My post last month on gendered terms for animal species has been widely, but poorly, read. That in itself is no surprise. But unlike the usual tendency of readers to scan quickly for something to disagree with and then to rush to denounce both the piece as well as the moral character and intellectual ability of the author, for some reason this time readers have rushed to express their agreement with what I've said, and to claim it as support for what they themselves believe. Readers have done this who themselves uphold opposing and irreconcilable views relative to one another.
I suppose it is a sort of triumph to win the favor of people in opposite camps, to puzzle them so much that they end up reading the text like a Rorschach blot and just seeing what they want to see. But anyone who has read me in the past on the metaphysics and semantics of natural kinds in general, and on the question of sexual and gender identity in particular, will know that, while I find “AHF” less secure than Byrne does, this is not because I have any commitment to the falsity of “AHF”. I am not committed to “TW”, and I do not at all think that philosophers such as Kathleen Stock are “transphobes” for their defense of “AHF”.
Let me therefore try to be clear about some relevant points in my note on Byrne's article, and also about what is not contained in or implied by my note.
In it I attempted to show that specialised terminology for the males and females of various animal species, including human beings, reflects an interest in their reproductive function. I acknowledged that it is certainly possible for us to have an interest in the reproductive function of a species at one time in history, and not at another time. This change is in principle possible even in our thinking about human beings.
But if we were to come to think about human beings without any interest in their reproductive function, we would effectively have to achieve the sort of indifference to and ignorance of our own species that we currently have in relation to, e.g., jellyfish. The only way we could achieve such a thing, I suggested, is by radical biotechnological intervention in human reproduction.
Some readers, remarkably, seemed to think that I myself look forward to a future condition of such indifference and ignorance.
I do not look forward to this. I think it would be bad. I also think it is the only scenario in which the social salience of a specialized term for adult human females would disappear. Unlike Byrne, moreover, I think it could come about.
No one wants to be “defeatist”. No one wants to be foolish either, yet in contemporary academic philosophy fear of the one is much more common than caution about the other. Unlike many philosophers, I am not engaged qua philosopher in any ameliorative project, and if I envision a particular future scenario, it is not necessarily because I want to see it become reality.
Outsourcing our reproduction to machines and laboratories would entail such a radical denaturing, such an abandonment of our basic human and animal good, as to not even count as a Pyrrhic victory. Human beings, if I may imitate the style of Aristotle, are to be classed among the copulative animals. I also think human beings are basically bipedal, and basically diurnal, even if it is possible to get around otherwise than on two legs, and even if it is possible to stay up all night and sleep in the day. I think we will be better off if we stick to this arrangement, more or less, even if we do have the option, through technology and cultural inventiveness, to live differently.
I suppose this makes me a ‘conservative’, in at least one of the senses of this term. It is not that I believe that ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are written into the order of the cosmos, as one might have supposed in Renaissance European astrology and as we see vestigially in popular books about men’s Martian and women’s Vesuvian origins. It is not that I think sexual difference is what ‘keeps the stars apart’, that it is a structuring principle much beyond a relatively small class of biological beings. Even here on earth, it does not structure the lives of various archaeota or cyanobacteria, who vastly outnumber all sexually reproducing beings combined, if we are counting, and who hold their own against the biomass of humans, krill, cattle, and plants, if we are weighing. But it does structure the lives of many, many species of plants and animals, and to the extent that a species plays a salient role in human society, the sex roles of its individual members will be known.
It is a tautology to point out that human beings play a salient role in human society. This leaves us (again, in the absence of biotechnological intervention) with a certain rather strong attunement to the existence of men and women, for better or worse, just like steppe nomads were attuned to the existence of mares and stallions, and Nuer herdsmen can still tell the difference between bulls and heifers at a glance. Again for better or worse, these social categories are anchored in the gonads. I take this to be just obvious, and I take anyone who denies that it is obvious to be under the sway of an illusion.
Sorry if I'm disappointing anyone who read the original piece and thought they agreed with me. But honestly, you should read more carefully.
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