorry, but I think this all kinds of an isolated demand for rigor and that no one reading my post in good faith would come away with the impression that I have some sort of reverse-Kantian objection to identifying a murderer in hiding. If I said "If a man knocks at your door, explains he's starving, and asks for a crust of bread, it's clearly the correct thing to do to feed him", and I later clarified that obviously this statement takes all kinds of common-sense assumptions for granted (eg: "you" have some food to spare; "the man" is a stranger to you rather than a wealthy personal enemy of yours trying to discredit you with a hidden camera; etc.), only a pedantic logician would call that disingenuous.
Well, there was, of course, an implicit "all else being equal" in the sentence you quoted. In your thought experiments as stated, all else is not equal; but that doesn't impinge upon my point, which was that insisting on calling Tex "William" isn't necessarily the right thing just because it is, in a technical sense, "the truth". There can be other, context-specific reasons why it might be good to identify a person currently calling himself Tex as his legal name of "William" against his will - if he's a wanted murderer hiding under an alias, for example. Your Michael Jordan impersonator largely falls into that category. (And mind you, it could be the case that a tall black guy's legal name happens to be Michael Jordan (e.g.), and suddenly the ethical thing would be to only refer to him by a nickname where it might cause undue confusion! The underlying "truth" is besides the point!)
I don't think trans people are in this category in the vast majority of cases. The most crucial difference is that it is legitimate for a hotel to treat the real Michael Jordan differently than they would a random lookalike, whereas if people treat a random person differently depending on whether they believe that person to be a man or a woman, that's their problem for being sexist. Moreover, most trans people are not trying to pass themselves off as the real Michael Jordan. The typical trans woman puts a trans flag in her Bluesky bio and will start talking about her transition journey as light conversation - she will certainly mention it before a date gets to second base. The "trap" who passes perfectly and uses that to lead on a potential sex partner all the way to the bedroom is largely a creature of fantasy, and not behavior mainstream modern-day trans people would endorse (if only because it doesn't tend to go well for the trans woman herself).
Similarly, in your King Charles example, there is more at stake than politeness and self-identification. If Charles Johnson is suffering from a delusion that he is the King Charles then perhaps I shouldn't go along with that (unless medical professionals recommend going along with the delusion for the patient's wellbeing, which does happen with e.g. dementia patients, but that's another question). Nor would I go along with it if a trans woman started telling me about her uterus or a childhood memory of her first period. But normal trans people are not like this. They know they are biologically of the opposite sex; in fact they often advertise it. If my friend is an eccentric who knows perfectly well that he's not really a Windsor, but would like me to call him "your majesty" as a kind of 24/7 LARP (perhaps he's into micronations?), I'd happily roll with it - and if for some reason I refused, it would be absolutely fair of Charles to not want to be my friend anymore.
(This doesn't change if my friend has maverick philosophical opinions that lead him to defend the position that at the end of the day, the "king" of a micronation and the "king" of a real recognized countries are more alike than they are different, in the way that a trans woman might know perfectly well that she's not the kind of woman who has a uterus and a vagina, and simply defend the esoteric metaphysical point that she's still as entitled to the word "woman" as anybody else.)
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
Yes. I don't think it's as dickish as deadnaming a trans person unless he's actively stated hearing his legal name spoken is painful to him - and conceivably he might be enough of a menace that being dickish to him is a defensible strategy in any case - but all else being equal, it's clearly not a nice thing to do, and the people who do it know that it's not a nice thing to do. A lot of anti-Ratsphere leftists make it a point to call Scott Alexander "Scott Siskind" and I think that's dumb and rude of them, too.
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
More pointedly, I think the image of "trying Papa's things and Mama's things and then realizing that the Little One's things are just right" is supposed to lead children away from messing around with their parents' things when they're home alone. Which is less of a moral lesson and more of a practical, avoiding-accidents-in-the-home sort of lesson. The story doesn't actually illustrate that lesson, so much as wrap the image in a fun little story that'll stick in kids' minds.
