>We solve this dilemma in one of two ways. Blood and fire until 'they' are gone or learning to live together despite having differing moral structures.
The first method is the only workable one. The second is impossible: many peoples' morality absolutely requires that they impose their moral values on everyone around them. So "learning to live together" would require living by the moral codes of people you fundamentally disagree with.
Just as an example from your list: abortion. The pro-choice people would be perfectly happy to have legal access to abortions, and for anti-abortion people to simply not get any. That won't work for anti-abortion people, who will insist on legislatively banning all abortions (to varying degrees, to be fair). The only way to live peacefully with anti-abortion people is to simply give up and let them ban abortion. This obviously is unacceptable to pro-choice people. I can make similar arguments about many other moral positions, such as whether women should be allowed to drive or not.
> The only way to live peacefully with anti-abortion people is to simply give up and let them ban abortion. This obviously is unacceptable to pro-choice people. I can make similar arguments about many other moral positions, such as whether women should be allowed to drive or not.
Well, I agree with your general point that people with an absolutist view of abortion may not be able to live together. However, for most, I think the issue is somewhere in the middle, and may not be the highest priority:
- you may be anti-abortion but agree that in some cases abortion is useful/necessary, e.g. for medical reasons
- you may be pro-choice but agree to a limit on abortions in the final weeks of pregnancy(rights of the woman vs rights of the unborn get very blurry there)
Abortion may be an important issue to you but not the most important. An anti-abortion person may be able to compromise living with legal abortion, as long as they are given some small compromise, and as long as their other issues are resolved to their satisfaction(e.g. economy). A pro-choice person may be able to compromise living with illegal abortion if given some compromise for the most extreme exceptions(e.g. rape, medical), as long as their more important issues are settled to their satisfaction.
I believe most people do not hold an absolutist view in earnest, even if they express one publicly. There are plenty of reasons why that is - it's much easier to give a voice to the absolutist view, it's a simple soundbite("abortion is murder!"), it's easy to "recruit" people by othering the opposition - "it's only idiot conservatives that want to ban abortion, no smart reasonable person would stop women from having a choice".
I would like to believe that, given the opportunity of honest discussion, people would agree that finding a compromise is best for their community. I believe the underlying issue behind many such social rifts is that the community cohesion has eroded away, with people split into tribes and into an us vs them mentality. This means that even if they are amenable to compromise, it's likely to happen only through members of their own community, as they see the rest as "others" who are not worth their time(examples here are a plenty, hopefully I don't need to give any..)
There's always the third option of marginalizing the absolutists and ignoring their demands until they die off from old age and no longer form a powerful constituency. I'm not saying it always works or is inherently better, but it certainly has worked in some places.
Sure, you can just ignore the moralists you don't like, but what if they don't go quietly? Then you have to use something stronger against them. With the abortion issue for example, it's been a never-ending tug-of-war in politics, with each side constantly working to change the makeup of the SCOTUS to either maintain the status quo or to overturn it. While not an actual, physical battle, it's been a constant political one, for decades now. It's never been settled. And with the latest election, the "let's wait for them to die off" idea obviously isn't working so well: the anti-abortion people are winning politically (at least for now), so I reject the idea that the people with strict religious moral codes are dying out. (Notice that, in the US at least, it's religious people who typically have far more kids than non-religious people.)
That usually does end in violent conflict. I clearly phrased my original remark badly, badly; my point was not that the surrender or conflict can always be avoided, but that they are not always the inevitable outcomes. It depends on demographics, the political/historical context and so on. Peaceful realignments do occur too; I brought it up because studying where that breaks down might help identify the conditions that make conflict more likely.
The first method is the only workable one. The second is impossible: many peoples' morality absolutely requires that they impose their moral values on everyone around them. So "learning to live together" would require living by the moral codes of people you fundamentally disagree with.
Just as an example from your list: abortion. The pro-choice people would be perfectly happy to have legal access to abortions, and for anti-abortion people to simply not get any. That won't work for anti-abortion people, who will insist on legislatively banning all abortions (to varying degrees, to be fair). The only way to live peacefully with anti-abortion people is to simply give up and let them ban abortion. This obviously is unacceptable to pro-choice people. I can make similar arguments about many other moral positions, such as whether women should be allowed to drive or not.