"what is actually good flows from our nature"... [is] begging the question
I wasn't aware we were arguing metaethics at that level here, so a charge of begging the question seems entirely out of line.
That what is good comes from the sort of thing that one is, is not all that controversial. It's actually one thing I didn't have to explain or defend at all in my thesis on ethics, but as always your panel may vary. Let's go through a few candidate explanations of the good:
I'm leaving out explanations of the good such as Divine Command Theory and Ethical Nihilism since I assume you wouldn't buy into them anyway.
In each of these cases, what is good comes from what it is to be human. Our nature is the grounding of value, and to ignore a major part of our nature is sure to lead one astray when seeking out the good.
Did you have another idea in mind for what constitutes goodness?
That's as much begging the question as saying there must be a God because he's good, and all the good we have in the world must therefore flow from His love.
That's not begging the question either, though I suppose it might be if it was stated more clearly. Does anyone actually argue that, anyway?
It's good because good flows from our nature, and our nature is good because discarding it is bad?
No. I did not argue that our nature is good. That would indeed seem circular.
And of course, you're still begging the question of why "part of our nature" equals "certainly bad" to "discard".
Sorry, were you using 'begging the question' in the colloquial sense this whole time? I'd assumed not, since you referred to Aristotle. If not, please point out where I'd initially set out to prove that "part of our nature" equals "certainly bad" to "discard". I'd initially used (something like) that as a premise and not my conclusion!
If you see what I'm doing as "just babbling" then I don't see how you even have anything to argue against. You're being disingenuous, at best. That I'm taking fairly standard philosophical views and arguing using logic should not equate to "just babbling".
That what is good comes from the sort of thing that one is, is not all that controversial.
But since that's precisely the thing we're arguing about, to present it as your premise is begging the question, per the definition I quoted.
In addition to that, it's not even relevant. I could equally say, "what is bad comes from the sort of thing that one is", and use this to prove that we should discard bad feelings. So stating it isn't actually reducing the original problem in any way.
...That I'm taking fairly standard philosophical views and arguin
It seems that LessWrong has a nascent political problem brewing. Firstly, let me re-iterate why politics is bad for our rationality:
Politics is especially bad for the community if people begin to form political factions within the community. Specifically, if LessWrong starts to polarize along a "feminist/masculinist" fault-line, then every subsequent debate will become a proxy war for the crusade between the masculinist jerks and the femenazis.
Alicorn has contributed in several ways to the emerging politicization of LessWrong. She has started name-calling against the other side ("Jerkitude" "disincentivize being piggish"), started to attempt to form a political band of feminist allies ("So can I get some help? Some lovely people have thrown in their support,"), implicitly asked these new allies to downvote anyone who disagrees with her position ("There is still conspicuous karmic support for some comments that perpetuate the problems"), and asks her faction to begin enforcing her ideas, specifically by criticising, ostracizing or downvoting anyone who engages in a perfectly standard use of langage and thought: modeling the generic human female as a mechanical system and using that model to make predictions about reality. She has billed this effort as a moral crusade ("unethical"). I am sure she isn't doing this on purpose: like all humans, her brain is hard-wired to see any argument as a moral crusade where she is objectively right, and to seek allies within the tribe to move against and oppress the enemy. [notice how I objectified her there, leaving behind the language of a unified self or person in favour of a collection of mechanical motivations and processes whose dynamics are partially determined by evolutionary pressures, and what a useful exercise this can be for making sense of reality]
We should expend extreme effort to nip this problem in the bud. As part of this effort, I will delete my account and re-register under a different username. I would recommend that Alicorn do the same. I would also recommend that anyone who feels that they have played a particularly large part in the debate on either side do the same, for example PJeby. That way, when we talk to each other next in a comment thread, we won't be treating the interaction as a proxy war in the great feminist/masculinist crusade, because we will be anonymous again.
I would also implore everyone to just not bring this issue up again. If someone uses language in a way that mildly annoys you (hint: they probably didn't do this on purpose), rather than precipitating a major community feud over it, just ignore it. The epistemic rationality of LessWrong is worth more than the gender ratio we have. A 95% male community that manages to overcome a whole host of problems in instrumental and epistemic rationality is worth more to the world than a 80% male community that is crippled by a blood-feud between a feminist faction and a masculinist faction.