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Or even "I know they keep firing on your position. But from my position, well safe and far away, that doesn't make it right for you to shoot people."
"Think about how upset being shot at makes you. Isn't it hypocritical of you to want to shoot back?"
As an aside, I hate how hypocrisy is now the cardinal and only sin in certain discourse. Since, as the theory goes, all morality is subjective, it leaves one who swallows the subjective-pill unable to point out how someone else's culture, values, or religion are evil and wrong. However, it's always possible to point out hypocrisy since virtually everyone falls short of their professed values in some way or the other. It is the universal argument. "No I don't believe in your backwards, primitive, parochial morality but then again you don't perfectly live up to the virtues you profess so really neither do you nyah nyah nyah." But there are worse things than being a hypocrite, namely: not being a hypocrite because you have no virtues to fall short of. There are only two types of non-hypocritical people: saints and the amoral, and there are many more of the latter than the former.
Arguments over hypocrisy are the last stop before total values incoherence. Previously, we would have argued over the implementation of shared values, but those values are no longer shared in any meaningful sense. Having accepted that there is no meaningful overlap of shared values, we appeal to the meta of consistency. If consistency fails, there's not really anything left to talk about.
There's literally centuries - millennia actually - of discourse over morality and what it is and should be. But first you do need to accept that morality exists.
There's only nothing left to talk about if both sides believe values are merely subjective and that, therefore, no values can be more correct than any other in any absolute sense. Even totally incoherent contradictory values aren't wrong - after all, thinking that someone's beliefs shouldn't contradict themselves is itself just another merely subjective value judgment.
I observe a set of people who share my values, and a set of people who do not share my values.
When dealing with the set of people who share my values, appeal to those values we share is a viable method of conflict resolution; we agree on ends, and are only arguing about means.
When dealing with the set of people who do not share my values, I can't appeal to my values because they don't share them, and so such an appeal would be meaningless, and I usually have no interest in appealing to their values, because I don't share them and they don't generally support the argument I'm making.
Once I recognize that a set of people doesn't share my values, what is there to do? Even if I believe my values are objectively correct, I have no way of forcing this set of people to agree. Any further discussion depends on a retreat to subjectivity to even be possible. If I'm not willing to consider that my values might be wrong, why should I expect them to do so?
Search for shared values and go from there.
What if there are no shared values, or not enough shared values to found a workable peace?
You could say "we all want to live", but I can point to suicide bombers to demonstrate that actually, no, "we" don't. The search for shared values can in fact fail. More often, the search for shared values can succeed, but return such minimal values-overlap that conflict is preferred on both sides anyway. The problem with Liberalism is that it assumes this can't actually happen, so when it does there's no plan B.
Sure that is the problem, but at least there was a plan A. There's never going to be a perfect answer where everyone gets along in all possible situations (remember, I've been married 20 years.) The alternative to trying to find common ground--which I'll boil down to: "Fuck 'em"--is, at best, expedient, but falls prey to an arguably worse problem of wholesale generalization (since you mention suicide bombers, Muslims leap to mind) of a group that is not homogeneous.
I am all for plan A, even now.
One of the recurring arguments I've participated in over the years is whether we should ban circumcision. I'm circumcised, and on the balance I would rather not be. Nevertheless, I consistently argue that we should not ban circumcision, because while I perceive it to be a net-loss, I do not think it is a very severe net loss, and I observe that there is a significant population of my fellow citizens who disagree with my assessment and wish to retain it.
Usually, those arguing for banning it point out that it is genital mutilation performed on helpless infants. They point out that we ban female circumcision/genital mutilation just fine, and that there is no principled distinction for why we should ban one and not the other. Now, my understanding is that female circumcision is often much more damaging than male circumcision; I base this on descriptions of female circumcision on the one hand, and my own experience with being circumcised on the other. but beyond that, I note that there is not a large population of people practicing female circumcision deeply rooted in our society, so maintaining a ban on the practice is considerably less costly. I think we should tolerate the practices of our neighbors, and decline to make neighbors of foreigners with practices we are not willing to tolerate.
I think this is a pretty good way to look at things. My experience is that it is not a Liberal way of looking at things, and in fact Liberals will tend to object strongly to both ends of it. In my experience, they will argue vociferously that circumcision should be banned because it is a violation of human rights and dignity, and likewise that female circumcision should not only be banned here, but we should expend significant effort to suppress the practice abroad, since it is so obviously repugnant. They will then argue that there is no reason not to import large masses of people for whom female circumcision is a well-cemented custom, on the assumption that all that is needed is "education" to conform them to our standards. By doing so, though, they make those very standards and the enforcement of them far more fraught then they ought to be; if we're basically all on the same page, there's no reason for a massive centralized enforcement apparatus to ensure conformity, but once we're trying to mass-conform large numbers of immigrant Muslims, the same mechanisms can be turned to mass-conform Jews or Christians like myself where we run afoul of the issue du jour. And we will run afoul of it, because the "common sense values" that the centralized enforcement apparatus would be hammering people into observably undergo large-magnitude swings under timescales of less than a decade.
The standard Liberal position is that our political and social processes, things like voting, legislating, the courts, a free press, the "marketplace of ideas" and so on, are sufficient to handle arbitrary differences in values. I used to believe that. I very much do not believe that any longer. It is not enough to simply punt to "the system" to handle differences in values. "The system" is priceless, but it is in fact a fragile thing, and if we treat it like an immutable fact of the universe it will not be there to pass on to our children.
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