I just re-read it: are you going to actually respond to my response now?

Your response is philosophically coherent only because it abandons the very moral framework classical theism usually wants to keep. That’s the key point.
…
You explicitly state that for God:
…
apply only analogically, not literally. Once that concession is made, the problem of evil is not solved - it is declared inapplicable. That is not a resolution; it is an exemption.

Firstly, my rebuttal of the OP made no mention of this: my rebuttal was that God cannot create a being that is omnipotent which was the crux of your argument. Secondly, God is goodness itself; and this is not analogical predication. In classical theism, God is goodness from which all else flows univocally.

However, thirdly, you are right that a lot of what we attribute to God is analogical in classical theism (such as being an intellect, will, powerful, etc.); but this doesn’t exempt God from moral responsibility. When I say God is pure intellect itself thinking, that is analogical predication; but in no way suggests that God is not an intellect. Your argument here hinges on the idea that if we know something analogically that is not in any way related to the analogy made; and this is contradictory to the idea of an analogy. An analogy is a similarity between two things. God being an intellect analogically means that there is something chiefly similar between Himself as a Person and us as persons (and this is why we are ‘made in the image of God’). Your rejoinder here is to say that because it is analogical we cannot say God is an intellect in any similar way to intellects we see in His creation; but that is to say that we cannot analogically predicate anything to God which was presupposed as true at the onset.

To answer each one-by-one:

responsibility

God is responsible for His actions because His is absolutely free and a substance of a rational nature (viz., a person); but He never does anything immoral to hold Him accountable for (for reasons I already described).

Again, remember the difference between liberty of indifference vs. for excellence.

permission

I am assuming you meant ‘permissibility’ here: permission implies some other authoritative person that permits one’s actions, whereas permissibility is about whether one in principle is permitted to do something (despite there being a person giving permission or not). Either way, in more mainstream classical theism, God can will lesser goods (unlike my view); and so He does have leeway to do morally permissible acts which are not the best acts. In my view, God always chooses what is best; so morally permissibility does not exist for God, and this is why I would view moral permissibility as a product of limited ethics (viz., we have the difference between supererogatoriness and permissibility on earth because we have a limited understanding of ethics and limited power to uphold it). I don’t think this damages God’s perfection: if you had perfect power and knowledge of what is good, then you would be obliged to do the best—not some lesser good.

Justificiation

I am not sure what you mean here: justification for what?

* praise God as morally good in the same sense we mean “good,”

Yes we can and many have. Goodness is the equality of a thing’s essence and esse; and when we say we speak of God as ‘good’ analogically to His creation, we just mean that His creations are not perfectly good—they come at a lesser degree of goodness because they are not absolutely self-united. God is goodness itself in classical theism.

Again, by arguing that analogical knowledge severes our knowledge of the thing being analogically understood; you are denying that analogical knowledge is valid.

* say God is just, loving, or omnibenevolent in any ordinary moral sense,

Again, yes we can. Justice is the treatment of something relative to what it is owed; and God has be creatively just and restoratively just. He is just in His creation powers, because He is a being of pure power—of creation abilities—and is purely actual; so He must be fully realized at being a creator and this entails that He cannot fail at creating thing’s properly to what He wills to create. Moreover, what He wills to create must be perfect because, again, He has to choose what is best (which is a creation ordered perfectly to Himself).

He is just in restoration because what is perfectly good is His initial creation so it must follow that (1) restoring each being back to that proper ordering is best when any being falls and (2) He must treat the being relative to its dignity since that is relative to its nature as a part of that perfectly ordered creation.

* appeal to God as a moral exemplar.

You cannot step outside morality to escape moral critique and then step back inside to make moral claims.

Classical theism does not ‘step out’ of morality to resolve the problem of evil: it shifts the focus from goodness being supervenient (like the monetary value of a diamond) to natural (like the shape of a diamond) and notes, correctly, that God is the perfect embodiment of what is good because His essence and existence are absolutely identical.

* God’s perception just is what is best,

(emphasis added)

No, this is not what I said.

1. God has perfect knowledge of what is good.
2. God wills what He perceives as best.
3. Since God’s knowledge of what is best is perfect, what He perceives as best is best.
4. Therefore, what God wills is always what is best.

God’s perception of what is best is not the standard of what is best: His perfect knowledge of what is best, which is Himself, and the nature of an intellect entails that what He perceives as best will always align perfectly with what is best.

That is not an evaluative claim - it’s a tautology.

A tautology is when something is logically necessarily true (viz., in a truth table, every value is ‘T’ all the way down); and that is not true of what I said. I was tying knowledge of goodness with perception of goodness (in an intellect). God is by His nature perfectly good merely because His nature is such that He is absolutely simple; because, again, goodness is just absolute unity in classical theism.

You are thinking of this like a non-classicalist akin to a Protestant: something outside of God must be the standard of what is moral or God just is the Arbiter of morality (viz.,the euthyphro dilemma), but classical theism doesn’t fall prey to this—that’s a false dilemma.

Besides, you have not proven that God exists and created the universe we exist in.

I don’t need to do that: your OP argued that God should have created being omnipotent; and that is impossible.

If a world with less involuntary suffering and greater flourishing was metaphysically possible, and if God necessarily actualizes the best, then the existence of massive suffering requires explanation.

There is no excess suffering in the world. Again, this bottoms out at the idea that you think that it is metaphysically possible for God to have created a better world of which you think would involve less suffering on earth; and I am pointing out that all you have demonstrated is that you can conceive of such a world but not that it is metaphysically possible.

This is the classic and vague new atheist technique to say that there’s pointless suffering in the world and that this means we aren’t in the best possible totality of creation; and from a classical theistic perspective there is no pointless suffering in the world nor is this world the totality of creation.

Of course, classical theists have their own arguments to get to such a God existing, and I can dive into those if you would like, but I do not need to demonstrate God exists to negate your OP.

* childhood cancer,
* extreme congenital pain,
* moral ignorance leading to eternal consequences (on many theologies),

are not tragic features of reality but necessary components of the optimal order.

Exactly. Allowing evil, at least in some stages and areas of creation, is necessary for higher goods; such as, to use on of your examples, the possibility of childhood cancer in order to have predictable natural laws and free will to love what is good.

If there were no possibility of childhood cancer, then we would all be robots without any free will to love what is good or evil. That’s the ‘better’ world you are arguing for here.

That is a very heavy metaphysical cost.

Sure, I agree: at face value, it seems like a hard pill to swallow and, for the record, I am not saying that objections relying on the problem of evil are all baseless or without merit. Yours, though, tried to posit that omnipotence is a feature God can create limited beings with; and that is not coherent.

* God has no deliberative alternatives,

God has deliberation: He has free will and in an absolute sense. What I was saying is that He always freely chooses what is best upon deliberation.

* God’s act is necessary and automatic given His nature.

No. The Trinity unfolds necessarily from His nature, but He has free will to choose. My point was that, in God and uniquely in God, necessity and freedom ‘run right up onto each other’ as He necessarily freely chooses the best. He does not necessarily choose what is best; and He does not merely freely choose what is best. We do, by analogy, have the ability to freely choose what is best but in a limited way because we will only choose it if our knowledge of what is best is sufficient. So we do not necessarily always choose what is actually best despite always choosing what we perceive as best.

Reframing divine freedom as FFE rather than FOI doesn’t help here.
…
If a being lacks alternative possibilities, cannot refrain, cannot revise, then it does not meaningfully choose in the sense required for moral praise or blame - regardless of how perfect its internal state is.

This is exactly why I noted the difference between FFE and FOI that you glossed over. You just implicitly conflated them by arguing that one is not truly free if they cannot choose otherwise from options; which is FOI, and my point was that classical theism rejects FOI. I don’t think freedom fundamentally consists in being able to have done otherwise nor to choose from options. If you take the FOI view as you did in the above, then God is absolutely unfree; whereas in FFE He is absolutely free.

You conclude that: even if God has no freedom, He is still perfectly good.

No I did not: God is absolutely free because He is in the best state of being most conducive to His flourishing as an intellect. Again, FFE.

At that point, “perfect goodness” is no longer a moral claim

Agathology is not morality. Likewise, classical theism is tying agathology, morality, and God’s nature together in a coherent and beautiful way that avoids these issues you are having given that you are implicitly thinking of moral properties (metaethically) as if moral non-naturalism is true; and until you break out of that you will not be able to contend with classical theism properly—these objections you have made will continue to plague your mind.

:up:

CC: @Fire Ologist, @Tom Storm

The point was that it did not fruition through violent dominance as @Ciceronianus suggested.

Learn your doctrine.
Once born, we are said to bear the stain of the Original Sin, and this is enough to send us straight to eternal suffering.

That is simply false. Original Sin is distinct from personal sin; and does not carry with it guilt. See CCC 1:2:1:1:7:

By yielding to the tempter, Adam and Eve committed a personal sin, but this sin affected the human nature that they would then transmit in a fallen state.294 It is a sin which will be transmitted by propagation to all mankind, that is, by the transmission of a human nature deprived of original holiness and justice. and that is why original sin is called "sin" only in an analogical sense: it is a sin "contracted" and not "committed" - a state and not an act.

405 Although it is proper to each individual,295 original sin does not have the character of a personal fault in any of Adam's descendants. It is a deprivation of original holiness and justice, but human nature has not been totally corrupted: it is wounded in the natural powers proper to it, subject to ignorance, suffering and the dominion of death, and inclined to sin - an inclination to evil that is called concupiscence". Baptism, by imparting the life of Christ's grace, erases original sin and turns a man back towards God, but the consequences for nature, weakened and inclined to evil, persist in man and summon him to spiritual battle.

-- (see here)

Original Sin affects us, as children of Adam and Eve, like a baby born damaged from their mother's smoking habit. We are not guilty of anything but we are subject to concupiscence due to being born without a state of grace. You do not go to hell because of Original Sin; but you are more likely to sin (personally) because of it.

That story would be silly if it weren't so cruel in its misrepresentation. Angels are incapable of even desiring autonomy.

This is also incorrect. An 'angel' is a being of pure form that is an absolutely unique form (viz., it is its own species); and each has the free will (being a substance of a rational nature) to choose to will in accord with their nature. Since they're unique form makes them what they are; if they choose to go against their nature that itself transforms them into another absolutely unique being, namely a unique demon. This is why demons are of each their own unique, fallen species and it is relative to what they were as an angel.

And yet God made Adam and Eve.

That doesn't make Him culpable for their free actions. That's like me deciding to have a son with my wife, my son grows up to be a serial killer, and you say "well that's your fault for having him in the first place".

These are all truisms that mean nothing until we clearly specifiy what exactly is "good" (and "evil").

Goodness is the equality of a thing's essence and esse; and badness (evil) is privation of goodness.

Why, yes, indeed, according to the Catechism of the RCC, it's virtually impossible to go to hell.
However, the RCC is just one Christian denomination claiming to have the right understanding of God, among several thousand.

Catholicism, including Orthodox churches, is historical Christianity. Protestantism didn't come around until the 1500s; and most of its influential founders (like Luther) don't even believe the same things as modern Protestants. I am not interested in trying to defend every version of Christianity: proper Christianity is catholocism.

Again with the accusation of strawmanning! You don't say!

That is a straw man. Christianity, even in protestant thought, does not rest its ethics on 'picking the right religion'.

It's not a specifically Catholic view, sure. But I never claimed to be presenting or arguing against the Catholic view to begin with. That's your strawmanning. You should be sorry.

The vast majority of Christian denominations are incompatible with your claims about them. They are unfounded and incorrect. Sure, there is probably some protestants out there that have wild views; but Christianity has a traditional view that is held predominantly by Christians. I am not straw manning you by responding with the basic 101 views of standard Christianity (despite denomination).

