Short answer: my ideal victory condition looks like people having the power to make the choices that affect them, and people using that power to make choices I endorse.
I don't expect that to happen, certainly no time soon, but that's my ideal victory condition.
Various real-world approximations of that ideal are possible, but you're right that at some point in any real-world approximation I will need to draw some more-or-less arbitrary thresholds to compensate for regions where the ideal function just ain't computable.
So, yes, in the real world choices arise between people not having the power to make the choices that affect them (on the one hand) and people using their power to make choices I decry (on the other).
My sensibilities mostly tell me that given that choice, I err strongly on the side of people having the power to make the choices that affect them. Whether those sensibilities count as "liberal" I really don't know, but I'm comfortable enough with that label if I have to pick a label.
That said, I'll admit that in the real world situations arise where the reason I decry person A's choice is precisely because it takes away person B's ability to make the choices that affect them. And yeah, as you suggest, those sorts of situations throw my sensibilities into a muddle. "Let people make their own choices" as a guiding principle has a way of short-circuiting when faced with people who make the choice to prevent other people from making their own choices.
With respect to abortion in particular, one can go down the rabbit hole at this point of "but there isn't a person B, there's just a fetus!" Which I mostly consider a distraction, since I tend to think one can always in principle evaluate the value of an existing system in terms of the expected value of the evolution of that system, even if one can't always actually compute the result. In other words, I would say that the value of a fetus is expressible in terms of the expected values of the people that fetus can become, so the personhood of the fetus doesn't really matter much -- whether the fetus is a person or not, the value of a person is relevant in determining the costs of terminating its development.
That said, it's a damned effective distraction, which is why abortion is so beloved as a topic of discussion among people who would rather confound their opposition than think clearly. But I digress.
Anyway, yes, examples like this are problematic for me. I don't feel too bad about that... I'm mostly a Godellian in such matters. That is, I believe that for any decision system powerful enough to make useful decisions at all, there will be decisions that system is incapable of making. And when it comes to those decisions, users of that system will have to do something annoyingly ad-hoc.
I'm not crazy about that fact, but I don't see any way around it.
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I don't expect that to happen, certainly no time soon, but that's my ideal victory condition.
Various real-world approximations of that ideal are possible, but you're right that at some point in any real-world approximation I will need to draw some more-or-less arbitrary thresholds to compensate for regions where the ideal function just ain't computable.
So, yes, in the real world choices arise between people not having the power to make the choices that affect them (on the one hand) and people using their power to make choices I decry (on the other).
My sensibilities mostly tell me that given that choice, I err strongly on the side of people having the power to make the choices that affect them. Whether those sensibilities count as "liberal" I really don't know, but I'm comfortable enough with that label if I have to pick a label.
That said, I'll admit that in the real world situations arise where the reason I decry person A's choice is precisely because it takes away person B's ability to make the choices that affect them. And yeah, as you suggest, those sorts of situations throw my sensibilities into a muddle. "Let people make their own choices" as a guiding principle has a way of short-circuiting when faced with people who make the choice to prevent other people from making their own choices.
With respect to abortion in particular, one can go down the rabbit hole at this point of "but there isn't a person B, there's just a fetus!" Which I mostly consider a distraction, since I tend to think one can always in principle evaluate the value of an existing system in terms of the expected value of the evolution of that system, even if one can't always actually compute the result. In other words, I would say that the value of a fetus is expressible in terms of the expected values of the people that fetus can become, so the personhood of the fetus doesn't really matter much -- whether the fetus is a person or not, the value of a person is relevant in determining the costs of terminating its development.
That said, it's a damned effective distraction, which is why abortion is so beloved as a topic of discussion among people who would rather confound their opposition than think clearly. But I digress.
Anyway, yes, examples like this are problematic for me. I don't feel too bad about that... I'm mostly a Godellian in such matters. That is, I believe that for any decision system powerful enough to make useful decisions at all, there will be decisions that system is incapable of making. And when it comes to those decisions, users of that system will have to do something annoyingly ad-hoc.
I'm not crazy about that fact, but I don't see any way around it.