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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 13, 2026

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There needs to be some way to reconcile a difference in moral values.

Patchwork. All the people with value X live in X-land and all the people with value Y live in Y-land. Then we can see which one is better in the long run. Gigantic continent sized super-state is a terrible idea.

Unfortunately one of the sides of this debate seems to have decided on universalism and declared their position on the matter a human right and attempted to make it apply to the whole country.

I suspect parts of the other side also would prefer dominion. But you can't have a federation of even one side wants an empire.

Both sides of this debate have decided on a universal stance. Both want their moral system to apply to everyone, even people that aren't buying into it. They both want dominion and to ban the other.

Ergo vae victis.

Only if you think values are zero-sum.

I suppose in theory artificial wombs could remove the moral hazard, but I get an inkling that it's the financial and moral obligations people don't want, not merely the bodily impositions. And as to whether the baby is dead or alive, it is zero sum.

As a comment upthread suggested. The policy positions can be downstream of the same values. There is a very clear tension in this debate between the right to bodily autonomy vs how much of that right you have when it concerns another person's life. Both the left and right have been on different sides of that equation in different policies. That would imply that they both value it. The compromise is in applying it universally across the board.

Example:

  • Forced covid vaccination (or other plague vaccination) vs the right to bodily autonomy. The right maintains that the government should not be able to tell them when medications they must inject into their body (clear bodily autonomy) vs the left believing that the lives of 100s of people outweigh that right in order to stop a pandemic.

  • Abortion vs the life of a child. The bodily autonomy of one person vs the life of 1 child. Now the right is on the side of life vs the left on the side of bodily autonomy.

They both clearly believe in the right to bodily autonomy, they share the same value, they just disagree on downstream policy prescriptions. Which means compromise is possible.

No, they don't. Those who support legal abortion on "bodily autonomy" grounds don't assign any meaning to "bodily autonomy" outside the cause of abortion. Not to forced vaccination, not to drug use, not to anything. "Bodily autonomy" is not a general principal, it is a soldier assigned to that specific front and no other.

I feel like this a convenient bias, because it also looks like anti-forced vacc supporters don't extend bodily autonomy to abortion. Looks like world is full of political hypocrites

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