For example:

The view that God creates living beings who by default deserve only eternal suffering is the view with the most damning implications, and as such, it's the one that needs to be refuted or resolved, or overcome, or whatever.

Not a single mainstream version of Christianity believes this. Not one. I would be interested to hear why you believe this, though.

This is Bob Ross feeling superior to me.

I don't feel superior to you; in fact, what you quoted of me was the exact opposite of what a person would say if they had a superiority complex. Being confident in one's views on a topic is not the same as feeling superior to others.

Twice he invents the charge of strawmanning against me, and he believes he knows The Truth About God while I don't.

I'm sorry, but your views are patently straw mans of Christianity. No mainstream version of Christianity thinks that by default we go to hell; or that you merely 'pick the right religion' to go to heaven.

Tertullian was a lawyer. He's making an argument

Circeronianus, there is an obvious difference between seeking out martyrdom unnecessarily and owning your persecution. This is the difference between a black person randomly walking up to a white person and asking them to kill them; and black people showing up in protest willingly accepting any persecution, including death, that comes their way as a sign of rebellion.

Tertullian is absolutely right that Christian’s should embrace suffering and martyrdom for Christ; but that’s not what you were insinuating: Tertullian is not saying to go out of your way to try to find a way to die.

What is right to a Christian is what God demands, because what God demands is right, essentially by definition. I don't think what is right is dependent on the will or command of any god.

Are you thinking of protestantism? Divine Command Theory is not compatible with traditional Christianity (i.e., catholicism).

Your claim that he'll is the absence of God is contrary to Scripture and tradition. For example, Revelation 21:8 says that as to the cowardly. the faithless, the detestable, murderers, the sexually immoral,, sorcerers and liars "their portion shall be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death."

There have been several different interpretations of what hell is like, as I said before. Some think the fire of hell is just God’s love which is insufferable to those who hate God (since they flip evil for good and good for evil); some say it is a place if sensatory punishment; etc.

The Catholic view has not changed fundamentally: hell is the absence of God in a maximal sense. It can’t be completely separate from God since God is the very Subsistent Being which actively sustains the existence of everything; but God removes Himself maximally from the damned in hell. Viz.,: https://www.vatican.va/content/catechism/en/part_one/section_two/chapter_three/article_12/iv_hell.html .

In terms of Revelations or any Holy Scripture on hell, you can’t interpret it for yourself at face value of what you read: that’s sola scriptura type madness. The church has the authority to interpret scripture; and the official doctrine has always been, for roman catholics, that fire is symbolic (for many reasons). You have to remember, there is nothing quite like hell on this earth: we speak sometimes as if great suffering is like it; but we can’t really describe how tormenting it would be to be completely removed from God other than to exist. We are not as removed from God in this life as you probably think: God is from which all good flows.

When I was in Catholic grade school, we'd be shown films displaying sinners writhing in flames. The Church has grown soft, it seems.

There has been a shift in terms of the fiery imaginary; but that's a shift in the symbolic way to represent God's absence---not that hell is fundamentally different than what the church has been teaching.

I actually meant that more than semantics. Biological sexism would be treating a man with a voice within the range of an average female like they aren't a man. While its not the average biological sex expectation that a man have a voice range that high, it does happen. Treating them as a woman because they have a rare, but perfectly normal expression of being male would be biological sexism.

Yes, but then you do seem to be agreeing with me that sexism qua gender is completely divorced from sexism qua sex in your view. No?

No, elevation means favoring gender as indicating that a person is a sex over the fact of their sex

And this is why such a divorce is problematic: gender isn’t about sex in your view but, rather, a expectation based off of sex that isn’t accurate about sex. So, either, by my lights, (1) all gendering is sexism qua gender in your view (because gender is always an inaccurate expectation of a person based off of an erroneous understanding of sex) or (2) gendering someone is not inherently sexist (because does not attribute anything about sex to the person but, rather, something else called ‘gender’).

In the case of #1, all gendering is an ‘elevation of gender over sex’ because attributing a gender is always to attribute falsely facts about them based off of erroneous understandings of sex; and this is always incongruent with their sex they have. Viz., if by definition my gendering of you as a woman or a man is always factually false because gender has to do with attributing traits to a person based off of sex when it is illegitimate, then no matter what I say about your gender I am attributing to you ‘gender facts’ that are always incongruent with your sex.

We can play with this with your example of voice:

If I say you are feminine because your voice is high, then either that is a purported gender fact or a sex fact. If it is a sex fact because voice pertains to sex, then I am not elevating gender over sex. If it is a gender fact because voice pertains to gender, then I am attributed to you something that is not entailed (according to your theory) by your sex; which means I am elevating your gender over sex (in the way you described) even if you are female (because your I am saying you have a female trait which is not entailed by femaleness, thusly giving an expectation of you that is not endowed by your sex).

In the case of #2, we could get out of #1 (in your theory) by saying that gender is not intrinsically sexist qua gender because there are genders and it is distinct from sex. However, then, gender, when properly understood and attributed, is not elevating gender over sex despite attributing things to a person that are not entailed by their sex which may include non-sex based expectations.

Going back to the the voice example:

If I say you are ‘floppy’ because your voice is high and a high voice is a trait we rightly associate with the gender ‘floppiness’ (which has no association with your sex), then I am not falsely attributed a sex-based expectation of you given erroneous facts about sex (such as that you should have a masculine voice because you are male). Thusly, I am not elevating gender over sex (in your phraseology) and consequently am not being sexist even if I tell you that you are not being a good floppy because you have a deep voice instead of a high one. If gender is divorced from sex, then legitimate gender expectations would not entail sexism in the sense of having unwarranted sex expectations.

This is why I noted, and I dare say correctly (: , that you are equivocating sex and gender internally given your terms as if they are the same while also claiming they are divorced from each other. When you say:

So if a woman wore a top hat and you called her a man, that's sexism due to the woman defying a gender expectation.

I underlined the portions that use gendered terms in the sense of sex and bolded the ones that are using the gendered terms in the sense of gender. Since you have divorced sex and gender, these terms cannot be treated as if they are referring to the same things such as male and male (one in the sense of sex and the other in the sense of gender).

I can rewrite your quote like this to demonstrate it potently:

So if a woman wore a top hat and you called her a floppy, that's sexism due to the woman defying a gender expectation.

See how now it has become abundantly clear that floppiness is not the same as maleness; and the onus is on you to demonstrate how they are connected to each other if they are truly divorced. I could legitimately be right that she is a floppy for wearing a top hat and simultaneously agree with you that she is not a biological man (male).

I disagree with this Bob. I've been able to post this topic, and I've seen a wide variety of topics that cover things which might be taboo or difficult to talk about. There still needs to be some moderation which handles approach and tone. It may be the case that people who read it may not want to discuss it properly, but that's a far cry from it being banned to be discussed at all.

With all due respect, without having read every post you have made, I don’t know of any that you have posted that are threatening to the liberal ideology. My point was not that one cannot have controversial conversations on TPF: it’s that if the topic is too disapproved of by the liberals on here then you get banned or censored even if it doesn’t violate the TPF’s rules and guidelines. Race realism and anti-LGBTQ+ topics are the most notable; and I don’t think your posts on transgenderism and gender/sex have really opposed the liberal views on it. Mine suggested they might be wrong, and that’s why they got taken down.

But not to assume it is to assume something much harder to swallow -- that this is indeed the best of all possible worlds, so good that not even God could make it any better

Not quite. I think you are thinking of ‘this world’ in the sense of our universe: I was referring to the totality of God’s creation, which includes heaven.

How would one go on to argue which of the two assumptions is more likely? I don't know if there's a "likely-ometer" we can employ!

This is the central question one should be asking, and this is very astute of you to discern: most people get stuck in a problem of evil debate without examining this crucial aspect of the discussion. I would say that we have good, separate reasons to believe that God exists and in this classical sense; and so it must be the case that this is the best possible creation. However, someone could approach it from the perspective that this universe seems too insufferable or evil to be possibly what God could create; and this argument requires that they demonstrate why. When I say God exists in the classical sense, I must demonstrate why; just as much as they must demonstrate why this world is not a part of the best totality of creation. The problem is that they don’t demonstrate it: they leave it at this vague intuition they have.

But in favor of the first assumption, it's hard to disagree with the idea that a world without the suffering of my neighbor's child wouldn't be a better world

Free will; natural laws; soul-building; etc.

 Surely just one could have been spared?

But this, without justification, is a baseless and vague intuition you have. I get why you have it, but you need to demonstrate how God could have spared even just one child that has suffered pointlessly without comprising the higher goods of freedom, love, heaven, etc.

It could only mean that God's idea of the best doesn't remotely resemble what a human would mean

This is partially true, I think: for example, we tend to think suffering is intrinsically bad; but I don’t think this is true. Suffering is neutral: it depends on why you are suffering. This idea that suffering should be avoiding at the cost of almost everything is a liberal idea that I don’t share.

No, that's too broad-brush. We have the intuition that a great deal of suffering is bad and that we can conceive of a world without at least some of it

In order for this to be true, you would have to have sufficient knowledge of the totality of creation—including heaven and hell—so as to decipher how one could create a world that doesn’t sacrifice perfect justice, perfect mercy, freedom, love, etc. for the sake of avoiding suffering.

Can you demonstrate it?

There are, by the way, other defenses of the ways of God that don't back us into this corner, as you of course know.

True.

You purposefully omitted answering if you are a woman, which makes me think you are a man. This makes your argument self-undermining and paradoxical; because if I accept your argument that men shouldn’t have an opinion on anything that only directly affects women, then I shouldn’t take your own opinion seriously about this because it pertains something that directly affects women and is being professed by a man. Therefore, if your claim is true, then I must take it as false; and if it is false, then I am back to the idea that I have no good reasons to accept this line of logic.

All I'm saying is, let's put it to a vote then. Ask every free woman on Earth right now: "Should women be in charge of women's rights or should men make decisions for you?" I don't think the answer will come at a surprise to anyone

Let’s put it to a vote: “should people who have never own guns be in charge of gun rights or should gun owners be?”. Should people who have never been a cop be in charge of what cops should be doing or just cops? You didn’t address the obvious flaws with your argument. I don’t see why we should accept that only those that are within the group affected by the vote should be the only ones voting on it. Irregardless, voting is different than having an opinion; and everyone has the right to an opinion that should be taken seriously, intellectually, when formulating laws.

Do we call it "technically irrelevant" because it can be framed against semi-tangential alternate situations and scenarios, even though it's clearly not?

How is it “clearly no” tangential? If you believe that women should be the only one’s with a voice on aspects of law that only affect women directly, then this means you believe that the group affected is the only one that should be able to vote. This applies to laws about police brutality, gun rights, property taxes, conscription, etc.

I am not seeing why we should accept this.

 One that happens to be timelessly and famously relevant in the context it was lifted from. Mob rule i.e. "the will of the people" (just the way things are).

I don’t support an ochlocracy. Are you saying that if men get to vote on women’s rights that this is mob rule?

Why should a sane, rational adult person not be the one chiefly in charge of their own experience and ultimate quality of life? Answer me that, and I'll show you a green dog. :wink:

No one is absolutely in control of their way of life nor can that ever happen. Depending on your view of voting, some people (whether that be all citizens of the nation or some subset) get a direct voice in some aspects of the government for checks and balances.

Even in an ochlocracy, no one has an absolute voice over themselves: it’s everyone’s vote counts equally and every aspect of law is voted directly on by the people.

Again, let's put that to a vote. You'll find the resounding answer is something about "ingrained male patriarchy" and "historic systemic abuses and ultimate deprivation of personhood toward women" and all sorts of other phrased goodies like that. I mean, they're not wrong. Do you think history is made up or fabricated in terms of oppression and violence against women?