Speaking as a very pro-trans person: I don't especially believe that "gender" "exists" in some objective sense separate from subjective preferences - nor that it needs to.
I think it might help you understand my perspective if we look at another marker of identity with huge emotional significance to individuals, but very little biological basis if any: names. If an individual whose legal name is William would prefer to be known as Bill or Tex or Archimedes, it's clearly the correct thing to do to call him by his chosen name. In some technical contexts it might be necessary to bear in mind that the name on his ID papers is "William", but it would be dickish and bizarre to chime in whenever he says "Hi, my name's Tex" and go "ackshually, your name is William; either you're lying or you're delusional". If one of Tex's coworkers keeps passive-aggressively calling Tex "William" no matter how many times he explains that he doesn't like hearing that stuffy-sounding name that doesn't feel like it reflects him as a person, that coworker would clearly be engaged in a kind of low-grade psychological harassment.
Social transition, to my way of thinking, works very much like this, except in addition to a "William" who would rather be an "Alice", it's a "Mr" who would prefer to be called a "Miss", a "he" who would prefer to be called a "she". It is clearly, I feel, the nice, the civil, the moral thing to do to respect that person's wishes; and it doesn't require anyone to be confused about what William/Alice has got in his/her pants. She can be a conversational "she" and a medical "he" in the same way that the first guy was a conversational "Bill" but a legal "William". It's just that, unless you're a doctor/an IRS employee, the underlying technicalities of Tex or Alice's identities are none of your business. If a guy tells you "I'm Tex" it's none of your fucking business whether it says "Tex" or "William" on his driving license, outside a few specific technical circumstances; likewise if someone tells you "I'm a woman" then it shouldn't be any concern of yours what she looks like naked, unless you happen to be a doctor, or a prospective date. To put it another way, under normal circumstances, the only relevance that the sex of a random person has to you, whatsoever, is by what titles and pronouns it would be polite to address that person; how you should refer to them if you don't want them to feel insulted or misrepresented. So if that person dislikes the pronouns and titles that their biological sex would normally entail, sex loses relevance altogether, trumped by self-identification.
And a similar analogy can be devised for medical transition. Let's say you like to shave your chin but keep a mustache. Is there some specific factor in your brain that makes you a Person Whose Inner Identity Is A Mustache Guy? Probably not. It's besides the point. It would still be dickish of someone to say "biology says the male Homo sapiens is meant to have hair all over his face, you're not allowed to shave your chin", or indeed "it's better for society if grooming norms are cohesive, shave that mustache as well or you're a hippie freak". How you want to style your facial hair-growths is your business; if it's emotionally important to you to present the face of a Mustache Guy to society, and you don't feel like yourself with a lumberjack beard or a full shave, then it would be dictatorial of society to force you to do otherwise; it would be rude and invasive of any private third party to tell you how they think you ought to be styling your body.
"Gender identity" is just a kludgy concept lumping together a lot of disparate preferences, positive and negative; and even when two trans people share a preference, they might have come to it for completely different reasons (much as you may like to shave your beard because you think a full beard makes you look like some kind of caveman, while I like to shave my beard because I don't like how sweaty and itchy it makes my neck). But all those preferences, individually, should be valid in any free, humane society.
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
Even taking this as read, you might still expect male-to-female trans lesbians who like themselves a sexy video game protagonist, no? I had been reliably informed there were a lot of those in the gaming world.
WandererintheWilderness
6d ago
Are there no progressive sex-positives getting involved?
Well, at least you're acknowledging that a new religious movement is what trans is.
Not exactly, but I do concede that it's a belief system - and as a liberal atheist I believe belief systems should get the same kinds of legal protection whether or not they're grounded in supernatural beliefs, as historical belief systems tended to be. Persecuting Daoists or Buddhists for their beliefs continues to be wrong even if we're simply talking about their moral or philosophical beliefs rather than anything properly theological. I feel the same logic should apply to Transgenderism - and Vegetarianism, and Effective Altruism, etc.
