If the British have a fault, and I say this as an epitome of Britishness in this respect, it is that they have horrible teeth. This is one explanation for the British reflex of politeness. We seldom bare our fangs in anger. Our smiles, on the other hand, scourge the soul and harrow the heart.
Sadly, the influx of Romanian and Estonian dentists has so greatly improved orthodontics that public discourse, at least in British philosophy, has become as envenomed and abusive as it has always been across the pond or, that yet wider ideological chasm separating us from the Continent.
I suppose the hatred now focused on Kathleen Stock OBE does have a precedent. Over a hundred years ago, Bertrand Russel earned similar obloquy- indeed he was sent to jail. But then Russel visited America, got his teeth fixed and thus started getting laid. This caused him to give up philosophy.
Why is Stock now reviled? Apparently it has something to do with sex- which, for true blue Brits like me is not something we need to bother with because bluetooth is as much a feature of our smartphones as it is a description of the one or two rotting molars which continue to maliciously protrude from our black and bleeding gums.
This is not to say that we don't have sex. It's just that when we get disoriented and, in momentary confusion, end up bumping uglies, our profuse mutual apologies and eagerness to take all the blame, though not preventing the repetition of the faux pas, sometimes mellows into a modus vivendi of a conjugal, or even romantic, type.
Stock takes a different view-
I defend an account of sexual orientation, understood as a disposition to be sexually attracted to people of a particular biological sex or sexes. An orientation is identified in terms of two aspects: the sex of the subject who has the orientation, and whether that sex is the same as, or different to, the sex to which the subject is attracted. I explore this account in some detail, and defend it from several challenges. In doing so, I provide a theoretical framework that justifies our continued reference to Sexbased sexual orientation as an important means of classifying human subjects.
Human beings don't like being 'classified'. We may accept certain classifications as yielding utility in certain contexts- e.g. medical- but reject any such thing imposed on us by worthless shitheads. I reject classification as 'Black' for any philosophic purpose but may accept it, temporarily, for a medical purpose. However, as technology improves, I expect to see the classification 'Black' to disappear. It will be replaced by a more precise and technical classification based on particular DNA sequences or something more arcane yet. My point is that the underlying 'Structural Causal Model' evolves in a direction which dissolves 'ready to hand' classifications like 'Black', 'Male', 'Fat' etc.
At one time it may have been argued that 'Black' was a politically important classification. Black peeps should serve White peeps the way God intended. Alternatively, Black peeps should go 'ooga booga' and slit Whitey's throat so as to overthrow Capitalist hegemony and the incessant surveillance carried out by my neighbor's cat.
Clearly, this type of classification is mischievous and actual Black people reject the fuck out of it.
What about the position Stock defends?
A sexual orientation is a relatively stable feature of a person, differentiated from sexual predilections or preferences. Its possession causes a person to sexually desire, be aroused by, and exhibit other sexually-motivated behaviour towards, only those people of a particular Sex.
What happens if you assent to this proposition? Well, straight off the bat, any accusation of sexual harassment lodged against you is prima facie credible if it aligns with your imputed 'sexual orientation'. It is not in our interest to accept a type of classification which would automatically gives us a motive in a wide category of supposed crimes. The fact is, for most of us, sex is something we only do with one person who is very special to us not primarily because of any physical attribute they have. Our 'orientation' is to that person- or the memory of her or the hope of her or the idealization of her, if we haven't met her yet. This, at any rate, was the old view. It is perhaps also the true view for the majority of people. It is not the case that businessmen have an 'orientation' towards avarice and unjust enrichment nor that scientists are continually performing experiments in every department of their lives or that church-goers have an orientation to constantly get down on their knees to praise the Lord. It is generally observed that businessmen aren't particularly avaricious when out of the office, church-goers may spend their working week in highly secular professions, and a spouse who has regular intercourse may be wholly repulsed by the thought of doing the deed with someone else of either gender.
By pretending that Capitalists spend all their time robbing the poor or that Whites spend all their time thinking up ways to humiliate or exploit Blacks or by saying that a Lesbian is constantly sexually harassing every woman in the vicinity, a great mischief is done.
Stock justifies this great mischief by
1) firstly, saying an orientation is a 'disposition'. A disposition is, roughly, a capacity of a thing, under ‘ideal’ conditions, to exhibit some further particular behaviour or other characteristics.
If evolution is a true theory, we have no dispositions- at least with respect to sex (because sexual behavior is subject to strong selection pressure)- because 'ideal conditions' for a species are more likely to lead to degeneration (Speigelman monsters) or loss of robustness.
We may say about behaviors which have no survival value, that they are ruled by dispositions. X farts furtively because X is of a shy and retiring disposition. Y farts loud and long because Y not?
