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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   25721 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 10, 2025

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To be fair, I think that bodily autonomy generally makes a good Schelling point. There are certainly limits, few would argue that the psychotic who is stabbing himself to kill the spiders crawling inside his skin should get bodily autonomy,

Yes, well, few as they may be, there seems to be a higher concentration of them in the biggest international association concerned with transgender health.

but get really upset with a mother who does a better job of protecting her kid from chemicals, even though death from oxygen deprivation is the natural fate of a human almost anywhere in the observable universe.

The majority of the observable universe being the cold vacuum of space, you're quite correct, but the one bit of the universe where humans are typically seen, depriving them of oxygen does usually require some form of intervention. If you want a real gotcha you can say they would be upset at refusing a blood transfusion or a dialysis machine, though even there the Natural Law enjoyers have arguments for why they are ok with that, and not other things.

Failure to prevent the onset of puberty is not meaningfully different from purposefully inducing puberty

Puberty is a necessary process for development of not just all humans, not just all primates, not even only of all mammals, but practically every animal observable to the naked eye, that anyone will ever run into. Without it it, you lose access to one of the core functions of your body. You can say that it might be worth it under specific circumstances, bot it's loony say they're the same.

just like killing a patient by turning off their ventilator is not meaningfully different from killing them through the injection of pentobabitone.

The ventilator itself is an active intervention, while puberty is, again, the process of developing a core function of one's healthy body, making the analogy somewhat stilted.

Naturally, that does not mean that any intervention is good, just that there are no moral shortcuts which save you from looking at the outcomes.

This is where most utilitarians cheat. It's not enough to look at the outcomes, you need a moral framework to judge those outcomes by.

On the object level, I do not have a race in the "gender interventions in minors" topic

I got used to the "no dog in this fight" folks, but I'd imagine you'd have somethimg to say about your "real world" model of mental health not really reflecting reality because of this issue.

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