Thinking a lot at the moment about the balance between principles & pragmatism and between making good arguments & negotiating.
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But to focus solely on this is to neglect how things work in practice and whether what you're doing will have the outcome you want.
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If everyone could be convinced by good arguments for good principles, that would be great. But there's psychology & belief & perspectives.
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And so then there's a need to decide what your essential goals are and what will best achieve them.
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But a sole focus on that leads to the abandonment of principles & then there's no possibility of ethically worthwhile outcomes.
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So needs to be a balance in which you have strong principles & good arguments for them but don't always need everyone to be fully on board
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every step of the way. Providing you share the key principles. Being OK with ppl coming at the same thing from a different angle can be hard
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For me, anyway. I always want to explain to people in great detail exactly why they are wrong about something until they get it.
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But this is the fatal flaw of the ideologue who demands purity & will sabotage their own goals in demanding it.
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It should be enough to say 'I disagree with you on that but let's focus on the problem we both see' in very many cases.
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I once found common ground with an Islamic feminist because we both wanted legal gender equality but had different justifications for this.
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Not that different tho. She said 'Allah is just. Gender inequality is unjust. Therefore it is against the will of God.'
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Once you took the will of God out of the equation, our conception of gender equality & justice was the same.
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Therefore, it was probably best not to get bogged down in an argument about whether God a) exists and b) is a fan of gender equality.
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Do you have any thoughts on free will/determinism? I think this belief affects how many think about fairness, law, role of government, etc.
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I tend to avoid that topic coz I find it tedious & to get bogged down in different ways of looking at free well. Different levels.
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I broadly agree with
@Intrinsic29 on this and he usually enjoys discussing it from the same perspective you are thinking of.
End of conversation
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