The nature of a subject’s sexual orientation, in a particular case, is type-identified in virtue of two features: a) the Sex of the desiring subject;
This is what has got Stock into trouble. We no longer believe that 'the Sex of the desiring subject' is something unambiguously given. In any case, as medical technology improves, the thing will soon be pretty much elective.
b) the Sex of the type of person typically desired by the subject.
If we believe in evolution we ought not to believe that something as important as sexual selection will not have drivers unknowable to ourselves. Otherwise, a predator or parasite could 'hack' us or we ourselves might myopically destroy our own evolutionary robustness.
It may be that there are things yet more subtle than 'pheromones' and that our entire limbic system might conceal mechanisms based on a higher type of maths than we can yet conceive.
A heterosexual or straight orientation is one which causes one to sexually desire (etc.) only people of the opposite Sex to oneself. A homosexual (gay or lesbian) orientation causes one to sexually desire (etc.) only people of the same Sex as oneself. A bisexual orientation is one which causes one to sexually desire (etc.) people of the opposite and same Sex to oneself.
An orientation to gaslight young people so as to gain power over them involves telling them they have an orientation of a particular sort even if there is no evidence for it and the thing is prima facie absurd. Stock writes ' A great advantage of thinking of sexual orientation as a (multi-track) disposition, is that generally, a disposition is ontologically distinct from its stimulus and manifestation, and in fact may never be manifested (Alvarez 2017).
A great advantage of telling stupid lies is that being a stupid liar means you go to the top of the class in a shite discipline. That is what is happening here. Stock is telling stupid lies and then saying a great advantage of her stupid lie is that no process of reasoning or painstaking uncovering of fact can contradict her stupid lie. But, the reason she finds the notion of 'sexual orientation' greatly 'advantageous', is exactly the same reason for sensible people to stick with the opposite view.
This fits with many of the ways we ordinarily think about sexual orientation . For instance, there might be cases where a person has a sexual orientation yet doesn’t exhibit arousal or other relevant behaviour. This might be explicable as a case where no relevant stimulus is present (e.g. no prospective partners; no suitable material for fantasising), and so no relevant manifestations either. In such cases, a person might even be unaware of their orientation, given a lack of evidence of it.
Similarly, a person may be unaware that she isn't me when she illegally gains access to my bank account. It may be greatly advantageous to her to believe she has an orientation and a disposition to be me despite there being no evidence of any such thing existing.
Just as a crook, standing in the dock, may want a completely false and mischievous type of reasoning to have currency, so may a shite academic or a paranoid political activist. Perhaps, Stock wants to stick with a 'sex' based definition of Lesbianism because then she gets to gas on about how her people are doubly disadvantaged in that both they and their partners belong to the oppressed half of humanity. Stock is concerned that Lesbianism's grievance value might be undermined if, by replacing sex with 'gender', every woman could say 'well, my partner has a tiny dick. So I get to be counted as Lesbian too.' But why should things stop there? Male homosexuals may say 'OMG, me and my hubby are so like discriminated against by size queens that we are practically Lesbians'. Donald Trump obviously qualifies as a Lesbian- hounded out of office by bigots- because of his tiny hands. In this way the 'Grievance Value' of Lesbianism gets diluted.
Stock is a Lesbian and wants to keep a Lesbian type of politics (despite it having been boring, stupid and wholly useless) going simply as a matter of securing her bread and butter. The emergence of a loud, social media savvy, 'gender' rather than 'sex', based activism represents unwelcome competition. Stock writes-
The prevalence of homosexual and heterosexual dispositions undoubtedly contributes to their social significance, since it means that any empirical consequences will be correspondingly large, but it doesn’t seem important in itself. In fact, though, I think this last point gives a clue to what really differentiates homosexual and heterosexual dispositions from other sexual preferences. To look for some further inherent differentiating factor is, I think, the wrong approach. Instead we should recall that homosexual and heterosexual dispositions are ones we collectively care about, across a range of contexts, such that names and accompanying concepts for them have eventually emerged, staying in prominent use amongst language-users. Calling them ‘orientations’ is just a way of demarcating them from other less interesting or important preferences. ‘Orientation’ doesn’t denote any special inherent feature of a disposition. It’s therefore pointless to ask why homosexual and heterosexual dispositions ‘orient’ whilst other preferences don’t; or to argue that other preferences are orientations too, because they, too, ‘orient’ in some relatively arbitrary shared sense. Rather, the use of the concept denotes a contextual difference: linguistic communities are more interested in those dispositions than other preferences, as a valuable causal explanandum across many fields, for reasons I’ve already given.
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