Clearly, you aren't really paying attention to the position I'm putting forth. It's also clearly a personal issue for you and you will not accept anything short of absolute agreement to your beliefs. That's fine.

But what you're doing is basically doing is demagoguery and third-rail political posturing. Therefore, continuing to engage with you on this topic is pointless, and not the type of pointless I enjoy engaging in.

On a personal note, given how I've found out today that I have cancer and need a second thyroid surgery (don't worry, its among the best and most survivable ones), and far worse had to inform my parents of this, I am finding pwning you a rather therapeutic return to normality:erm:

Sure, and same for me. So it seems we agree on the nature of the positive v negative distinction, the problem is here:
Right, well there were indeed two separate distinctions being made and it seems the confusion did indeed rest on you thinking I was arguing they were the same. The initial distinction was the issue of relative centrality and some things being very central to an wedding, and others being very unimportant. While this might not settle the mind of a deontologist, "for me at least", such a spectrum is meaningful. The second distinction was the positive vs negative, meant as a response to the "all acts are spiritual" claim. They are not, were not, and can't reasonably be seen as the same distinction.

You can phrase it however you see best (my attempts have led to unfortunate tangents on relatively important issues like frequency and at what time one does the thinking and the like), but I think there is a meaningful concept out there to classify actions like driving a car and mowing the lawn. They share characteristics such as a) they don't appear to be very important in and of themselves b) we do them often c) we don't usually (ever?) bother contemplation of their spiritual importance, perhaps because of some combination of b and that they are "obviously" unimportant. Seems like "common tasks" is a reasonable term to use here for such things as driving and mowing lawns but if you don't like that exact term I am not married to it. I think my problem (problematic in that it led to confusion on my intentions) is that I sort of bundled the properties into the definition but it wasn't the case that all the properties were important for a particular argument. As in, the fact that we do them often isn't important in and of itself and yet you kept acting like I thought this was a key point when I didn't.

The latter. If LZ had never stepped into the conversation, we could have quickly clarified that the original comment (i thought obviously, but apparently two people disagreed) was emphasizing the relative importance of the two acts, their relative centrality. The unimportant characteristics you have been harping on (like frequency) could be discarded and we are left with an implication like "because baking a cake is an unimportant participation in the wedding, it is reasonable to find it unimportant spiritually". Deontologists and maybe others aren't going to agree with that, but so be it. However, LZ started bringing up examples like mowing the lawn and the like in this new context of "all acts are spiritual" and it seemed like a conversation could be furthered by expanding a bit and trying to capture a bit more of the similarities in mowing lawns and driving cars and the like. While I think I tried fairly repeatedly to emphasize that there were these two separate distinctions going on, I now regret this in the sense that it took (hopefully) all the way until this post for you to understand that I was not implying they were the same distinction.
I really don't think we disagree, it is just that there are two different ways to parse this - each obvious in their own right - and you incorrectly seem to think I am conflating them. On the one hand, we have both stated many times now that what is spiritually positive is independent of whether one is actively aiming to be spiritually positive (and by actively I agree we can mean at the time of the action or any other time). On the other hand, if we take the context of choosing between actions, then using verbs like "thinking" and "trying" is entirely appropriate. As in, positive acts are these things that we both are accepting as existing, and if we try to please God then we try to engage in said positive acts and not in negative acts. It seems like you have interpreted this as me saying that thinking was an inate part of the definition of positive, opposed to one thinks about whether an act is positive or negative. Hopefully that clears the last significant issue up.

