Questions for Men and Women

 

Why do so many women and men treat woman’s fertility as a sickness? Why do so many (oh, so many) people ask a person who is pregnant if she or her husband are planning to get “fixed” after the birth of the expected child, as though her fertility is a sign something is broken?

Why are so many ob/gyn offices festooned with posters, pencils, pens, mugs, clipboards, paperweights, lights, boxes, calendars, and charts manufactured by companies that make contraceptive pharmaceuticals?

Why does Planned Parenthood have the right in many school districts to have “educators” teaching students as young as kindergarten what sex is like using stuffed toys? Why do federal regulations require that minors are allowed to be given contraception without their parents’ consent through Title X funding?

Why was abortion the leading cause of death in the world last year?

Aren’t these things related?

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  1. Stina Inactive
    Stina
    @CM

    Saint Augustine (View Comment):
    Three available sense of nature, not to be equivocated:
    A: how things work when we don’t interfere.
    B: the proper function of something.
    C: the laws governing the world.

    From where I sit, I am understanding Midge’s argument is to take umbrage with some conservatives’ emphasis on B & C because normal people may think we mean A.

    That’s what I’m taking away. If it isn’t what she means, then I don’t understand anything she’s saying.

    Midget Faded Rattlesnake (View Comment):
    “Midge merely misunderstands male and female roles”

    That’s not what I said. If you want others to put in the effort to understand you, then you need to try to understand others.

    I didn’t say you don’t understand them. I said it sounds like you have a problem with their promotion among conservatives.

    • #61
  2. Stina Inactive
    Stina
    @CM

    Midget Faded Rattlesnake (View Comment):
    I’m misrepresenting something

    Considering I have already had the pleasure of debating you on this subject and witnessing your handling of another Ricocheter, I can say with confidence you DID misrepresent our arguments continuously.

    I’m just making sure I’m not misrepresenting yours. In other words, I’m trying to understand you. 

    • #62
  3. Saint Augustine Member
    Saint Augustine
    @SaintAugustine

    Stina (View Comment):

    Saint Augustine (View Comment):
    Three available sense of nature, not to be equivocated:
    A: how things work when we don’t interfere.
    B: the proper function of something.
    C: the laws governing the world.

    From where I sit, I am understanding Midge’s argument is to take umbrage with some conservatives’ emphasis on B & C because normal people may think we mean A.

    That’s what I’m taking away. If it isn’t what she means, then I don’t understand anything she’s saying.

    Yeah, that seems right.  I confess I zoned out for a good bit of dialogue in the middle, but that fits my vague impressions of what I’ve seen.  And GNOG and GOTCHA seem like the elevation of C to the level of a religion.

    Midget Faded Rattlesnake (View Comment):
    “Midge merely misunderstands male and female roles”

    That’s not what I said. If you want others to put in the effort to understand you, then you need to try to understand others.

    Not understanding others–that sounds like Midge, not to mention me and everyone else!

    Not trying to understand–that doesn’t seem like Midge.

    • #63
  4. JudithannCampbell Member
    JudithannCampbell
    @

    I know many conservatives in real life; none of them would ever pressure anyone into getting married and having children if they don’t want to. There definitely are some conservatives who want to force everyone into the same mold: there definitely are some conservatives who believe that everybody should get married, and not only that, but everybody should get married young. I vehemently disagree with that world view, and so would the conservatives I know in real life.

    I don’t have children; the conservatives I know in real life are fine with that, but I have encountered conservatives on the internet who have told me that I am selfish and not doing my duty. I find it very easy to blow off their opinions, probably because I don’t know them in real life, but if I knew a lot of them in real life, yes, they would make me miserable.

    It is possible to respect natural differences between men and women and also have a live and let live attitude that allows for individual differences: I have seen it with my own eyes among the pro-lifers I know in Western Massachusetts. For instance, most of them were stay home mothers, but their biggest hero was Mildred Jefferson: she wasn’t married, never had children, and devoted herself to her career as a physician. I could never live the way she lived, but she was the happiest woman I have ever encountered; there was, literally, a light that glowed around her. She respected stay home mothers, and stay home mothers respected her, and it was a beautiful thing. 

    It’s never a good idea to try to force everyone into the same mold. 

    • #64
  5. Midget Faded Rattlesnake Member
    Midget Faded Rattlesnake
    @Midge

    Stina (View Comment):

    Saint Augustine (View Comment):
    Three available sense of nature, not to be equivocated:
    A: how things work when we don’t interfere.
    B: the proper function of something.
    C: the laws governing the world.

    From where I sit, I am understanding Midge’s argument is to take umbrage with some conservatives’ emphasis on B & C because normal people may think we mean A.

    That’s what I’m taking away. If it isn’t what she means, then I don’t understand anything she’s saying.

    OK, it’s not what I mean. It’s not wholly unrelated to what I mean, but it’s also not what I mean.

    Setting A aside entirely, for example, I have epistemic problems with B in a fallen world full of incomplete information. I’m not calling B useless — it’s obviously possible to form categorical intuitions about what something should be for. I just think there’s hubris in over-investing in B. It can be touching, human hubris, born more from desperation than anything else, but still hubris.

    Consider an example not wholly unrelated to fertility: pain. We desperately want to understand pain in the B-sense, to understand its moral “nature” or “proper function”. Pain is a state desperately crying out for a moral — crying out so desperately that we’ll invent a moral, any moral, if necessary; spin any number of factitious yarns to narrate the pain into something familiar and justifiable.

