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No you can't. I get that you are really enamored with this high minded centrist/independent shtick. But electorally it fails 100% of the time, and most people have woken up that. People have a list of priorities, and if their top priority is "Make sure school doesn't start teaching my 6 year old they can choose their gender", and a combination ticket of Hitler/Genghis Khan is anti "Have schools teach kids to sterilize themselves" and they are running against Jesus and Santa Claus who for baffling reasons are pro "Elementary Teachers keep a castration kit in their desk drawer"... well I hate to tell you this but Hitler/Genghis Khan get my vote. And I'll stand by that vote in the concentration camps because they got my 23&me results and saw I had 0.7% Jewish ancestry.
I don't get to pick policies ala cart. Sadly I have to prioritize and pick the candidate that I think has the best chance of achieving success in my top priorities. And these days they are "Keep Democrats from making my life worse like they have the last 30 years".
I feel like I'm not getting through here. I am not talking about what wins elections. I am talking about what is ethical. What is right. We do not live in a perfectly convenient world where doing the right thing will always leave you better off. A Christian will tell you that this is because you must wait until after death for your Reward, an atheist will tell you that this is because the world wasn't actually designed by a benevolent intelligence, but the point remains the same. I never asked you to imagine that President Hitler an VP Khan send you to a concentration camp: that is, again, smuggling your own personal welfare back into it. What 'm saying is: if you have moral principles at all, then surely, surely you recognize that there is some amount or degree of harm inflicted to random strangers that would outweigh the welfare of your child? That, no matter how much you want your child not to be transed, it would be evil of you to put material pursuit of that goal over the lives of ten million people you've never met and never will?
But I'm not even talking about elections, here. I'm talking about criticizing and denouncing evil in your Tribe. Under sufficiently gerrymandered assumptions you might still end up voting for the very people at issue as the lesser evil - but I would like to see some acknowledgement that there is evil here, and that this is a relevant consideration, separate from your personal welfare or even that of your kids.
Why do you seemingly struggle to accept that is a moral principle, just one you disagree with?
Not everyone is a universalist. Not everyone is a utilitarian. I would find it evil to put any number of people above your own children- maybe, if it were truly existential, I would crack (and indeed I've heard Southern Baptist preachers use that example to describe the Father sacrificing the Son, as the singular unique time such a thing was justifiable).
You're doing a fine job highlighting innate familial conservatism and Scott's "don't want to play the philosophical game" rebuttal to WWOTF, though.
I suppose I struggle to reconcile this with having a concept of nation-wide politics at all. Politics isn't about how you feel you should act - it's about how you feel some guys in Washington ought to act (and the rest of the machinery of state with them). I can understand a deontological commitment to always put my own children first, but it seems absurd to judge the US government based on whether it specifically puts my literal children first.
So when I said "if you have moral principles at all" perhaps I should have specified "if you have moral principles by which you can judge the actions of strangers, and not just your own". That is, moral principles such that you can say what the right or wrong thing for Alice and Bob to do might be, in a hypothetical world where you yourself don't exist at all. In a democracy whose population is counted in the hundreds of millions and where your vote doesn't even rise to the level of a rounding error, if you take an interest in politics then I expect that this is because you have criteria in mind on how you feel the government "should" act, with or without you in the picture. I expect that you would still have an opinion on who 'should' win in 2028 even if you knew for a fact you'd be dead by then, along with everyone you know.
And I don't think this is exclusive to universalist utilitarians. I believe many (most?) deontological systems recognize that it is meaningful for an individual to ask what the right thing to do is for someone other than himself, and it is conceivable that what the individual feels to be his own duty will run afoul of others' equally-righteous duties. For example, maybe I conclude that it is my duty as a parent to put my child first no matter what, but also that it is the cops' duty to punish murderers no matter what, and if this ends in me being gunned down trying to protect my murderous son then so be it. Yes? And in that framework, one's opinion on large-scale politics feel like they concern how you believe cops (etc.) should act, not how you believe you should act. It needn't be incoherent to say "I believe it is the state' moral duty to put down murderers, although I also believe that if the day should ever come that my son commits murder and seeks shelter in my house, it will then be my duty to set myself against the state".
All of which said, I do recognize that someone might just not have any particular moral intuitions of this kind - might be genuinely completely neutral on what actions are taken where they do not impinge on one's personal sphere. Sure! But I don't know what someone like that is doing talking about politics. Their set of moral preferences are simply not apt to make useful conclusions about how to run a government.
And in that case, one of the constraints could be along the lines of "any policy that sets the state above the policy is morally wrong," and another could be that "each family should prioritize their own wellbeing."
Thus, when we get to a policy where the state overrides the family, that is wrong.
The US government need not put my children above all others, but neither should it believe that it knows what's better for them than I do.
Sure. But I never said you couldn't oppose pro-trans policies on moral grounds. I said that there had to be (in principle!) a level of evil from the other side such that you would deem the side with pro-trans policies to be the lesser evil, even if that evil did not affect you personally. Say, you're a brown-haired man with a brown-haired wife and children; Candidate A wants to trans children to the same extent that current Dems do; and Candidate B wants to torture all redheaded children to death but will leave your brown-haired children alone. I think you don't have to be a shrimp-loving utilitarian to admit that in such a hypothetical, Candidate B is more evil than Candidate A and you should therefore vote for Candidate A, even though B's evil wouldn't affect your family personally while A's lesser evil might.
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No.
With that cleared up, if millions could be saved if I let demons devour my child, maybe they should craft an electoral platform to accomplish that same good... without requiring me sacrifice my child! You know, The Lottery was supposed to be a cautionary tale, not a manual.
I don't negotiate with hostage takers.
…Are you sure? Would you literally send every human being on Earth to Hell if it meant saving your child, and your child alone? If the answer is yes, do you believe this is a moral position? (I could sympathize with feeling that if push came to shove you couldn't press the button. But I would regard this as a case of my personal affections overwhelming my conscience. I would, in the cold light of day, recognize that I was acting immorally, even if I could not help myself.)
Not with hostage takers, no. If there were some bizarre natural occurrence where my daughter had to be dissected to provide the cure for all mankind, or everyone would die.... maybe. Maybe they'd still have to kill me first.
But if a bunch of psychopaths have decided murdering my daughter is arbitrarily inseparable from their plan for a global utopia because reasons, just shutup, then no. I chose my daughter over my dead body every time. You don't get to create a moral dilemma and then benefit from being the "lesser evil" in it. It's a lie. They are the greater evil by virtue of having created the situation in the first place, and they'll do it again!
Well okay, but that's… not remotely what this thread has been about. This started out as an attempt on my part to find a circumstance in which you would deem a right-wing platform too morally heinous to support even if it would be advantageous to you personally. The Hitler-Khan administration would be the ones doing the killing, here. This is not about any kind of moral dilemma constructed by the Left, this is not meant to be an analogy for any particular current political question - it is about me probing the theoretical limits of your worldview, and wanting to confront whether you accept in principle that there could be a right-wing platform you would reject on moral grounds.
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