Tag: behaviour

Care Without Conquest: Feminist Lessons for the Workaday Philosopher

Posted in identity, language, modernism, morality, nature, perception, philosophy, podcast, postmodernism, psychology, sexuality, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
2–4 minutes

I recently posted The Ethics of Maintenance: Against the Myth of Natural Purpose. In it, I brushed – perhaps too lightly – against my debt to feminist philosophy. It’s time to acknowledge that debt more directly and explain how it spills into the mundane greasework of daily life.

[Scroll to the bottom to see Midjourney’s take on feminists. You won’t be surprised.]

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
The Ethics of Maintenance: Against the Myth of Natural Purpose

I tend not to worship at the altar of names, but let’s name names anyway. Beyond the usual French suspects – your Sartres, de Beauvoirs, and Foucaults – I owe much to the feminist philosophers – Gilligan, Tronto, Butler, Bellacasa, and de Beauvoir again – and, while we’re at it, the post-colonialists, whose names I’ll not recite for fear of being pompous. Their shared heresy is a suspicion of universals. They expose the myth of neutrality, whether it parades as Reason, Progress, or Civilisation. They remind us that every “universal” is merely someone’s local story told loud enough to drown out the others.

This isn’t a matter of sex or gender, though that’s how the names have been filed. The core lesson is epistemic, not biological. Feminist philosophy re-centres care, interdependence, and the politics of maintenance, not as sentimental virtues but as systems logic. The post-colonialists do the same at a geopolitical scale: maintenance instead of conquest, relation instead of domination.

On Gender, Behaviour, and the Lazy Binary

I don’t buy into sex and gender binaries, especially regarding behaviour. Even in biology, the dichotomy frays under scrutiny. Behaviourally, it collapses entirely. The problem isn’t people; it’s the linguistic furniture we inherited.

I’m weary of the moral blackmail that calls it misogyny not to vote for a woman, or racism not to vote for a black candidate. These accusations come, paradoxically, from sexists and racists who reduce people to the colour of their skin or the contents of their underwear. Having a vagina doesn’t make one a caretaker; having a penis doesn’t preclude empathy. The category error lies in mistaking type for trait.

When I refuse to vote for a Margaret Thatcher or a Hillary Clinton, it’s not because they’re women. It’s because they operate in the same acquisitive, dominion-driven register as the men they mirror. If the game is conquest, swapping the player’s gender doesn’t change the rules.

Maintenance as Political Praxis

My interest lies in those who reject that register altogether – the ones who abandon the mythology of Progress and its testosterone-addled twin, Innovation. The ethics of maintenance I’ve written about, and the philosophy of Dis-Integration I keep harping on, both gesture toward an alternative mode of being: one that prizes endurance over expansion, care over conquest.

This isn’t new. Feminist philosophers have been saying it for decades, often unheard because they weren’t shouting in Latin or running empires. I’m merely repackaging and re-contextualising, hoping that bundling these neglected insights together might make them audible again.

Knowledge never comes in a vacuum; it circulates. It leaks, cross-pollinates, mutates. To claim “intellectual property” over an idea is to pretend ownership of the air. I’ll spare you the full rant, but suffice it to say that the moment knowledge becomes proprietary, it ceases to breathe.

Conclusion

If I have a creed – and I say this reluctantly – it’s that philosophy should serve as maintenance, not monument-building. Feminist and post-colonial thinkers model that: constant attention, critical care, resistance to the entropy of domination.

I’m just trying to keep the engine running without pretending it’s divine.

Bonus

Image: Feminists, according to Midjourney 7
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Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

Blame is a Social Construct

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The propensity to assign blame is deeply intertwined with human moral frameworks, often reflecting our need to ascribe responsibility and maintain social order. Blame allows us to identify transgressions, enforce norms, and establish accountability within our communities. But when it comes to non-human animals, the concept of blame becomes more complex.

Do Non-Human Animals Have a Sense of Blame?

Non-human animals certainly exhibit behaviours that suggest some rudimentary understanding of social rules and consequences. For example, studies on primates show that they can experience forms of moral emotions like guilt or shame. A chimpanzee might avoid eye contact or show submissive behaviour after breaking a social norm, such as stealing food from a dominant individual. Similarly, domestic dogs have been observed to display so-called “guilty” behaviours—such as avoiding eye contact or cowering—when they sense that their human is displeased. However, it’s debated whether this truly indicates guilt or simply a reaction to their owner’s emotional state.

However, the concept of blame as humans understand it—an attribution of moral responsibility that involves complex cognitive processes like intention-reading and understanding of moral rules—appears to be uniquely human. Non-human animals can recognise when another individual’s behaviour deviates from the norm and might react accordingly, but they don’t seem to hold others accountable in the same moral or punitive sense that humans do.

Blame and Morality in Humans vs. Non-Human Animals

In human societies, blame is often accompanied by a desire for reparation or punishment, as well as a cognitive understanding of intentions and causality. We don’t just react to actions; we interpret motives and hold individuals accountable based on our perception of their intentions. This is where non-human animals typically differ. Their responses to perceived wrongdoing are more likely driven by immediate social consequences—like changes in dominance status or access to resources—rather than a sense of moral outrage or an abstract concept of justice.

For example, if a wolf in a pack disobeys a social rule, it might be punished by the alpha, but this is more about reinforcing social hierarchy and cohesion than about assigning moral blame. Similarly, if a cat lashes out at another cat after being disturbed, it’s responding to an immediate violation of its personal space, not holding the other cat morally accountable.