    Many of the morals (proudly brought to you by the Copybook Gods — order their latest edition today! Promo code GotCHa) surrounding the general abstraction “pain” aren’t bad ones — indeed they’re good and necessary ones! Pain is an incentive, a motivator; pain reflects the fallen state of the world; pain can be a sign that you have departed from your B, your Tao. Etc, etc. These are all good hypotheses.

    Still, frustratingly enough, when pain is located in a particular body through C — brute biology — it’s often very hard to tell what the “nature” or moral of that pain should be for that body. The hypotheses, so voluble when addressing no-body in particular, are left with nothing intelligible to say. B and C collide, and the result is absurdity. I am OK with this absurdity, less OK with that strain in conservatism that disapproves of treating these things as absurd.

    • #65
  6. Midget Faded Rattlesnake Member
    Midget Faded Rattlesnake
    @Midge

    Midget Faded Rattlesnake (View Comment):
    B and C collide, and the result is absurdity. I am OK with this absurdity, less OK with that strain in conservatism that disapproves of treating these things as absurd.

    Returning to the focus of the OP, I think human fertility, and its many complications, is pretty goldarn absurd. And I don’t think it separates neatly into a “proper function” and an “improper function” as Auggie describes here:

    Saint Augustine (View Comment):
    Catholic natural law ethics as I understand it is all about B, which involves A when interference has a bearing on proper function. That can weigh for or against interference: With colonoscopies, interference is to check on, protect, or restore proper function; with contraception, interference is usually to prevent proper function.

    It’s my understanding that Catholic advice is to avoid treating all the symptoms of fertility that aren’t openness to pregnancy with contraception, too.

    For example, if someone gets period-related GI issues, musculoskeletal pain, or asthma — and possibly several of these life-altering symptoms together — the advice is to treat each issue in its own right, even if birth-control pills exist that would tame all of these with just one treatment. Labeling such symptoms the “symptoms of fertility” is a misnomer in Catholic thought, because some women do have fertility without such symptoms being bothersome. Rather, they are symptoms of “something else” which happens to be aggravated by fertility. The desire to find separate natures for these symptoms is understandable, I think, but also somewhat doomed in the face of how jury-rigged the biochemistry of the human body actually is, with all sorts of less-than-ideal cross-talk across “separate functions” (leading some to ask, are these functions really so separate after all?)

    I believe I’ve heard of cases where Catholic women have been approved to take The Pill to control a medical problem once other attempts to control the problem have been exhausted. Hysterectomies, a one-and-you’re-done thing where fertility can’t be restored no matter how much one might repent later, are also relatively popular among Catholics who do use “contraceptive methods” — this latter strikes me as faintly absurd perhaps because it’s also excellent usage of instrumental rationality.

    • #66
  7. Stina Inactive
    Stina
    @CM

    Midget Faded Rattlesnake (View Comment):
    Consider an example not wholly unrelated to fertility: pain. We desperately want to understand pain in the B-sense, to understand its moral “nature” or “proper function”. Pain is a state desperately crying out for a moral — crying out so desperately that we’ll invent a moral, any moral, if necessary; spin any number of factitious yarns to narrate the pain into something familiar and justifiable.

    So how does religion play into this?

    You point out the Gnon and GOTCHA stuff as false gods, but I understand you to be a Christian. And the Bible has something to say on some of these things that would appear to contradict your rejection(?) Of morality of certain natures and pain (wherein they are addressed by Christian theology).

    And since religion is the predominant way we address morality, it seems relevant to turn to religion to make a case for the morality of nature, but that gets us right back to gnon or gotcha.

    • #67
  8. JudithannCampbell Member
    JudithannCampbell
    @

    Midget Faded Rattlesnake (View Comment):
    Hysterectomies, a one-and-you’re-done thing where fertility can’t be restored no matter how much one might repent later, are also relatively popular among Catholics who do use “contraceptive methods” — this latter strikes me as faintly absurd perhaps because it’s also excellent usage of instrumental rationality.

    I know plenty of cafeteria Catholics who get their tubes tied, or get vasectomies, but I have never heard of anyone getting a hysterectomy unless it really was medically required. I don’t have time to read the entire study that you linked to; could you maybe copy and paste the part which makes this claim? Because it seems like a pretty incredible claim. 

    How could you even get a doctor to agree to perform a medically unnecessary hysterectomy?

    • #68
  9. Midget Faded Rattlesnake Member
    Midget Faded Rattlesnake
    @Midge

    Stina (View Comment):

    Midget Faded Rattlesnake (View Comment):
    Consider an example not wholly unrelated to fertility: pain. We desperately want to understand pain in the B-sense, to understand its moral “nature” or “proper function”. Pain is a state desperately crying out for a moral — crying out so desperately that we’ll invent a moral, any moral, if necessary; spin any number of factitious yarns to narrate the pain into something familiar and justifiable.

    So how does religion play into this?

    You point out the Gnon and GOTCHA stuff as false gods, but I understand you to be a Christian. And the Bible has something to say on some of these things that would appear to contradict your rejection(?)

    It is not a rejection, and I would hope not even an apparent rejection given my having written stuff above like “Many of the morals (proudly brought to you by the Copybook Gods — order their latest edition today! Promo code GotCHa) surrounding the general abstraction “pain” aren’t bad ones — indeed they’re good and necessary ones!” then listing several possible morals.

