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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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My concern is mostly with my lack of understanding, really. At least I assume I simply don't get it; very subjectively it just sounds like propaganda to me. The premises and the conclusions strike me as ideologically motivated, and the argumentation seems like a logical fig leaf used to tie the two together. But I figure I can't just dismiss it that easily without even understanding how these kinds of things are meant to work.

Applied ethics (the branch of philosophy that deals with evaluating whether specific actions are right or wrong), as practiced in contemporary western academia, is mainly just a propaganda factory for the ruling ideology. So your assessment is correct.

There’s a lot more to philosophy than just this sort of thing, though.

I suppose that the idea here is to work backwards: given that the argument is correct and that the premises imply the conclusion, it is inconsistent to accept the premises and reject the conclusion. So if you do reject the conclusion (as most people do), then the reader is challenged to either reject one or more of the premises, or to find a fault in the argument that makes the implication not hold. This is a standard case of working backward from moral intuitions to check that the foundations make any sense.

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