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Comment by theplague42 | Hacker News Reader

I sincerely don't know what you think politics would be except for morals put into law.

Try having "morals put into law" and what you end up with is Sharia law. In democracy you should avoid doing that, because people typically do not agree on what's moral.

Laws should made from purely utilitarian point of view, not the moral one. The reason why, for example, murder is illegal isn't because it's immoral, but because most people do not want to fall victim to such crime so they voted to make it illegal. Same for theft, or even such minor annoyances like fining someone for playing music too loud.

> Laws should made from purely utilitarian point of view, not the moral one.

You are trying to draw a distinction between the "utilitarian" and the "moral". But, to quote the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP), "Utilitarianism is one of the best known and most influential moral theories" [1]. Claims about what is "utilitarian" are inescapably moral claims.

> but because most people do not want to fall victim to such crime so they voted to make it illegal.

In historical terms, that is quite false. In every democratic country, murder was already illegal for centuries (even millennia) before democracy was introduced. In fact, the earliest surviving legal text (the Sumerian code of Ur-Nammu, c. 2100–2050 BCE) criminalised murder, and predates the invention of democracy in ancient Athens (594 BCE) by approximately 1500 years.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200630100724/https://www.iep.u...

We are humans first, Americans second, and Democrats/Republicans/whatever third.

The issue is that many folks want to view others as $POLITICAL_PARTY first and human second.

Are fetuses human? That's a political issue. Who is allowed to be American? That's a political issue.

Hell, half of conservative political rhetoric is distinguishing between real and fake Americans.

That’s fine, and the mark of a well-functioning society is the ability to have those discussions calmly and rationally.

You can only really have those kinds of discussions calmly if you're not at all affected by the decision. It doesn't have anything to do with a functioning society. If you're black it's hard to have a dispassionate discussion about stop-and-frisk or no-knock raids.

If I point a gun to your head do you think we can stand there and have a calm and rational discussion about whether I should pull the trigger? Of course not! You're going to fight to protect yourself.

I always find it curious how easy it is for beliefs seem to line up so smoothly along party lines... even unrelated ones like economic policy and religion all seem to line up in a very clean way in the US.

Is there another universe where all the religious people are very pro-economic redistribution? That seems to be within reasonable interpretation of the teachings of Jesus.

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