    It’s a correction, a correction which the Bible itself contains. Sure, the Bible has plenty of Copybook wisdom, especially in Proverbs, but also stuff like Ecclesiastes, the Book of Job, or Jesus healing the blind man, when His disciples apparently expect him to pin the blindness on some moral cause. ‘”Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him’ is not a particularly satisfying answer to why people other than this particular man Jesus heals with muddy spit are afflicted with conditions like blindness, but maybe it’s not supposed to be a satisfying answer. We can’t always assume suffering is a logical moral consequence of defying our Copybooks, but we can hope suffering might be an occasion to display the works of God — whatever that might mean.

    Whatever that might mean. In Memoriam AHH captured quite well the frustration of not knowing what that might mean. We can only act on the knowledge we have, and we know there’s knowledge we won’t have in this life (mirror dimly and all that).

    Of morality of certain natures and pain (wherein they are addressed by Christian theology).

    And since religion is the predominant way we address morality, it seems relevant to turn to religion to make a case for the morality of nature, but that gets us right back to gnon or gotcha.

    Nature is God’s good creation, and nature is fallen, too. Causality, whether moral or otherwise, is a creature of God — hard to “personify” as a single creature, but I think Gnon or GotCHa suffice. It would be foolish for humans to attempt to develop a notion of justice very far removed from causality, but we know justice and causality aren’t identical. The Copybook Gods are right there in the Bible, in Proverbs and elsewhere. If we look in God’s direction, we will see them, but God is beyond them, so to avoid idolatry we must to see through them. They’re God’s good creation, but also principalities and powers at work in a fallen world, and perfectly happy when someone doesn’t see through them and worships them as God instead.

    Conservatives see it as their unending task to remind everyone that those Copybook Gods are there — that we should see them. I’d nominate Kipling’s poem as the #1 conservative favorite in the English-speaking world for this reason. Copybook Gods? They’re everywhere! Don’t pretend you can’t see them, people — you can, and you should, lest they gobble you up! It’s quite useful to rhetorically opacify these gods simply so that people can’t deny they’re there. But Christians must see through them to get to the God beyond.

    Huh. I wish I had thought of saying that several comments ago.

    • #69
  10. Stina Inactive
    Stina
    @CM

    JudithannCampbell (View Comment):
    but I have never heard of anyone getting a hysterectomy unless it really was medically required.

    The only birth control method reported at higher rates in high religiosity Catholics than any other group was sterilization*.

    The authors wrote many of the deviations up to Americans being the least informed on their religions and not being reliant on church teachings (american rebelliousness).

    Otherwise, the entire study was somewhat complimentary to highly religious women.

    *sterilization was not defined. It could have been spousal sterility or tubes tied or hysterectomy, but I saw no definition of sterilization as being “hysterectemy”.

    • #70
  11. Midget Faded Rattlesnake Member
    Midget Faded Rattlesnake
    @Midge

    JudithannCampbell (View Comment):

    Midget Faded Rattlesnake (View Comment):
    Hysterectomies, a one-and-you’re-done thing where fertility can’t be restored no matter how much one might repent later, are also relatively popular among Catholics who do use “contraceptive methods” — this latter strikes me as faintly absurd perhaps because it’s also excellent usage of instrumental rationality.

    I know plenty of cafeteria Catholics who get their tubes tied, or get vasectomies, but I have never heard of anyone getting a hysterectomy unless it really was medically required. I don’t have time to read the entire study that you linked to; could you maybe copy and paste the part which makes this claim? Because it seems like a pretty incredible claim.

    How could you even get a doctor to agree to perform a medically unnecessary hysterectomy?

    OK, glancing through, I see I should have used the phrase “female sterilization” rather than refer to any specific type of female sterilization:

    In that study we found24that Catholic women were more likely to have used NFP, and less likely to have used condoms and the pill, if they attended church services frequently, believe that their Catholic faith is very important, and are orthodox in their sexual ethics. However, they also used female sterilization more frequently. So, even though these women seemed to be influenced by their religion…

    … the influence is not exactly what was intended.

    Apologies for getting the correct phrase “female sterilization”, which used in the study, conflated with hysterectomies specifically, though hysterectomies were anecdotally a pretty common procedure among the Catholics I grew up with. Usually I double-check stuff like this before posting but — kids.

    • #71
  12. Midget Faded Rattlesnake Member
    Midget Faded Rattlesnake
    @Midge

    And… cross-posted with Stina’s. Thanks, Stina for getting to it even if I couldn’t have.

    • #72
  13. JudithannCampbell Member
    JudithannCampbell
    @

    The Catholics and cafeteria Catholics I know are interesting people: many of them have lots of kids, and start off in their marriages saying “Let’s have ten kids! Let’s do this!” and then they have 5 kids, are totally exhausted, and get their tubes tied, or have vasectomies. These methods are probably considered preferable among cafeteria Catholics because they aren’t chemical and prevent conception rather than disrupting it. 

    • #73
  14. Stina Inactive
    Stina
    @CM

    Midget Faded Rattlesnake (View Comment):

    Conservatives see it as their unending task to remind everyone that those Copybook Gods are there — that we should see them. I’d nominate Kipling’s poem as the #1 conservative favorite in the English-speaking world for this reason. Copybook Gods? They’re everywhere! Don’t pretend you can’t see them, people — you can, and you should, lest they gobble you up! It’s quite useful to rhetorically opacify these gods simply so that people can’t deny they’re there. But Christians must see through them to get to the God beyond.

    Huh. I wish I had thought of saying that several comments ago.

    Yeah… I do too, but you got there.