I am failing to see your point here. Are you saying that if enough people vote that men shouldn’t have an opinion on X that they shouldn’t have an opinion on X? My point was that everyone has a natural right to an opinion on everything; and to deny that on the basis of sex is sexist.

You've never been a minority in "the real world" (AKA a non-civilized country), have you? It's hell, mate. Absolute hell. You have no idea how grateful you should be for your apparent ignorance in that particular area. Hopefully you'll live out the rest of your days in such a blissful state of not knowing. I mean that sincerely.

Firstly, you know nothing about me; nor is this relevant to our topic.

Secondly, women are not a minority in the West; so this makes no sense to bring this up.

I still love you.

Just who wrote the Book of Revelation is a matter of some dispute.

It is widely accepted as John the Apostle; and this is the official church teaching.

Tertullian in Ad Scapulam, Chapter 5, wrote of all the Christians in the province of Asia presenting themselves to Gaius Arrius Antoninus at his judgment seat, and his comment to them: "O miserable men, if you wish to die, you have precipices or halters." Tertullian seemed to be arguing that Roman cruelties to Christians was their glory, and that Christians "even invite their infliction."

This is wildly false, and I don’t mean to insinuate that you are being disingenuous. What it says is:

Your cruelty is our glory. Only see you to it, that in having such things as these to endure, we do not feel ourselves constrained to rush forth to the combat, if only to prove that we have no dread of them, but on the contrary, even invite their infliction. When Arrius Antoninus was driving things hard in Asia, the whole Christians of the province, in one united band, presented themselves before his judgment-seat; on which, ordering a few to be led forth to execution, he said to the rest, O miserable men, if you wish to die, you have precipices or halters. If we should take it into our heads to do the same thing here, what will you make of so many thousands, of such a multitude of men and women, persons of every sex and every age and every rank, when they present themselves before you? How many fires, how many swords will be required? What will be the anguish of Carthage itself, which you will have to decimate, as each one recognises there his relatives and companions, as he sees there it may be men of your own order, and noble ladies, and all the leading persons of the city, and either kinsmen or friends of those of your own circle? Spare yourself, if not us poor Christians! Spare Carthage, if not yourself! Spare the province, which the indication of your purpose has subjected to the threats and extortions at once of the soldiers and of private enemies.
We have no master but God. He is before you, and cannot be hidden from you, but to Him you can do no injury. But those whom you regard as masters are only men, and one day they themselves must die. Yet still this community will be undying, for be assured that just in the time of its seeming overthrow it is built up into greater power. For all who witness the noble patience of its martyrs, as struck with misgivings, are inflamed with desire to examine into the matter in question; and as soon as they come to know the truth, they straightway enrol themselves its disciples.

What he is referring to is that Christians should not back down, but rather embrace, suffering in the name of Christ—all the way up to death; and this not the same as trying to find ways to die for Christ when it simply isn’t there.

If you read the above, full quote of Chapter 5; it clearly outlines that Arrius was executing some of those Christians and so they all banded together in solidarity as a statement to say “hey, if you want to execute Christians, here we all are: we have no master but God Himself”. This is not the same as randomly approaching a magistrate and begging him against his will to execute you.

I think knowing that your sins will be forgiven if, sometime in the future, you really, really repent and seek forgiveness renders wrongdoing of less significance now

That’s a sin, Ciceronianus. A proper Christian has the mentality you speak of of doing what is right because it is right.

one should be virtuous for the sake of being virtuous.

This is true in Christianity. We follow God because He is perfect goodness; and to follow Him is to be virtuous for solely the sake of what is perfectly good. It is a sin to follow God in hopes of a reward; just as much as it is to avoid what is wrong to avoid punishment. It is better to avoid it for fear of God than to do it anyways; but it is not the right thing to do (ideally). A person who avoids what is wrong for sake of fear of punishment or does what is right for the sake of reward is a psychopath on a leash.

You might ask: why, then, is there hell and heaven? The rewards of heaven is just to be with God (viz., to live in a perfectly ordered world with a personal relationship with God and His church): there is no external reward to loving perfect goodness here (like giving a kid a lolipop for doing their chores). Similarly, hell is the absence of God; which is in-itself what is deserved by those who, at the very least, are deliberately unrepentant when they have sufficient knowledge of what is perfectly good (which is God).

The cost of this move, however, is that God no longer has alternative possibilities or deliberative choice in the ordinary sense. A purely actual, necessary being cannot do otherwise than it does. As a result, moral predicates such as responsibility, permission, or justification apply only analogically, not literally.

This is a very good observation, and I just happened to explain this in detail to another gentlemen; so let me quote that here:

This assumes that it would have been better for their to be less suffering at the cost of the natural world in which we live now; and I am not sure why that would be the case. Again, this assumes that God has a magical power to create a world which is better than the one we have because we have this intuition that suffering is bad and that we can conceive of a world without it; but this confuses metaphysical possibility with conceivability.

This isn’t true for classical theism simpliciter, but my flavor of it would say that a completely actualized and pure intellect would always have to pick the best option. This is because it has to have full knowledge of everything that is real and what could exist due to lacking nothing at what it is (which is an intellect); and the nature of an intellect is that it always wills what it perceives as best; and what this being, since it has perfect knowledge, perceives as best is what is best; and it has unrestrained power to will what it perceives as best (which would be what is best in this case). This means that the world which was created, in its entirety, must be the best out of the options that could have been out of necessity.

What is best is a creation perfectly ordered towards what is perfectly good; which is God Himself. So whatever may be contained in God’s creation must have been, at least prior to any Great Fall, perfectly ordered towards Himself (which is perfect unity, communion of persons, complementary natures, etc.).

The point is that God necessarily freely chooses what is best; and this is unique to God because there is nothing the same as Him in His creation. The problem is that your view thinks He just necessarily chooses (without freedom); and this assumes a ‘freedom of indifference’ metaphysic of freedom (where freedom is fundamentally about being able to choose from options). Whereas, on the other hand, classical theism holds the ‘freedom for excellence’ view (which is that freedom is fundamentally about being in a state of being most conducive to flourishing at what kind of thing you are). In FFE, one can freely choose option, e.g., A when A was the only option they could choose from; and this is not possible in FOI. In FOI, God is uniquely the kind of being that is absolutely unfree because He has no option to choose otherwise like we do; whereas in FFE, God is uniquely the kind of being with absolute freedom because He can will in accord with reason with perfect knowledge uninhibited by anything external to Himself as pure act of thought (and this is what is most conducive of a state of being for an intellect to be an intellect).

In that sense, classical theism preserves internal coherence by stepping outside the moral framework that gives rise to the problem of evil, rather than resolving it within that framework

But this isn’t true given your critique above. All your critique would show, at best, is that God has no freedom; but God, according to your concession of classical theism (for the sake of your point), would be perfectly good still and consequently would create in a perfectly good way.

who I guess you're defining as pre-Christian?

Classical theism is pre-Christian but also heavily influenced Christianity: Thomas Aquinas is the most notable Aristotelians in the Catholic world.

But how would a classical theist...apply this concept of omnipotence to the usual set-up requiring a theodicy? 

I think how goodness and God are tied together in classical theism is quite beautiful (even if it is false); as it sees God as goodness itself from which all other things flow. In modern times, especially in protestantism, we see morality being used in a moral non-naturalist sense where goodness is a property thing’s have akin to monetary value instead of akin to roundness. Consequently, they are incapable of giving an account of how anything is really good because they must seek some external source to anything that attributes that supervenient property of goodness on to it (like a person attributes a value of $10 to a cup); and this leads them to have to special plead that God just makes up what is good as the Divine Arbiter.

In classical theism, on the other hand, goodness is the equality of a thing’s essence and esse; and so goodness is innate and natural to the thing in question (like having the property of hardness, roundness, etc.). This means that a thing is perfectly good when it is perfectly united in being and essence—in whatness and thatness. Absolute unity is, then, perfect goodness; and this absolute unity can only happen in subsistent Being itself. Why? Because anything which gets its being derivatively from something else—even its own parts—is has at least one aspect of its being which is not entail by its essence: namely, its being. This means that no contingent being can be perfectly good because it cannot be perfectly united in essence and existence (since its very existence is not a part of its essence). The only being which would have being intrinsically is Being itself; and so a perfectly good being would be Being itself, which is absolutely unified with itself and perfectly self-harmonious. This is also why the more being a thing has the better it is; because the more being it has the more its essence and existence are united (viz., the more realize it is at what it is)(e.g., a car without wheels isn’t as good as a car with wheels). Likewise, absolute unity requires absolute simplicity because if the being has parts then it does not have being intrinsically (for it depends on those parts to exist). This is what God is: He is the uniquely perfectly good being, which is the ipsum ens subsistens that is absolutely self-unified, self-harmonious, pure being, and purely simple.

When the questioner asks why God did not create a world without (or merely with less) suffering, this request doesn't seem to have anything to do with what is metaphysically possible, or what would be beyond "innate" power.

This assumes that it would have been better for their to be less suffering at the cost of the natural world in which we live now; and I am not sure why that would be the case. Again, this assumes that God has a magical power to create a world which is better than the one we have because we have this intuition that suffering is bad and that we can conceive of a world without it; but this confuses metaphysical possibility with conceivability.

This isn’t true for classical theism simpliciter, but my flavor of it would say that a completely actualized and pure intellect would always have to pick the best option. This is because it has to have full knowledge of everything that is real and what could exist due to lacking nothing at what it is (which is an intellect); and the nature of an intellect is that it always wills what it perceives as best; and what this being, since it has perfect knowledge, perceives as best is what is best; and it has unrestrained power to will what it perceives as best (which would be what is best in this case). This means that the world which was created, in its entirety, must be the best out of the options that could have been out of necessity.

What is best is a creation perfectly ordered towards what is perfectly good; which is God Himself. So whatever may be contained in God’s creation must have been, at least prior to any Great Fall, perfectly ordered towards Himself (which is perfect unity, communion of persons, complementary natures, etc.).

I'm glad to be considered your friend :smile: but . . . have you mistaken me for another TPFer? I don't think we've conversed before. If I've forgotten, my apologies.

No worries: maybe I am mistaking you for someone else.

Yes. That is the tactic to get you to shut up. It begs the question why he bothered to come in to say that. Trying to shame people away from important conversations is how backsliding occurs. — AmadeusD

Exactly, it is shame that this forum doesn't support free speech and the free exchange of ideas about philosophy; as we could have productive conversations that help further the knowledge base.

Thank you for the kind words Bob. :)

:heart:

If you want a clearer separation, biological and sociological sexism might suffice.

Would you agree, though, semantics aside, that sexism in the sense of sex would be divorced from sexism in the sense of gender given your definitions of sex and gender?

To go back to gender, my point is that gender becomes sexism when elevated above sex.

Before I respond, I think I need to grasp better what you are conveying here. Am I correct in thinking that ‘elevation’ here refers to contradiction? That is, that being sexist in the sense of gender happens when the gender of a person contradicts their sex?

After he created us by default such that we only deserve to suffer for all eternity.

In Christianity, we reap what we sow; and only those that on their demerits will they go to hell. What you have done is omitted justice from the discussion and straw manned Christianity with the idea that everyone should go to hell despite having sinned or not.

Likewise, it is up for debate what exactly ‘suffering’ is like in hell. The popular view in present day is that hell is just a maximally distant place from God—from goodness itself—and those who deserve to be there tend to want to to be there by obstinately rejecting goodness itself. Think of Satan as an embodiment of this: he was a high-ranking archangel with solid knowledge of God’s goodness, and he rejected in favor of his own autonomy—to be his own god.

