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JoshuaZ comments on How to Avoid the Conflict Between Feminism and Evolutionary Psychology? - Less Wrong
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Wouldn't that just be the non-overlapping magasteria argument, though?
No. The problem with NOMA type arguments isn't because of an attempt to separate normative and descriptive statements about reality. The problem with NOMA is that it is a pathological system deliberately constructed to avoid paying rent while still claiming that ontological entities exist which in their usual constructions have their rent checks bounce.
The problem is that feminists generally don't restrict themselves to making normative claims. Furthermore, many of the arguments for their normative claims rely on descriptive claims.
But if their normative claims rely on descriptive claims relating specifically to evolutionary psychology, that's just an is-ought fallacy. Like most humans, a lot of feminists commit that. Unfortunate, but certainly not a problem that's specific to feminism.
The "is-ought fallacy"?!? Where are people supposed to get "ought " from if not from "is"? "Is" is all we have! Morality had better come from reality somehow! It does - and science explains how.
Of course the morality comes from the reality somehow. But we often don't know how exactly. But there is a pressure to provide an explanation. So people invent wrong explanations for their morality.
Later, when the official explanation is proved wrong, people are generally bad at understanding difference between "the specific explanation E of the moral norm M is wrong (but there may be some other explanation why M is good)" and "the moral norm M is bad". So the proponents of M are typically reluctant to admit the mistake in E.
Also, it's not just about truth, but also about politics. Perhaps E is wrong. But for a long time it was successfully used to defend M. Not all explanations have the power to convince people. It may be politically wise to keep a wrong, yet convincing explanation, instead of replacing it with a less convincing one, or even admitting that you don't have a good one.
EDIT: The political aspect is complicated by the fact that convincing explanations must have short inferential distances (for their target audience). The true explanation may be too difficult for this. The long-term political solution to this problem is to change education, to make the desired inferential distances shorter.
Doesn't the "is-ought fallacy" normally simply refer to the fallacious inference that because something is the case, it therefore ought to be the case? Maybe I meant the naturalistic fallacy.
Checking back, the idea as presented was: "feminism is a normative set of beliefs, evolutionary psychology is a descriptive set of theories, and therefore there is no such conflict". I think the example of religion shows where that argument comes unstuck. Beliefs additionally have to be of a particular kind - in order to avoid clashing with facts.