Re: Are you a Caveman?

If you want to point to rape, incest, necrophilia etc. all being "natural"

For someone who doesn't believe in history, you sure think a lot of things about nature...

I am not arguing, and need not argue, that anything (anything) is natural. I am only arguing that it is not empirically sound to study modern society (or even historical societies for the most part) and infer "natural" things from it. Because humans have not lived in natural environments for 10 thousand years.

That's not even an original contention from me. Desmond Morris in The Human Zoo was already writing that in the 1960s.

then I have no arguments - everything can be seen as "natural".

Well, rape is present in non-human animals (and has a specific reproductive strategy value). Incest is usually avoided but not to the degree humans do (such as bans on sororal polygamy or marrying your stepdaughter). Necrophilia, that I know, is unattested in non-human animals, but Gardner offers a possible argument for it in humans.

You still contend it is unlikely to be a fault in development?

What I contend is different, and I suspect you are mixing both arguments because that way you can make an unfalsifiable claim, which you cannot make with both taken alone.

My first argument is as above: empirically, it's simply false to observe historical/modern societies and call anything from them natural. If they keep anything from nature, it is, although not exactly at random, not because it is natural, so you cannot use its existence (or its avoidance) to reconstruct nature. If I am claiming anything, it's that we cannot know whether something is "unnatural" or "faulty" (or "natural" and "correct") by observing historical and modern societies. I would claim the same if you made the opposite argument based on the same observations. (Which is my main problem, by the way, with those who assert, and use as pro argument, that "most adults are attracted to minors")

My second argument, which I don't like to emphasize because it enters, both to assert and to refute, into Naturalistic Fallacy territory, is that natural doesn't normative make. I am convinced that rape is natural. Infanticide is certainly natural. Women oppression is certainly natural. Fraud is also natural. When I say it's natural, I am most definitely not arguing that it should be legal or considered to be good. Conversely, written language is definitely not natural, but I am not burning books.

And sorry, but paying attention to the argument that "pedophilia is a fault in natural development" is giving merit to the idea that rape, infanticide, women oppression and fraud are fine but written language is not.

A third argument, which I haven't introduced here, but I have in other threads, is that everyone, as autonomous beings, has a right to be "faulty" as you call it. Autonomy comes with the right to be wrong. And with the lack of that right, comes genocide in one way or another.