Thread by @dynamic_proxy

There are some words I use a lot, as tools, whose actual meaning (as in the discriminatable bounds of their usage and application) I might be hard-pressed to define. "Moral" is definitely one.

The sense is something like "contributing towards
the narrative function of establishing an order of values". I don't often use "moral" to mean "good"; I often use it to mean "salient within the process of determining what 'good' is"

And often, in that sense, I'm using it critically, to note where one genre of discourse - narration organised around the purpose of discovering or demonstrating value - is aliasing another (e.g. factual description).

There's an argument this aliasing is always going on - we are always mixing up fact and value, all theories about what is the case are tangled up with theories about what ought to be the case - but I think the moral and the factual are distinct centres of narrative gravity

Hence, for example, in the previous thread, my premise is that a moral image of sexual difference (a Mars/Venus-type typology) is a different kind of thing to a scientific image (description of biological systems), and it's bad for the former to alias the latter

I also think that "gender" is not distinctly either of these things: phenotypic sex is a tall stack of effects, with all kinds of weird feedback loops between levels, in which psychology and social organisation are cogs in the same apparatus as endocrine and anatomical variance

In a way, gender is a machine "for" mixing up fact and value, producing a being whose functioning in the world is distributed across ontological strata. It has multiple centres of gravity - a three-body problem, if you like (what would be the third?)

(the answer is possibly "the spiritual", another word I use a lot without quite being able to explain what it means - if I were a Hegelian I might have a better story for this...)

Anyway, there's a difference between mixing of genres, and aliasing of one by another (or what Badiou calls "suture": one genre becomes the "driver" for another). Everything in the human world has a moral aspect, but it's still bad to suture e.g. factual description to morality.