He first fucks us up

God didn’t cause us to fall: adam and eve did and we suffer the consequences—but not guilt—of their sin.

and then offers us some conditional salvation

It has to be conditional to be just. If you do not want to be saved, for example, then it would be unjust to force you to be saved: that would violate your free will and autonomy to choose what is good or evil. God’s plan is the perfect synthesis of justice and mercy—not one at the expense of the other.

 resting on picking the right religion.

This isn’t true, and is a common misunderstanding among areligious and even some religious people. There is a Divinely revealed and guaranteed way to end up saved (which is the Sacraments); but this does not mean that anyone not on that path is going to hell.

It is hard to say exactly how perfect justice works and how that mixes with perfect mercy; but we can plausible say some things about it. For one, what fundamentally justifies a person before God, in light of Christ’s sacrifice, is their love of God. This is fides formata; and this love is of God, which can be sought after and acquired through reasoning about the natural world and natural law. A person does not have to accept formally a particular religion to love God in the sense of loving goodness itself in subsistent being (which is what God is). We come from many different backgrounds, with different IQs, with different obligations, with different cultures, etc. and justification gets very nuanced; however, the guaranteed and normal path to salvation is the Sacraments. If someone were to understand this sufficiently and reject participating in the Sacraments, then they do not really love God; but a person, for example, that doesn’t sufficiently understand this could still, given other factors, love God.

You are straw manning traditional Catholicism with an oversimplification of ‘picking the right religion’.

How is it an act of infinite wisdom and goodness to create living beings who by default deserve only eternal suffering?

I would like to ask you why you believe that Christianity teaches that we deserve only eternal suffering by merely being born human: that’s not the traditional nor a predominant view.

I don't find that "inspiring". Of course, your ilk are going to tell me that there is something wrong with me

I don’t think there is anything wrong with you: I think that if I understood your background and what you have come to know and why you have come to believe it that I would completely understand why you believe it as true (although it is false).

Hey J! Long time no see, my friend.

Classical theism is a view going back to Aristotle which views God in a specific way. In this view, God is subsistent being itself; which is the same as pure act of thought; and that the same as pure act of will; and that pure goodness; and that pure actuality. In short, omnipotence, "all-powerfulness", and "maximally powerful" refer to the same thing in this view; that is, that a being has intrinsic power unrestrained by anything else. This is what it means for God to be purely actual: pure act lacks all potential (going back to Aristotle) and so it cannot be actualized in any manner by anything else. This pure act is pure power; since power classically is the ability to actualize potentials and pure act is purely able to actualize a potential (untainted by anything else).

My point in bringing it up was that a lot of sloppier arguments against God's existence hinge on thinking of omnipotence (as well as other attributes) as if it is some sort of absolute power that entails the ability to do anything we can conceive of. This is patently false and a straw man of theism; as is evident from the fact that I can conceive of God killing Himself and re-creating Himself as nothing itself to then re-become Himself as God, and yet this is clearly not metaphysically possible for God to do. God, as pure act, is properly eternal and changeless---which does entail that He cannot kill Himself.

Persecution of Christians in the Empire before Constantine was sporadic and local. Nero's efforts were limited to the city of Rome, for example. Persecution was seldom organized or pursued throughout the Empire. I'm afraid the persecution was vastly exaggerated by Hollywood.

This belittles the point: Christian’s were brutally persecuted throughout the early church.

~60 A.D.: Nero burned them alive as a source of light in his gardens; disguised them as animals to be thrown to wild dogs; etc.

~80 A.D.: Domitian was very harsh on Christians. Most notably putting St. John the Evangelist in boiling oil and exiling St. John the Apostle (after which he wrote the Book of Revelation).

~160 A.D.: During Marcus Aurelius’ reign, albeit it not directly his fault, Christianity was widely persecuted.

Etc.

The problem is that you are belittling Christian persecution because it was not oftentimes incredibly centralized to the highest government. Christian’s widely had to meet in secret, were executed for their faith, blamed for every problem with rome, etc.

In fact, Christians were notorious for their eagerness for martyrdom. Tertullian actually boasted of this death wish. He wrote of an incident when a crowd of Christians accosted a Roman magistrate and demanded he kill them. The annoyed magistrate told them that if they wanted to die so badly they could find rope to hang themselves or throw themselves off a handy cliff, but he wouldn't accommodate them.

You make it sound like they were begging romans to kill them: that’s simply not true. Tertullian encouraged Christians to endure persecution—up to and including death—for the faith because of the horrific persecution that was going on. He wrote in the Apologeticum:

Christians are persecuted in ignorance, because they are not allowed to defend themselves - as long as they can be called 'Christians', they can be executed. Real criminals are allowed to deny their offences, defend themselves, and are tortured to get them to confess. By contrast the Christians are not allowed to demand evidence of any crimes they are condemned for, and are tortured to make them stop confessing. Christians are denied any chance to vindicate themselves, nor do the magistrates try to find any evidence of crime - the name of 'Christian' is enough.

(https://www.tertullian.org/works/apologeticum.htm)

You are twisting history into this phantom of rome where Christian’s lived normal lives most of the time but had this fetish for martyrdom; and that is simply ahistorical.

The doctrine of forgiveness of sin provides a method to avoid responsibility. Why be virtuous when you can always be absolved on request?

This would be a fair point IF asking for forgiveness was repentance. You seem to be under the completely false impression that if you simply ask of the Jesus to forgive you that you are forgiven: that’s not the historical view. In Catholicism, our salvation is caused (1) meritoriously by Christ’s sacrifice, (2) efficiently by God’s grace, and (3) instrumentally through our participation in God’s grace. This means that sola fide should be fides caritate formata: love is works and faith. We are saved by our genuine love for God and our participation in the Sacraments to elevate and maintain a state of sanctified grace.

Doing a sin with the intention of immediately repenting afterwards is itself a sin requiring repentance; and it is a mortal sin since it (1) has grave matter, (2) was intentional, and (3) had full knowledge. To be clear, this means that in your scenario here where someone avoids trying to be the best person they can be for God’s glory because “they will get saved anyways through repentance” will go to hell.

I thought about this very thing when I was first mulling this over, but it turns out 'genderism' has a different meaning.

The problem, though, with this is that you are purposefully equivocating discrimination based off of gender vs. sex (in your own definitions) because ‘genderism’ is already taken. By your definitions, what you are describing as ‘sexist’ is not sexist: it is discrimination based off of gender (unless, perhaps, I am grossly misunderstanding). This would entail that you would need to come up with a different ‘ism’ word (or even maybe coin one) or just use the phrase ‘discrimination based off of gender’.

Normally I don’t die on semantic hills (; , but this actually matters; because your basis of your argument for, e.g., it being wrong to say a woman isn’t really a woman if she doesn’t stay at home and cook is that it is discrimination based off of sex (i.e., sexism) but yet it is discrimination based off of gender.

When we shift the focus from sex to gender, in your terms, then it gets interesting to me because your definition of gender seems to imply, by my lights, that maybe you consider it just sociological, irrational expectations that we have of a sex which we shouldn’t; so this makes us wonder what is wrong with misgendering someone in your view if it all just irrational expectations based off of tastes. Think of it this way, imagine there are different stereotypes of pizza lovers. There’s most notably the cheese-is-a-topping people (let’s call them the cheesies for short) and the pineapple-on-pizza-is-great people (let’s call them crazies for short—I love throwing people under the bus for eating pineapple on pizza :smile: ). Now, imagine I thought that all stereotypes about pizza lovers is purely relative to tastes; and someone tells me I’m a cheesy because I am currently eating cheese-pizza. However, they do not understand that eating cheese-pizza does not thereby implicate one as considering cheese a topping: little did they know I’m a crazy; and so I do not really fit the stereotype of a cheesy—they mispizza’d me. Now, the central question is this: what did they do that was immoral there by mispizza’ing’ing me? Perhaps we would say they did something immoral by bringing it up (as maybe it’s taboo or something to talk about it); or maybe they would be doing something immoral if they knew I didn’t fit the stereotype but insisted I did anyways (maybe for trolling purposes). However, what we couldn’t say is that they are being sexist. We would need to evaluate how immoral it is to mispizza someone on the grounds of merely confusing or purposefully misidentifying someone with a stereotype vs. a different one.

What I would say you have done here, unless I am misunderstanding, is, by analogy, shifted mispizza’ing a person to discriminating against them based off of sex; for if I discriminate against someone because of their pizza stereotype then I have not thereby discriminated based off of there sex.

It is also worth noting that misgendering someone is different than discriminating based off of gender; just like mispizza’ing someone is different than discriminating based off of pizza stereotypes. If I refuse you service because you a dirty cheesy and only accept crazies in my shop, then I am being a pizza’ist; however if I accidentally or purposefully mispizza you, then I am ascribing to you what you are not: which is not discrimination itself—it’s a false attribution.

This is what is really interesting though about your view:

then it follows logically that a person who voluntarily identifies with a gender (such as 'femaleness') is being sexist against themselves.— Bob Ross

Correct.

I honestly didn’t think you would accept that (: . This means that, by analogy, anyone who self-identifies with any stereotype of pizza-loving is thereby being sexist against themselves.

Are you a woman?

CC: @Questioner

So your male opinion is not welcome in the arena of female comfort. How arrogant must one be to think they're allowed to make decisions for not just random individual women, but ALL women, who they've never even met?

This is a fallacious argument. Can you not vote on gun rights because you've never owned a gun? Can you not have an opinion on how ALL cops should behave despite never having been a cop? What you are doing is group identity politics, where you ignore the fact that everyone has an intellect that they can use to formulate opinions so that you can thought-police your political opposition.

Check your male privilege mate. It's just not welcome.

To be clear, you are making the claim that a man has male privilege merely because they have the right to have an opinion about a topic. Why would you believe that? Are you against sexism?

And it just feels part of the culture war nonsense that tries to subliminally attack trans, gays and every other LGBTQ person in society. My opinion is that these discussions are very low quality for this forum.

To be clear, you are insinuating that good-faith discussions about LGBTQ+ that are central to politics are ‘low quality for this forum’.

I’m not sure we should entertain the level of discourse that comes out of the rising hate we see in society.

Can you give some examples? Liberals throw the term ‘hate’ around like it is this catch-all, vague term. I would be curious to hear what recently has happened to the LGBTQ+ movement that you would consider hateful by its opposition. Is anyone who opposes the LGBTQ+ movement being hateful categorically for you?

We can easily have a civil discussion between each other who aren’t transsexuals, but a civil discussion that isn’t having insights and perspective from the people it’s about is seriously lacking in being able to have a qualitative level

Some topics don’t require any serious knowledge of anyone’s experiences—let alone nuanced experiences from a particular group. E.g., do I need to get to know people that perform math—like doing 2+2—to have reasonably conclude that it is 4?

When we need keen, nuanced insight from a person is in expert-testimony. Trans people aren’t experts on transgenderism by being trans: that’s like saying I am an expert on male biology because I am a male.

This is a controversial and provocative issue. If you’re going to mess around with it, you need to come up with better arguments. Something with substance. That’s what infuriates me about this, not your opinions, but the low quality of your arguments.

@Philosophim, don’t take it personally: there are a lot of far-left people in this forum that will try to irrationally crucify you for merely trying to have a good faith discussion about LGBTQ+. For some reason, it is like a sacred cow for people like T Clark. Keep up your respectful, good-faith discussions!

The irony is that people like @Philosophim don't come across to me as even necessarily right-wing on LGBTQ+ and yet people like @T Clark bash them anyways out of paranoia.

