Trans journalist Erin Reed called Douthat’s interview “hostile” and noted that El-Sayed previously stood up for trans rights when asked in August by Fox News’ Jesse Watters whether he supports “sex changes for minors.” El- Sayed replied, “The government shouldn’t tell you what kind of health care you should have, and if you’re a minor, that’s between you and your doctor and your parents.”
In September, a state university student asked about his position on gender-affirming care. El-Sayed answered, “I don’t think the government gets to have a say about what health care is provided in what circumstances and why.”
Reed also praised El-Sayed for remaining steadfastly committed to trans rights at a time when other Democratic politicians have adopted right-wing framing, saying they oppose government-funded surgeries for trans kids (something that almost never occurs) and “biological men in women’s sports” (an inaccurate and insulting reference to trans girls and women athletes who want to play on sports teams matching their gender identity).
“El-Sayed’s race will be one of the most important to watch on election night,” Reed wrote. “If he can win a highly contested seat despite the anti-transgender Republican money spent against him and the attacks from the right-leaning wing of his own party, it will be a clear case that embracing anti-trans views is not required to win swing states and swing districts across the United States.”
On his campaign website, under the heading “Healthcare Freedom for Women and LGBTQ+ Americans,” El-Sayed wrote, “Healthcare decisions should be made by a patient (and their parents if they are a minor) and their doctor–no one else. That includes reproductive and gender-affirming care…. I oppose any effort to criminalize certain medications and the use of lawfare or funding cuts to stop healthcare providers from providing full-spectrum healthcare that meet all the needs of their diverse communities.”
What exactly is this “logical order of operations” you’re referring to? Can you define its premises and demonstrate how you draw your conclusions from them?
You also declare that “public property is a misnomer” without offering a single argument to support that assertion. There is quite a large body of legal precedent that says otherwise.
Your entire response seems to consist of declaring your opinions to be fundamental truths, wrapping them in unnecessarily convoluted language, and then insisting that anyone who disagrees doesn’t understand logic.
That’s not logical reasoning. That’s intellectual posturing.
I’d be genuinely interested in seeing you express your argument as a set of clearly defined premises and a conclusion. Preferably without using the word “logical” as a substitute for actually demonstrating logic.
Absolutely.
So you have objective and subjective morality. Morality simply meaning actions we should or should not take. If something is immoral, it is an action we should not take. What actions should we not take is predicated on logic.
The fundamental premise here is simple: You cannot desire the violation of your own will.
This is actually impossible. Let’s say for instance that you don’t want to be punched in the face, but then you want me to punch you in the face. You are not desiring the violation of your own will here, your will has simply changed to desiring that I strike you. Even if you changed your mind again, you are still not desiring the violating of your own will.
And since it is not possible to quantify value in an objective way, you also cannot create an objective hierarchy of value for will. Your will and mine are equal, for all intents and purposes. Any and all ideas we might have that seem to contradict that claim are merely our personal opinions.
So what this fundamentally means is that since you would never want me to initiate any actions of which violated your will - AND you cannot quantify an objective hierarchy of value for human will - then it leads that you as well should not initiate any actions of which violate my will.
Imagine the golden rule but edited in just the slightest. It’s not do unto others as you would want done to you but do unto others as they would want done to them.
In fact, majoritively this is how all human societies already engineer themselves - they just take a great many smaller caveats away from this in their own quest for greed and power.
Take murder, rape, assault, theft, or fraud for instance. ALL of those things are only made manifest when at least one party initiates an act against another in which the second party did not consent. If you hand me $20 and your will is aligned to do so (a gift, say), that does not manifest the idea of theft. But if I take that $20 from you without your permission, I have violated your will within a logical order of operations across time.
In short, we both held the same will as it pertained to that $20 - exclusive authority over it.
The reason why you are the owner of that $20 is because you fulfilled two primary fundamental criteria: 1. You desired exclusive authority over it. And 2. You did not violate the will of another as it pertains to that $20 in order to obtain exclsuive authority over it.
In other words, you wanted it and you didn’t steal it.
And these things predated my will to also hold exclusive authority over it. We have a conflict here though - a conflict of wills - where both of us desire an outcome that we both cannot have. There is only one $20 bill and both of us want exclusive authority over it, but only one of us can.
