Okay, the subject I always focus the high beam on here is abortion.
Why?
1] it is a conflicting good that almost everyone is familiar with
2] it is a conflicting good that almost everyone has an opinion about
3] it revolves literally around life and death
4] it is the issue that, embedded in this…
1] I was raised in the belly of the working class beast. My family/community were very conservative. Abortion was a sin.
2] I was drafted into the Army and while on my “tour of duty” in Vietnam I happened upon politically radical folks who reconfigured my thinking about abortion. And God and lots of other things.
3] after I left the Army, I enrolled in college and became further involved in left wing politics. It was all the rage back then. I became a feminist. I married a feminist. I wholeheartedly embraced a woman’s right to choose.
4] then came the calamity with Mary and John. I loved them both but their engagement was foundering on the rocks that was Mary’s choice to abort their unborn baby.
5] back and forth we all went. I supported Mary but I could understand the points that John was making. I could understand the arguments being made on both sides. John was right from his side and Mary was right from hers.
6] I read William Barrett’s Irrational Man and came upon his conjectures regarding “rival goods”.
7] Then, over time, I abandoned an objectivist frame of mind that revolved around Marxism/feminism. Instead, I became more and more embedded in existentialism. And then as more years passed I became an advocate for moral nihilism.
…first propelled me in the general direction of this:
If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values “I” can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction…or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then “I” begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.
In other words, there are folks on both sides of the divide – the abortion wars – who construe their own moral/political narrative as anything but dysfunctional and flaky. On the contrary, they almost always perceive those who are not “one of us” on this [and every other issue] as the truly dysfunctional, flaky ones.
Now, if you were to confront these folks – folks for and against abortion – outside any particular clinic, how would you go about arguing that, with respect to the act shredding the life of the unborn, you see “describing human morality as dysfunctional or flaky” here “as no cause of alarm”?
Maybe I am just not understanding your point.