believing that there are no sex differences and that apparent differences are due to socialization alone. — Walter Pound

No one (at least in the broader, conventional conversation in society) is claiming that. The whole idea is that gender is distinct from biological sex.

No, with no possibility otherwise on that one. But that's simply because I use the word "universe" to refer to "everything extant (present and past)." Hence there can't exist something prior to everything extant/everything that has ever existed.

I'm a subjectivist on value judgments like good/evil.

What are you thinking we do as offensive speech-acts now that weren't done in the 1780s?

Well, why not just create animals in simulate conditions? — kill jepetto

No one was saying to not create simulated whatevers.

If there is heaven, why aren't we all in it? — kill jepetto

I'm an atheist. I don't believe any religious claims. I don't believe in anything "spiritual." I don't buy teleology, etc.

Re the Prussian system, the article says, "At the same time, it also taught things like obedience, duty to country, and general ethics." That sure wasn't the case when I went to public school in the U.S. (I graduated high school in 1980)

Re the Canadian law you're referring to:

(a) Long before this bill was introduced, the Canadian criminal code prohibited the promotion of genocide and the public incitement of hatred against groups identifiable by colour, race, religion, and ethnic origin. (Sounds like they basically wanted to make it illegal to try to get a holocaust going against some ethnicity, religion, etc.)

(b) The bill simply proposed adding "sexual orientation" to the above. (So don't start a holocaust against LGBTQ folks, either)

(c) The bill actually added protections for good-faith opinions based on religious texts--which is the exact opposite of what the article you quoted above suggests.

(d) The bill in question was passed into law all the way back in 2004.

While I'm (controversially) not in favor of any speech restrictions whatsoever, this also seems like over-the-top scaremongering, basically. The law has been in effect for almost fifteen years. What are some of the questionable legal cases that have arisen in its wake?

It's not as if people didn't intentionally offend, insult, etc. others, that some didn't advocate controversial socio-political approaches, etc. in the mid to late eighteenth century.

That doesn't seem like a very good quantification method for something like complexity.

I would think that first we should define how we're even using "complexity" (versus "simplicity")

For a long time these artefacts played an important art in culture: telling stories, interpreting, instructing, nurturing, — Brett

Seeing a bifurcation there seems like oversimplifying and cherry-picking to me. Not all art was focused on telling stories, etc. prior to the Enlightenment, and those things also didn't disappear in modern art. You could say something like "There was no non-representational painting prior to the modern era" and that might be correct (although I'm not 100% sure it is--it's kind of weird that it would be, because there was certainly other abstract visual art, exemplified in decorative arts, architecture, etc., as far back as we know about), but that doesn't amount to a dichotomy re instructing, nurturing, etc.

That's not to say that there haven't been various shifts in focus a la trends--no set of aims was ever universal, the best we could do would be to talk about trends, but that has to do with many different factors, including what artists could do and had to do in order to make a living in various eras, including technological developments, including developments of technique, etc.

How would you be quantifying complexity first off?

So then it would seem that one can, indeed, provide a definite answer.

Did I just provide a definite answer?

People think different things, obviously.

When there's no evidence for something, no particular reason to believe it over alternatives, I don't believe it. So my answer is, "No."

If someone wants to provide evidence or good reasons to believe otherwise, it would be possible to change my mind, but they'd have to actually do that work.

Well, I do agree with 1.3, simply because I believe that everything is dynamic. And I agree with 1.7

The rest either I disagree with or I think it's ridiculous word salad.

What other real thing do you need to ask that question about? — Bloginton Blakley

What other?

I am not arguing gender is 100% biologically informed. I am saying people don't gender themselves based on whether they played with trucks or ponies as a child. — Judaka

Sure, but if social norms don't factor into it at all, why wouldn't any way you feel simply be what your biological sex is like?

Moral judgements are mental by definition — Janus

But that's all I'm saying! So why would anyone be arguing otherwise? (Now it could be because of the word "judgment," but that's why I said "moral properties" or "moral whatever-we-want-to-call-'ems, whatever word you think would best make your case re moral somethings that aren't mental")

I wasn't commenting on what they can be motivated by. What they can be motivated by is different than the judgments (or moral whatevers) themselves, which is what I'd be talking about when I talk about moral judgments (whatevers) per se.

You just have to look at what the basic needs of human beings are. For example, food and water are universally valuable for human beings. — Andrew M

How do we get to needs that aren't dependent on wants?

For example, you only need food and water if you want to stay alive. If you want to die via a hunger strike, you rather need to avoid food and water. (Well, avoid water in that case if you want it to be quicker.)

Misunderstanding of the role that meaning plays in making a promise, particularly regarding truth conditions setting that out. That's what I was discussing. — creativesoul

In other words, you'd be saying that they have the meaning wrong. But that's just what they're saying--that you have the meaning wrong. So when I ask you what we'd appeal to, I'm asking you what we can look at to figure out who is really right or wrong.

Proper account of morality cannot involve the objective/subjective dichotomy. — creativesoul

I said absolutely nothing about that in my reply to you that you're addressing. I asked you "proper account of morality per what?" You're supposed to tell me per what.

I think this conflates genetics with brain structure. — Walter Pound

No one is saying that gender and biological sex are the same thing. The whole point is that they're not the same thing. They can differ. You can feel differently than what your biological sex is.

