[xyzzy_plugh]

There's no such thing "supposed to naturally" as "supposed to."

We aren't "supposed to" be like the other animals on our planet? Or are many mothers and newborns "supposed to naturally" die during child birth?

It's difficult to have a productive, thoughtful conversation when it starts this way.

[sixo]

It's difficult to have a productive, thoughtful conversation when someone reads a moral imperative into the phrase "supposed to" and starts lecturing about it.

The sense of "supposed to" above is: the human system was "designed" for a certain environment, and its behaviors make sense there. Outside of that environment many behaviors won't make sense, but can easily be explained by reference to the original environment. This is not a moral point, although it is one often employed in moral arguments.

[xyzzy_plugh]

Your explanation makes sense but wasn't remotely my interpretation. I'm still unsure if I can interpret it as such.

[WillPostForFood]

At the same time, you can't ignore what we are evolutionarily. If we evolved in small groups or tribes, it is natural to have traits that work better in tribes. Take the judgement out of "natural" or "supposed to" and call it "as designed", or "as evolved".

[xyzzy_plugh]

Of course we can ignore it. We do it all the time.

Maybe those traits are good for working better in tribes, but irrelevant, or worse, harmful in the modern age?

[jandrese]

Maybe better phrased as: "Humans evolved in small communities for thousands of years, but those communities had to be larger than a single family unit in order to survive, so there is an instinctive urge for humans to be in communities."

[andrewflnr]

This is where the steelman comes in. Replace "supposed to" with "have adapted to over the last thousands to millions of years" and enjoy the productive conversation.

[xyzzy_plugh]

Thank you for this. You are correct.

My thinking aligns here, insofar that it's not apparent to me that the current situation is somehow less bad than any historical scenario.

In some sense it all comes down to what we're measuring. What are we measuring here exactly?

[EGreg]

You gave up too quickly. Allow me to steelman YOUR point LOL

Let’s go with what his rewritten suggestion is saying, and see how it reads in various contexts…

“Aren’t humans supposed to be not exclusively homosexual? The only species with actually observed exclusively homosexual individuals are humans and domesticated sheep. In every other species, including Bonobos, individuals may be seen engaging in occasional homosexual behavior but then “defect” eventually and hook up to impregnate the females. So perhaps gay men and lesbians doth protest too much. Maybe they are all open to a heterosexual encounter here and there. The drop in genetic fitness of a purely homosexual preference would be so low that it would have been heavily selected against by evolution.”

Of course, this can show that humans have recently made biological evolution not apply as much, with sperm banks, contraception, reducing child mortality to negligible levels etc. They moved past historically high levels of war, polygamy, forcible intercourse, human trafficking, etc. As Steven Pinker details in “The Better Angels of our Nature”.

And before that, they already used rudimentary technology to make eunuchs, castratos, Shakesperian actors playing women etc.

And therefore the idea of “should have” is relative now. “This is how it’s always been so this is the way it has to be”. And with AI, it gets fuzzier still!

[andrewflnr]

This is where we get to goals rather than facts, but I'd argue that trying to second-guess gay people's sexuality is a distraction. The moral principle is to let consulting adults do what they want, as long as they're not hurting anyone. Nothing after that needs to matter more than a bar conversation.

(Yeah, that probably sounds like moving the goalposts. In a lot of cases the goal will be implicit and you can just talk in your debate partner's languages of "supposed to", and that's the situation I was imagining in my first post. But if it gets messy, then yeah, you'll need to get explicit about is-ought.)

[EGreg]

I think you’re writing off David Hume and his is-ought distinction too readily hehe

Besides, isn’t evolutionary psychology too full of unfalsifiable just-so stories LOL

[andrewflnr]

Regardless of "just-so" stories, there exists a physical truth of how our ancestors lived. Sometimes we can learn it, and should at least consider how it affects us, and pretty often (I suspect anyway) the optimal choice will be changing our habits rather than fighting our nature. (Though sometimes "considering" means figuring out how to do better).

[bmandale]

The idea that something is "supposed to" happen is a normative statement. But the idea that we aren't "supposed to" do anything is also normative, and is therefore self-contradictory. Any proposition that we are supposed to do one thing or another is not necessarily correct, but at least it is self consistent.