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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 think people are being horribly harsh going after the professor here as if this was definitely their real belief. This reads more like the classic of putting forward an untrue conclusion with flimsy but existing defenses and giving perspective philosophers an opportunity to learn by dismantling it. I wouldn't take this as a condemnation of the prof.

I’m reasonably certain this is intended to tie into the existing culture war argument that lesbians not sleeping with trans women are transphobic.

If so it's not a very good argument. Isn't gender identity also thought to be unchosen and thus would be illegitimate to discriminate on? It wouldn't just make lesbians receptive to trans women but men as well.

It only needs to be good enough to persuade undergrads who already want to believe. As for your second point, you need only add a "punching down" filter to applicability to make it fully consistent with progressive norms.

Here the culture war actually matters. First of all, even if this is just a hypothetical, you may have to avoid some answers for completely nonphilosophical reasons, depending what the class and campus is like. You're answering the question with one hand tied behind your back. Second of all, since this is a culture war topic, and people do argue related things outside philosophy classes, it's a lot more likely that the professor does believe it than if he was asking you to refute, say, an argument that we should subsidize broccoli over tomatoes.

I could see the professor believing something adjacent to it being bad to discriminate in friendships. I find it quite hard to believe they actually are seriously going to endorse that homosexuals not being willing to sleep with/marry the opposite sex is immoral. That's a really kooky conclusion hacked together poorly enough in the context of a philosophy class that the simplest explanation is that this is being done intentionally. If it makes the students grapple with the truth value of commonly held but unexamined beliefs all the better.

Internalized vs. Externalized beliefs.

In this case, it's Externalized in a way where the prof's friends should have the ability to sleep with whoever they want, but outside of that, it exists in strictly a theoretical space that people shouldn't take seriously. It's based in an understanding and active adoption of the "Who, Whom" dynamic. Or Low-Rez vs. Hi-Rez dynamics.

I find it quite hard to believe they actually are seriously going to endorse that homosexuals not being willing to sleep with/marry the opposite sex is immoral.

For real world culture war issues, people often believe things without believing their logical consequences. So in the scenario where the professor believes it, he might just not recognize that the argument applies to homosexuals, or he might make an unprincipled exception for homosexuals.

If it weren't literally a philosophy professor I could believe this but that's quite an thing to argue in this context.

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