I think we’ve already hashed out our differences on gender and sex; but I would like to point one thing out as just food for thought:

You say that:

2. Definition of sexism

prejudice or discrimination based on sex OR
behavior, conditions, or attitudes that foster stereotypes of social roles based on sex

(underlined for emphasis)

If gender is “the non-biological expectations that one or more people have about how a sex should express themselves in public”, then the stereotypes of social roles based off of sex would be genderism and not sexism; for your definition of sex and gender entail that such stereotypes have nothing to do with sex itself other than being loosely tied to sex in an illegitimate fashion, so, thusly, it cannot be sexist since ‘sexism’ has as its object of thought what is discriminatory about sex (which would be the first part of your definition of sexism).

So:

"Women should cook in the kitchen. Martha does not cook in the kitchen, therefore she is not a woman," that would be sexist.
…
On the other hand, if William, a male, decided to cook in the kitchen and someone said, "William isn't a man," this would also be sexist

This idea of ‘a woman’ or ‘a man’ here, in your terms (as far as I can tell), refers to gender and not sex since it pertains to stereotypes based off of sex.

I think maybe your response would be that stereotyping sex with a gender is sexist because it tries too tie too much to sex; but nothing about sex in your terms has been discriminated against (such as their voice tone to use your example). Instead, the person would have been, at best, misgendered.

It seems like by noting misgendering is sexist; you have actually implicitly adopted a more realist framework about gender that is incompatible with your definition of it.

Likewise, if gender is about 'how a sex should express themselves in public' and any 'stereotypes of social roles based on sex' is sexism; then it follows logically that a person who voluntarily identifies with a gender (such as 'femaleness') is being sexist against themselves.

In short, it profited from its intolerance.

I don’t find this entirely plausible of an account of the fundamental spreading of Christianity because Christianity was built off of violently peaceful martyrdom (although later on it got pretty violent I do admit). For example, the apostles died gruesome deaths and Christianity was heavily and brutally persecuted throughout the early church. It wasn’t even legalized until 313 A.D.; and even all the way into the 600s A.D. Christians were still heavily persecuted by Muslims, such as the Coptic Orthodox Church tattooing their kids on the wrist so they would know they were Christian if they were kidnapped from their parents or their parents were murdered. It was also forced in some cases as a form of branding to discriminate more easily.

You are right, though, that there was a lot more intolerance by Christianity of other faiths than we have now in liberal times to be fair.

Third, zealous commitment to its spread among non-Christians (the missionary impulse), sometimes by force of arms.

This seems, to me, like a basic tenant of any successful movement. Zealotry is necessary aspect of spreading the ideology: an ideology that doesn’t believe their ideas are worth spreading becomes a stagnant pool of dirty water.

Fourth, the appeal of a religion which promised forgiveness of sins, thus providing hope that salvation was possible regardless of wrongs committed during life.

I feel like this should be inspiring to us all: I am not sure why you would consider this not “inspiring or attractive”. Christianity is uniquely the only religion where God is so merciful and loving that He comes down to us out of genuine concern for us: all other religions place God as this being way above us that it would be beneath Him to care about us in any personal way—let alone die for us.

Because of this, it gives a unique view that we can achieve union with God through God’s mercy; and not by the super rare chance of doing everything right to make it. Why is this uninspiring to you (even if you don’t believe it is true)?

I don't know who resurrected this thread, or perhaps its been viable this entire time, but I would say that you are viewing reasons to live divorced from goodness. What is good is ultimate what should motivate the rational agent to live or to die; and so we must ask ourselves "is it good to live or to die?".

If you think goodness is non-natural, then it makes sense that you evaluated the fundamental 'to be or not to be' in terms of some extrinsic purpose; however, I would say goodness is natural. Goodness is, classically, just the equality of a thing's essence and existence; and so the more realized a thing is at what it is---the more being it has---the better it is. Consequently, the most fundamental good is living; and this is why we see a natural affinity towards survival among everything that lives.

I will just give classical theism's two cents...

If a being is omnipotent, it has the power to bring about any logically possible outcome, including the existence of beings who are equally omniscient and omnipotent. — Truth Seeker

God is maximally powerful, as innate power itself, which is constrained by metaphysical possibility. God cannot do whatever he wants: this is a straw man that new atheists tend to use to appeal to a magical kind of power that is the crux of their arguments against the coherence of God's supposed nature. As an obvious example, God cannot annihilate Himself out of existence and then, from nothing, create Himself back into existence: this is not something His nature allows Him to do despite Him really being all-powerful.

In terms of omnipotence, in classical theism 'omnipotence' does not refer to absolute power that is akin to a magical get-out-of-jail-free card that allows God to do whatever we can conceive of; instead, it is to have innate power. God is purely actual---pure act itself---which makes Him have power intrinsically (since 'power' classically is 'the ability to actualize potential').

God cannot create a being that is likewise omnipotent; and we can prove this two ways. First, omnipotence requires pure act; so a being of pure act, of pure actuality, is the only kind of being that can be omnipotent. Two purely actual beings have no potential to be actualized; and each has the ability to actualize any potential. Therefore, two or more purely actual beings could not exist since they would limit each other.

The second way is to note that a purely actual being must be purely simple because anything that has parts has the potential to be affected (by those parts); and two purely simple being cannot coexist because they would be ontologically indistinguishable from each other (thusly collapsing into each other).

Is tolerance always a virtue? — Questioner

One of my favorite quotes by Lewis: "Tolerance is a virtue to the man that lacks convictions".

So we have the supposed paradox of tolerance; that the left, in advocating "tolerance", is hypocritical in not tolerating the right - in not tolerating intolerance. — Banno

Intolerating intolerance is intolerance; and this is a convenient way to try justify ruthlessly persecuting any views you deem threaten the viability of liberalism while simultaneously rejecting that you are persecuting anyone (since it is just 'intolerance of intolerance'). It's a classic liberal cop-out to me.

Why can't both sides just admit that any ideology that they deem too immoral is not tolerated? Let's just be honest about it.

I’m don't know if there are moral facts or if morality is grounded in anything beyond emotional responses, perhaps emotivism is correct, of which, presumably, there are more and less defensible versions. — Tom Storm

Then, why should anyone care about what you think is moral or immoral if it is just your emotions speaking? Why would society, that is supposed to be predicated on rationality, inform its legal codes based on your emotions?

:fire:

When some people get into politics too far, they start to think 'their side' is more intelligent, empathic, and generally superior than the other. This leads to intolerance. You start getting more narrow minded and thoughts like, "The right are full of bigots" or "The left are full of morons". In reality, it is YOU becoming a moron. Ego is one of the greatest destroyers of an intelligent and open mind.

I talk to everyone. I've spoken to racists, homophobes, sexists, genderists, and people who think the other side should all just die. I've spoken with sexual reprobates, socially inept people, arrogant demeaning people, wealthy, middle class, and poor people. — Philosophim

:fire:

This is why you are a rarity among the human race, Philosophim; and I respect that. Freedom of speech and rational dialogue is essential to a flourishing nation; and we seem to be forgetting that in modern times.

CC: @unimportant

I keep seeing "right winger" as "right whinger".

Lol. Right-wing politics isn’t usually a form of white supremacy, if that is what you are insinuating. The liberal media likes to label everyone who is conservative that is white a white supremacist, while ignoring the non-white conservatives, as a weak rhetorical tool to make people avoid, out of fear, looking into the topic.

For example, look as Nick Fuentes in the United States right now: he’s booming in popularity right now and all they keep doing is labeling him a white supremacist when he clearly isn’t. It’s all rhetorical games to avoid losing a liberal America; and this also happens a lot in Europe.

Racism, we don't accept, but tolerate

Who’s “we”? Certainly not liberals. Liberals in America will go out of their way to cancel someone culturally so badly that they get fired from their job if they do something so, dare I say, “horrible” as say the n-word; and european liberals are so intolerant of racism that they throw people in jail or prison for comments that are taken as racist.

Every ideology that gains power and dominance in a culture will be intolerant of any position that jeopardizes its survival. This is why the less popular a dominant ideology is the more tyrannical it has to be in order to maintain power.

In terms of liberalism vs. traditionalism, it depends on the flavor you are comparing which is more or less tolerant of opposing doctrines. The unique aspect of liberalism is that it also ruthlessly persecutes its perceived enemy ideologies but under the guise of tolerance itself; so they tend to be blinded to their intolerance, irregardless of whether or not it is permissible or right to be intolerant in such manner.

I find that the most interesting aspect of liberalism is this susceptibility to hiding behind a mask---saying one thing and doing another. They fight racism by becoming racist (e.g., affirmative action, "you can't be racist to a white person because they are the majority", etc.); they fight sexism by being sexist (e.g., "your a man so you can have no opinion on abortion", "force women to be more represented in engineering, etc.); they resolve theft with theft (e.g., retributions to black people for slavery); etc.

Liberalism is the first ideology that triumphs by purporting the exact opposite of what it is---most notably by imposing a liberal ethic under the guise of secularism.

Is liberalism more tolerant of views it does not accept than traditionalism? I don't think so: they are just as ruthless in persecuting their perceived opposition as traditionalism is. This is natural and by no means immoral; but it doesn't get acknowledged by liberals because they think they are incredibly tolerant because they accept as many views as possible.

I agree that we seem to have gotten off topic. I was hoping to make some headway on the other points and then reel it back to the topic of transgender rights; but I think we are now doing circles unfortunately without any headway. With that being said, if there's anything about your topic of transgender rights that you would like to discuss further, then I am all ears.

See your consciousness is part of reality however. Everything you personally experience is objectively real.

What you experience is a construction of your brain of what it thinks the world is; which means it necessarily is not identical to reality itself. Knowledge of reality is not a part of reality: it is the comprehension of that reality.

To be fair, I think you are just using ‘real’ to refer to ‘existence’; so I understand where you are coming from. However, this over-simplifies the conceptual landscape here; as we cannot say things like ‘money exist but is not real’ but instead ‘money is real and a chair is real’. It reduces everything to having the same status of existence in virtue of existing.

I'll still propose that money is objectively real. But that is because thoughts are objectively real.

I think you use ‘objectivity’ to refer to that which the subject experiences; and ‘subjectivity’ is anything pertaining to the subjective experience. If this is true, then even in your own terms money is not objectively real since it only exists insofar as two or more subjects value something at a particular amount.

Would you at least agree, semantics aside, that money does not have the same kind of ‘existence status’ as a chair?

In my opinion it is this very muddying of unclear terms that promotes confusion and unclear thinking on the subject. People are mostly confused when it comes to gender terminology, and I believe at this point it is encouraged to stay that way by design.

It might be better to collapse gender and sex for the sake of the masses; but technically I would say that using the Thomistic concepts of virtuality and reality can really help sublate the two mainstream positions (one being that sex and gender are divorced and the other that they are the exact same).

This is a subjective view of yours Bob.

With all due respect, this is just an assertion that begs the question. I outlined why objectifying the face is ontologically grounded in female nature (as the object of sex); and this does entail, if this is true, that men wearing makeup like women do is feminine and immoral. There’s nothing about this argument I am making that purports subjectivity (e.g., “I think it is immoral for men to wear makeup because I feel like they shouldn’t be”).

In your view, of course, gender isn’t ‘real’ in the sense that it is something that exists like a chair: it ‘exists’ insofar as it is merely the agreement between subjects of what they feel or think should be the case with no objective basis. So, naturally, in your view, I understand why you would push back here and reject it.

Freedom is just a basic descriptor of actionability

True, but freedom is not the kind of capacity for action where one just chooses from options; it is the kind of capacity to will in accord with reason, and this entails that we are more free the more virtuous and biased we are towards what is good.

Think of it this way, to use your example, walking itself is a capacity to move the legs to move around. When properly understood, to be maintain this capacity you have to do things to keep the legs in shape and healthy. There are ‘oughts’ which arise out of the maintenance of that capacity. You are a saying ‘this capacity is not itself normative’, but to me it does entails norms because there is a way it is designed to operate. Even just hypothetically, if you reject that the mere way legs are entail how one should use them, if you want to maintain your capacity to walk then you have to exercise your legs (e.g., you can’t sit 100% of the time: they will be neglected and fail to work properly).

