nerfhammer comments on Of Exclusionary Speech and Gender Politics - Less Wrong

62 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 21 July 2009 07:22AM

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Comment author: nerfhammer 21 July 2009 08:14:52PM *  7 points [-]

Is it out of bounds to consider plain and simple prejudice as the trigger?

Disgust reactions are frequently based on prejudices that should be challenged and rebutted. People frequently describe male sexuality in strikingly similar ways to how prejudiced people describe (typically male) homosexuality. You know, it's disgusting, it's ridiculous, it's wrong in some indescribable way, it's threatening and dangerous in some abstract, unfalsifiable sense. Except it's not taboo to talk about male heterosexuality that way. Men are pigs, after all, and that they want to have sex is ridiculous and wrong ipso facto. We should question and challenge rather than try to rationalize these impulses. Maybe the validity of this kind of reaction shouldn't be automatically assumed. Maybe the icky wrongness is hard to articulate because you're trying to implausibly rationalize a slippery gut reaction, not trying to describe an elusive actual moral principle.

Here's an interesting interview with Martha Nussbaum on related topics: http://www.reason.com/news/show/33316.html

Comment author: thomblake 21 July 2009 08:43:11PM *  1 point [-]

One of the (few?) areas where I would disagree with Nussbaum. She believes that ordinary human emotions are informative and should be taken seriously, with the special case that disgust should be ditched entirely, and I'm pretty sure there's at least an obvious tension there.

Comment author: nerfhammer 21 July 2009 09:15:45PM *  1 point [-]

I don't necessarily agree with Nussbaum, I just thought it was interesting and related.

There is ample stuff that's perhaps more empirical