So morally, we back you, because logically neither of us can desire the violation of our own wills and also because your will predated mine. In short, in order for you to continue to hold exclusive authority over that $20, you need do nothing, whereas for me to hold exclusive authority over it, I must violate the second rule of ownership - I must violate your will in order to have it. I have to rob you.
This is why societies punish murderers, rapists, robbers, and fraudsters. They don’t punish all of them because of power and corruption, but as a whole, all societies always have done this, or desired to do this, given their resources and power.
Rape as another example does not manifest unless there’s at least one non-consenting party. Same thing for murder. If both of us went into an MMA match together for example and we both fully understand the risks therein - including but not limited to possible death - then so long as we both followed the rules then if one of us died in the ring, we didn’t commit murder. Would it be a tragedy? Well, sure, but it wouldn’t (and shouldn’t) be called murder.
Now if I laced my gloves with lead which wasn’t in the rules and you didn’t consent to that? Then I murdered you. Even if my intent wasn’t to kill you, that is still breaking your consent which lead to a highly negative outcome for you. In many societies across the world as well we wouldn’t even classify such an act as first degree murder, and the penalty wouldn’t be as severe, though it would still be severe.
Or if someone tries to enter my home to harm me and my family and I put them down - that too isn’t murder, even though the assailant didn’t want to die, the logic there is that my will predated theirs - I did not want someone to attack me and my family, or even enter my home without my consent - so the moment they did my act of violence was a reaction to their initiated act of which violated my will. It’d be akin to taking my $20 back if you stole it from me. I should be allowed to at that point even if you don’t want me to because it’s my $20.
In fact you already agree to this because you have no choice because of the two cardinal premises here. You would never want me for example to violate your will, so even if you were to tell me you would be OK if I took $20 from you that’s missing the point - that just means your will was aligned to give me $20. I again, never robbed you. You never ACTUALLY want to be robbed, you might just agree if someone takes something from you that you subjectively agree with their justification for doing so and thus, change your will so that you would be OK with them having what they took.
Your will was never violated then.
I think I see the problem now. You’re confusing a moral principle you personally endorse with a conclusion that necessarily follows from logic.
Your entire philosophy appears to depend on three claims:
Except 3 does not logically follow from 1 and 2.
I can acknowledge that you don’t want your will violated, acknowledge that your will has no objectively demonstrable superiority over mine, and still decide to violate it.
You can call that immoral. You can call me selfish. But you cannot call it logically contradictory without introducing an additional moral premise establishing that I ought to respect your will.
You’re attempting to derive an “ought” from an “is,” and you’ve simply skipped the step where you’re supposed to justify it.
But your theory of property rights gets even more interesting.
You claim that ownership requires two things: wanting exclusive authority over something and not violating anyone else’s will to obtain it. You then assert that whichever claim existed first takes precedence.
Okay. Let’s test that.
I hereby declare my desire for exclusive authority over the entire surface of Mars.
I’ve violated nobody’s will in making this declaration, and my desire predates the desires of any future Martian settlers.
By your stated criteria, I’ve satisfied both requirements for ownership.
When the first settlers arrive, are they violating my will by occupying my property?
If not, why not?
What additional requirement have I failed to satisfy, and more importantly, where did you logically derive that requirement from your original premises?
Because this illustrates the fundamental problem with your “logical order of operations.”
Something happening first doesn’t establish that it has moral authority over something happening later. That’s an additional normative rule you’ve introduced without justification.
You keep using examples of murder, rape, and theft because those are cases where your conclusions conveniently align with moral intuitions most people already share.
But demonstrating that your framework agrees with conventional morality in obvious cases doesn’t prove your framework is logically necessary. It doesn’t even establish that your principles work consistently in less obvious cases.
And the funniest part is your insistence that I “already agree” with your philosophy because I supposedly have no logical choice.
No. I can agree with your conclusions about murder, theft, and consent without accepting your reasoning for arriving at them.
That’s not a contradiction. It’s an elementary distinction between the validity of an argument and the truth of its conclusion.
So here’s what I’d genuinely like you to demonstrate:
Can you derive your principle of nonaggression, and your rule that earlier desires establish property rights, using only your two original premises, without introducing any additional moral assumptions?
Because until you can, you haven’t demonstrated that morality is objectively dictated by logic.
You’ve described your preferred moral framework, assumed its foundational rules are true, and then mistaken the resulting consistency for proof.
