Via Rachel Brown on Left, Right, and Center, an interesting suggestion for a moral rule:
While violence may sometimes be unfortunately justified, what if we declare dehumanizing and inflammatory language by leaders to never be justified, and impose a strong moral and international-law prohibition of that. Would that help us restrict organized violence to what is genuinely unavoidable, help prevent gratuitous carnage?
Not endorsing, considering. Interesting. https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/left-right-center/response-israel-palestine-biden-us
@interfluidity How would you define "dehumanizing and inflammatory language"?
A good example would be abortion. Say you have a Mike Pence for governor. How do you write the law so he can't arrest pro-choice protesters for "dehumanizing" unborn children? Hell, most moral protests are "inflammatory" by design.
@LouisIngenthron i don’t think this is a rule you can apply to publics, who have free speech rights. but people in institutional positions of power can be legally bound in what they say while in their roles (and people who aspire to those positions can be bound by strong norms). 1/
@LouisIngenthron so Pence can’t arrest protesters for “dehumanizing language”. that’s easy. a harder question is could anti-abortion activists slippery-slope support for abortion rights into proscribed dehumanization, so it’d effectively become illegal for political figures to support thise rights. 2/
@LouisIngenthron i think that’s a real concern, but not necessary fatal. every rule we define demands lines be drawn, and there is always risk that advocates will push the lines where initial framers don’t mean them to go. that process, drawing, defending, and deciding after all to let shift lines is much of what our court system struggles with everyday. i’m not sure this set of proscriptions of official (and only official) speech would be slipperier than lots of other lines we draw. /fin
@interfluidity I think it is, though, because shifting regulations on industry, for example, is one thing. But shifting lines on permissible speech is far more dangerous.
But let's move on to the second problem... how would you enforce this?
Because I believe that, in essence, the idea is a good one... just not that it should ever be encoded into law. The way we *should* punish leaders who use dehumanizing and inflammatory rhetoric is *by not voting for them*.
@LouisIngenthron i think the reason for a rule like this is precisely because we know in the heat of some moments, rhetoric like this is popular, contributes to leaders’ political fortunes rather than harming them.
so, the wise thing for a democracy to do in cooler times is to democratically choose to prohibit it. 1/
@LouisIngenthron individually we understand that while we have a choice every moment, if we want to lose weight it’s better not to have chocolate in the house, to skip it at the store, even though of course no one forces us to open up our pantry and succumb to it. if someone claimed we should all tolerate chocolate something like home minibars because that maximizes point-of-purchase choice, we’d understand that’s not actually pro freedom. /fin
@interfluidity It seems to me, you're trying to address a symptom, rather than the cause.
And you nailed the cause: "rhetoric like this is popular". If you try to muzzle it, you won't eliminate it; you'll just drive it underground, where it's even more dangerous.
We need to address the demand, not the supply. And that starts with education.
@LouisIngenthron at a popular level, sure I agree we need to address the demand, though I think "education" is nearly always a nonanswer, a stand-in for an answer, rather than an answer.
but the supply by public officials in power and authority I think might have an important role in catalyzing popular impulses towards self-righteous violence, and the behavior of public officials is among the most clearly legitimate objects of public regulation. 1/
@LouisIngenthron nothing is a panacea, but do you think this wouldn't have a reasonable chance of helping? /fin
@interfluidity I genuinely think it would make it worse.
Right now, they complain about being "silenced" but since it's just them getting banned on Twitter or whatever, only their most die-hard supporters buy it.
But if they were actually silenced by the law, then their grievances would be legitimate, and that would help legitimize their entire platform.
The point is, if we address the demand, then these people won't ever *get* to a position of power in the first place.
@LouisIngenthron Why is it a legitimate grievance that a person hired by the state has to conform the manner of his speech to democratically prescribed norms? Is it illegitimate that a schoolteacher may discuss differences between religious communities, but would be fired if she referred to one as "vermin"? 2/
@LouisIngenthron Even for ordinary citizens, the first amendment permits restrictions of the *manner* of speech. For public officials, the legitimacy of restrictions is much clearer, and still this would only be a restriction on manner. One could advocate for war. One could not refer to the citizens of the group we would be at war with as "human animals". 3/
@LouisIngenthron Why does our highest level officials having restrictions on manner of speech that we'd readily accept for every schoolteacher in the nation amount to a legitimate grievance? Or should public schoolteachers have the right to refer describe some groups as animals when they teach about history and cultural difference? Do schoolteachers have a legitimate grievance there? /fin
@interfluidity We, at least in the US, already have a system for this... it's called impeachment. We don't need any law against certain speech for that.
And you may say that impeachment isn't a plausible or practical solution, but if that's true, it's only because a majority of the public have intentionally elected representatives that don't find that language to be enough of an offense to warrant a punishment.
And all of this... is a reflection of the will of the electorate. So long as the electorate wills cruelty, no law will stop it.
@LouisIngenthron Political institutions shape the electorate as much as the electorate shapes political institutions. The electorate under an approval voting system would yield very different representation than plurality voting and primaries. The US Constitution is very self-consciously founded on the insight that "democracy" alone in not enough to form a decent state, careful institutions must organize and shape how the "will of the people" is formed and expressed.
@LouisIngenthron Where impeachment is not an adequate institution, we can make new ones. Why have laws against bribery, when there is always impeachment?
@LouisIngenthron We've been trying to educate the human community to be better for all of humanity. Basing any practical politics on the near-term success of that strikes me as a bit fanciful. 1/