The thing about being a reasonable person is that we have to be the ones to listen to the people who live in absolutes, in certainty, in black and white and to assuage them when they throw fits that benefit literally no one…

…I am three shades of done with the nauseating hero-worship of people who refuse to compromise their “values” which are really no more than the things that make them feel good.

That seems contradictory. How can you get mad at people for living in absolutes then make absolutist statements about their motives for not wanting to compromise their values? Do values like compassion have any global benefit beyond making a compassionate person feel good? I think so. I can’t really get frustrated at principled people for having principles, especially if those principles appear to be for the overall greater good.

You are right to decry absolutist certainty. You can be quite sure that if you take out a quarter and flip it, it’s coming up either heads or tails (or I guess it could land on its side); you can be certain its never coming up rainbows and unicorns. But, when it comes to whether one or another method of attempting to implement a set of principles and render them into social policy will work better, or if that social policy will even represent an improvement, we have only our reasoning to go on.

Nothing along these lines is certain, and no reasonable person should be absolutist about it, but we should also not abandon logic when hearing arguments contrary to our own. Different people have different premises upon which they build their logical cases, and sometimes it isn’t possible to determine which premise is better, or which logically-dictated course of action is superior. This is why I think the above contradiction should be avoided. You may not agree with someone, but to reduce it to them just wanting to feel good is a disservice to reasonable people who disagree with other reasonable people everywhere.