Livre d'Or

In general I have no problems being friends with people who vote differently from me, but I do have problems being friends with people who actively support political views I perceive as directly detrimental or even dangerous to me and people I care about. I am fine being friends with people who differ from me about the best way to improve equality between genders and ethnic groups, but I don't know how close I want to be to people who think women and minority gendered people are literally inferior to men, or that people with dark skin aren't really human. A cynic might say that perhaps I'm only willing to "agree to disagree" when the issue at stake is relatively unimportant, but I don't think it's exactly that.

Given some of your wording in this paragraph, perhaps it's not so much whether the issue is important, but the more specific and qualitative question of whether it's moral or strategic? It sounds as if you're much more prepared to be tolerant if you have the same ultimate values and goals as somebody else, but different analyses of the strategic question of what actions taken now will best work toward those goals in the future, whereas you're less tolerant of people whose ends, as opposed to their choice of means, differ unacceptably from yours.

If so, that doesn't seem massively unreasonable to me. If nothing else, it's easier to have a useful discussion with somebody who shares your most basic premises, because talking about whether those premises lead to this or that conclusion can often be backed up with useful arguments or evidence. And also, because these strategic questions are essentially factual rather than moral (in that sooner or later evidence will come along about whether some given strategy turned out to be effective), it's easier to feel that even your own opinion might turn out to be wrong, so you don't get so unalterably attached to it. Whereas when the lowest-level axioms are different there's much less of a way to convince people; when those axioms are moral then people get very, very attached to them (the more so if the people this person is willing to not care about include that person, of course); and finally I think it can be much easier to talk past each other – anything one person says, the other person thinks 'But how does that work towards my ultimate goal of [whatever it is you don't agree with them about]?' and then doesn't articulate that clearly enough for it to be instantly clear what the problem is.