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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   24181 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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It doesn't seem to me that this sort of position is compatible with your critique of the naturalist fallacy above. The argument against obesity is that it's divergent from our natural state, from what we ought to be. But as you say, rabies, infant mortality, etc, etc, and it seems to follow that any downside to obesity could easily be framed as just a matter of insufficient technology.

I don't follow. I'm not the one arguing that obesity is bad because it's not natural. I think it's bad because it makes you slower, weaker, ruins your QOL, makes you more likely to die early and less likely to find an attractive partner.

If there was a magic pill or surgery that let you be obese without any of the present downsides, that's a matter of aesthetics. It would be no different to dying your hair a weird color or getting a garish tattoo.

Being super fit and muscular isn't natural at all. Yet that's the revealed preference in terms of what people look for or aspire to, and they at least feel bad about not being there. The closest humans to a "state of nature", hunter gatherers, aren't super models or killing it on dating apps.

I would argue that we should value the places where nature is consonant with our desires, and we should be skeptical of places where our desires require wholesale rejection of nature. To the extent that our desires potentially bring us into conflict with nature, I think we should favor the desires that are as concrete and general as possible, over the desires that are highly individual and unusual. I think doing so would allow us to pursue common ground for a supermajority of the population.

Humans have been rejecting nature ever since they sharpened sticks and lit fires. It's worked out pretty well overall.

I think that questions of whether something is natural are often irrelevant to whether its good or desirable, noting that this unavoidable requires a subject to decide what counts as good or desirable. If that was you, then you might intrinsically think natural = better in many situations.

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