Analogously, freedom is a capacity to will in accord with reason; and this does entail, to maintain and have it, cultivating virtues, an environment conducive to it, and the knowledge of what is good to will in accord with. My main point was that your view entails necessarily that we are less free when we do these things; and this is counter-intuitive. Moreover, my second point is that you lose your freedom by expanding your options in this liberty of indifference kind of way.

Yes, that is both outdated and you have to remember that it was written in an era in which 'free speech' was not a thing

It wasn’t an argument for liberty for excellence in a substantive sense: I was rejoining your claim that implied that we should accept liberty of indifference because it is common now. If that is your view, then you should actually accept liberty for excellence. We aren’t really in disagreement here I don’t think.

Good philosophical practices rely on clear, unambiguous, and fundamental definitions.

Correct, but we have to go beyond clear definitions to determine the truth. We both have clear definitions of freedom here: we must venture beyond mere definitions to determine which gets it more right about what freedom is.

To be clear, freedom for excellence defines freedom as ‘the capacity to will in accord one’s nature’ which is the same as ‘to be in a state most conducive so one’s flourishing’.

If you wish to argue that choosing virtues makes you less free, that is your claim, not mine

I thought you were saying that freedom is about the capacity to choose: do you believe that, in principle, someone can become more free while simultaneously having less options to choose from?

Lets define real. Normally 'real' means 'what is'.

In colloquial speech, ‘to be real’ and ‘to exist’ are interchangeable; but there is a substantial difference between the two. Not everything that has being is a member of reality. For example, the color red that I see exists as a construction of my consciousness but has no membership in reality: if you were to omit my consciousness of the, e.g., red block there would be no redness in the block.

I think we need to use a more sophisticated definition of ‘reality’ here, because otherwise we erode the meaningful distinction I made by simplifying terms. Money is not real: it is inter-subjective—not objective. Money exists, of course! However, it is not a member of reality. E.g., the $100 price of the diamond does not have being like the diamond does. Likewise, the existence of gender, if it is just sociological, does not have membership of reality—it exists as inter-subjective agreement and that is it.

for now we can agree in this thread that gender as a social construct is a purely subjective opinion based purely on emotions, nothing rationally substantive.

Agreed, relative to your theory.

You and I might hold identical views, the key here is you are using gender in my mind as a synonym for sex

Effectively, yes: I hold they are the same. Technically, no: I am leaning more towards sex and gender being virtually but not really distinct.

Is that backed by fact or opinion Bob? Ever see a woman fall in love with a kpop star?

Firstly, I should clarify that men wearing makeup is not always immoral: it is the act of objectifying the face as a man that is immoral, and most of the time that is what makeup is for so it is usually immoral for a man to do. Some men need to wear makeup for TV podcasts not to objectify the face but to avoid camera issues or makeup is done for dead people in coffins so they look more lively, and that doesn’t seem to be threatened by my critique here (unless I am missing something). Kpop stars that are male are engaging in something immoral, under my view, which goes back to my claim about gender realism: in your view, there simply is no right or wrong answer here—it is just people’s tastes—whereas in mine there are facts about this.

Likewise, I agree that women and men can be sociologically or even psychologically conditioned to be attracted to social cues that they should not be; so I have no problem simultaneously admitting that women fall, in modern times, for men that mimick femininity—such as men that wear makeup and do their nails. This is in no way a refutation of the biologically underpinning of such things (like makeup) that I noted before.

No, I get that. My point is that is a choice we are free to make.

With all due respect, this is an unintentional red herring. My point was that if we hold your view that freedom is about making choices and virtues limit choices, then virtues make you less free—irregardless if you freely cultivated them or not. Most people would have the opposite intuition: they would say that virtues make you more free despite them making you have less options. If this is true, then we need to re-evaluate what freedom fundamentally is, because it can’t be focused on having options to choose from in accord with your own will. Your response here has been to note that we can freely choose to cultivate virtues; but I am noting that the virtue itself, once established through free or unfree means, is a restriction on ‘freedom’ in your sense of the term.

I see a very simple and unambiguous use of freedom as "The ability to make a choice within one's capabilities", and then adjectives can come in to modify it so that we both clearly know what each is referring to

I was just providing a rejoinder to your argument that we should hold freedom of indifference because it is more common; by just noting that historically freedom for excellence is much more common.

The classical way of thinking about freedom is that it is the ‘capacity to act with virtue and achieve the human good’ going all the way back to Plato; and during the Age of Enlightenment, which was the precursor for classical liberalism, they started taking liberty of indifference more seriously. Now, we live in a post-classical-liberal world; and we take for granted that ‘freedom’ has to do with making choices, like your definition, when it classically did not mean that. This is doesn’t mean your view is wrong, but that’s why I also gave my counter-examples to show hopefully how your view can be counter-intuitive, such as in the case of having to admit that virtues cause a person to be less free (which is a consequence of your view).

form- full potential
actualization - the whatness of a being's form (Can be less than full potential)

Act is what provides the being to something; and potency is the capacity to change (viz., to have a potential actualized). Act is not the same thing as being: a material being is comprised, in being, of form (act) and potential (matter). Matter is what receives the form: it is what is actualized. For example, I can mold a pot out of clay: the ‘potness’ is the form (act) and the clay is the matter which receives it (potency).

Form and act are identical; and potency is just a something that has potential that could, in principle, be actualized.

There are almost always exceptions and sub categories. I'm not saying it can't be handled, but how does your particular approach handle this problem?

True, but this is one of the many reasons that I think form realism is the only way to coherently account for essence realism. If one says, like I previously noted, that the essence of a thing is embodied in there mere fact that it exhibits some set of essential properties that make it that type of thing, then you are absolutely right that there will always be exceptions where one will want to count a thing as that type even though it doesn’t exhibit all the essential properties (e.g., this cat only has two legs but is still a cat).

Form realism gives the only coherent account because it avoids this issue. If there is a real distinction, not a merely conceptual distinction, between a material being’s form and matter—viz., the actuality that actualizes the potential to be that kind of thing and the stuff that has the potential to be actualized in that manner to be that kind of thing (e.g., the ‘potness’ and the clay)—then even if the matter doesn’t properly get actualized by the form the form still has the fullness of the essence in act. My act of molding the clay into a pot has the fullness of the essence of a pot within it, but perhaps the clay breaks or something. Now, a ‘soul’ is just a type of form that is self-actualizing: it is an act of a being in virtue of which it is alive. In this view, a unified principle of the body, not a mere aggregate of cooperating parts, is what actualizes, dynamically through time, the organism: this is what is called a ‘soul’—it is the form of a living being. All living beings have a soul, including plants. The plant can grow into a tree, e.g., of its own self-development given the right environment: the unified act of its own self-development is its soul. With non-soul forms, with static forms that don’t develop the matter through time of its own accord, there is no possibility of the matter which doesn’t receive the act (form) properly still being that kind of thing because the act doesn’t ‘stay with it’. For example, if the pot breaks after it dries, although the act of molding it contained the fullness of the essence of a pot, that pot is no longer a pot if it cannot fulfill the purpose of a pot (perhaps it has a whole in the bottom now and can’t hold any liquids).

Crucially, with souls (i.e., ‘dynamic forms’ or self-actualizing principles), they contain and stay with, in being, the living being as the full essence which is being actualized, through the self, in time. My unified actualizing principle, which is not the mere aggregate of parts of my body working together, has within it the whole essence of male humanness, which it has to have in order to attempt to actualize the matter—the body—into a fully developed male human; and so even if the matter—the body—does not get actualized properly, due to external factors, the soul has the fullness of the essence of human maleness or femaleness. This means that a man that has, to use your example, testicles inside of them still has the fullness of maleness, which would have the testicles on the outside, in virtue of their soul.

Again, if you take the view that we account for essentialism with the idea that we are just an aggregate of parts working together to cause this emergence of a living being and that we are some type of thing if we have the set of essential properties for that type, then I completely agree that it fails to account for essentialism because there always will be things of that type which truly, in matter, lack some of the essential properties of that type of thing. This is just one of many reasons to abandon this kind of essentialism for either nominalism or form realism.

This is why a handicapped person would not have a right to a handicapped spot, and this would best be considered a privilege?

I am not sure. All I was noting is that they wouldn’t have right because they are handicapped: it would have to be grounded in their nature and being handicapped is a privation of that human nature. I was thinking maybe one could argue cogently that since a human does have the right to walk, it may be coherent to ground proxied rights of helping them move around if they are handicapped. It gets sticky though, because we technically don’t have a right to walk anywhere we want; such as private land. So maybe it is a right to have a handicap parking spot on a public buildings but just a privilege on private ones. I would have to think about that one more.

Another way to see gender is if we took the same biological form of a man in both cultures, but one culture believed that all men should be warriors while another culture believed all men should be scholars. Its not a biological expectation, but a cultural one. This is what I mean by 'subjective'. There is no underlying objective grounding for this expectation, it really is just a societal opinion or pressure.

This is a really good and important point to bring up, because this highlights the differences between modern gender theory and an older kind like mine. Modern gender theory, by associated gender with sociology, has collapsed gender into something that is not real: it is inter-subjective, which is not real. Modern gender theory is a form of gender anti-realism; and this falls prey to the same issues, analogously, with moral anti-realism.

In my view, as a realist about gender, your examples highlight the real disputes between cultures about what the gender facts are where one can be truly wrong or right, more correct or less, about gender; whereas, under modern gender theory as you expound it, there is not true disagreement because there are no facts about gender (since they are just inter-subjective stances that people have of what they expect in people’s behaviors) and so these examples you gave are highlights of equally right stances on gender (because there is no objectively right stance to take) which is just an exposition of the tastes of the given culture.

In my view, there is real, rational disagreement we can have about what gender is and how gender roles work; and so I can admit that cultures have gotten it wrong, some have gotten it sort of right, and some have gotten it sort of wrong.

Whereas your make up example is not a sex expectation, but a gendered one. In ancient Egypt men used to wear make up just as frequently as women. There is no biological aspect that necessitates men or women wear makeup, its a cultural strategy and/or outlook about biological differences that has nothing to do with the 'form' of the biological being itself.

I would say it is a gender fact that women are the one’s that have the role of wearing makeup, although it is morally permissible for them and not obligatory, and as such any culture that said otherwise got the facts wrong, and this is because women a procreative role that makes them the object of sex. This is not to be confused, to be clear, with saying women should be ‘objectified’ in the modern, colloquial sense of that term; but, rather, that the way sexual attraction works when there are two sexes in a species is that one gets aroused by being the object of the sex (viz., of someone putting themselves in them) and the other from taking something as the object of the sex (viz., of themselves putting themselves in someone else). This is not to say that we should be lustful, but loving relationships always involve this dynamic, which should also include a deeper communion between them and the willing of pleasure for both in the sexual act, because without it there can be no such thing as a two-participate sex where both get aroused. Even in non-traditional sex, there is an imperfect resemblance to femininity and masculinity in this sense: it’s necessary for sexual attraction to happen. Makeup is something that attempts to exemplify its object—usually the face—as beautiful, attractive, etc.; and this is to objectify it (which is usually the face). This is an upshot of the way sexual attraction works: a beautiful women is an attractive women, and this is to say that the women taken as an ‘object’ (which is not to say to objectify them lustfully or abuse them) is exemplar of being the kind of sex that receives sex and does not give it. This is why women naturally feel empowered by putting on makeup, dressing up, and being very interested in their outward appearance whereas men do not in the same ways (even in the case that a man cares about his appearance); and this is also why feminine men, like gay men, will also feel empowered and tend to gravitate towards makeup, wearing outfits that show off their figure, etc. These are all naturally grounded in femininity: they are grounded in the natural sexual role that women have.