    I think I got a taste of what your saying now even if I’m not fully aware of the flavors.

    I do think it’s important to be aware of how the world is. We can’t really change or control the world, only ourselves (within limits, even there).

    It seems to me the recognition of that reality is to avoid hubris – thinking we can destroy the gotcha gods leads us to misery or disaster, maybe not now but eventually; maybe not us personally, but those innocents in the future (not guilty of the father’s sin, but bearing its consequence regardless, thank you Adam).

    The beyond (for me) is God’s promise of better for his children. Isaiah 61:1-3 is the ultimate in that promise for me. It’s not that we need to understand why this world sucks so bad or why these copybook heading gods rule us in such tyranny (other than the existence of sin), but to trust that this isn’t all He has in store for us.

    • #74
  15. Saint Augustine Member
    Saint Augustine
    @SaintAugustine

    Stina (View Comment):

    Midget Faded Rattlesnake (View Comment):
    Consider an example not wholly unrelated to fertility: pain. We desperately want to understand pain in the B-sense, to understand its moral “nature” or “proper function”. Pain is a state desperately crying out for a moral — crying out so desperately that we’ll invent a moral, any moral, if necessary; spin any number of factitious yarns to narrate the pain into something familiar and justifiable.

    So how does religion play into this?

    Lewis, Problem of Pain!

    You point out the Gnon and GOTCHA stuff as false gods, but I understand you to be a Christian. And the Bible has something to say on some of these things that would appear to contradict your rejection(?) Of morality of certain natures and pain (wherein they are addressed by Christian theology).

    And since religion is the predominant way we address morality, it seems relevant to turn to religion to make a case for the morality of nature, but that gets us right back to gnon or gotcha.

    I thought the point of Gnon and Gotcha (how to capitalize? does it even matter?) was to have a purely natural religion without the G-d of Abraham.

    If the terms can refer to “nature and nature’s G-d” in the classical, Lockean sense, I must be a follower of Gnon and Gotcha myself.  It looks like Midge is too, and you.

    • #75
  16. Saint Augustine Member
    Saint Augustine
    @SaintAugustine

    Midget Faded Rattlesnake (View Comment):

    Stina (View Comment):

    Saint Augustine (View Comment):
    Three available sense of nature, not to be equivocated:
    A: how things work when we don’t interfere.
    B: the proper function of something.
    C: the laws governing the world.

    From where I sit, I am understanding Midge’s argument is to take umbrage with some conservatives’ emphasis on B & C because normal people may think we mean A.

    That’s what I’m taking away. If it isn’t what she means, then I don’t understand anything she’s saying.

    OK, it’s not what I mean. It’s not wholly unrelated to what I mean, but it’s also not what I mean.

    Setting A aside entirely, for example, I have epistemic problems with B in a fallen world full of incomplete information. I’m not calling B useless — it’s obviously possible to form categorical intuitions about what something should be for. I just think there’s hubris in over-investing in B. It can be touching, human hubris, born more from desperation than anything else, but still hubris.

    . . .

    A reasonable enough concern, a reason for caution and epistemic humility.

    But not evidence against natural law ethics.  If it were, it would also be evidence against medical science.

    Consider an example not wholly unrelated to fertility: pain. We desperately want to understand pain in the B-sense, to understand its moral “nature” or “proper function”. . . .

    No, we really don’t.  I think literally no one does.  Probably, you think we do because you do not understand the concept of B.

    We want to understand pain’s purpose, but not all purposes are proper functions.

    Pain is by definition not a thing with a proper function.  The kidneys and the heart have a function. The body as a whole has a proper function (and, Aristotle and Catholics and I say, so does the human being as a whole).

    Feet are good examples.  My foot has a function–walking and running and leaping.  The pain in my foot does not have a function in the relevant sense.  It’s a symptom of improper function, not itself a proper function.  (It does have a purpose–a clue to the fact that I have plantar fasciitis.  But not all purposes are proper functions in the B sense.)

    • #76
  17. Saint Augustine Member
    Saint Augustine
    @SaintAugustine

    Midget Faded Rattlesnake (View Comment):

    Midget Faded Rattlesnake (View Comment):
    B and C collide, and the result is absurdity. I am OK with this absurdity, less OK with that strain in conservatism that disapproves of treating these things as absurd.

    Returning to the focus of the OP, I think human fertility, and its many complications, is pretty goldarn absurd. And I don’t think it separates neatly into a “proper function” and an “improper function” as Auggie describes here:

    Saint Augustine (View Comment):
    Catholic natural law ethics as I understand it is all about B, which involves A when interference has a bearing on proper function. That can weigh for or against interference: With colonoscopies, interference is to check on, protect, or restore proper function; with contraception, interference is usually to prevent proper function.

    It’s my understanding that Catholic advice is to avoid treating all the symptoms of fertility that aren’t openness to pregnancy with contraception, too.

    For example, if someone gets period-related GI issues, musculoskeletal pain, or asthma — and possibly several of these life-altering symptoms together — the advice is to treat each issue in its own right, even if birth-control pills exist that would tame all of these with just one treatment.

    I rewrote # 60 a couple of times.  One edit was to specify that contraception is only usually to prevent proper function.  If a doctor prescribes birth control pills to treat medical problems (as they do for endometriosis), I think natural law ethics is ok with that.  (I suspect it’s stated somewhere in the vast oceans of official Catholic theology.)

    . . . The desire to find separate natures for these symptoms is understandable, . . . .

