Apologies, I didn't mean to imply that you personally stated exactly that (it was the GP that did). However the context (both this comment chain and the entire thread) is critically important here. The grandparent, many sibling comments, and many news articles all do state as much.
The bit I quoted from you was
> > all sensible moral systems tell us to treat LGBT individuals with basic dignity
which to me seems to imply that you think her views go against "basic dignity", which actually does seem to me to be roughly the same as claiming they are abhorrent.
> I think she's wrong
I agree.
> and that everybody should be on the same page about that. I don't want dawdling on my ethics committees.
Uhh... I vehemently disagree here. I don't want to dictate other's views, and I am very much against anyone who does want to do that. "Dawdling" on your ethics committee would be... people who don't share your views. Which isn't imo a valid reason to exclude them.
What it comes down to for me is that calling for someone's removal or exclusion on the basis of their views is to my mind an attempt to dictate moral values. On the other hand, calling for such on the grounds of poor reasoning ability citing past arguments they've made seems perfectly valid. As previously noted, if it were me she wouldn't be my first choice (or my second, or my third, or ...). But that's quite different from the current public outrage, calls for removal, claims of abhorrent viewpoints, etc, etc.
If you had a committee on space exploration with the goal of solving technical challenges in getting to Mars would you staff it with people who believed in a flat Earth? This whole idea that people with ignorant viewpoints belong on a pedestal because they have opposing views is just silly. We can reasonably say that some views are backwards and counterproductive especially in this case with the Heritage Foundation that deals in deception and the falsification of evidence.
Check out my response to 'pdonis in this same thread.
I think it comes down to a distinction in kinds of views: contrasting versus undercutting. Ethics committees exist to bring together and flesh out contrasting ethical claims; they can't cope with claims that undercut the ethical endeavour itself. I take the ethical endeavour to fundamentally be about human dignity; someone who can't commit to that can't "do" ethics in any way that a committee will find useful.
I do agree that a committee likely won't be able to make meaningful progress if their views differ on too low a level.
I also suspect we would both agree that an ethics committee whose members don't hold views on human dignity that are reasonably similar to our own won't arrive at results that are useful to us personally (due to that difference in fundamental values).
I also (as previously noted) would agree that people with an established history of forwarding logically faulty arguments aren't going to prove useful and thus have no place on an ethics committee.
Where I disagree is your implication that her views are somehow opposed to our shared societal understanding (as Americans or westerners or whatever) of human dignity. Since I don't know her personally I suppose they might well be, but if so I've yet to see evidence of it.
What I see is an increasingly polarized rhetoric in the media on a number of topics. Unfortunately, that currently seems to extend to characterizing people who don't wholeheartedly agree with trans activists or who raise even reasonable questions about these things as being somehow immoral or unethical people. Such behavior seems to me only to stifle any useful discourse on the topic, drive people farther apart, and to actively push views on both sides towards ever farther extremes.
(As an aside, that last paragraph would seem to fit almost as well in any of the Facebook regulation threads of late. Looking at the history of the early 1900s, I honestly have to wonder if social media is really what's causing all these problems, including the one being discussed here, or if it simply makes visible the extreme polarization that currently exists.)
Apologies, I didn't mean to imply that you personally stated exactly that (it was the GP that did). However the context (both this comment chain and the entire thread) is critically important here. The grandparent, many sibling comments, and many news articles all do state as much.
The bit I quoted from you was
> > all sensible moral systems tell us to treat LGBT individuals with basic dignity
which to me seems to imply that you think her views go against "basic dignity", which actually does seem to me to be roughly the same as claiming they are abhorrent.
> I think she's wrong
I agree.
> and that everybody should be on the same page about that. I don't want dawdling on my ethics committees.
Uhh... I vehemently disagree here. I don't want to dictate other's views, and I am very much against anyone who does want to do that. "Dawdling" on your ethics committee would be... people who don't share your views. Which isn't imo a valid reason to exclude them.
What it comes down to for me is that calling for someone's removal or exclusion on the basis of their views is to my mind an attempt to dictate moral values. On the other hand, calling for such on the grounds of poor reasoning ability citing past arguments they've made seems perfectly valid. As previously noted, if it were me she wouldn't be my first choice (or my second, or my third, or ...). But that's quite different from the current public outrage, calls for removal, claims of abhorrent viewpoints, etc, etc.