KissingSunlight said:
Would not having laws that discriminate against other people a good thing? If you break down the mentality of such laws, it comes down to "I am afraid of what is unfamiliar to me. So, it must be something we shouldn't allow in society."
What you seem to be advocating is pro-scold
Yeah I expected this to be a bigger topic honestly, but to address the point the part of your post I quoted, you absolutely can't frame it that way. I reject the relativism underlying it and presenting itself as a truer morality.
It's says on the one hand that people have their beliefs, and right or wrong about those beliefs, they're entitled to them, as well as their views, behaviors, and understandings of reality, so long as they don't interfere with other members in society's ability to pursue their own interests, ideas, conceptions and intellectual pursuits. It sees society as nothing more than an arena in which self interest as defined in a very specific hedonistic way is sought after...
"Indeed from an Aristotelian point of view a modern liberal political society can appear only as a collection of citizens of nowhere who have banded together for their common protection...
What this brings out is that modern politics cannot be a matter of genuine moral consensus. And it is not. Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means."
-Alasdair McIntyre
Ethics in this kind of society is governed by rules that support this underlying presupposition. You have your Kantian duties, your Lockean rights, and your Bentham-ian understanding of utility as defined by a global level of pleasure.
All of these ethical systems you would almost certainly be familiar with even if you don't know them by name. They're your inalienable rights of life, liberty, and property, your concepts of "Right is universal and rooted in the nature of the action itself not in the circumstances or results" and your "The ends justify the means as established by the amount, intensity, and duration of pleasure produced in the population."
These enlightenment rule based ethical systems are all very self contained and internally consistent, but all accept a pre-rational premise as their starting point.
No convincing argument is given for why my actions should be universal, focused on the maximization of pleasure, or confined by the need to not step on any natural rights. You either accept the premises given already and act consistently from there or you choose and assert a different premise making any sort of rational ethical conversation between people with different prerational premises impossible.
There's nothing to talk about. You either accept what's valued by me or you don't. People see that and you start to see the relativism of morality seep into the daily conversation.
When I say wishing the a good for a group, I don't mean MY understanding of good. I don't mean MY prerational but consistent premises. I mean to say there are some premises that are not merely valued, but valuable.
I fundamentally reject the idea of a relativistic live and let live philosophy as being the truth. There is good and there is bad, there is right and there is wrong... or there isn't.
To continue pretending that Lockean natural rights have any real rational power behind them defending their existence, and then to use that concept to defend differing interpretations of good as being equally valid is to ignore the problem and cobble together several conflicting ethical theories in an ad hoc and clearly bad way (if there are standards)
And If I'm right in my assessment, then to value those things and to want them for others needs to be spoken. All of it, and with a mind to a rationality behind each "should" that doesn't terminate in a "because."
That objectivity may not actually exist and values truly are fundamentally subjective... which means 1.) I'm wrong, but also that relativism of society is the natural state of things. What isn't the natural state of things is the understanding of that relativistic conflict of ideas as having any SHOULD that holds it together. If ethics are subjective, if they genuinely and truly exist not as a quality of the object being examined, but as a value that exists in the observer then it's not a question of what's valuable. There is no valuable, there is only valued, and you telling me to value appreciation of difference of opinion over appreciation of biological or scientific truth has no weight and cannot have any weight behind it.
If I'm scolding you for your behavior or your philosophy or beliefs do not mistake me. I am not scolding you for breaking any sort of Hobbesian subjective social contract, I'm scolding you for not adhering to an objective standard.
You have to reject that objective standard either by saying it's not a correct assessment of the objectivity of it (To which I will probably react quite negatively to any attempt to salvage the enlightenment project as a feasible alternative), or you have to reject objectivity itself which leaves you just screaming at me about forcing my values on others while doing the same to me by saying I should value respect for other values.
It's a contradiction according to your own standards.
So no, again to answer your question. To argue for standards of behavior is not the same as harassment unless you define harassment to be any criticism of behavior that doesn't meet your subjective minimum standard of not hurting someone... in which case then yes, technically I would support it.
