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.”
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.