Eternal Problems And Pat Solutions
Imagine being unceremoniously thrown out of a new friend’s home after saying one thing that caught him off-guard. In the moment you figured that your line would be interpreted as another benign statement, but it utterly repelled him. The line’s contents are irrelevant for our purposes. For all we care; a spin on the recent news, a twistedly crass joke, a thinly-veiled threat directed at someone you both know, a flawless syllogism getting at a sacrilegious truth. It could’ve been anything. Apart from the isolated utterance, suppose also that you had ample reason to suspect that the unapologetically opinionated personality you’ve been told you have many times over could have gone on to ruffle the friend you’ve just begun to know. You had a sense that it could happen, or would happen, somewhere down the line. You didn’t figure it would be this soon, but there you go. What’s important is that you chose to speak in a free-wheeling manner, as you tend to, instead of letting your apprehension of a possibly unpleasant confrontation stop you.
You believe exactly what the
impartial spectator believes. The impartial spectator can at once understand
that you were not entitled to remain guested in the salty friend’s pad, while grasping that he acted like a jerk for booting you. As a conversationalist, your friend is free to have an intensely negative overreaction to what you said, and
indeed to any statement, for any reason. But as a host, and especially as
one who considers himself to be at least somewhat gracious, he is morally
analyzable in this circumstance. He is capable of properly handling vs. mishandling
his follow-up action to the gut-level reaction that any statement spawns
in him. This is something he can do well or badly even when he’s not in the
midst of hosting company, but he can do it egregiously poorly whenever an
opportunity to mistreat a guest he’s invited into his home arises.
So I want to be clear that the
host’s knee-jerk sensibilities are
not what lands him in the wrong. His freely acting
on those sensibilities, to the tune of that gut-level defensiveness, is what
makes him wrong and a graceless bastard. By catering to primal hankerings; by welcoming the outburst, the ex-friend shows himself to be inadequately introspective of his first-order mental faculties.
This behavior is improper in
some moral ways (he wronged you) and in some non-moral ways as well (he’s plain
undisciplined and incurious). His giving you the boot entails what I like to call dualistic misconduct as it captures
two main sources of misconduct; epistemic and moral.
To recap; you have no rights
claims (i.e. legal, constitutional, contractual) to remain on this person’s property, and you
know it. Yet this sheds zero light as to the evaluative status of the host’s
decision to expunge you from his home and, presumably, to end the friendship over
it.
If you see nothing wrong with this summary, consider yourself conceptually spared from about ~99% of False Dilemma arguments surrounding Big Tech deplatforming supposed ideological groups on ideological or non-ideological grounds. Maybe the ~99% estimate is pushing it, but honestly I can’t see it being much lower than that. It would take me less than twenty seconds to recount the totality of people who frequently discuss these themes and who manage to avoid indulging various low-resolution mental models for calibrating the problem-deliberation-solution dynamics and stakes. Most of the commentators with whom I’m familiar have shown themselves to favor something akin to one (or two) of the following three proposition-paragraphs:
