Popehat’s Ken White, on punching nazis:
We have social and legal norms, including “don’t punch people because their speech is evil, and don’t punish them legally.” Applying those norms is not a judgment that the speech in question is valuable, or decent, or morally acceptable. We apply the norms out of a recognition of human frailty — because the humanity that will be deciding whom to punch and whom to prosecute is the same humanity that produced the Nazis in the first place, and has a well-established record of making really terrible decisions.
You — the bien-pensant reader, confident that sensible punchers and prosecutors can sort out Nazis from the not-Nazis — will likely not be doing the punching or prosecuting. The punching and prosecuting will be done by a rogue’s gallery of vicious idiots, including people who think that Black Lives Matter should be indicted under RICO and that it’s funny to send women death threats if they write a column you don’t like.
Compare Twitter in 2017, in which a nazi celebrating the president’s inauguration is sucker punched on camera (and we all spend a lot of time seriously considering the political necessity of punching nazis) with Twitter in 2015, when we joked about killing baby Hitler. We were so young and innocent then.
On the topic of what White says, I couldn’t agree more. It’s a great application of the Kantian categorical imperative to our current political environment:
So act according to the maxim where you can will your actions to become a universal law.
It’s sort of a beefed up version of the golden rule. This is handy, because most of the discussion in my liberal social media bubble seemed to take the golden rule to mean something like:
Do unto nazis as you would have other do unto nazis.
This is a much more convenient philosophy, because we all support the punching of nazis as a general rule. But as White points out, the categorical imperative makes it impossible to rationally want to impose a law allowing everyone to punch everyone with whom they violently disagree. Because the nazis disagree with you and I. And some people find Black Lives Matter activists as repulsive as you and I find the nazis. You can’t rationally hope that someone punches you for disagreeing with them, because nobody wants to get punched.
Here’s hoping this is the last ‘conversation from 1930s Germany’ we have in 2017.