To me at least, this seems so obvious I would not have thought it ever necessary to belabour the point and not quite sure why you would have suspected I would think otherwise. You have a pretty consistent pattern of interpreting other's (or at least my) posts in the least charitable manner, and then stick to that interpretation despite repeatedly being informed it was not the interpretation I intended. We seem to much less often discuss substantive disagreements between our respective views which is somewhat of a shame because I am sure we DO have such disagreements, and they are worth exploring, and we both enjoy the effort it takes to make these prolonged back and forths. But it just keeps getting bogged down in issues where you repeatedly take what seems to me to be a very uncharitable interpretation of my posts and stick to that even as I repeatedly clarify my intended meaning and/or improvement its subtlety. Maybe you feel the same way in reverse, but to me it consistently feels like I fully understand your position but you have misunderstood mine.
Obviously. I can't imagine I implied otherwise.
Sure, it has little to do with the random tangents we have gone on later. But the observation of how society commonly views things does affect the original original issue of the level of exemptions to be put in gay marriage laws.

I accept your apology.

Aaron, I can't believe that you actually think:
1-businesses should be able to discriminate however they wish, and
2-removal of anti-discrimination laws will not cause harm and a more segregated... and immoral... society.


Who could possibly be harmed in such a scenario?

Anyone with any disability
Anyone who looks different, either via skin color, ethnicity, height, weight, etc...
Anyone of the wrong gender
Anyone too old (after all if you are too old we can just fire you and replace you with someone younger)
Immigrants, both legal and illegal
Anyone who does not share your religion
Women who are pregnant
Anyone who has children who needs to take care of them
Anyone in the military
Anyone not from the right place
Etc, this list is never ending.

Our laws and secular legal system has established these protections which benefit all of us. You can move to places in the world right now which do not have such protections if you wish. Places such as Pakistan, Russia, and Saudi Arabia come to mind.

Here is another example I was pondering. Imagine there is a guy in the community who is known to be a swindler. He holds business meetings invites a bunch of people and then pitches them his bs investment speal. As a local baker we know what this guy is up to. The swindler (Freddy) comes to our bakery to get cake for his shindig.

Are we justified in refusing service to Freddy?

(assume we know he is going to use the cake at one of his investment meetings)

Aside from our somewhat silly conversation, there is actually some deeper issues in this. Namely, the importance of "intentionality" is I think quite widely disagreed on. Or perhaps not openly disagreed upon, but different treatments of it are emphasized at different times. A gay marriage opponent might suggest that gay marriage is, unequivocally, a sin and violates God's will, and that this is true regardless of how loving ones intentions may or may not be. In my discussion of Aaron I was going with the flow of describing actions as positive or negative regardless of whether one was even thinking about it - ie zero intentionality. Others like you find it to be a key variable and, at least from a secular standpoint, i tend to empathize more with that view.


So just to be clear, at no point did I mean to imply that common denoted non-spiritual.

As an aside for your interest, I have often disliked the word "spiritual" because of its sort of vacuousness. It sort of gets trumped up as this deep concept but is rather amorphous filling various roles as need be. Saying something so general as "everything man does is spiritual" just sort of solidifies this idea that spiritual is a rather vacuous word (ya? you like that metaphor contrast). What I would find meaningful is something like "God is with us in all that we do" or something like that. That seems like a specific concept, for which spiritual is really just being used as a placeholder here for that.

1- Under the conditions I put forth, yes. I do think some businesses will choose to increase the level of discrimination, but that the general availability of goods and services, especially in the more populated areas will create a situation in which those businesses either (a) go out of business because they are unable to sustain themselves without the patronage or (b) become niche businesses that fall off the public radar.

2- There may be some increase in discrimination by some, but I don't think you'll see a broad increase, and that both social/economic pressures (starting from the given position) will not cause significant harm on the basis of discrimination (particularly racial discrimination).

Sure. There are all sorts of possibilities. But I don't think these are particularly significant under the two principles I put forward (especially the availability one) given the current social trends in the US.

But those places also don't have the same demographic trends as the US current has.

I'm sorry to hear this, and I hope the surgery goes well for you so that we can continue the endless banter.

But I won't be continuing the endless banter at just this moment... You wrote more than I can respond to in the time I have before I have to run off to a meeting.