(…) then in my eyes this strengthens rather than weakens the case for banning these interventions for children.
I wholeheartedly agree - about FGM, male circumcision, and medical transition for children. Physical alterations to children has always been the one point where I diverge from the progressive consensus re: trans issues, though it puts me into quite a lonely place politically - my belief is that in an ideal world, children should be allowed to socially transition, but barred from making permanent changes to their bodies just yet, and this is something both sides view as unacceptable from opposite directions.
(Now, mind, I do think that there's something of the isolated demand for rigor to the scrutiny applied to transitioning children. There are a lot of other alterations to children's bodies that are currently kosher, from getting a girl's ears pierced to so-called-"corrective" genital surgery on intersex infants. I tend not to find that much common ground with a lot of anti-child-transition campaigners due to them not caring about those things, never mind their views on adult transition, which are rarely congruent with mine. But I'm leaving this as a parenthetical here, insofar as given your stated position on circumcision I think you might actually be ideologically consistent on this kind of stuff.)
WandererintheWilderness
6d ago
There should really a better way to encapsulate the specific idea "people are trying to make there not be any Xs anymore" as distinct from just "people are systematically mistreating Xs"; many groups are persecuted without their enemies' aim being to extinguish the relevant identity altogether. Trivially, that UN definition you quote conceives of itself as applying to gender-based "persecution", and it would be… surprising for any government to set itself the goal of actually erasing women from the Earth (even in the non-murder-based sense of trying to forcibly transition all women into trans men), so they can't intend that "persecute" should be understood as implying an intent to destroy.
I dislike the "trans genocide" terminology, but I'm kind of stuck on a better word that doesn't minimize the concerns. Attempts to extinguish belief systems by any means necessary up to and including forced conversion and outlawing specific rites are a well-attested historical phenomenon which seems like it'd make a better analogy, but I don't believe that idea has a more specific name than the somewhat broader umbrella of "religious persecution".
But "people" includes me; it includes how I treat myself, and how you ought to treat me viz. what requests you make of me. Anyway, would you mind answering a couple of from me in turn?
I'm fairly bemused by this. Of course a principle on how you should treat people by default can be nullified by specific circumstances, but should still be followed in the absence of these circumstances; e.g. the general principle "it's not nice to kill people" vs the specific circumstance "you can kill in self-defense if they attacked you first". I don't see how this is any different. Hence, first question/set of questions: on what basis do you think people should in general be treated? Do you have a principle that applies in all circumstances and correctly models the ethical way to behave with any human being in any context? How and why does this principle demand that you always refer to a Homo sapiens with a penis by the word "he"?
I don't see how any of my answers could lead to that conclusion. Even if you disagree with some of the judgement calls involved, I staked a case based purely on materialist concerns, with none of the references to a magic transcendental True Gender written on the soul that less sophisticated trans advocates sometimes refer to, and which would validate a comparison to astrology. Put another way, I did not expect to convince you to support trans rights through this comment chain, but I did hope to make you see that I do not have any factually-erroneous object-level beliefs about the world on the subject of what gender is and how it works, in the way that a believer in astrology does; I merely have a value system that's fairly exotic compared to yours. So, my second question: would you in fact agree with that statement? If not, why not?
Finally: I made references to the possibility of a Singularity forcing the issue. Where would you stand if, in 30 years, we've all been converted into shapeshifting telepathic nanite clouds, only taking anthropomorphic form if we wish to? (For the sake of argument. Let's not get into whether you think a Singularity will happen within 30 years, or whether you believe it's possible for a brain-upload to have qualia.) Would you insist on only referring to people by the pronouns of their original, long-since-discarded flesh body's physical sex? Or would you say that the Earth was now exclusively populated by "it"s, and refuse to refer to anybody as "sir" or "madam" ever again?
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