Yes, the decision to cultivate habits to make good or bad choices makes it easier to continue making those choices, but a person freely chose to cultivate those habits.
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Its not a limit of freedom, its a free choice to build self-discipline. And I would argue self-discipline is about the mind controlling the body, not the other way around

With all due respect, I think you missed my point. I agree that you are freely choosing, in these examples, to cultivate the virtues: my point is that you are freely choosing to make yourself less free. Virtues make you more biased towards what is good which makes you less capable of choosing between options; and most of them actively limit your options (like self-discipline).

I think this contrasts too much with the common understanding of freedom

The reason I don’t find this compelling is because the vast majority of human history has used freedom for excellence—not your nor our society’s modern understanding of it. Freedom of indifference is a new theory that was brought about during classical liberalism. Just to clarify, and this doesn’t mean my theory is true, your theory is the one here that is much younger; so if you are trying to adhere to the ‘common historical understanding’, then it would be uncontroversially true that you should go with liberty for excellence: that one is centuries upon centuries old in the premodern world. Only with the Enlightenment and classical liberalism did people start thinking freedom is about making choices between contrary options.

Forgive me for the double post, but I just thought of another example that provides clarity into our differences on the nature of freedom.

To build self-discipline is inherently to limit one's options to get their body to obey their mind (e.g., I am not going yo indulge myself with this delicious cake because I know I shouldn't and I want to cultivate my brain to obey what I believe I should or shouldn't be doing irregardless of how I feel about it). This would, under your view, limit freedom; but I would argue that it actually makes me more free by limiting my options to cultivate and maintain self-discipline because it makes me more capable of willing in accord with my beliefs of what I think I should be doing and prevents my feelings, desires, passions, etc. from impeding on or overcoming that. I would say I am more free by limiting my options in this way exactly because it sets up my subconscious to be more biased towards what is good for me; which is to will in accord with my reason—it makes me be in a state more conducive to my flourishing.

I'm curious what your thoughts are on that.

I believe this is the crux to why many of the rights requested by trans gender individuals such as mandated pronouns and opposite sex entitlements, are not rights but personal desires.

Agreed; and, moreover, they are trying to get rights that the other sex has—not the rights they have relative to their own sex: that’s what is so controversial about it.

You don't actualize into a form. You are. Your existence is what you are, and that may or may not fit into an abstract that we apply

A ‘form’ is not a ‘concept’ in the sense I am using it: a concept is an idea in a mind, whereas a form is an actualizing principle in a being. A ‘principle’ here is being used to denoted something objective: something which is not stand-dependent nor an aspect of a mind’s ‘subjective experience’. The actualizing principle of a being is its act(uality); and the matter which receives it is its potency (potential).

Which leads me to:

This is what I proposed earlier considering someone who is crippled or has a different hair color.
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There is a whatness to you being Bob Ross
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Does a person with a missing index finger have different rights than someone with five? What If I'm missing my pinky toe?

A real essence is a ‘whatness’ which is inscribed in the being itself objectively: it is not an abstraction of a mind. In the case of a mere concept of what it is to be something, that is, by itself, insufficient to provide intelligibility innate to a being; for it is an idea conjured up by a mind for its own understanding and, consequently, is not something real in the being that it is contemplating. When I conjure up an idea of a circle, that by-itself is just something I use to understand circular beings in reality; but that in-itself provides no innate intelligibility to the circular beings such that they really are circles.

If the essence is real, no matter if one justifies it with form realism or not, then it is embedded in the object itself—not a mere abstraction from a mind.

If an real nature (essence) is intrinsic to the being, then whatever one believes makes it that kind of being as opposed to another must be (1) in that real nature and (2) universal to any kind of that type.

So:

There is a whatness to you being Bob Ross

Essence is never identical to a particular. An essence captures a type of being; which, in principle, could be instantiated in multiple of that type: it’s a genus. It’s gets tricky with God, but let’s put a pin in that one (;

Likewise, I think you are conflating the psychological identity of a being (person) with their ontology. Who I am is unique: there cannot be someone that is me in the sense of ‘me’ as a specific subject; but what I am is common to all male humans. If you remove enough of my personality, maybe who I am changes; but only by changing my biology do you change what I am. Likewise, you can change certain things about me without changing fundamentally what I am; such as swapping out my hair color.

This is what I proposed earlier considering someone who is crippled or has a different hair color.

A cripple cannot have any rights that are grounded in their crippleness, because that is a deprivation of their nature—not a part of their nature. Their nature is such that they should have legs; and, again, I would say they have that nature fully in virtue of their ‘form’ (soul).

They may have certain rights grounded in their nature that grant them special needs; because their right to things pertaining to walking are still a right they have because their nature dictates it—it just wouldn’t be in virtue, intrinsically, of them being crippled that would warrant such rights. Same with losing a pinky.

To be clearer: Expectations about biological sex are not sociological.

A social aspect of human life is any that pertains to inter-subjectivity. When people expect the penis, to take a sex-specific example, to behave, to be purposefully vague, in such-and-such ways is a social expectation grounded in biological sex. There is no such thing as an expectation held by multiple people that is not social; because a group holding an expectation is them inter-subjectively agreeing upon the belief that such-and-such should work this-and-that kind of way.

Any ‘biological expectations’ that are inter-subjective, which would be the vast majority of them, are social expectations; and the only way for there to be an expectation that isn’t social is if it is purely subjective instead of inter-subjective—like if I were the only one that thinks that things should work a specific way.

If this is true, then all I am noting is that social expectations can be grounded in objectivity—including biological sex; and this is go much farther than you might think, such as women wearing makeup as an upshot of their female nature and men not wearing it as a part of their nature.

If we define freedom as, "The ability to act based on what you are", that {freedom for excellence}fits

(emphasis and notes added)

This presupposes the idea, again, that freedom fundamentally is about being able to choose from options; and this is not compatible with freedom being fundamentally about a state of being most conducive to flourishing.

If I cultivate, for example, the virtues; then I am biased towards what is good; so I am less apt to choose ‘freely’ in the sense of purely choosing from contraries; so it follows, under your view, that I am less free the more virtues (or vices) I cultivate. On the contrary, in my view, I don’t need the ability to choose otherwise or to choose from options to be truly free: if I am most able to will in accord with what is good, whatever that state of being might be (which is going to be a state where I, as a human, are most prejudiced towards doing what is right), then I am the most ‘free’ in my view.

This is why I gave the example of God, but admittedly I think it missed its mark. The point was not to get into a debate about the nature of God: I was just trying to demonstrate where these two theories of freedom go when we apply them most radically.

Another famous example, to try again, is the holocaust (or any extremely authoritarian regime that snuffs out ‘freedom’, in your sense, in a dystopian and horrific kind of way). If freedom is about having the ability to choose from contraries (options), then a government that restricts options is restricting freedom; and so it is impossible for one to become more free in an environment that is actively restricting or has restricted people’s ability to choose from options (assuming they don’t rebel or something like that); but if freedom is about being able to will in accord with what is good, which is to be in a state of being more conducive than less to your flourishing, then one can, in fact, become more free even in such an environment.

In the holocaust, as horrific as it was, in a freedom of indifference view it is impossible to say that anyone in a concentration camp became more free as they lived there compared to when they were in normal cities because the Nazis had rounded them up and severely limited their ability to make their own choices; however, in a freedom for excellence view, although this is not a condoning of what they did, some people, in fact, became more free because the horrific conditions forced them to cultivate the virtues and have a much deeper appreciation of what is good compared to when they were living comfortable lives in the cities—of which makes their state of being more conducive to their flourishing (notwithstanding the malnourishment, torture, etc. that they were inflicted with of course). The love they acquired for the good, in a much deeper sense, and the virtues which came with it, built saints in those very torturous chambers.

Again, I am not using this example to condone Nazism (and I just say that just in case Jamal decides to read this, lol): it’s just another radical example to juxtapose the two theories of freedom.

Which leads me to:

But freedom in itself does not deal with morality.

In freedom of indifference, this makes perfect sense and I am inclined to agree; for you are thinking of freedom as fundamentally having the ability to choose from options; and so this naturally has no bias towards what is good or bad (and, as a side note, that’s where it gets its name of ‘indifference’).

However, in freedom for excellence, as the name ‘excellence’ suggests, freedom and goodness are interrelated. There is no separation between them such that one can be more free while, for example, acquiring less good. I become more free the more I acquire what is good; whether that be knowledge of what is good, virtues (viz., good habits), or an environment more apt to allow me to realize my nature (e.g., lots of healthy food available, no hard drugs at my disposal to use, time to workout, no gambling, etc.).

I know you disagree, but I hope I have demonstrated sufficiently the differences between our ideas of freedom; as they are central to the discussion so far.

I look forward to hearing from you,
Bob

Apologies for the belated response: I meant to respond yesterday but ran out of time ):

Human rights are rationally agreed upon rights that should be conferred to all people...Universal, non-discriminatory, equal, and ideas that we would like to respect, protect, and fill.
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“If this is true, then what rights we have are tied and anchored in our nature as a human; and so we look at that nature to expose which rights we have and which rights we think we have but don’t.”
— Bob Ross

No objection. We may have to define human nature, but I think we both have a general sense of what that is for now.

I think we will need to dive into what a nature and human nature is; because, to me, the idea that human rights would be necessarily, in principle, universal amongst humans is incoherent with the idea that, in principle, rights are grounded in human nature. This is because ‘human nature’ is not a real nature: (human) femaleness and (human) maleness are human natures that exist within our species. The species itself is an abstraction; and, likewise, ‘human nature’ is an abstraction of the subset of essential properties that (human) males and (human) females share; but the fullness of the real nature that a male or female have is broader than that. In principle, there is nothing restricting rights to only what can be grounded in what each share. Again, why should be believe that two beings of different natures should have the same exact rights—and not just a subset of shared rights—in virtue of their personhood? Perhaps you are open to the possibility of different rights that persons of different natures could have such that they don’t share all the same rights with other persons of different natures; but that, perhaps, there simply aren’t any meaningful differences between them that, in actuality, would warrant different rights. If so, then I would ask you to elaborate more on that.

So you know where I am coming from, I am an essentialist: I think there is a whatness—viz., what it is to be this particular thing contrary to another thing—that real objects (e.g., cars, roads, humans, cockroaches, trees, iron, etc.) have intrinsically. In my case, I account for it with form realism: I think there is a unification, actualization principle of things in matter which provide its innate intelligibility (of what kind of thing it is). Someone else may account for it, for example, by suggesting that each type of thing is that type in virtue of exhibiting some essential set of properties (as opposed to having a unification principle that provides it) and, so, anything that has that set of properties is that type of thing. Admittedly, if one takes the latter route, then it could follow that ‘human nature’ is real; because things could embody multiple natures as a mere collection or aggregate of parts that exihibit different but compatible sets of essential properties (e.g., Bob having brown hair and being a human exhibits both the nature of brownness and humanness). In my case, since the form provides the whatness, I would say that the real essence is embodied in its form, in the fullness of its essence, and this entails that, for humans, their form is what provides their intelligibility as the kind of thing that is a human; and this form is male or female—so ‘human nature’ is an abstraction of what the two forms have in common. In simple words, I don’t think it is possible for their to be a human being that embodies a real nature of ‘humanness’ that is neither male nor female (and I say this knowing about intersex people); but the counter would be obviously that nothing embodies natures in a ‘real’ way like I am describing if forms are not real or they are a set of essential properties something embodies.

My main point would be: why should we believe that the part of ‘female’ and ‘male’ nature that is shared between them is all that we look at to determine their rights if rights are natural?

