US writer Fredrik deBoer on the reaction (chiefly US, it seems) to the Charlie Hebdo murders: That’s what’s happening today in regards to the terrorist attacks in France. We are having a series of loud, impassioned, righteous conversations about questions like “Should people murder?” and “Should we have the right to publish cartoons?” We’re debating, in other words, dead moral questions, and for the same reason we always do: because that debate allows us to ignore the ones that might lead us to a different place than the celebration of our own liberal righteousness. To read the people writing about this attack, this is the fundamental question at hand: were these killings OK? If that were actually a moral question worth asking, then it would provoke disagreement. And yet I see no disagreement. None at all. Please: point me to any piece that endorses these killings that does not come from the looniest fringes of our political order. This Jacobin piece https://jacobinmag/2015/01/charlie-hebdo-islamophobia/ is getting passed around as an example of left-wing illiberalism, and yet in its very first paragraph, it asserts what absolutely everyone else is asserting: that there are no justifications for this, that the attacks are abhorrent, that free speech must be defended. Please, point me in the direction of a defense of these attacks that is anything resembling prominent or empowered. You are all debating an idea that no one at all is advancing. fredrikdeboer/2015/01/07/on-debating-dead-moral-questions/
Posted on: Thu, 08 Jan 2015 03:08:22 +0000
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