Evolutionary Perspective

From an evolutionary standpoint, blame and moral emotions likely evolved in humans to facilitate cooperation and social cohesion in increasingly complex societies. As our ancestors formed larger and more intricate social groups, the ability to understand others’ intentions, enforce social norms, and hold individuals accountable would have been crucial for maintaining group stability and cooperative behaviours.

Non-human animals, even those that live in complex social structures, do not face the same cognitive demands as humans when it comes to maintaining large-scale social cohesion. Their social rules and enforcement mechanisms are typically less nuanced and more directly linked to survival and reproductive success.

Conclusion

While non-human animals demonstrate behaviours that hint at a basic understanding of social rules and can respond to transgressions, the uniquely human capacity for assigning blame—and the moral frameworks that arise from it—appears to be a product of our advanced cognitive abilities and complex social structures. Blame, in humans, is not just about responding to actions but involves a deeper understanding of intentions, responsibility, and justice—concepts that are foundational to our moral systems but beyond the reach of non-human cognition as we currently understand it.

I started writing a book on blame, agency, and retributive justice a few years back. Perhaps I should revisit it along with the dozen other books in progress.

Gay Genes

Posted in nature, philosophy, psychology, sexualityTagged , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I’ve been so busy attending to other things, that my blogging here has gone by the wayside. Philosophy is an activity meant for those with spare time.

Besides philosophy, genetics is an interest of mine. An article I was reading, Genetics may explain up to 25% of same-sex behavior, giant analysis reveals, prompted me to react and respond. This article by the Economist came out ,too.

As the article states, there is no one gene, and we can’t even predict ‘gayness’ based on some configuration of genes. That humans’ knowledge of genetics is so nascent is one reason, and over-imagining the impact of genes on behaviours may be a problem. Just because you want to find a relationship doesn’t mean one exists.

My take is that genetics establish a predisposition. Genes may limit your height to 180 cm, but environmental factors may not allow you to reach this limit, and anything short of genetic modification will not allow you to surpass this limit.

I don’t see a reason for sexual orientation to be different. One may have a propensity to same sex attraction, let’s say 70%, but if environmental factors fail to catalyse this predilection, it may never manifest. Even this is too simplistic.

Being ‘gay’ is an identity marker. Just because a person has same-sex relationships does not mean the person identifies as gay. Moreover, one can be ‘virginal’ or celibate and otherwise have had unexpressed same-sex tendencies. More-moreover, ‘gay’ is not about activity; it’s an emotional attraction. A ‘gay’ person might have sex outside of their identity orientation for myriad reasons, for example, access to a partner of the preferred orientation (say, prisoners) or for survival (say, prostitutes).

On balance, I’d argue that this is a quixotic venture into finding the underpinning of a human social construct. Once again, humans obsessed with categorisation, as if finding a category provides special meaning to the thing in it.

Natural Causes

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2–4 minutes

Some of us are concerned with the metanarratives underlying society, but and given society is apt to have many competing metanarratives. Logical Positivists tapped into the narrative of science, which is a primary theme of Enlightenment thinking. This was supposed to have supplanted the narrative of superstition, except it didn’t. And a sort of empirical, scientific Nature was supposed to have supplanted the metaphysical gods, except it didn’t.

Illuminati Eye Symbol

Apart from the problem that a supernatural God was replaced with a sort of animated Nature, some people just didn’t buy into the new narrative. Today, in the 21st Century Western world, some people still subscribe to these pre-Enlightenment notions, but that’s not the root of the issue. Neither is necessarily right or wrong. And in a Hegelian synthesis, some people assuage the ensuing cognitive dissonance by merging the two and cherry-picking the ones that work for them. These people usually have little difficulty finding people who believe that the earth is 4.5 billion or 6 thousand years old, that Ayurvedic medicine is superior or inferior to Allopathic medicine, that vaccines cause or don’t cause autism, that homeopathy is effective or ineffective, that the Illuminati are some secret society that rules the world or not.

Many people still can’t get past an appeal to nature, whence the Organic and traditional medicine movements. This is not to say that some or all of these claims might have validity; it’s just to say that ‘because it’s natural’ is not a suitable defence. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day—unless it’s set to a 24-hour display, in which case it’s only right once a day.

Without rehashing the argument whole hog, we know that poison ivy and uranium, arsenic, and cyanide are all natural. Not many attempt to defend this with an appeal to nature, so this suffers from selection bias from the start. 

you cannot go against nature
because if you do
go against nature
it's part of nature, too

                — Love and Rockets, No New Tale to Tell

The larger issue is about how we define nature. I don’t recall if this was Lyotard or Lacan (and I don’t feel like looking for the cross-reference at the moment), but by definition everything observed is natural, whether physical or behaviour.

Love and Rockets – No New Tell to Tell

Some humans—notably the Enlightened ones—like to view themselves as somehow above nature, but the veneer is nanometers thin and threadbare at that. And these people extend this concept to behaviour. As the song goes, you can’t go against nature because when you do, when you observe it, it is by definition part of nature, too.

Oftentimes, this becomes a moral argument: this or that is unnatural. Certain sexual activities are usually held up as examples, and yet many of these activities are not only practised by many humans, they are also practised by members of other species. The argument is that we need to elevate about nature, an so they are making some appeal to meta-nature or some such.

In any case, the complaint shouldn’t be whether it’s natural anyway. It might rather be couched in some instances as not ‘naturally occurring’, so plastics would not happen save for manufacture, but neither would asphalt or telephones or televisions or processed foods, so I find it to be disingenuous to rail against some items that do not occur naturally whilst ignoring the ones you happen to find useful.