That’s not a logical derivation. It’s circular justification with extra
So you’ve declared your desire to hold exclusive authority over Mars, but that’s irrelevant because there’s nothing you can do with that. It doesn’t really create a conflict of wills of which need resolving in the first place.
Will it tomorrow? Maybe, but also maybe not. Let’s say it does. Well how do we resolve such a conflict? In addition, can you own something you’ve made up but don’t fundamentally know of what it is? For instance, what if I say I own your soul? Does your soul even exist? I would argue there’s no such thing and there’s simply no evidence to support that there’s such a thing as soul, so declaring that is kind of irrelevant. Can you own an entire planet? You know there’s apparently a planet out there and you know it has a name (likely, many), but do you have an actual context beyond that of that in which you’ve desired to own? It’s a good question I don’t have an immediate answer to but it doesn’t nullify anything I’ve said just because it’s complicated. Fundamentally, if you are the first person to ever desire exclusive authority with all of Mars, then Mars is your property.
I never said you needed to respect anyone’s will. I said it’s illogical not to. Logic is objective, and everything subjective is, at its core, arbitrary. There are ideas that are material and ideas that are ethereal - if those are the terms we’ll be using, anyway. In other words, you have ideas such as, which ship is the true ship of Theseus? But the truth there is neither, because there never was a ship of Theseus. We made the ship up. There are only simples arranged in particular patterns.
But that kind of thinking isn’t helpful for us to navigate the world. We know what fundamentally manifests the idea of “ship”, and that’s primarily material, but the idea for instance of “trans” is ethereal - it isn’t predicated on any kind of essence like ship is. We know what ship is not for instance, and we have enough cardinal attributes associated to ship to communicate the idea of ship, but trans is more abstract so as to not really mean anything - it fundamentally means whatever you want it to because that’s all anything without an essence can even mean.
So when you say, “this ship is mine” we can do something with that, but if you say, “I am trans”, there’s nothing we can do with that information that isn’t arbitrary. We can defend your property rights to your property being ship, but how do we defend your rights to being trans without it being wholly arbitrary?
I’m not picking at trans by the way, I’m just using it as an example since it’s so frequently in our discourse today.
To circle back and reiterate: I’m not saying that anyone has to respect property rights and clearly some people do not, but this is a philosophical proposition of logic that’s by far more rational than the arbitrary systems many use today to discern right and wrong. Saying you obtained your morals from god is nonsensical because it is patently clear that god-beings and “magic” just don’t exist. It is delusion to believe that they do, so predicating ones worldview around what doesn’t even exist can only lead to coincidence - it cannot lead to actual predictions of reality of which logic can - with certainty - accurately predict.
I’d be happy to go over more of this because I could write an entire book about it - not because it’s convolutedly complicated, but because most people don’t stop and think what the words they’re using even mean. Reductionism is how you get to truth, and reductionism requires logic to get there. We don’t know the difference between stool and chair, nor when something stops being something as you shave off atoms, or why we’re alive beings made of dead materials, but this is the stuff if ignorance, not of reality. Given enough time and reverse engineering, the answers are likely to come.
That being said, I believe the answers to a solid and just moral framework rely on logic and reason. If you’re not using logic and reason, you’re simply arbitrating. Everything else becomes an argument over justifying why you should hold exclusive authority over something because you feel a certain way about it. This is always just an argument over might makes right.
I would argue that the whole of human conflict does not come because two or more individuals have a different opinion per say, but because they see the same part of the world and believe it is construed in completely different ways. For instance, in Islam, the prophet Muhammed married a girl who was 6 years old and consummated the marriage when she was 9. Traditional Sunni Hadith outline this, and her name was Aisha bint Abi Bakr. Muslim scholars sometimes argue that she may have been older, but my point is that many millions of people believe the former, and if your worldview is such that the prophet of god was permitted to marry a 6 year old then your worldview is likely to accept that as simply a god-given moral construct.
It is not a matter of, “why can’t we all just get along” when you have someone who believes it should be OK to marry a 6 year old with a marriage consummation of 9. For many millions, that is simply rape and there is no way to reconcile this - do this and the answer must be violence. Full stop.
Or another example could be China or Russia’s believe that America and capitalism are sinister agents of the world while many Americans see Communism and the collectivist way as ultimately sinister and authoritarian. There are never any “good” arguments between the two, simply different justifications for why “I feel strongly, therefore fuck you”.