    Again, I don’t think anyone looks for anything like that.  The only relevant concept of “nature” here is the proper function of a thing.  Symptoms are not proper functions; they are properties of things that have proper function.  Pain in my left foot is not a proper function; the only proper function involved is walking (and running and leaping).

    • #77
  18. Saint Augustine Member
    Saint Augustine
    @SaintAugustine

    Saint Augustine (View Comment):
    The pain in my foot does not have a function in the relevant sense. It’s a symptom of improper function, not itself a proper function.

    Saint Augustine (View Comment):
    Pain in my left foot is not a proper function; the only proper function involved is walking (and running and leaping).

    On the other hand, physical pain does involve certain neurological processes.  I guess we could say that they have a function, which is to produce pain.  In this sense, we don’t look for the function of pain; pain is the function of those processes.  We look for pain’s purpose.

    • #78
  19. Western Chauvinist Member
    Western Chauvinist
    @WesternChauvinist

    Saint Augustine (View Comment):
    (I suspect it’s stated somewhere in the vast oceans of official Catholic theology.)

    I agree. Catholic hospitals are permitted to perform procedures to remedy ectopic pregnancies. Some would call them “abortions,” but it isn’t the intent to take the life of the child, rather to save the life of the mother. I am fairly certain exceptions are made for the use of contraceptive medications for various conditions when it is not the intent to contracept, but to remedy a woman’s condition. And forgiveness is made available if sincerely sought in any case.

    • #79
  20. Midget Faded Rattlesnake Member
    Midget Faded Rattlesnake
    @Midge

    Saint Augustine (View Comment):

    Midget Faded Rattlesnake (View Comment):

    Stina (View Comment):

    Saint Augustine (View Comment):
    Three available sense of nature, not to be equivocated:
    A: how things work when we don’t interfere.
    B: the proper function of something.
    C: the laws governing the world.

    From where I sit, I am understanding Midge’s argument is to take umbrage with some conservatives’ emphasis on B & C because normal people may think we mean A.

    That’s what I’m taking away. If it isn’t what she means, then I don’t understand anything she’s saying.

    OK, it’s not what I mean. It’s not wholly unrelated to what I mean, but it’s also not what I mean.

    Setting A aside entirely, for example, I have epistemic problems with B in a fallen world full of incomplete information. I’m not calling B useless — it’s obviously possible to form categorical intuitions about what something should be for. I just think there’s hubris in over-investing in B. It can be touching, human hubris, born more from desperation than anything else, but still hubris.

    . . .

    A reasonable enough concern, a reason for caution and epistemic humility.

    But not evidence against natural law ethics. If it were, it would also be evidence against medical science.

    Consider an example not wholly unrelated to fertility: pain. We desperately want to understand pain in the B-sense, to understand its moral “nature” or “proper function”. . . .

    No, we really don’t. I think literally no one does. Probably, you think we do because you do not understand the concept of B.

    With respect to you, @saintaugustine, I’m calling bollocks on this one. I don’t have to misunderstand the concept of B in order to witness how people treat people. And people quite frequently moralize on pain, to the point of treating pain as if it had a “proper function” (whether it does or not — we’ll get to that). People act as if they were desperate to understand pain’s nature.

    We want to understand pain’s purpose, but not all purposes are proper functions.

    Do lab tests and other means of gathering evidence have functions? Does evidence have a proper function?

    Pain is by definition not a thing with a proper function.

    The dashboard lights on your car, which are supposed to blink upon registering evidence of improper equipment function, do they have a proper function?

    It seems to me pretty obvious that, if “proper function” means anything at all, these dashboard lights do. Their function is to provide evidence of improper function. Don’t shoot the messenger here: some things’ proper function is to provide evidence of improper function. Pain is (especially to conservatives) one of these things. How many times do we say pain will be good for people because it will teach them a lesson?

    Evidence and education sound like “proper functions” to me.

    The pain in my foot does not have a function in the relevant sense. It’s a symptom of improper function, not itself a proper function.

    Why not “in the relevant sense”? Symptoms are evidence. Evidence educates. The distinction you’re drawing, between some senses being relevant and others being not, strikes me as spurious.

    It’s one thing to assert that, if everything functioned properly, there’d be no pain, and so pain “doesn’t belong” in a universe of proper functioning. It’s another thing to assert that, given that other things don’t always function properly, pain still has no proper function as a warning sign that other things are not functioning properly. I don’t buy the latter. Other things don’t always function properly, and pain has a proper function in alerting us to that fact. Given the actual biology of pain, the pain we feel is in fact rather bad at living up to that proper function, but that doesn’t mean we can’t model it as having a proper function, just not perfectly fulfilling it.

    • #80
  21. Saint Augustine Member
    Saint Augustine
    @SaintAugustine

    @Midge, when talking about natural law ethics you have to think of “proper function” as a technical term.  Like the word “valid” in a logic class, some ordinary English uses of the term “proper function” have to be left behind.

    Feet, hearts, the human body as a whole, the soul, the human being as a whole, kidneys, and eyes have proper functions (things like walking, pumping blood, living, loving G-d and neighbor, practicing virtue, purifying the blood, and seeing).

    Pain and evidence do not have proper functions.  I don’t think lab tests do either.

    A proper function is not just any old purpose, but the activity of a thing that can only be fulfilled by doing that activity.

    At least–that’s as well as I can understand natural law ethics.  Maybe some accounts construe all purposes as functions and allow for some functions to not be activities.

