Still I think you are misinterpreting (not strawmanning) Kaj when you assume that he was trying to assert, defend or justify his (liberal) ideological position. I read the post as doing something very different: pointing out reasons why many political arguments naturally fail when both parties have insufficiently compatible base values.
I believe Kaj does not think that there is no difference between the statements “killing people without a very good reason should be illegal” and “homosexual partnerships should be illegal”. But he probably thinks that the important difference is a matter of value judgement. Even if I justify the distinct moral status of murder and homosexuality by a more general principle, e.g. that an act is immoral if and only if it causes harm, the justification relies on my fundamental values and is no good in a debate where my interlocutor doesn’t share these values.
(I think this should be pretty uncontroversial and politically neutral. Kaj has perhaps made a mistake using the labels “conservative” and “liberal” and expressing where his own sympathies are, which may have created an impression that the article was defending liberal ideas.)
Still I think you are misinterpreting (not strawmanning) Kaj when you assume that he was trying to assert, defend or justify his (liberal) ideological position. I read the post as doing something very different: pointing out reasons why many political arguments naturally fail when both parties have insufficiently compatible base values.
I believe Kaj does not think that there is no difference between the statements “killing people without a very good reason should be illegal” and “homosexual partnerships should be illegal”. But he probably thinks that the important difference is a matter of value judgement. Even if I justify the distinct moral status of murder and homosexuality by a more general principle, e.g. that an act is immoral if and only if it causes harm, the justification relies on my fundamental values and is no good in a debate where my interlocutor doesn’t share these values.
(I think this should be pretty uncontroversial and politically neutral. Kaj has perhaps made a mistake using the labels “conservative” and “liberal” and expressing where his own sympathies are, which may have created an impression that the article was defending liberal ideas.)
Yes, this. My worst mistake was probably straying into normative wording, given that the post was meant to be mainly/purely descriptive.