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by davidgould 2378 days ago
> If you have ethical qualms, fine, but there seems to be a tendency to condemn those whose ethical qualms do not prohibit ...

That's sort of the point of ethics though, it's pretty weak to say "I choose not to steal because it is wrong, but you do you."

1 comments

On the other hand, if I said "I choose not to have an abortion, but you do you" that'd be a pretty up-to-date stance, right?
While that statement is usually used as an explicit indicator that the speaker doesn't consider abortion immoral at all, I think there's a difficulty here in that morality is used in two different ways: things I don't think anyone should be doing e.g. owning slaves, and things I'd feel uncomfortable doing e.g. having an abortion.

Perhaps they're two degrees of the same thing, but it doesn't seem obvious to me.

I think there is also a subset of the first: things which I don't think anyone should be doing but social pressure forbids objection - eating meat comes to mind. Abortion may fall into this category for some, but in my experience even in fairly liberal circles people are willing to object to abortion, they just tend to couch it more.