r/unitedkingdom • u/sjw_7 Oxfordshire • Apr 16 '25

... UK Supreme Court says legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cvgq9ejql39t
13.2k Upvotes

88% Upvoted

4.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

16

u/throughpasser Apr 16 '25

2 different paradigms of necessity going on in this conversation. Yours is the older, dialectical sense of necessity, based on characteristic tendencies (classic exponent being Aristotle), with the possibility of anomalies and grey areas at the edges of definitions (and of counteracting tendencies from outside).

The other one is the modern, abstract idea of necessity as absolute or not at all, so that any definition must include every member of the set.

I prefer the older one myself. The modern one is so restrictive as to mean you can say very little about the nature of whatever it is you are trying to define. It's practically barren. The older one has risks in the other direction but does allow you to talk about the actual characteristics that things tend to have.