Originally a comment by Artymorty on Could completely reframe.
Not to sound too contrarian, but I’d like to put a small asterisk next to the charge of naturalistic fallacy here.
The naturalistic fallacy is the mistake of applying moral justification to a belief or action based on finding examples of it in “nature”.
But “natural” also has a real meaning, as in the philosophical term, natural kinds: these are categories that have a basis in material reality rather than subjective human thought.
The gender-critical argument relies heavily on the argument that the biological sexes are natural kinds — objective, material categories of humans (and all other mammals) with a very clean division between them. Gender activists could just as well throw the charge of naturalistic fallacy at us for making the argument that transgender ideology is bogus because the sexes are natural, “real” categories while “gender identities” are not.
With enough drilling down, one finds that virtually all moral arguments eventually ground themselves in claims about the material world, about the nature of reality. Every ought is ultimately anchored to an is. This can lead to what I like to call the naturalistic fallacy fallacy: argue about anything long enough and it will start to look like it rests on the naturalistic fallacy.
For both gay rights and women’s rights, I believe that nature is in fact our friend, not our foe: the material basis of our differences has come to matter more and more in the battle to protect our freedom and dignity.
Take, for example, the moral argument for banning gay “conversion therapy”. It’s one thing to say, “there’s nothing wrong with being gay, so people shouldn’t be forced to get therapy to un-gay themselves.” But that only gets us up to justifying a ban on forced conversion therapy. The moral argument that homsexuality is harmless justifies gay people’s right to not be forced into therapy to “cure” ourselves of it. Ok. So far, so good, no obvious naturalistic fallacy here. But then: what about gays who want to be straight? There are countless homosexuals who wish they weren’t (Elliot Page probably being one example). Why would we ban them from seeking therapy to at least try to straighten themselves out? Here, the argument suddenly draws upon material reality — nature: science has recently identified homosexuality as an inborn trait that is as-yet not modifiable. The moral argument for banning people from undergoing gay conversion therapy even if they truly want it is that homosexuality is natural, and it’s clinically proven to be harmful to even try to change it with the technology we have today. Now, imagine if doctors get better at brain surgery: it’s not entirely unfathomable that some day soon we will have the technology to modify people’s sexual orientations. Well, guess what? Homosexuals would be even more dependent on the argument that homosexuality is natural to defend ourselves then, wouldn’t we. It’s a tricky bind we could very well end up in.
So we ought not dismiss the appeal to the “natural” so quickly. It’s becoming more imporant all the time, as technology restructures our civilization.
Which brings us back to sex, “transgender”, and the medical technology used to modify the cosmetic appearance of people’s sex, like Elliot Page.
I don’t fault Elliot Page for trying to prove that she’s changed sex by reaching for examples in nature. In fact, I think she’s on the right track to look to nature for answers: by that I mean she should be grounding her facts and her morals in the material world — in reality, which is… nature.
It’s just that she’s done a terrible job doing that. Cherry-picking things that have nothing to do with material reality as it applies to her specifically. In her case, she really has stumbled into the naturalistic fallacy. Rather than looking at nature and finding comfort in the fact that she is exactly what she is — a female ape, with her own unique personality and attributes, and there’s nothing “wrong” with that — she wandered around the zoo looking for “natural” things that might back up her misguided idea that mammalian sexes aren’t natural categories at all.
Ironically, she’s at once fallen for the naturalistic fallacy and something of an anti-naturalistic fallacy: she seems to have looked to nature to prove that her sex isn’t natural.
Leave it to trans to make an illogical pretzel out of everything it touches…
Leave a Reply