This stance I’m presenting is a philosophical neutral point (it’s more or less the NAP just described in more detail) that explains why it shouldn’t matter how you feel because everyone should be allowed to live their life the way they so choose so long as they are not initiating actions of which violate the will of others.
In short, do not murder, assault, rob, or defraud others.
And the thing here is: The moment you want to try to argue that there are justifications for murder, assault, theft, or fraud, why should anyone care to hear you out anymore? When you show up at my doorstep armed threatening to kill my children, there’s only one answer I have for you, there’s no alternative discussion there.
And I will be on the right side of morality, it doesn’t actually matter how you or I feel about it personally.
Try to use mental gymnastics to pour over justifying why you should be able to murder my children just doesn’t matter, and it shouldn’t matter, and my explanation for why is a hell of a lot more logical and rational than justifications predicated on, “I feel strongly, so fuck you”.
In fact, what I propose doesn’t even concern how I feel personally. You could live your life in ways I completely think are nonsensical, delusional, or down right self-destructive, and my stance is simply that you should be allowed. I might try to convince you otherwise, but never use violence to control how you live.
There is no other way for us to coexist in this world without a non-stop attempt at dominating one another unless we adhere to this kind of worldview. No other worldview comes even close.
Well, I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting you to actually concede the Mars example.
“Fundamentally, if you are the first person to ever desire exclusive authority with all of Mars, then Mars is your property.”
That’s genuinely remarkable.
So according to your philosophy, someone can establish exclusive ownership of an entire planet simply by thinking about owning it before anyone else does.
No occupation. No use. No labor. No agreement. No interaction with the property whatsoever.
Just desire and chronological priority.
And somehow you’ve convinced yourself this is an objectively necessary conclusion of logic rather than an arbitrary rule you’ve invented.
Consider what that means.
If I was the first person to desire exclusive ownership of Mars, every future human being would apparently be morally obligated to respect my claim. Even people who have never met me, never agreed to my ownership, and have absolutely no reason to recognize my authority.
You’ve effectively established that my desire can generate obligations for other people without their consent, while simultaneously claiming that your entire philosophy protects individuals against the imposition of another person’s will.
How did my private desire acquire moral authority over everyone else’s future actions?
You still haven’t answered that question. You’ve simply asserted that being first is what matters.
But why?
Chronological priority is an observable fact. The moral authority you attach to it is not.
And this brings us back to the problem you keep avoiding.
You say:
“I never said you needed to respect anyone’s will. I said it’s illogical not to.”
Okay. Demonstrate the logical contradiction.
Suppose I acknowledge that your desires have no greater objective value than mine, recognize that you don’t want your property taken, and nevertheless decide to take it because doing so benefits me.
My behavior might be immoral under your ethical system, but what proposition have I contradicted?
I’ve made no claim that you want your property taken. I’ve made no claim that my will possesses objectively greater value. I’ve merely pursued an outcome you oppose.
Where is the logical inconsistency?
You appear to be confusing three entirely different propositions:
Those propositions are not interchangeable.
You then spend several paragraphs discussing religion, transgender identities, geopolitics, and people threatening to murder children.
None of that establishes the missing deduction.
Nobody here is advocating murder. Nobody is arguing that assault should be permissible. And nobody has suggested that people should be allowed to murder your children.
Questioning the logical foundation of your ethical theory is not an attempt to justify atrocities. That’s a spectacular non sequitur.
In fact, I agree that consent and nonaggression are extremely important moral considerations. I just don’t pretend that my agreement makes them mathematical theorems.
And your claim that society cannot coexist without your particular philosophy is another unsupported assertion. You’ve moved from claiming your principles are logically unavoidable to arguing that they produce preferable societal outcomes.
That’s a completely different argument, one that requires evidence about consequences rather than appeals to logical necessity.
The irony is that you repeatedly criticize other people for constructing moral systems around arbitrary assumptions, while your own framework relies on an assumption you have never justified: that an earlier desire for exclusive control creates a legitimate property right.
You haven’t eliminated arbitrary moral premises. You’ve selected your preferred premises and declared them objective.
So we can skip the next five paragraphs about how terrible murder is. We agree.
Let’s address the actual philosophical question:
What rule of logic establishes that being the first person to desire exclusive control of something gives you a moral right to exclude every other human being from it?
