| >Look, things like murder or pedophilia are unambiguously evil. But they're absolutely not. What's the one thing everyone says they would do if they could time travel? Kill Hitler. Those actions are unambiguously evil to you which makes them subjectively unethical. >So it's not out of line or particularly dangerous to say that a person who engages in one of those activities or supports/defends those who do is unethical and possibly even evil. >Extending the life of humans? That's not objectively evil. It has not been clearly demonstrated to be a negative on anything. In fact there are plenty of arguments that it could fix a lot of problems we have. So to come out and attach a label to someone who dares work on such a thing, before we even know what it would mean is dangerous. I feel like society, at least a larger portion of it, understood this in the past. Your creating taboos. Things we don't dare talk about or explore because we fear having our lives destroyed by twitter lynch mobs and the like. Here I begin to question whether you know what objective and subjective really mean. You're basically using "objective" to mean anything that agrees with your subjective opinion. All ethics is subjective, there is no objective base on which to call someone unethical. >No one should force you to have to shop where you don't want to. But what you actually want to do is knowing as "mobbing" in Europe and it's generally illegal (at least in some countries). The issue is one of power. With twitter flash mobs and so on today, you can quickly destroy someone's life with this kind of behavior. Most people don't mind if what that person is doing is obviously unethical but this thread is applying this to things that are completely unsettled. No one knows what will happen if we extend life because it's never existed before. This has nothing to do with boycotting which is what we're talking about. Mobbing != a boycotting campaign and I think you know that. So put away the crazy comparisons and make a case for why people shouldn't be able to participate in a boycotting campaign. >If you said something critical of Hitler, certain people took offense. They felt Germany had been in a bad way for a long time and this man was doing something about it. Why would you question him unless you wanted to destory Germany? So they started supressing thought. If your paper was critical of the Fuhrer brown shirts would storm in, trash the place and assualt people. As we know, eventually there was no one left to say anything eventually. This is so stretched... You're making the jump from me exercising my individual freedom to call someone out to brown shirts. Come down to earth please. >Live and let live. There are people out there with different views than you. Some of those views might be down right offensive if you really thought about it. But society has always been this way and until recently we still managed to avoid getting so polarized about it and trying to censor everyone. Read a history book, polarization is not a new thing, censorship is not a new thing and people exercising their freedom of speech to decry unethical people and actions is not censorship, it's the opposite. What you want: removing my ability to boycott, removing my ability to speak freely is censorship though. |
Fine. I was going for "things society generally accepts to be evil".
>there is no objective base on which to call someone unethical.
If you want to get this technical but I'm obviously using the words loosely here: I'm using "objective" as a short cut to mean "things that are outright proven or agreed on by practially everyone". So nearly everyone would be ok labelling a criminal as such but I don't think most people believe extending life to be evil. In fact, I'd consider such a position quite niche in general since everyone is for it at least to a limited extent (i.e. medicine).
>So put away the crazy comparisons and make a case for why people shouldn't be able to participate in a boycotting campaign.
I think social media has made the random person too powerful. Any random person can decide that someone else is "evil" based on literally anything they want and if they have some means of organizing a flash mob they can destroy that person's life. The victim doesn't even have the ability to sue who ever did it. So it's a major imbalance of power. Normally this kind of power to destory people's lives is limited to the justice system.
>So put away the crazy comparisons and make a case for why people shouldn't be able to participate in a boycotting campaign.
Well, labelling someone is defamation of character and it's not a protected right. You can be successfully sued for doing it (though not arrested afaik).
>censorship is not a new thing and people exercising their freedom of speech to decry unethical people and actions is not censorship
Social media has changed this. Decrying someone everyone knows to be unethical is not the issue here. Getting a flash mob to attack someone doing something that some consider unethical while others consider it some of the most important work humans will ever work on is an entirely different thing.
You never had the right to "speak freely" in the way you're trying to twist it. Defemation of character will potentially land you in civil trouble and no nonsense about "first amendment rights" will save you.