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People should care because it's good for us to care about one another.
Rather, you can wish all you want, but why should anyone bear the costs of your wishes?
This is, for me, a recurrent political challenge as an American, because I end up stuck between the bifurcated "standard positions" constantly. I object to abortion but I value doctor-patient confidentiality, so as long as I don't know it's happening, I don't think I have much to say about abortion--but if you want to spend tax dollars making it affordable, accessible, etc. then I have a problem. If a man wants to dress in lipstick and ballgowns, enjoy! But if he wants to police my language and my thinking by making implausible demands concerning his pronouns, he can fuck right off.
The law is at its most ethically plausible when it is mediating conflicts between important interests. Modern welfare states, however, are substantially modern manipulation states, deploying government coercion not to mediate legitimate conflicts but to thumb the scales in furtherance of questionable aims. People think it's not good enough for the state to merely abolish segregation laws; they think states must proactively "integrate" communities, even over the objections of historically oppressed minorities. People think it's not good enough for the state to decriminalize activities; they want the state to subsidize those activities. This, I think, actively erodes the care that we should quite naturally feel toward the other humans in our lives. I should care if my friend wishes to have a different body; if the technology existed to actually change them into what they want to be, I'd be all for it!
But I wouldn't pick up the tab for it, and should not be required to pick up the tab through insurance pooling or taxation--any more than I should be required to pick up the tab for their wished-for sports car.
I've never found the confidentiality argument from Roe persuasive, and I don't think the legal system ever did either. Any coherent principle that treatments are exclusively between doctors and patients has to skip over that Roe was never found to legalize medical marijuana or euthanasia, both of which we've punished patients and doctors for in the past.
I think there are reasonable arguments in either direction, but a hard libertarian view of the doctor-patient relationship seems only to be referenced as a rhetorical cudgel rather than a principled argument.
Well, it was used as a throwaway example in this case, but since it is apparently all anyone wants to talk about...
My substantive position on abortion is that it should not be legal except in cases of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother. But because I am not against abortion in all cases, I have created an enforcement problem for myself. How should doctors confirm rape/incest/etc.? This creates a potentially perverse incentive for women to lie to their medical providers about what happened, and about things that may require doctors to report to law enforcement. Sending a man to prison for a rape he did not commit strictly because you do not want to have his baby is morally repugnant, of course, but people have, and will, lie for far less.
Consequently, my resort to doctor-patient privilege is less of a "hard libertarian" view than it is an attempt to balance all competing interests and think of a policy that raises the fewest serious problems. If I were the tyrant in charge of such things, then, I would forbid the advertising of abortion services and spend no public resources enabling abortions. But I would also not criminalize the provision or acceptance of abortion services. There are obviously other details I'd have to iron out re: deliberate murder of the unborn, and really I'd like to see abortions that do happen limited to very early in any given pregnancy. But the real point of saying all this is just to further illustrate how wildly outside the realm of remote possibility my views are. Absolutely no one cares what I think on the matter; my views give too much to their outgroup, pretty much no matter who their outgroup is.
The difficult to diagnose ones are crimes so perhaps use conviction of the perpetrator if we were organized enough to have trials within 9 months.
An alternate method is to have an abortion court where the woman makes her case and an interested party for the rights if the baby make their case and an impartial jury decides. Burn the records afterward, sealing stopped being trustworthy too long ago.
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Nope. I'm sorry, I'm just one man, and there's millions of human tragedies unfolding every day. I don't have that many fucks to give away, if I actually cared for everyone I'd be a nervous wreck. I'm actually happier to pick up the tab for someone's fanciful wish, than to be forced to care for it. You're Dwayne Johnson stuck in a dadbod? Here, have a gym subsidy, or something. You want a sports league for guys who wish they were women? Why the hell not, knock yourself out. You want me to care? Why? Who are you anyway, and why did you follow my daughter into the locker room?
It's off topic, but I don't get that argument. Doctor-patient confidentiality is not absolute. We let doctors handle pretty hard drugs, but my understanding is that if a doctor starts prescribing hard drugs for the explicit purpose of getting their patients to trip balls, they're getting locked up. Doctor-patient confidentiality would get even more disregarded when the lives of third parties were involved. I don't think a doctor is allowed to say "I have just the thing for your condition! Here's a prescription for carrying out an assassination!"
That's fine, but it's probably worth noticing that this is not what you said. What you said was:
This is meaningfully distinct. "Why should anyone care about that" is very different from "I have no reason to care about that." I quite agree that you have no reason to care what some rando wishes, or even what a great many randos wish. Some dude in a dress follows your daughter into the locker room, well, you have great reason to care about your daughter's comfort, and no reason at all to make that a lower priority than his comfort. But noticing that you don't have any reason to care, while important, is not the same as saying that no one should care.
I didn't say that it was, but as you note, it was just a side point to illustrate my frustration with the polarization of certain arguments.
I'm having issues explaining what I'm driving at. No, they're not distinct, it's not just about me. The "traditional" way to talk about a gender dysphoria, it's that it's an extremely rare psychological condition causing people a lot of distress over the sex they're born with. If this is what we're going with, fine, I do see a reason why society should care, the same way we should care about schizophrenics, phobics, bipolars, etc. tikimixologist said it's somehow similar to wanting to be more fit, if they're qualitatively similar, then yeah, I'm sorry I don't see why anyone should care. You can want all you want, please give me a good reason for anyone to care. If "people should care because it's good for us to care about one another", that sets the bar for caring so low, we'd all be curled in a fetal position, and sobbing all the time from all the caring we're doing for everyone else.
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You are being excessively literal in a way which is the scourge of rationalists.
"Why should anyone care" means "why should people other than the ones central to the situation care", not literally "why should any human being care".
I'm never going to apologize for seeking clarity. Or maybe put a little differently: if I'm an autist at heart, then telling me I'm being too autistic is like telling a bird it is being too feathery. Like, look around you. If you have a problem with rationalists, you've come to a funny part of town...
Looks like a motte-and-bailey to me. "What? No! I just meant me, personally--I don't mean literally no one should care about the outgroup I'm railing against and weak-manning right here in the thread. What kind of monster do you take me for?" Uh huh. Try pulling the other one.
The post contained:
That post claims that "nobody should care" is wrong because the person at the center of it cares about what happens to him personally. That's not "as long as it's the outgroup", unless his outgroup is one person, that's blatantly misreading it.
Furthermore, there's no motte and bailey around because most normal people are capable of understanding that phrase. This is on the order of going to a party and being told "Have as much cake as you want" and then claiming it's a motte-and-bailey when you loaded all five cakes from the party into your truck and drove home with them, and your host got mad.
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I disagree that this is a bad thing. Precision of language is a laudable goal to strive for, even if nobody ever quite attains the goal in practice.
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You’re not wrong, but neither is it wrong to answer the question literally. Where it goes wrong, in my eyes, is when it turns into pedantry, dismissal, or antagonism.
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