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I don't justify anything. But biology is driving our behavior, so it is important to understand it. And it changes incentives. Therefore if you assume men and w

I don't justify anything. But biology is driving our behavior, so it is important to understand it. And it changes incentives. Therefore if you assume men and women should be the same, you will arrive at the wrong conclusions. By the way differences don't imply injustice. One simple example why equality is not the correct goal: I don't think fathers and mothers should have the same right to their children. I say that as a father - of course I wish it were different and I never ever want to give up my children. But seeing what women go through to bear children, it seems ridiculous to demand that men should have the same right to them. At least in the first years, maybe over time the claims can change. But suppose a couple splits up 6 months after the birth of their child. I don't think they should have equal rights to the child. However, another consequence is that mothers should have more rights to stay at home and spend time with their children than fathers. And from that suddenly you see "inequality" appear which you will interpret as injustice if you forget about biology.

wpietri 12y ago
Once again, you are using biology to morally justify societal differences. It is always a fallacy. (In particular, it's known as a fallacious appeal to nature or sometimes as the naturalistic fallacy. There's a large literature on the topic if you'd like to look.) I agree that it is important to understand the biological realities. But they tell us nothing about what is right, or what rights people should have. I get why the fallacy looks appealing to you from this particular angle, but it just isn't tenable as an approach to ethics. For example, it was used extensively to justify slavery: black people were seen as naturally inferior, so slavery was not just ok but morally necessary. (See, for example, the Cornerstone Speech [1].) Part of the way using it consistently goes wrong is that people confuse what is normal with what is natural. You're not used to seeing men behave the same way around small children as women, so you wave alternatives away as "ridiculous" and treat your particular socially constructed experience as natural. This is exactly the same way slavery was justified. Having only seen one thing work, it was self-evidently ridiculous to southern slaveholders that anything else could possibly work. Normal was taken as natural. The differences between black and white people therefore couldn't possibly be unjust. And anybody opposed to them was opposed to nature, God, and all else right and true. If you really want to make an argument for women spending more time with young babies, then you'll have to do it on the grounds of practicality, not rights. Fathers and mothers have equal rights to their children, but courts, who act in the interests of children as well, look at the whole picture. As a practical matter, breast-feeding infants generally need to spend a lot of time around their moms, so even given equal rights, courts can reasonably favor keeping moms and infants together. But in arguing from practicalities, you have to recognize how contingent that is on society and technology. For example, the notion of wet nurses has fallen by the wayside. But if that were still popular, judges might more easily let a father have custody of an infant if he could hire a wet nurse to take care of the practical issues. If tomorrow some technical genius makes a machine that produces synthetic breast milk that's just as good, then again the practicalities might shift. And even with the existing practicalities, they get weighed as part of an overall picture. Courts today weigh biological issues like nursing against other practical factors, so women don't always get custody, even of infants. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_Speech http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_Speech

wpietri 12y ago

Once again, you are using biology to morally justify societal differences. It is always a fallacy. (In particular, it's known as a fallacious appeal to nature or sometimes as the naturalistic fallacy. There's a large literature on the topic if you'd like to look.) I agree that it is important to understand the biological realities. But they tell us nothing about what is right, or what rights people should have. I get why the fallacy looks appealing to you from this particular angle, but it just isn't tenable as an approach to ethics. For example, it was used extensively to justify slavery: black people were seen as naturally inferior, so slavery was not just ok but morally necessary. (See, for example, the Cornerstone Speech [1].) Part of the way using it consistently goes wrong is that people confuse what is normal with what is natural. You're not used to seeing men behave the same way around small children as women, so you wave alternatives away as "ridiculous" and treat your particular socially constructed experience as natural. This is exactly the same way slavery was justified. Having only seen one thing work, it was self-evidently ridiculous to southern slaveholders that anything else could possibly work. Normal was taken as natural. The differences between black and white people therefore couldn't possibly be unjust. And anybody opposed to them was opposed to nature, God, and all else right and true. If you really want to make an argument for women spending more time with young babies, then you'll have to do it on the grounds of practicality, not rights. Fathers and mothers have equal rights to their children, but courts, who act in the interests of children as well, look at the whole picture. As a practical matter, breast-feeding infants generally need to spend a lot of time around their moms, so even given equal rights, courts can reasonably favor keeping moms and infants together. But in arguing from practicalities, you have to recognize how contingent that is on society and technology. For example, the notion of wet nurses has fallen by the wayside. But if that were still popular, judges might more easily let a father have custody of an infant if he could hire a wet nurse to take care of the practical issues. If tomorrow some technical genius makes a machine that produces synthetic breast milk that's just as good, then again the practicalities might shift. And even with the existing practicalities, they get weighed as part of an overall picture. Courts today weigh biological issues like nursing against other practical factors, so women don't always get custody, even of infants. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_Speech http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_Speech