Not a moral intuition. Not a practical argument about social stability. Not an example of something we already consider wrong.
An actual logical derivation from your original premises.
Because so far, the only thing you’ve conclusively established is that under your philosophy, someone can become the rightful owner of Mars by calling dibs.
And I’m struggling to see how that’s less arbitrary than the moral systems you’re criticizing.
Sure, but so what? What you’re missing here is the whole picture, which isn’t a knock on you. I never said this was simple, but it’s also not that complicated when you really get down to it.
Let’s say you do own Mars and everyone (or at least, the relative force monopoly) respect that and protect your rights over it. So what? Why should that even be a bad thing from a subjective perspective? Someone HAS to have exclusive authority over everything. There’s no such thing as a government - not really. A government is an idea, and ideas cannot own property. They can SAY they own property, but you can say anything you want. An agent of the government can just make a claim saying they can take your house and then the “government” owns it, all the while that single representative is the one who actually has exclusive authority over it.
The notion that you have some say over “public property” (a clear misnomer) is illusory. At least one person who represents “government” has the final say in what happens with that property. There’s no vote, and even if there is, there’s only a vote because that person or people let it happen. To argue that it’d be absurd to allow you to be the exclusive owner of Mars is nonsensical. Even if this weren’t the case, who exactly do you think is going to have exclusive authority over it if we ever do anything with the planet? Someone will. It will likely be divided up between owners, and many - if not the majority of those owners are going to be “government”.
Let’s assume you “own” a house. Do you, really? Do you hold EXCLUSIVE authority over that house? Can you do anything you want with it barring those actions do not violate the will of your neighbors? Well of course not. Hell, you can’t even finish your basement without the OK from the city. But there also is no OK from “the city”, is there? There’s always a PERSON who gives the OK. What does it matter who voted that person to have that authority? Who cares if that person has a badge, or a uniform, or claims to be “government”? Nothing changes that from just being a human being with the final say in what happens to a thing.
And what about property tax? You never stop paying taxes on the home you reportedly own.
So let’s go back to the Mars thing. So you own it, so what? What do you actually think you can do with Mars in a TRUE free society where we actually have freedom of both association and exclusive authority over our own property? Let’s say people ask to buy some land on Mars from you and you say no. OK, what if people want you to let them put hospitals on the planet, or power plants, or research facilities, or some such that might better mankind as a whole and you say no?
Well OK, so what stops your reputation from being tarnished due to an overwhelming feeling from people that you’re just a selfish asshole? If I own a place that sells food, I can just blacklist you from buying food from me. What happens if you can’t make purchases from a large portion of businesses because your reputation is so tarnished that everyone wants nothing to do with you?
What if your money becomes worthless because nobody will trade with you?
A true free society is one where someone can refuse to sell to black people and that’s “OK” because even if you and I disagree with that stance, we have freedom of association, so we can just refuse to associate with that individual.
If you like I can touch on your other points but I only had a few minutes to respond right now.
“Sure, but so what?”
Well, for starters, you’ve just conceded that your supposedly objective moral framework allows someone to acquire exclusive ownership of an entire planet simply by thinking about it first.
And your defense is that people might boycott them if they refuse to share? What does someone’s reputation have to do with the moral legitimacy of their ownership?
You also claim that “someone HAS to have exclusive authority over everything.”
Why? A government official approving a building permit doesn’t own the building. You’re conflating ownership with decision-making authority and presenting another unsupported assumption as objective logic.
But here’s the real problem:
Your entire philosophy supposedly rests on the principle that nobody’s will has objectively greater value than anyone else’s. Yet you’re arguing that my desire to own Mars at noon gives me moral authority over someone who desires it at 12:01, along with every future generation of humanity.
Why does my desire suddenly carry greater moral weight simply because it occurred first?
And before you say “because I owned it first,” that’s circular reasoning. We’re questioning what makes that ownership legitimate in the first place.
You keep responding to requests for logical justification with additional assertions about how you think society should function.
That’s not deriving morality from logic. That’s constructing a moral framework around your preferred assumptions.
So let’s make this incredibly simple: What principle of formal logic establishes that the first person to desire exclusive control of something gains a moral right to exclude everyone else?
Because so far, your objectively derived theory of property rights seems indistinguishable from calling dibs and declaring it a universal law of morality.