Are you saying that the definition of human nature can never be subjective, or that a human being's nature can never be subjective?

So, for me, a ‘nature’ is an essence; which is what provides what it is to be this kind of thing as opposed to a different kind of thing; and it can be real (viz., innate and intrinsic as embodied in the being itself: essence realism) or not real (viz., conceptually used by our minds to help categorize similar things: nominalism). To me, valid essences are real and embodied in virtue of the form of a being. So the form, which is the self-actualizing principle of the body that provides it with its whatness (viz., the simple ‘I’ that guides the material processes of the body, which is called a ‘soul’) is what counts as the real nature of the given human; and this nature is never generically ‘human’. Moreover, that nature is embodied in the being independently of what they feel or think about it; so it is stance-independently existent—hence ‘objective’.

You bring up a good point: what about the subjective experience we have? Isn’t that a part of our nature? Yes, but our subjective experience we have is not itself identical to our nature that provides us with being a type of thing that ‘has subjective experience’. To be fair, this is where the differences between essence being a set of properties vs. form get impactful. In my view, your form provides you with being the kind of being that will, under the right circumstances, develop into a being that has experience; but for ‘set theoriests’, for lack of a better term, the being doesn’t have that nature until it exhibits the set of essential properties; so if one thinks that ‘having consciousness’ is essential to being human, then anyone who isn’t currently conscious is not human.

The main point would be that the nature one has is not dependent on the subjective stance you take on it; and that’s all I mean here by ‘objectivity’. I understand, if I remember correctly, you use the terms to distinguish between the qualitative experience we have (viz., subjectivity) and what we are experiencing (viz., objectivity); and I think that schema holds much merit in the context of many discussions, and I agree with you that our nature includes ‘being a subject’.

But if we disregard a person's subjective experience, then we would be able to inflict immense pain on a person without a care or doubt

So, I would say that the nature itself is not identical to the experience we have; our nature entails that we will have such an experience (all else being equal). We do need to consider, to your point, the sensible aspect of our nature, as well as the nutritive and rational aspects, but this is irregardless of if someone is realized sufficiently at their nature. For example, to counter your example, imagine I could drug someone so they won’t feel the pain in your scenario: does that mean I have sidestepped the moral consideration that they are sensibility that are being violated? I wouldn’t say so. I would be purposefully depriving them of feeling which is a privation of their nature; so it is immoral (and I say this knowing that this may sound strange, but by ‘purposeful’ I mean ‘directly intentional’: I may intend to deprive them of feeling as a side effect of the means towards some good end [such as numbing them for surgery to save their life]).

Is there a right that society should have certain subjective expectations of someone with a red hair color? It doesn't seem so. For one, everyone could technically have a different expectation of someone with red hair color
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I think what you're saying is, "Can there be a human right about cultural subjective expectations?"

This is one of my main points: if ‘gender’ is solely a social expectation, then it has no objective grounding (i.e., it isn’t a social expectation about the real nature of a being—like your ‘biological expectation’ examples); and this means that all social expectations are irrational and immoral. If I expect you to behave some way out of pure subjective feelings or thoughts I have, with no underlying basis in reality, then I am being irrational and immoral because I am viewing you as having an obligation towards submitting to my own feelings are baseless thoughts. This is the consequence of modern gender theory as you outlined in in the OP: ‘gender’ becomes something which we can’t even talk about ‘gender rights’, because those would be just be rights we grant based off of social expectations that have no basis in reality (in objectivity). I understand that’s not what you are really conveying, but that’s the consequence of defining the terms in the way it is defined in the OP (by my lights).

So then if we say, "trans gender rights" the only way for this to make sense is if there are certain human rights being denied to trans gender people simply because they are trans gendered. I think that's the only way this makes sense.

Agreed.

In common, but in common based on biology and function. Do we consider that a person who cannot walk has a particular right that a human who walks does not? Of course we would say its "All humans who cannot walk". In such a way we can say, "All humans who are men". The key here is this cannot be due to a social expectation, it must be based on the objective realities and consequences of biology. I say this as a proposal, not an assertion. I'm curious what you think here.

Are you saying here that the only aspects of male and female biology that matter for consideration of rights is their rational will or intellect? I am not following how the biological and functional differences of women and men wouldn’t be, in principle, taken into account when discussing rights.

Another major difference, I suspect between us, is that I would say that social expectations and obligations can be, if done right, grounded in the real natures of humans; so the ‘biology and function’ of a male or female does legitimately lead to different social roles between them that are grounded in ‘biology and function’. Whereas, in the OP, if I am understanding correctly, the social roles would just always be purely inter-subjective.

In my view I say yes to all three.

I see now you are very libertarian (:

I would briefly note that goodness is the equality of a thing’s essence and existence; so ethics, for me, is going to be centralized around helping realize natures and not the freedom to make choices. I think the main difference here in what you said and my view is that you seem to believe that freedom to make choices (not withstanding you perhaps trying to talk people out of doing bad things or it harming other people) is what freedom truly is about; and I deny this. This is the difference between what’s called ‘freedom of indifference’ and ‘freedom for excellence’. I don’t think freedom fundamentally consists in being about to choose between options; but, rather, consists in a state of being that is most conducive to flourishing.

To really contrast these, let’s rope God into this (;

If freedom is about being able to choose from options (especially contraries), then God is the kind of being that is the most unfree being that could possibly exist because He cannot do evil (and in some views, like mine, He cannot do anything contrary to what is the best option); whereas, if freedom is about being in the best state of being to realize and act in accord with your nature, then God is the kind of being that is the most free being that could possibly exist because He is unimpeded by anything else as a pure intellect, has perfect knowledge of what is good, and has no conative aspect of His being (like the possibility of vices, appetites, etc. overcoming the rational will—e.g., “I really think I should workout, but I really don’t feel like it”).

You can see here how utterly incompatible the modern metaphysic of freedom is to the traditionalist metaphysic.

Freedom for excellence suggests that humans are more free the more virtues they cultivate, the less vices they have, the more knowledge of what is good they have, and the more their environment is setup for their good (viz., their realization and maintenance of their nature as a human); whereas, freedom of indifference would suggest that humans are more free the more options they can choose from without being coerced either way, so this will look like humans being the most free in a society that leaves them do their own devices.

In my view, because I take a different view of freedom, it makes someone less free to give them even the mere option to take hard drugs; and this is bad for them because it makes them less capable of realizing their nature.

Perhaps you would say that even if freedom is in either way expounded above, that we should be able to choose to do evil; and I agree, but not to the detriment of our long-term good. When we parent children, we give them some leeway to make their own mistakes so that they grow to love what is good for them (as someone shoving ideas down their throat doesn't make them love those ideas); but we also safeguard them against themselves so that things that are too dangerous can't ruin their lives.

As always, you have created a thorough and thought-provoking OP. If I may, I would like to give my two cents and hear your thoughts. Out of respect for the OP, I am going to use the terminology in the ways you define them to avoid muddying the waters.

We have many points of agreement from what you said in the OP, but the central issue I have comes out to play here:

Human Rights - Human rights are rights inherent to all human beings, regardless of race, sex, nationality, ethnicity, language, religion, or any other status
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Gender – a subjective social expectation of non-biological expressed behavior based on one’s sex. Example: Males should wear pants, females should wear dresses.

In your definition of ‘human rights’, you seem to, and correct me if I am misunderstanding, be acknowledging that rights are innate, inalienable, and grounded in the human as a human being; and this implies that rights are inherent to the nature of a human. There is something it is to be a human, of which both male and female humans have and participate in, and in virtue of this we have rights. If this is true, then what rights we have are tied and anchored in our nature as a human; and so we look at that nature to expose which rights we have and which rights we think we have but don’t.

Now I would like to turn your attention to your definition of gender: “a subjective social expectation of non-biological expressed behavior based on one’s sex.”. A right is, by your ‘human rights’ definition, grounded in the nature of being a human; and the nature of a human is never subjective; so it follows from this, I think plainly by my lights, that ‘transgender rights’ and ‘cisgender rights’ are internally incoherent phraseology in your schema. For gender is subjective (by way of social expectations, expressions, etc.) and rights are grounded objectively (in the nature of the being); so a, e.g., ‘transgender right’ would be a ‘<subjective category of thought tied to sex by a society> <that grounds a right any member of that subjective category has>’.

This is critical to the conversation, I would say, because if this is true then we can’t speak of ‘cisgender’ nor ‘transgender’ rights; instead, it is just ‘human rights’ and every human has such rights indiscriminately of gender. This means that the idea that, e.g., I have the right to use a certain pronoun to identify myself because I am of such-and-such gender is incoherent with your view on ‘human rights’. Instead, I would, e.g., have to argue that something innate to my nature grants me the right to use a certain pronoun (although I understand you were arguing against anyone having such a right).

However, if we are acknowledging that rights are grounded in the nature of a being and this is central to what rights a transgender has; then the question arises: “do all humans have the same rights as humans but not necessarily as male and female?”. That is, are we merely discussing what rights both sexes of our human species share in common; or does the other aspects of their nature not get weighed in for other rights that may not be grounded in their mere human nature but rather their specific nature as a male or female? For example, do women have the right, as women, to refuse conscription but men must fight? Do they have the right to enter a female bathroom space when men don’t? These are considerations that are incoherent with a view that thinks that all the rights humans have are ‘human rights’ as you defined it; because it considers rights that one sex may have that the other doesn’t which, by definition, will not be considered in a generic evaluation of our nature as a human instead of femaleness or maleness. I don’t have the right to go in a female’s bathroom; but women do. The right for me to use a male bathroom is not the same right as the right for females to use female bathrooms: those are two different rights.

I appreciate the fact that you addressed the view that sees transgenderism as a mental illness; and I largely agree with your conclusions from your hypothetical entertainment of it. Here’s something that is important though on that note:

As such, I believe it is a right for people to be able to, of their own free will and money, alter their body as a trans sexual. Bodily autonomy is a human right

You touched on this a bit in the OP; but it is important to note that bodily autonomy does not cover the right to do anything you want with your body. For example, does a suicidal person have the right to kill themselves? Does a masochist have the right to continually cut themselves to the point of risking bleeding out everyday? Does a person have the right to, in modern terms, “rationally and freely” decide to become a drug addict?

The point being, the critical thing that the OP skipped passed is: “what are rights for?”. I humbly submit, they are for allowing ourselves to have the proper ability to realize our natures—to flourish—unimpeded by others. If this is true, then actions we could “rationally and freely” will against ourselves that are sufficiently bad for ourselves would not be covered under rights for our own protection. We would not, then, have the right dangerous immoralities that we could commit against ourselves in a ‘rational and freely willed’ way—e.g., drugs, gambling, pornography, masochism, suicide, etc.

The question then becomes: “is it sufficiently bad for a person’s well-being to try to transition to another sex when it is currently medically impossible to do?”. I would say emphatically “yes”; as it is, I honestly think it is mutilation granted that it doesn’t actually change the body from one sex into the other—we simply don’t have the technology to do that. On these grounds, I would see it like giving someone the option to do meth: that’s not a right one has because it is too dangerous for them—not even in terms of the right to bodily autonomy.

Of course, I know you probably disagree with a lot of this and perhaps you evaluate ‘well-being’ more in terms of modern ‘happiness’ (so maybe transitioning is, under your view, not dangerous at all if ‘happiness’ is central to the good-life); but my main point is that I think the OP needs to weigh in how dangerous something is for a person when calculating if the right to bodily autonomy covers it; and it needs to clarify what it thinks rights are for, as a ‘right’ is a concept we developed to get at something about our nature for ethics. If it isn’t for helping us flourish relative to our nature, then I would need to know what your view is viewing it as.

Cheers