    • #81
  22. Saint Augustine Member
    Saint Augustine
    @SaintAugustine

    Midget Faded Rattlesnake (View Comment):

    . . . I don’t have to misunderstand the concept of B in order to witness how people treat people.

    Indeed.  I never said otherwise.

    My point in # 76 was that a particular remark in # 65 was false: No one is trying to “understand pain in the B-sense” because in the relevant sense that does not mean anything.

    In ordinary English, an argument can be “true” and a proposition “valid.”  In the technical terminology of logic class, that’s gibberish–well, maybe not gibberish, but at least a category error.  Only arguments can be valid, and only propositions can be true.

    When the technical terms are being used the question “Is the proposition valid?” and “What is the proper function of pain” make as much sense as “Does a Beethoven symphony taste more like tea or more like mango juice?”

    If a student in a logic class asks “Is the proposition valid?” he is confused; he is using regular English when he should be using the technical term.  In # 65 you were using regular English but should have been using a technical term.

    • #82
  23. Saint Augustine Member
    Saint Augustine
    @SaintAugustine

    Midget Faded Rattlesnake (View Comment):

    Aug.:

    Pain is by definition not a thing with a proper function.

    The dashboard lights on your car, which are supposed to blink upon registering evidence of improper equipment function, do they have a proper function?

    Yes, the lights have the function of blinking.  The blinking is the function, the blinking itself does not have a function (in the relevant sense of the term), and the blinking has a purpose which is not a function (in the relevant sense of the term).

    Their function is to provide evidence of improper function. Don’t shoot the messenger here: some things’ proper function is to provide evidence of improper function. Pain is (especially to conservatives) one of these things. How many times do we say pain will be good for people because it will teach them a lesson?

    . . .

    I don’t buy the latter. Other things don’t always function properly, and pain has a proper function in alerting us to that fact. Given the actual biology of pain, the pain we feel is in fact rather bad at living up to that proper function, but that doesn’t mean we can’t model it as having a proper function, just not perfectly fulfilling it.

    That’s all fine, but it’s not the same sense of the term “proper function” as natural law ethics.

    It’s one thing to assert that, if everything functioned properly, there’d be no pain, and so pain “doesn’t belong” in a universe of proper functioning.

    Yeah, that makes sense.  But I was not making that point.

    It’s another thing to assert that, given that other things don’t always function properly, pain still has no proper function as a warning sign that other things are not functioning properly.

    That was not my point either.  My point is that a proposition like “Pain has a proper function” is a category mistake if you are trying to talk about the sense of the term “proper function” employed by natural law ethics.

    • #83
  24. Saint Augustine Member
    Saint Augustine
    @SaintAugustine

    But anyway, the point isn’t to get our natural law ethics terminology right, is it?  Midge, I think you’re airing a concern with the things conservatives say, but I’m having a hard time grasping it.

    My impressions suggest something like this, but I hesitate to trust my impressions:

    Conservatives sometimes react to pain and suffering by telling people to grin and bear it or to take it as a clue that they need to straighten up and fly right; but this is a little overly simplistic and in any case not very kind.  It’s also (1) not well grounded in Christian theology, which should teach compassion for the suffering that comes with a world broken by sin; (2) not a very helpful understanding of the laws of nature; and (3) not an attitude whose connection to Aristotelian natural law ethics makes much sense.

    • #84
  25. Stina Inactive
    Stina
    @CM

    Saint Augustine (View Comment):
    Conservatives sometimes react to pain and suffering by telling people to grin and bear it or to take it as a clue that they need to straighten up and fly right; but this is a little overly simplistic and in any case not very kind. It’s also (1) not well grounded in Christian theology, which should teach compassion for the suffering that comes with a world broken by sin; (2) not a very helpful understanding of the laws of nature; and (3) not an attitude whose connection to Aristotelian natural law ethics makes much sense.

    If that’s what she’s saying, then I definitely 100% agree with this as a particular conservative movement failing.

    I’m just not certain it has been a fault present in the actual, recent debates she has brought it up in. Maybe it’s a meta issue, but it seemed out of place when debating JC and I. Neither of us believe there’s something that an individual necessarily is at fault for or needs to fix so they can be closer to the ideal*. Some might have things that need correcting that are within their power to correct, but in a broken world, it isn’t necessary that all who fail do (or that fixing our failings would bring us to the ideal at all). That’s what Grace is for… to make up the difference from where we are to the ideal.

    Our concern was that we believe the ideal should be promoted as opposed to destroyed (as we believe feminists have sought to do).

    *Neither JC or I have lived up to the ideal, either.

    • #85
  26. Midget Faded Rattlesnake Member
    Midget Faded Rattlesnake
    @Midge

    Saint Augustine (View Comment):
    @Midge, when talking about natural law ethics you have to think of “proper function” as a technical term. Like the word “valid” in a logic class, some ordinary English uses of the term “proper function” have to be left behind.

    I do understand the importance of specialized terminology, but I think our disagreement may be a bit more substantive than that. For example, when you say,

    Saint Augustine (View Comment):
    Yes, the lights have the function of blinking. The blinking is the function, the blinking itself does not have a function (in the relevant sense of the term), and the blinking has a purpose which is not a function (in the relevant sense of the term).

    the lights are something concrete, whose function is blinking — creating a pattern of information. Does that information have a nature in its own right, and can it be thought of not just as a function in itself, but as a thing which then has other functions? I say yes to this, you seem not to.

