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Politics : The Trump Presidency

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To: one_less who wrote (65432)4/8/2018 3:31:38 PM
From: Lane3  Read Replies (2) of 361544
 
Compelled thinking or compelled decision making rubs me the wrong way. The obvious examples are compelling people to select PC over their own thinking/feelings about things, which is already widely accepted.

I'm recognizing the difference between a law that forces someone to violate his conscience and political correctness. We were, I thought, talking about the former. Things like a wedding planner being required by law to participate in the wedding of a gay couple or a woman being required by law to give birth to a severely damaged fetus such that the baby would experience only pain until certain death. These are things that sorely offend the moral conscience of some whether or not you or I share their morality. If someone in an office environment using the training you mentioned is being compelled to do something he considers horribly immoral, then you would have a point. Which is why I asked for an example.

I'm not sure how your example applies. No one was forced to vote for Obama. It's hard to imagine that anyone was compelled to consider him the best choice or even a good choice or even to pretend that he was a good choice.

Perhaps what you have in mind is that it was not considered PC to express the notion that having a non-white in the presidency is distasteful and that there was social pressure not only to keep such thoughts to oneself but to change one's attitude about a racial test for president. But for that example to fit our discussion one would have to further consider that placing a racially mixed man in that office was not only distasteful but immoral.

I've spun through the foundations of morality--care, fairness, loyalty, liberty, authority, and sanctity--looking for a basis for judging that immoral. Perhaps loyalty since that means loyalty to one's tribe. Or sanctity if one considers black blood to be degrading. I have not heard of anyone directly expressing a moral objection on those or any other grounds.

So, without compulsion and without moral conscience at stake, I still can't get a handle on your issue.

A week or so I heard a network source on TV use the word "gyp" meaning swindle. It startled me. I thought that anyone sophisticated enough to be in such a position would know that the term is not polite because it evokes bigotry, thus not PC. OTOH, I had no reason to think she held an underlying hostility to gypsies. Is disabusing people from being impolite what you mean by "compelled thinking?" Is it just about using the word or is it pressure to adjust one's attitude towards certain groups, to alter one's moral conscience?

There are mechanisms in society that do try to upgrade moral conscience, what they consider to be an upgrade, at least. Schools and sports organizations and families and neighborhoods. Some like churches and the Boy Scouts do that for a living. Even the daughters of Emily Post. They stay short of compulsion, though, mostly.

Compulsion, morality, PC, politeness vs altered thinking. Muddle.

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