[awalton]

Utilitarianism will let you justify anything if you frame it right, including white supremacy, fascism, etc. This isn't something evidence and reason alone can handle.

Ethically and morally, as a society, we have to choose what behavior is okay and what isn't. What's happening right now is that we're verbalizing the changing of those definitions to include things like "'Grab them by the pussy' and other transparent actions of sexual harassment are not tolerable ways to treat women in 2017," in response to a wide number of people coming forward to complain about it all at once, for possibly the first time in history.

And understandably some conservative people who grew up in the "Mad Men" era (when these kinds of things were acceptable) are unhappy with those changes and inevitably writing articles like this one, thinking that the vast majority of people being upset with them for their now antiquated beliefs and speech is equal to the suppression of that speech. No, we aren't chilling your speech. Society is asking you to change your behavior and mocking you for not being able to. We went through this with women's suffrage, the civil rights movement in the 60s, and now we're going through it again with the #MeToo movement.

I'll defend to the death your right to say something stupid. That is your constitutional right in this country, and we have to stand by that to keep our democracy alive. But you had better believe I will call you stupid to your face for saying it, probably with a sarcastic and mocking tone befitting your stupid statement.

[asabjorn]

What many are having an issue with is that we see some agendas pushed using techniques from totalitarian regimes.

When two sides have different solutions to a problem or opinions, but one side feel morally justified to seek the firing of the other and have the power to do so we are not talking about an abstract concept of moral theory anymore.

There is a reason why functional societies follow the rule of law instead of the rule of the mob.