    And here we get to what I think is a common impasse between those educated in modern science and those educated in the Classics. I’ll stipulate the ancients were unmatched in organizing moral intuitions formed from everyday life into logically-sophisticated natural-law reasoning. That the ancients weren’t themselves consciously aware, say, of information theory or formal systems of probability didn’t prevent them from being astute, wise, having well-educated intuitions. But it seems to me they thought they could see the world through fewer veils than modern science does. Because in modern science, information theory does turn information — the abstraction — into a thing; we also now know consistent probabilistic reasoning requires turning the abstraction of evidence (any evidence, even anecdotal evidence) into a thing.  So, if you tell me functions cannot also be things which in themselves have functions, that makes no sense to me — and as someone trained in the modern natural sciences, it shouldn’t make sense to me.

    Modeling something as a thing — reification — is sometimes a fallacy. But often, very much not a fallacy, and instead an important step in reasoning. (“Modeling something as a thing” itself displays why reification is necessary for reasonable conversation.) That traditionally, certain boundaries have been set on what is a thing, and what’s merely a function of a thing, and that sticking to these boundaries is necessary for understanding traditional moral reasoning, makes sense. That is, however, not the same as saying tradition has discovered that these boundaries are innate. A modern scientific education teaches these boundaries are inherently provisional — of course functions can be thought of as things which then perform other functions! Now, some provisional boundaries are really useful, maybe useful enough it makes sense to get by in life treating them as not provisional — as if they were innate. On the other hand, whatever understanding we modern (or postmoderns as the case may be) are losing, understanding in the natural sciences is something we’ve truly gained.

    If you tell me the tradition of natural law has a well-developed convention for placing these provisional boundaries, that makes sense to me, and I know conventions are far from pointless so I won’t brush it off as “only convention”. What’s more difficult for me to see is treating this convention as not a convention. And then I wonder, does this convention come with costs as well as benefits?

    • #86
  27. Midget Faded Rattlesnake Member
    Midget Faded Rattlesnake
    @Midge

    Stina (View Comment):

    Saint Augustine (View Comment):
    Conservatives sometimes react to pain and suffering by telling people to grin and bear it or to take it as a clue that they need to straighten up and fly right; but this is a little overly simplistic and in any case not very kind. It’s also (1) not well grounded in Christian theology, which should teach compassion for the suffering that comes with a world broken by sin; (2) not a very helpful understanding of the laws of nature; and (3) not an attitude whose connection to Aristotelian natural law ethics makes much sense.

    If that’s what she’s saying, then I definitely 100% agree with this as a particular conservative movement failing.

    I’m just not certain it has been a fault present in the actual, recent debates she has brought it up in. Maybe it’s a meta issue…

    It could be a meta-issue. I think I have more reason than many to be alert to the meta stuff.

    That said, it’s a meta-issue I’ve seen affect how we treat one another here, and how women who are or could be young mothers believe they are treated by the conservative movement — even if few conservative would act, on a flesh-and-blood one-on-one level, to treat these young women in this way, what conservatives say to the world at large influences young women’s expectations of how they expect to be treated by conservatives, and what they must do to avoid mistreatment, not always for the better.

    @saintaugustine brought up equivocation earlier, and it seems to me equivocation is a common feature of conservative arguments regarding fertility. Perhaps that’s not just due to logical slipups, but inherent to the conservative worldview as a whole. For example, from earlier in this thread:

    Sweezle (View Comment):
    Does illegal immigration factor into this topic? Now that we have managed to create a country that reduces reproduction has the importation of new people who are more than happy to reproduce on our dime become more necessary?

    Arguments against interfering with natural fertility often bring up tribal survival like this. Why is it so common for conservatives to equivocate between religious promotion of fertility and let’s say more Darwinian or eugenetic promotion of (certain ethnic groups’) fertility? One answer is, these things really are related, making the equivocation no sleight-of-hand but just acknowledgement of How Things Are. That’s the Gnon/GotCHa argument:

    Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
    And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”

    What is wrong, in the poem, with reduced fertility in Kipling’s poem? Not that it does violence to the human dignity as such but that it risks “a tribe [being] wiped off its icefield, or the lights [going] out in Rome”. That makes the point of fertility brute biological reproduction so as to neither become extinct nor overtaken by invaders. Is that what I believe God wants me to have children for?

    I hope not. The Christianity I signed up for is an apocalyptic faith, not a fertility cult, and does not value souls by the number of offspring they could have had in order to perpetuate the species if only they had tried hard enough. Indeed, perpetuation of the species, while recommended in the Old Testament, has become rather beside the point in the New. Or that is how it has always seemed to me. The Kingdom is not a biological one; the abundant life promised goes far beyond the breeding gene.

    What is my purpose, as a younger woman, to the conservative movement? Is it to be a soul who values freedom, dignity, and civilization? Or is it to be a brood sow for a certain nation, ethnicity, or class? I’m not saying these two goals need be mutually exclusive, but they’re hardly identical.

    • #87
  28. Stina Inactive
    Stina
    @CM

    Midget Faded Rattlesnake (View Comment):
    That said, it’s a meta-issue I’ve seen affect how we treat one another here, and how women who are or could be young mothers believe they are treated by the conservative movement — even if few conservative would act, on a flesh-and-blood one-on-one level, to treat these young women in this way, what conservatives say to the world at large influences young women’s expectations of how they expect to be treated by conservatives, and what they must do to avoid mistreatment, not always for the better.

    So do you think we should give up on fighting for the ideals completely?

    I guess in a post-christian world, the ideals sound all or nothing, but should we really just give them up because people misunderstand and find it offensive?

