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Dont like trans-women in the women's bathroom? Lets address this "problem". We can pass a law so that at anytime you suspect a woman may look a bit too masculine you are allowed to inspect her genitalia, call the cops on them if their genitals look suspicious. That way you dont need to worry about all those "creeps" using the bathroom with your daughters.
@freemo just because a social custom is difficult to enforce doesn't mean all social customs should be ignored
@skells Yea it kinda does. There is no ethical way to enforce it.
@freemo we don't punish extra marital affairs
@skells sure we do, if proven in a court of law there an be severe civil penalties
@freemo proven in a court of law is a little different to inspecting peoples genitals on demand
@skells yes it is, so comparing something provable (maritial affairs) with sonething unprovable (your gender/sex), at least in a moral way, is pointless. So not sure why you brought it up.
@freemo i'll tip my cap to gender but in 99.99% of cases sex is a matter of genetics
don't have a horse in this race, found your argument a straw man though
@skells And I am saying that a cultural norm whiuch is impossible to ethically enforce does **not** have value and in fact causes harm as people will try to enforce it anyway causing harm.
@freemo I understand your position, it's not so clear cut imo
more broadly, we use religion to enforce ethical standards we can't police
the ethics of religion per se is another can of worms though
@skells still waiting to hear an example of a cultural norm that is impossible to ethically identify yet beneficial to adopt. Personally i cant think of one, which makes it fairly clear cut if not.
> considering another person's perspective before taking an action that effects them
> washing your hands after using the bathroom
> forethought and prediction of other road users actions while using a car
> don't anonymously abuse people online
most of them involve mental reflection or invading someone's privacy to enforce
@skells all of those are quite easy to identify without violating soneone ethically. I can see if someone considers another persons perspective based on their action and interaction. I can physically see them washing their hands, i can observe how they drive. I can see watch how a person interacts online... a person using a toilet though i have no way to ethically distinguish a persons sex.
@skells requiring mental reflection wasnt the criteria bythe way.. sure it may require that but that is irrelevant to the point as we are talki g about things that cant be ethically identified, not things that require mental reflection.
@freemo my point is that mental reflection is difficult to identify
that you can observe that another person thinks about another person's perspective is true to a certain extent, but it would be going too far that you can infer all of a person's ethical/unethical decisions from their outer behaviour
@skells which is why social norms dont polkce thoughts they police actions... we say to say please and thank you. All of the acts you describe matter because of the actions, what a person is thinking is irrelevant so long as their actions are ethical.
Going back to bathrooms, we again are talking about actions (using a bathroom, checking sex). What a person is thinking isnt particularly relevant to what we are discussing.
@freemo not psyched to get into the trans bathroom thing tbh, I can see both sides of the arguement and it's not a simple issue
more generally, I agree that social norms as thoughts is nebulous af, but i think there are plenty of actions seen as socially destructive that are difficult to practically enforce
white collar crime, adultery, malicious lying etc.
r.e. lying (and setting white lies aside, although i think it's an interesting area...) I've always thought that it was interesting that one of the ten commandments is "do not bear false witness" rather than "don't lie," perhaps somewhat to your point, that not lying is much harder to enforce than giving false witness in a court of law
Difficult to prove != unethical to prove.
There are ple ty if difficukt things to prove that people will get away with but still worth making illegal or discouraged in society. But that isnt what we are talking about, we are talking about things where the only way to prove them are fundementally unethical. The only way to prove what genitals a person has is to have their genitals inspectes. This isnt hard to prove it is in fact very easy to prove, its just unethical to do so.
@freemo this is a fair distinction to make
i think there has to be a recognition how profound a change in how we view one another is being suggested with the trans issue however
@skells there is no doubt the trans movement is asking for some profound changes in how we look at things. I am not claiming all those suggestions are valid either. In this case im just talking about bathrooms and i think in regard to that issue its fairly clear cut what the answer is. As for other areas of the trans debate we can address their merrit seperately.
@freemo
my point has nothing to do with trans-rights, I'm saying a cultural norm being difficult to police and the value of that norm are separate attributes
A = policy/norm X has social value
B = policy/norm X is difficult to police
a priori there's no correlation or link between statement A and B