#115: Bad Speech, Free Will, Apology, Cash, and Power

April 30, 2014

Just recently two men made bad speech. Not a bad speech, but “bad speech.” By bad speech I mean they said things that pissed people off. One of them, Donald Sterling, spoke badly about blacks over a private phone line; the other, John Kerry (aka “Lurch”) spoke of Israel in danger of heading towards apartheid. Some other have already noted that in both cases these were private occasions, but rarely have they followed up with the notion that this does not count as hate speech since by no stretch of the imagination could they be considered to have been inciting others to violence against minorities. They were expressing unpopular opinions in private. The general tone in the liberal/progressive population these days is that there are actually opinions which people simply have no right to have; and if they have them, then these others have every right, nay obligation, to aggress against them in every way possible. Unless, of course, those people have a lot of money or power.

But privacy of opinion aside, there’s another issue not being dealt with which seems to me to be far more interesting.

Philosophical ethics is honestly a lot of rubbish, really. There is, though, one principle which it would be hard to dispute, the principle that, as philosophers have put it, “ought implies can.”

What this means is that a person can only be held responsible for things within his control. Thus, even if shortness offends you mightily, you would be dismissed as a fool if you demanded on moral grounds that a person of five feet become a person of six feet. The reason is that they can’t do it. Height does not lie within their control.

But does belief? Does feeling?

Descartes seems to have thought that belief does lie within our control since he famously insisted that we limit our beliefs to only those which are absolutely certain. I don’t know that he was able to do this himself, but it was his target and, I’m sure, his New Year’s resolution every new year. A fellow named William Clifford published an article in 1877 pushing the thesis that we are morally responsible for our beliefs, which means that we can be blamed if bad things happen as a result of our holding a rationally unsupported belief. There is some support in the law for this intuition since there is such a thing as culpable ignorance. Certain people, at least, can be faulted for having poor information, for this makes them negligent. But extending this doctrine to our everyday beliefs and everyday lives would lead to absurdities.

Whether we go along with such an extension depends to some extent on how flexible we are with respect to morally or legally admissible “harm.” If one’s bad beliefs lead to one or more others’ suffering harm, then perhaps their bad beliefs should be morally or legally reprehensible. The modern Leftie has extended the notion of harm to include “having taken offence” and having “hurt feelings.” This has opened a gigantic can of worms. In this silly game, your beliefs have become a loaded weapon which often wittingly or unwittingly explodes and causes harm to even innocent bystanders. “Ban bad beliefs” is of a part with “ban guns.” Both bad beliefs and guns hurt people, and so they must be banned. We want a world free of guns, but also bad beliefs. But can we, even with the best intentions, neutralize our bad beliefs?

Test yourself.

Look at your two hands before you. I think you believe that you have two hands and they are before you, but can you stop believing that at will? It reminds one of that wonderful rhetorical question: Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes? It seems at the very least extremely difficult and if you succeed it would probably be at the cost of your common sense. Now, this is a very special case and what’s at stake in real life are much fuzzier beliefs, but ones which are arguably more important. I’m thinking of beliefs by which we guide our lives, practical ones, generalizations or rules for getting through life. In many cases, most, in fact, we couldn’t provide the grounds we have for holding them, but equally in many cases, we would be loathe to relinquish them. The key question is not whether these are good beliefs or bad ones, whether we really have good grounds for holding them or not; the key question is whether we can stop believing them by an act of will. We do believe them. Others often do not. Can we make them happy by simply choosing to no longer hold them?

And what about feelings? Lefties care a lot about feelings, but do they feel that people have the right to feel however they do? Are all feelings equally allowable? What if someone expresses a feeling of revulsion with respect to gays and their sexual habits? Must that person be bullied and threatened for the fact of feelings over which they have no control? What if the very thought of blue cheese makes you want to toss your cookies? Can you change that reaction by an act of will? But, if you can’t, then then “ought implies can” says that you are not blamable for feeling that way, and neither is the person who finds homosexual activity revolting.

Now, I can understand people wanting to punish or even kill people who hold such bad beliefs, the ones they can’t stand, but what frosts my ass is the sheer stupidity and hypocrisy of their moral outrage. They are morally outraged that so-and-so believes in his heart that they are unappetizing and undesirable. How can they be morally outraged? He believes what he believes, and he can’t change it. He can’t change it any more than they can change believing that he is unappetizing and undesirable.

The NAACP of LA is outraged by Donald Sterling, but not so outraged that they want to turn of the spigot to his money.

The ADL is outraged by what Kerry said, but not so outraged that they don’t do a one eighty as soon as he utters a pseudo-apology. Why, because he’s still Secretary of State (as sad a comment on our times as that is) and could still be of some use.

The truth is that none of these parties gives a rat’s ass about what the miscreant actually believes; all they care about is power and consequences. They see the bad speech as an opportunity to acquire power from which to acquire benefits. They engage in an extortion dance with the unfortunate miscreant.

The first part of the extortion minuet is to force the miscreant to publicly recant. This is the “Apology” phase. Religions and the commies did this historically with torture and drugs. Today, they do it with the public media, shunning, and screaming. The absurdity of this is palpable. Of course, they can make you apologize. Our POW`s said whatever they had to in order to avoid pain. You can make people say anything, but you can’t make them alter their beliefs, at least not without Commie-style conditioning and torture. But, once again, it really never was about their beliefs at all.

The second part of the minuet is to force some benefits out of the miscreant. In Donald Sterling`s case, the benefits are monetary. Give us the cash, Don, and we’ll get off your case. Or, on the other hand, start behaving like a fair-minded intermediary, Lurch, and we’ll stop pointing out what a biased loser you are.

This public extortion dance is popular entertainment and at the same time quite disgusting, but worse than that, it distracts us from the more important thing, namely the old American ideal of freedom of opinion and expression. The enemies of free belief and expression no longer lurk in the shadows to do their evil work, they feel completely free to intimidate and threaten their targets right in the open, and right in the heart of where freedom ought to live, the university. The Leftie thug has made the academy his new home.

It’s not only the case that people can’t change their beliefs at will, but also that the only way they may change their beliefs is under the influence of reason and persuasion. Threat and intimidation, the stock in trade of the Left, can certainly change what people say, but only persuasion has a chance of changing their beliefs.

Unfortunately, it’s not really about beliefs at all in the popular mind and verbal persuasion does not make popular entertainment as good as mob thuggery does.