3 ms·
I don't think it would be good to have a deterministic way to decide who gets to be called what in that case. The world would be a better place if we didn't mak
by hatthew 3y ago
I don't think it would be good to have a deterministic way to decide who gets to be called what in that case. The world would be a better place if we didn't make a distinction between mother and father, though obviously that's baked into almost all cultures and fully removing that would cause more problems than it would solve. Given that we don't have preexisting momentum to make a distinction between two parents of the same gender, I don't think we should try to standardize anything. Just pick two arbitrary titles like "dad" and "papa" and assign them randomly.
- smeej 3y agoI think the fact that it's baked into biology in the overwhelming majority of cases is why distinguishing between mother and father is so entrenched in practically every culture.
- hatthew 3y agoAgreed. Part of my point is that these days, the biological difference is becoming less and less relevant to the "cultural" difference between mother and father.
- smeej 3y agoI wonder how long it might take evolution to catch up with the shift in cultural mores, or whether we'll successfully overcome pretty much the whole history of humanity with technology. Sometimes it feels like we've found a fence in a field and started tearing it down because, today, we don't want it to be there, but I'm not as confident as I'd like to be that there wasn't some reason the fence was built that we haven't discovered yet. I'm not confident that there is, either. I'm just apprehensive about trying to change something in a few generations that developed over millennia. Are we definitely more astute than the way the planet and the universe directed human development? Maybe. But also maybe not.