4 ms·
It sounds like your ability to reason about the way other people think is limited. Be aware that this is a defect, not a virtue. It is also one definition I've
by fennecfoxen 13y ago
It sounds like your ability to reason about the way other people think is limited. Be aware that this is a defect, not a virtue. It is also one definition I've seen of bigotry: the inability to conceive of an alternative point of view.
In the meantime, as an exercise, let's do some reasoning about what people might hypothetically think, with the example of "infertile straight people".
First, infertile straight people commonly are unaware of their infertility until such time as they are actually interested in having children, which occurs late in the traditional order of [marriage, sex, children]. Perhaps someone could think that enforcing this question up front is impractically difficult, and this is a defect of the current regime. Perhaps someone could think that it's important that you're willing to have children before you enter marriage, but that subsequent discovery of infertility doesn't dissolve the marriage. Perhaps the issue didn't really occur to the person in question -- the media coverage of the issue is nil, so awareness has got to be pretty limited. Perhaps there are actually such movements, and you're just unaware of them. (For instance, were you aware of Sixtus V's decree of 27 June 1587?)
Perhaps the people with these opinions are silly and wrong to think what they think: from time to time, people can and are intellectually inconsistent. Perhaps this is the result of a something that invokes an inconsistent pattern of reasoning about the matter, such as a politician of an unfavored political party promoting the matter, or perhaps they were exposed to some cultural artifact depicting gay marriage in combination with a celebration of human sexuality in a way that the person in question found disgusting. Or perhaps they have a prejudice against gay people that falls short of being an un-person but which affects reasoning about relevant topics in an unfair and negative way (as is commonly suggested in a variety of racial-sensitivity contexts).