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PerseusWizardry  2yr ago (text post)   3914 thread views

Does my Philosophy of Sexuality Professor Have a Point? (It's a mandatory gen-ed)

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I assume that you are writing an essay?

All three premises could be disputed, but Premise 3 is most easy to dispute, so I would focus on that. In an argument, it's usually best to focus on the most easily disputed premise of your opponent. They might be wrong about a lot of other things, but your arguments will be better if you focus on developing one point very well, rather than firing out lots of potentially underdeveloped points. Marking essays is one of the ways I put bread on my table, so I know what I'm talking about.

Here are two lines of attack you could take:

(1) You could question that desert is the only reason why it would be wrong to racially choose your friends, and hence show that the premise is false. An alternative explanation is that choosing your friends on racial grounds will always, in practice, be using race as an indicator of other things, e.g. inferring that someone is bad-tempered because they're black or boring because they're white. Since using these stereotypes as indicators is wrong, it follows that choosing your friends on racial grounds is wrong. However, such stereotyping need not be involved in sexual preferences.

Of course, why some generalisations can be used in our reasoning (e.g. a black person is likely to be more resistent to the sun than a white person and more likely to suffer from vitamin D deficiency in some areas) whereas others should not is a very complex problem. However, in this context you aren't obliged to explain why it's wrong: just that it's an alternative explanation. It's always possible to go deeper, and the immutability claim in Premise 3 is also unproven.

(2) The desert claim is also wrong. That a characteristic is unrelated to desert does not explain why we can't discriminate on that basis, because there are plenty of such characteristics that we can reasonably use for discrimination. Imagine that you have a very sensitive sense of smell. You even tend to be violently sick when you smell something bad. Imagine that someone has a genetic condition that makes them smell very bad. They can cover it with perfume, deoderant etc., but that won't stop you from vomiting around them. There's no way they can change this characteristic of themselves, and you can't find a way to stop being sick when they are near. Their bad smell is not a moral fault on their part, nor any other sort of desert-based fault. Is it really wrong for you to choose not to be their friends?

Personally, I would focus on (2), because it's the easiest point to make. However, if you have enough space and time, you could also develop (1). So your argument would be that desert-irrelevance is neither necessary nor sufficient for why we can't discriminate racially when choosing our friends, and hence Premise 3 is false.

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