> See steego's reply.

I have... maybe I'm missing something here. Aren't steego and I saying the same thing - he's saying it explicitly and I'm saying it by example?

Maybe what I'm missing is what you were trying to say with the "search your car" analogy. Is it that privacy has a moral component to it? If so I can agree with that. I thought that "What argument can you use against it?" was meant to rhetorically imply that there is no counter-argument.

I guess I think of moral issues as "leaf nodes" in an argument tree. Things you don't really need further justification for.

You still need to weigh them against conflicting values, but if someone doesn't agree with you that issue X has a moral component at all (or if you disagree whether it's positive or negative), then you are bound to disagree forever.

When an officer asks "why? What have you got to hide?", they've turned it into a practical issue and removed the moral component that I believe exists. That's as ridiculous (to me) as asking why someone doesn't want to be punched in the stomach ("why? Did you just have abdominal surgery or something?").

That clarifies it a lot for me. I hadn't considered how that phrasing just removes the morality component from the question. It seems like a worthwhile skill to be able to detect such comments and point them out for what they are - I'm definitely going to develop that skill.

See steego's reply. Just because something is a moral issue doesn't mean that it can't ever be overridden by some other concern.