    If we don’t stop fighting for the ideals, how would you suggest we alter the arguments to sound less legalistic? And do you really think that would be effective in stemming a rising tide that no longer thinks the ideal of male and female (as sexual beings, not as gender roles) should even exist?

    • #88
  29. Midget Faded Rattlesnake Member
    Midget Faded Rattlesnake
    @Midge

    Stina (View Comment):

    Midget Faded Rattlesnake (View Comment):
    That said, it’s a meta-issue I’ve seen affect how we treat one another here, and how women who are or could be young mothers believe they are treated by the conservative movement — even if few conservative would act, on a flesh-and-blood one-on-one level, to treat these young women in this way, what conservatives say to the world at large influences young women’s expectations of how they expect to be treated by conservatives, and what they must do to avoid mistreatment, not always for the better.

    So do you think we should give up on fighting for the ideals completely?

    No.

    If we don’t stop fighting for the ideals, how would you suggest we alter the arguments to sound less legalistic?

    I think being less reactionary  — in the sense of reacting to every cultural change as if it were an existential threat from the left — would help.

    For example, consider the declining teen pregnancy rate, along with declining teen abortion rate, and rising average age of sexual debut (virginity loss). This is a huge accomplishment, a reversal of trends social conservatives have long complained about, and we should celebrate it! But where is the celebration?

    Subsumed, apparently, in the trendy new conservative worry that young people aren’t having enough sex anymore.

    Or consider the bizarre recent alliance between social conservatives and TERFs. Apparently, conservatives are antifeminist unless the feminists are TERFs because TERFs are anti-trans, and trans is even ickier than fem. Turning to TERFs to bolster our arguments about sexuality while otherwise lambasting feminism for wrecking men’s (and women’s) lives is sophistry.

    I want us to make up our goddamn minds. If youth hear from us they’re degenerate for having sex but also degenerate if they don’t have sex soon enough, why should they listen to us? At that point it really does start to sound like old people bitching and moaning about whatever young people do just because they can. If we tell youth feminism has corrupted them, then turn to TERFs to justify why gender-bending of various sorts will also corrupt them, why should they believe us, especially on the latter?

    When I went to college, I was fortunate enough to be around some Christians pretty deeply committed to chastity. And fortunate, I think, to be around Christians who didn’t see heteronormativity as an end in itself. After all, drunken parties were filled, weekend after weekend, with extreme displays of heteronormativity that we rightly recognized as debauchery — nobody got virtue points because at least their debauchery was extremely heteronormative debauchery.

    I realize some thoughtful conservatives argue rising age of sexual debut might be a result of youths’ failure to form relationships, period, resulting in the younger generation getting married late or not at all. I realize one reason young women postpone sex — because they’re more interested in building a successful life for themselves outside the home — also strikes those who believe women’s happiness generally can’t be located outside the home as problematic. Yes, the conservative mindset does leave us uniquely suited to see the dark side of social trends, even trends that seem to fit our values, but man, can we ever be sore winners!

    And do you really think that would be effective in stemming a rising tide that no longer thinks the ideal of male and female (as sexual beings, not as gender roles) should even exist?

    Honestly, I think we should worry less about the purported demise of male and female as sexual beings. I would worry more about promoting an ethic of chastity, including chaste singlehood for those who don’t feel like a good-enough fit for the traditional-marriage mold.

    Reports of the heterosexual libido’s death have struck me as greatly exaggerated, and when we prematurely mourn the demise of something whose rampant vigor until yesterday we deplored as obscene in its all-too-rude health, it’s confusing. Not just to outsiders, but to insiders like me, who begin to wonder, if this is how the inside reacts, does the inside even want them anymore?

    • #89
  30. Saint Augustine Member
    Saint Augustine
    @SaintAugustine

    Midget Faded Rattlesnake (View Comment):

    Saint Augustine (View Comment):
    @Midge, when talking about natural law ethics you have to think of “proper function” as a technical term. Like the word “valid” in a logic class, some ordinary English uses of the term “proper function” have to be left behind.

    I do understand the importance of specialized terminology, but I think our disagreement may be a bit more substantive than that. For example, when you say,

    Saint Augustine (View Comment):
    Yes, the lights have the function of blinking. The blinking is the function, the blinking itself does not have a function (in the relevant sense of the term), and the blinking has a purpose which is not a function (in the relevant sense of the term).

    the lights are something concrete, whose function is blinking — creating a pattern of information. Does that information have a nature in its own right, and can it be thought of not just as a function in itself, but as a thing which then has other functions? . . .

    Without changing the specialized definition of the term?  How exactly?  That blinking is the activity of the lights.  Does it have its own activity?  Its own activity?  No one’s disputing that it has its own purpose, but that’s not the same thing.

    . . . Because in modern science, information theory does turn information — the abstraction — into a thing; we also now know consistent probabilistic reasoning requires turning the abstraction of evidence (any evidence, even anecdotal evidence) into a thing.

    In other words, the modern scientists finally caught up to Pythagoras and Plato.  Good for them!  But no need to critique the ancients on these grounds.

    You’re still a bit off-topic.  Information being a thing is not the point.  The point is whether it is a thing which has a proper function in the relevant sense of the term.

    So, if you tell me functions cannot also be things which in themselves have functions, that makes no sense to me — and as someone trained in the modern natural sciences, it shouldn’t make sense to me.

    I think you’re still not using the technical sense of the term from natural law ethics; a function has a purpose, sure.  But does it have an activity?

    • #90
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