If you had any real empathy, you'd have just quoting me line by line with "I capitulate" at the end of every one

uke_master: good luck and much mojo. I hope everything goes well

Lemonzest: I don't believe existing anti-discrimination laws would apply to the scenario. It's legal to refuse service to people provided the reason for the discrimination isn't based on the person belonging to a protected class.

Best of luck Ute

Why only the focus on race? If not for equal protection/anti discrimination laws, women would be sent right back to the 1950s within a generation. Women are few and far between in corp america executive positions and they are *still* the out group. And imagine the impact in law, finance, and defense (and military if you are willing to include public organizations). Those organizations are good ol boy networks and women have enough of a struggle as-is.

Good luck getting a job if you are latino in many parts of the country. I guess they can all pack up and move to California?

And no one will ever hire a muslim. Those people will be really screwed.

Social pressure isn't going to prevent a business from doing anything as long as they can find an easy way to make a profit, and they will do so. What social pressure got us is people *voting* for these laws.

UM,

Sorry to hear about the "C". It feels like everyone in my extended family has had a bout of cancer at some point. GL and wish you plenty of rungood.

WN

I am more interested in hearing what people think is ethically correct than what actual existing laws state.

well the nice thing about the existing law is it gives you a point of reference for that. Not that everyone thinks the existing laws are ethically perfect but at the very least there was enough of a consensus on them as a compromise to put them in place.

But basically if you accept both that the business has some right to choose not to serve, but that systematic discrimination against minority groups (of whatever kind) easily becomes morally repugnant and damaging to society, than a compromise that creates protected classes and forbids discriminating only in terms of those classes makes some sense. It's a compromise between values where there is some tension between the values that has to be resolved.

And the idea behind the choice of classes is mainly that they are things which we have decided are not a reasonable basis for drawing moral conclusions about individuals. That is, to judge someone on the basis of their belonging to a protected class amounts to prejudce because the classes are irrelevant to the judgement. For example race or nationality. On the other hand, the reasons for expressing moral disdain towards Freddy are not like that. They are specific to him and at least prima facie reasonable.

Best of luck uke_master.

The link between ethics and law is interactive. Ethics to a degree will determine what will be codified into law, and what is codified into law will to a degree determine ethics.

People can also hold that law or lack of law which they would find ethically unjustifiable in a vacuum is justifiable because they support the existence of the legal system in which it arose. For some people we (ideally) make this logic a job requirement, for example policemen.

When people quote law in ethical arguments it is safe to assume they on an ethical level agree with it or agree with its existence.

Sorry to hear that uke, wishing you the best.

How religious liberty seems to be backfiring

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/th...-conservatives

Interesting piece, and I really liked the flow of the language as well: It didn't seem like it was written for idiots.

The main point is a good one, when the underlying cause of negative treatment of gays is discrimination and not the overlying claims of religious freedom... then as religious freedom is actually granted (as in the right of ministers to refuse service etc) you'll see the discriminators having to push into more and more absurd positions.

There is a danger to that as well however. Even if the mainstream does not follow, the people who do are likely to very strongly affirm their actions through belief. Or in more plain terms... Expect the fringe anti-gay movements to grow increasingly extreme and unflinching.

groups like NAACP and the united negro college fund show that discrimination is acceptable as long as the majority is being discriminated against

i have mixed feelings on whether a baker has the right to discriminate. my gut instinct says that do ... what gives the govt the right to say how you feel and who you cant refuse to bake a cake for

but i get the bigger picture... it's a fine line

Thanks guys

Interesting that the author talks about a 'mushy middle “swing vote”' and the author of this article from a 5 days ago (America is turning secular much faster than we realise) talks about a 'so-called "fuzzy fidelity" – ie those with no explicit religious affliation'.

Makes me wonder how many members of the press read each others stories and whether that's how these memes start. Or has this come from another source?

What is your justification for refusing to serve him?

In serving Freddy we become a party to his actions, though not directly. I just thought this would be a good example that secular people could relate to. Acting from conscience is not just an issue for religious people.

That's true, so either we're doing the same thing or there is a difference in the two situations. Can you see a difference?