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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6693 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 13, 2026

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The more I think about politics, I always end up coming back to this quote from a very good video (from a very good youtuber!).

A common bait-and-switch happens so quickly you might miss it, and it occurs very frequently. Pinker lines up a number of things that involve good fact-checking, methodological research, and asking questions, but these are not the reasons why we have core disagreements about values—they simply aren’t. There isn’t a scientific problem that is going to convert a Democrat into a Republican, and the insinuation that we can just “use science” to solve these problems is misleading.

A great example is abortion. This is largely a question about choice, life, and volition. While science can show developmental details about what a fetus is, or whether it has certain cognitive abilities, the core belief revolves around whether there is a responsibility to preserve that life, whether it has inherent value, and whether society recognizes a duty toward it. That is what governs the debate—not the microscopic details. So regardless of how much information we gather about the fetus, the abortion issue does not fundamentally change. It won’t be resolved by higher-resolution data; the question is about the value we assign, and science alone cannot determine that.

I think in most cases, politics are about values. To piggy back off the abortion example. The go to argument surrounding this typically is bodily autonomy, and although one could argue that this isn't really consistent on a factual, legal level. If I were in the room debating a pro-choice person on the issue, here is how it would go.

PC Person

The fetus is not entitled to its mothers body, consider the court case McFall v Shimp: McFall suffered from a life-threatening bone marrow disease and his cousin, Shimp, was a compatible bone marrow donor. Shimp refused to donate bone marrow. McFall requested Shimp be compelled to donate. The Court considered Shimp’s refusal “morally indefensible,” but still ruled in Shimp’s favor, explaining,

“For a society which respects the rights of one individual, to sink its teeth into the jugular vein or neck of one of its members and suck from it sustenance for another member, is revolting to our hard-wrought concepts of jurisprudence. Forcible extraction of living body tissue causes revulsion to the judicial mind.”

Judith Jarvis Thomson tackles the issues of bodily integrity and moral obligations in her essay, “A Defense of Abortion.” Thomson asks us to imagine a famous violinist with a fatal kidney ailment. One day a bunch of music lovers kidnap you and hook your kidneys up to the violinist’s circulatory system. In nine months the violinist will have recovered, but if you disconnect yourself prematurely the violinist will die. Thomson asks, “Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation?”

When you drive (have sex), you know there’s a possibility you could crash into someone (conceive). Even when you drive very cautiously (use contraception), there is still a chance of a car accident. Should you be in a car crash in which the victim’s life is at stake, the law does not compel you to donate blood or organs to save the victim. While it would be admirable for you to donate, you are not required to do so."

Me:

"Thats cool. Lets say you, for whatever reason, are a psychopath who enjoys taking children, draining them of their blood, hospitalizing them and or possibly killing. If I was king for a day, and assuming your blood was a match, I would sentence you to life in prison, and then order that your blood be drained and given to the remaining children to save them. Fight Me"

I don't find this to be unreasonable, given that we would already use lethal injection for these kinds of people (also a violation of "bodily autonomy"). Draining someone of their blood would be no less worse than forcefully injecting them.

You are free to think I'm a crazy person, fine. But that's not my main point. The same problem exists for issues like nationalism & immigration. You can scream all day about how immigrants are a net gain to the economy, or how they commit less crime. But a ethno-nationalist will simply go "No, I value the culture and heritage of the green people, and I'd rather them go extinct than to have our way of life polluted by the purples.".

Another explicit example of what im talking about is race. A black person does not vote democrat because they are factually good for the economy (whether or not they are is besides the point). If you asked average black voter to produce a study about specific policies that cite this, they would come up short. Support for democrats comes from the idea of racial solidarity, and the fact that black people value the black race, and would like to advance black interest.

I have no clue how one would even go about resolving this. Morals & values are not empirical - you cant prove bodily autonomy and cultural heritage are good in the same way you can prove what foods are and aren't healthy. These things are based on moral intuitions that are fundamentally subjective. I don't think I could ever change my personal mind on that issue to be completely honest, but on a societal scale, this is obviously not sustainable. There needs to be some way to reconcile a difference in moral values.

I never liked the proverb that goes like hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue (why is paying a tribute a compelling metaphor here?), but the underlying sentiment is somewhat relevant. Specifically, (1) unlike the rat-adjacent crowd, most people don't have absolute, immutable values nor are even particularly disturbed by the prospect of value drift; (2) they experience "conflicting" values/terms in their value function (ones that you can't maximise simultaneously) not as a fun math problem but as painful and embarrassing; (3) if a pair of values they hold keeps causing problems as in 2., they will happily gradually do away with one of them as in 1. (At some point vice is driven to default?)

Now, add to this that most people also, apart from any other values, hold pragmatism and reasonableness as a value, as well as (more cynically) being perceived as following universal, elegant principles of the kind that get mentioned as a Philosophy in textbooks, as opposed to boring non-universalisable ones like "more power to my race". As a result, it's generally actually quite effective to promulgate the statement that some object-level aspect of your target's value system is inconsistent, impractical and/or non-universalisable. They will feel the tension between the "LARP as philosopher-king" value and whatever other value you are challenging (e.g. abortion views, religion, in-group favouritism) and often enough the other value will be the easier one for them to do away with.

(Of course, this also creates the continued demand for apologetics, * Studies and other word slop that basically serves to shield the object-level values from having to be traded off against the acting-reasonable value.)

Is it hypocrisy to realize some values require compromises to achieve others? Robin Hanson wrote a good book years ago that I think did an excellent job in explaining what really motivates our outward value displays and the stories we love to tell about ourselves; and more specifically just how completely out of register it often is with the truth.

There are ways of being consistent and ways of not being consistent. Human beings tend to flout their values however when they feel they’re powerful enough to do so and believe there’s no blowback to getting away with it.

Even theologically, deontological ethics reduces to consequentialist ones. You can’t go up to someone and say “You’re going to Hell if you don’t X, Y, or Z.” If that person has no desire to avoid Hell, that argument will have no effect on them; it’s essentially meaningless. In every day life, people fear reprisal for not sufficiently conforming to the prevailing values and attitudes. When you see cracks bleed through the value systems are the seams, IMO it’s less about individuals being corrupted by some influence. You’re seeing their real values of naked self-interest at work trying to quickly snatch something for the present moment.

I rather believe something like the converse - most instances of what we consider "hypocrisy" are actually mostly tradeoffs between values, perhaps more specifically outwardly displayed ones and embarrassing/"naked self-interest" ones that are kept concealed. I don't think "naked self-interest" is a clearly delineated, distinct category of values anyway.

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