Are we cut out for universal morality?

I am making the distinction. However what you choose as an axiom in your science of morality is still a choice. You have to take what your moral instincts tell you and encode that instinct into an axiom. I can frame what I said from that perspective to help you understand.

Consider the situation I talked about and the two possible moral axioms that arise from it.

The psychopath that sat and watched the baby drown. Should he deserve any form of punishment? What should we encode as an axiom from our instinctual response to this situation? Should we just let people who sit by the pool watching the baby die not be punished? Is that the right thing to do?

What about the people who didn't donate a dime to Africa? Should they be punished? This is basically most people in the US. Should we punish everyone in the US?

Axiomatically speaking if one is punished so should the other.

This is the axiomatic conundrum. We evolved moral emotions to determine our behavior. Even when we try to interprete these emotions from an axiomatic perspective the conondrums remain on which axioms to choose. Depending on the situation neither axiom completely fits our interpretation of what is right or wrong.

Some people resolve this by choosing not to punish anyone by basing their decision on the axiom that punishment should only be reserved for murder by action not murder by inaction. However that is just an axiom you arbitrarily chose. Emotionally speaking murder by deliberate inaction is something everyone feels is fundamentally wrong as well and can be shaped into an axiom. The problem is this axiom conflicts with our instincts that are telling us that the people who killed starving kids in Africa by refusing to donate money are not guilty of murder.

There are other moral situations that can hijack our brain. Consider a train that is about to run over and kill 5 people tied to the track. You can save those 5 people by pulling a switch causing the track branch to switch to another lane. This lane only has one person tied to the track. Do you pull the switch? Save 5 people or save 1 person? By default the train will run over 5 people.

Think about your decision before I adjust the parameters. Most people choose to save 5 people over saving 1 person and they will flip the switch.

Imagine the same train. The track is now linear with no branch. 5 people are tied to the track. You see a really big fat man standing next to the track. You can save all 5 people by sneakily pushing the fatman onto the track. The fatman will die but his weight will stop the train saving the 5 people. What do you do?

The situation is the same, only superficial parameters have changed.

Basically the situation is this: you have the choice of saving the lives of 5 people or 1 person. Axiomatically we by default think that you should save 5 people over 1 person.

However while both situations are the same we feel the the second situation tends to feel wrong. It feels like murder if you save 5 people. The axiom of murder by action and the axiom of saving 5 people over 1 person in this situation form a moral paradox and the feeling of what's wrong or what's right changes depending on if we push a person onto the tracks or if we flick a switch.

This indicates that when you try to encode our moral instincts into axioms they form inconsistencies. An inconsistent system means the system is arbitrary and made up. It is not a "science" and just an arbitrary set of inconsistent behavioral rules. In other words, it's just a biological group of behaviors that coincidentally helps humans survive in a society; it is not some universal truth in the universe, not like the laws of physics.

Is it worth studying an arbitrary set of rules as if they were some universal truth? No. I think it's excessive. You need to create laws so that society functions but any analysis deeper then that (like the philosophy of ethics for example) is a pointless endeavor. There is no axiomatic or fundamental truth here.

> if you defend trans rights, you are going to forget more important fights such as the obesity crisis, the opioid crisis, the absurdity of your healthcare system

I don't understand this argument at all.

Lots of people disagree with the Left's proposed policies on these issues, but they do have policy proposals. It's just flat-out inaccurate to argue that trans acceptance has reduced Left focus or fervor about other subjects. If anything it's the opposite, the people who are most likely to be arguing the loudest for trans rights are also most likely to be proposing large changes to our health care system, mass decriminalization of drugs, mass reform of how we police opioids and how we rehabilitate addicts, and public health laws and restructures of our food system. I can count on one hand the number trans activists I know online who aren't fiercely pro-union and fiercely in favor of raising minimum wages at a federal level.

The common argument from USA Republicans is not that the Left is too weak on these issues, it's that the Left is too radical on these issues. I don't know what experience would lead someone to believe that trans activists are less likely to be politically involved in other areas or less likely to support at the very least populist-adjacent ideas. It just does not match up with reality in the US at all.

People can criticize the far-Left activist-sphere for a lot of things, but they're definitely not rejecting populist ideas or cozying up to the elites. It's just a wild argument to make. Ask McConnell if he thinks that people like AOC aren't interested in worker rights or unions. I mean, my goodness, the position of the mainstream GOP leadership in the US right now is that the far-Left is composed of dangerous radicals who want to execute Bezos and give all of his money to his factory workers.

If what you say is the common French perspective about what attitudes are in America, then France is not getting good enough reporting about American issues or how people over here are actually arguing about them.

Similarly:

> adressing some issues means not adressing other.. the public debate cannot handle so many things at once

I don't know how this is being reported elsewhere, but to be clear, it is Republicans who are proposing these bills. More anti-trans legislation has gotten proposed in the last year alone than we had in probably the last decade. Republicans did that, not Democrats. So the idea that this is an attempt to avoid distracting from other issues just doesn't make sense, because if that's what Republicans actually believed then they wouldn't be constantly bringing the issue to the forefront of debates and passing a ton of legislation fighting against trivial issues like what bathroom someone walks into.

