Discussion Post: 'Canadian high school defends transgender teacher who wore enormous prosthetic breasts underneath tight T-shirt to class'.
What is your best response to Peter Boghossian's tweet on this news story?
This story has caused a lot of chatter online. In response, my friend Peter Boghossian put his best philosopher hat on and posed the below challenge on Twitter:
Most people have strong moral impulses about whether this individual should be allowed to teach their children in a public school, but very few can construct a good argument why or why not. It’s more difficult thank you think. Try it.
‘Most people have strong moral impulses about whether this individual should be allowed to teach their children in a public school, but very few can construct a good argument why or why not. It’s more difficult thank you think. Try it.’
This feels very much like an appeal to the ‘living truth’ principle of John Stuart Mill. How can we know what we think we know if we cannot make an argument for it?
Well? What are your best responses to this? Make your case in the comments. I’ll tweet out some of the best ones. Go!
I suppose we should first establish whether paraphilias are a philosophical issue. I don’t really believe they are. It is also a matter of science and its ethics, since paraphilias (and sexual violence) are overwhelmingly a male phenomenon. People used to know that, and I don’t mean just the professionals - it was common knowledge, even if some young women have always been quite naive about the darker side of male sexuality. (older women, not so much, which is why they are most vociferously attacked and marginalised). And we used to know human brains don’t mature untiil we are in mid-twenties, but all of it has gone out of the window. So IMO iit’s about morality. I’m not religious but I certainly consider imposing your fetish on others in public immoral. I used to believe decline of religion was unequivocally a good thing, but now I’m not so sure.
It could be awkward and discomfiting for both boy and girl adolescents (especially girls developing larger breasts), at a minimum it would be a distraction from school learning.