If we're screening for criminals/known terrorists/associates, then you'd need papers--otherwise, if people didn't need papers, we'd not be able to screen for anything. Also, presumably it's not the easiest thing to just fake the papers, or again the screening would be useless in general, and there would be no point in even doing it. If it turns out to be useless in general, then what are we even doing with any border security at all, aside from checking bags to make sure that criminal items--like bombs, endangered animals/animal parts, etc.-- aren't being brought in just then? (Which by the way, I'm okay with checking, but I forgot to specify that)

But, let's pretend that, say, it's easy to fake the papers for the child trafficker, but not for other stuff.

I would just let the child trafficker with good faked papers go through, yes.

If we were talking about a child trafficker moving a kid from Belle Glade, Florida to Jacksonville, or even Newark, New Jersey to LA, then of course they'd not need any papers whatsoever. Nobody's checking anything there. Nobody's screening anything. And I don't want everyone checked whenever they travel anywhere.

I can see some merit to checking or screening people occasionally (such as when they cross a national border) to try to catch some criminals or terroristic threats, but I'd be far more easily persuaded to not even do that than I would be to force people to be held while we check their DNA just because they're traveling between countries rather than across the street or from city to city or state to state.

Just for background, by the way, I consider myself a "libertarian socialist." On the libertarian side, I'm basically a minarchist. The socialist stuff comes from disagreeing with the libertarian embrace of free-market capitalism as the official economy. I'd institute a very different, government-overseen system where the competition for scarcer resources is based on providing both the basics for everyone and the things that people want, which we'd learn via regular polling. I'm kind of a laissez-faire hippie, with the hippie side being attracted to helping people other out communally. Re borders,I think that ideally, we wouldn't even have different countries.

How would you help the sheep-and-blue-field guy? — S

Try in various ways to explain how alternatives make sense to me, via various ways of characterizing, detailing what I'm talking about, what properties I'm referring to/how those properties can obtain, what it amounts to for them to obtain, etc.

In both cases, evidence is available; in both cases, an opinion is required. — Banno

What sort of evidence would there be for anything being morally wrong, though? And as I explained earlier, it's conflating different senses of "opinion."

That could be (re Russell saying something similar). My idea could have been influenced from him--Russell is my favorite philosopher overall and I first started reading him over 40 years ago, but I don't recall where, exactly, he might have expressed something similar.

Either this is a mental disorder or they're correct, — Judaka

That seems like a false dichotomy.

We can and do simply use the term for a psychological notion, which has obvious influences from social norms.

Or "individual", assuming there are literally an infinite amount of genders that people can identify as. At that point you might as well acknowledge that if you categorize and quality literally everything that no two people are exactly alike and we can just see everyone as individuals and throw away all of the nomenclature I've seen thrown around over the last half decade integrating anything from temperature to animals into gender terms and phrases. At that point, at least to me, it's getting out of hand and quite frankly silly.

All of the above can be ignored if we're going to stick to two, or at most, a few different types of gender. — Taneras

Does that reflect what's going on in the heads of the relevant folks, though?

I'd have to clarify what the scope of "motivated by" would be, but in general, no--I'm simply claiming that moral judgments, or whatever we want to call moral xs such as "Murder is wrong," "It's obligatory to nurture children," etc. are mental phenomena, and are not phenomena that obtain elsewhere than minds.

I said nothing at all to suggest that I believe the phenomena in question is arbitrary. I'm just saying that it's mental phenomena, not ocean phenomena, not oven phenomena, not atmospheric phenomena, or anything else like that.

I already said that in my view it's not conceivable. That you think it is doesn't help me.

If someone thinks it's not conceivable that there's a sheep in a field without it being painted blue, I wouldn't say that they're making an assumption.

Insofar as we're talking about anything mental.

Aside from that, obviously the properties are not going to be human-independent.

"Before you can do this". We understand that we're not talking about the preconditions for anything, right?

I don't know why you went back to "imagining a tree," but okay, let's use that. We're not talking about what imagining a tree is derived from, or preconditions necessary for it or anything like that. We're supposed to be talking about stuff that's only identical to the imagining per se.

the shape of a tree is as new to mind. — kill jepetto

No idea what you're saying here.

What's the non-local part in this case?

It only doesn't make sense to you because of your assumption that everything must have a location. That's not my assumption, and you haven't justified it. So it's not my problem, it's yours. You're the one who isn't making sense whenever you make your location category error. — S

I'm just trying to clarify your definitions here: if not-P is inconceivable to S, is P an "assumption" on S's part? In other words, for any claim where we can't conceive of an alternative, are we making an assumption?

So if you can be conscious of a desire, wouldn't that just be local, and not "localized non-local"?

Yes, they are; but aren't they also derived from the non-local? (You should see what I'm saying here). — kill jepetto

At the moment, I don't at all care what they're derived from--I'm not asking you about that. You agree that "x is derived from y" doesn't imply "x is identical to y." I'm asking you about x, as x. Not what x is derived from. So can we please stop talking about what it's derived from for a moment? If you want to go back to that later we can, but let me ask what I want to ask you first.

So if desires are mental phenomena, they're local to minds, aren't they?

"Derived from the non-local" isn't at all something I'm asking you about. I'm not asking you about derivation. I'm asking about desires, say, qua desires. Not what desires are derived from.

Desires are mental phenomena, no?

I'm not asking you about necessary preconditions or anything like that. I'm just asking you about imaginings, desires, emotions, etc. per se.