What would make the response make sense is if Republicans viewed petty victories like policing genitalia inside of a public restroom as victories in a broader "culture war" in which trans people symbolize a cultural enemy.

Which, look, it's fine. We can acknowledge that some things are a culture war. You bring this up yourself when you talk about the fear that allowing trans rights to progress too far will lead to people who dissent being ostracized. For Americans that is inherently a tribal fear. It is a fight over a change in cultural values and standards: a worry that a certain cultural tribe (often white, Conservative, and/or Evangelical) is losing power compared to other subgroups.

> but you didnt answer to point 2

Sure I did:

> You bring this up yourself when you talk about the fear that allowing trans rights to progress too far will lead to people who dissent being ostracized. For Americans that is inherently a tribal fear. It is a fight over a change in cultural values and standards: a worry that a certain cultural tribe (often white, Conservative, and/or Evangelical) is losing power compared to other subgroups.

I don't disagree with you that people have this as a fear, but it is a tribal fear, it's a fear of turning into the outgroup. In America, anti-trans legislation seeks to mitigate certain demographics' fear by othering the groups that "threaten" them. The anti-trans laws that get passed because of that fear are passed with the intention of slowing down and hurting what Republicans have designated as the enemy tribe (in this case, the trans community).

It's hard for me to think of anything more tribalistic than viewing an entire demographic as a threat, and then actively taking away their rights in an attempt to reverse cultural change.

> but you seem to think only one side is.

I don't think that's at all an accurate representation of what I've said:

> And of course, this isn't necessarily Republican-exclusive, I do also see Democrats who call themselves allies but have done very little research about what problems trans people face or how trans communities talk about these issues. And I do think there's a little bit of tribalism there where a subset of the Democratic party has picked a side in this debate based pretty much entirely on their party identity, not because they understand what's going on or because they've done any research.

My main argument here from my first comment has been:

> Some laws are tribalistic in America.

It's not just the populations that are tribalistic, it's not just the way the laws are applied. The laws themselves are tribalistic. The laws themselves are designed to hurt people.

To the extent that we're focusing on Republicans, it's because Republicans are behind the vast majority of this legislation. We're talking about tribalism within the law itself. Cancel culture as modern Republicans see it is a cultural issue, not a legal issue, so it's not really applicable to a debate about tribalism within the law.

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> when you can lose your job for voicing conservative opinions, no wonder you turn to voting trump.

Honestly, on the Republican side of things, if people want to be bigoted in private or express an opinion... I mean, I don't like their opinion, I'm not going to pretend it's not homophobic/transphobic, I'm going to exercise my right to free speech and call them out -- but that scenario would be a very different thing from Republicans passing legislation to take people's rights away, and I wouldn't be nearly as upset about it.

I think there's this characterization of the trans community itself that they're looking for a fight; the more I interact with them the less I believe it. They want to be left alone, they want people to give them a few extremely basic accommodations like using correct pronouns. They want to have access to medical care, they want to be able to make their own medical decisions without a bunch of governors getting in the way. I mean, talk about cancel culture, they want to be able to come out as trans or present as their gender identity without getting fired.

This is something Conservatives should be able to sympathize with, but they seem to be under the impression that cancel culture is something brand new that's only getting applied to Conservatives, rather than the default state of the world that's been applied to trans people and minority communities for generations in America. I mean, I'm genuinely sorry about Conservatives getting harassed on Twitter or losing their jobs, that must be really scary. They should try getting kicked out of their households by their parents and becoming homeless just because they dated the wrong person.

But whatever, to the extent Conservatives are only trying to believe things, fine. They can do that, go ahead. They just need to stop threatening business owners with jail time over their bathroom policies, they just need to stop threatening doctors with legal punishments if they provide affirming care to trans children. It's wild for Republicans to be complaining about cancel culture at the same time that they're passing laws that threaten to take away doctors' medical licenses just for telling a kid that trans people exist and they might be one.

My beef with Conservatives is not that they have "wrongthink", Conservatives can believe whatever they want. My beef with them is that they are actively going out of their way to hurt people that I care about, and that it really seems like the cruelty and suppression of the communities I care about is the entire point of their laws.

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> From a french person pov, the polarity and violence between is literally insane considering you guys mostly agreee on important (to me) issues.

This might be just skewed reporting in France. Republicans and Democrats currently disagree on a large number of issues, including health care, unions, minimum wage, environmental policy, election policy, voting rights, economic policy like tax rates, stimuluses, and unemployment. Even stuff that really should be bipartisan like ranked choice voting doesn't seem to be.

So yes, partisanship is real, it is getting worse, it is concerning both on the Democratic and Republican side of things. But also no, there are real fundamental disagreements here on almost every single aspect of how to run the country. If the "real issues" you're looking at are stuff like workers rights and the economy, Republicans and Democrats do not agree at all on that stuff. The conflicts there are (imo) entirely legitimate: they're actual policy differences based on real differences of opinion on how to fix things.