[joshuamorton]

> 1. You're trying to bake bad things into the premise, without accounting for not-bad things that the mob considers (even temporarily) nonetheless to be something to speak up about

Not really, "insults" are something which, for the purposes of discussion, we agree are bad things. But for the purposes of cancel culture there's usually a disagreement about whether or not the thing was bad.

So some person does some act. I believe this act to be morally bad. You do not (or you do). Given this, you need to convince me that the danger of me speaking out is greater than the harm from the act going uncountered. This is fundamentally distinct from the question of whether or not insulting someone for no reason is moral. Relatively simple analysis would say that it's a net negative.

I'm not going to try to cancel someone over a thing that I don't think was bad, you don't need to try and convince me to not take part in that thing, so we can in fact bake a bad thing into the premise, because based on my moral frameworks, you can assume that I believe the thing someone has done to deserve cancellation is a bad thing.

> Even for bad things, proportionality matters.

I agree.

[cxr]

> you need to convince me that the danger of me speaking out is greater than the harm from the act going uncountered

The Cafferty example is a good one.

Also, agree or disagree regarding the "tone deaf" part of the comment from https://twitter.com/JeffDean/status/1268542647318261769?

(From your previous https://twitter.com/JeffDean/status/1268542647318261769 — sorry, no direct reference for where the "tone deaf" advice/lesson actually came from instead of the paraphrasing, but the conversation would be helped greatly if that stance could actually be nailed down on your end.)

> This is fundamentally distinct from the question of whether or not insulting someone for no reason is moral.

My grocery store quip was not about the morality of the insult. It was squarely on this topic. It was a statement about both the limits of protection and whole-picture pragmatism. An insult (or rebuke) that is not undeserved doesn't differ here wrt these two considerations.

[joshuamorton]

> The Cafferty example is a good one.

Right, I'm not denying that there have been specific instances where cancellation has led to bad results. As far as I can tell, you're arguing that cancellation is never moral and should always be avoided but my prior comparison to policing is relevant.

To be consistent here, if you believe that the police sometimes act unjustly, you would necessarily support abolishing the police. Or even more broadly, if the US government ever acted unjustly that we should destroy the government.

So there's something more subtle at play than "it did a bad thing once", you seem to believe that the outcomes of cancellation are more often bad than good, and I disagree with that from what I've seen.

> Also, agree or disagree regarding the "tone deaf" part of the comment from https://twitter.com/JeffDean/status/1268542647318261769?

Yes, I broadly agree that Jeff originally retweeting that was a bad take, when I first saw that he retweeted it I cringed a little. His immediate defensiveness didn't help, but ultimately the outcome was fine. I think everyone is better off for him having gotten feedback.

(as an aside, even the apology didn't age super well, https://twitter.com/JeffDean/status/1268544712895614976 and the responses are amusing, Erika Shields has since stepped down due to her department's mishandling of the events in Atlanta, but I can't blame Jeff for that, I had the same reaction to the original videos of her, I've since learned a bit more).

> An insult (or rebuke) that is not undeserved doesn't differ here wrt these two considerations.

But (whether you agree or not) a large part of cancel culture is about forms of accountability. Either accountability to oneself (in the form of self reflection and learning, as in the case of Jeff above) or accountability to the larger community (as in the case of Cafferty, if we for the moment pretend it wasn't a mistake).

In the modern era, I'd argue that there are three broad categories for which people seek justice. There's punitive justice (or retributive justice), where you punish the bad person for the bad act (this also acts as a disincentive for future bad acts). There's restorative justice, where the goal is to repair the harm done by the bad act. Then there's "protective" justice, where the goal is to protect the good parts of society from the bad people.

Insulting someone when they deserve it is punitive, and maybe it disincentivizes future people, but it's a weak disincentive.

"Cancellation" can do all three: it clearly has punitive aspects (which are effective enough that people are concerned that it goes too far punitively), it has protective aspects, by which you can take a dangerous person and reduce their sphere of influence (removing them from positions of authority, publishing that they are a bad person so that people are aware, etc.), and it can even have restorative aspects (see Jeff Dean). Personally, I find punitive justice to be the least compelling.

So in terms of how justice may be reached, an insult and a "cancellation" are different.

But back to the police. So I think we both agree that cancelling someone can have false positives (Cafferty). So can other systems of justice in the US. And there are many. For some acts there's the police, for some acts there's civil cases, and in other cases there's other methods (for example in contexts like a job or a university there are formal and informal tribunals).

These systems have always existed. HR departments and such have been around for ages. They have flaws. The criminal justice system has a horrifying rate of false positives for certain crimes and demographics, and a horrifying rate of false negatives for others. I'd argue that these are systemic failures of the US criminal justice system.

You can't really address the false positives with cancellation. I mean maybe in some cases you get a situation where a bad judge is recalled (but is it cancellation if it's an elected representative, or is it just political engagement?) But systems do naturally develop to address the false negatives. They start as whisper networks and then grow once you have enough whispers.

And because of things that started as a "cancellation", Harvey Weinstein and arguably Bill Cosby are behind bars. And the #MeToo movement was born. I think those are undoubtedly good things. I'd prefer it if the justice system didn't need a patchwork of whisper networks and activism to achieve justice for people, but it's apparent to me that it does.

So do you take the tradeoff: Cafferty remains employed but so does Weinstein?

I mean, Blackstone's ratio would sort of say yes, although some research on that statement will reveal that the ratio was really only mentioned in the context of capital crimes. And I certainly agree that we should not kill innocent people (in fact I'm so against it that I don't support the death penalty). But while there are pragmatic issues with redefining our criminal justice system to ignore Blackstone's ratio, there are not as many to allowing us to do so extrajudicially (but legally!).

And without something like Blackstone's ratio guiding us, I think I would take the tradeoff. Cafferty's life won't be ruined, he'll be able to get a new job, and while it is, yes, undeniably shitty what happened to him his life isn't ruined. But Weinstein and Cosby's accusers were able to find justice for the same reason, and I don't see a system under which Hannibal Buress is able to say his joke about Cosby, or where the Shitty Media Men list could be published but that prevents the harm to Cafferty.

Ultimately I'm okay with that. Any way of achieving justice is going to have some harms. It will either let some people free, or harm people who were innocent. As long as our criminal justice system continues to hold the biases it does, there's a need for other systems to hold powerful people accountable when they commit crimes that go unpunished, and when they do bad things that aren't criminal.

The cost of any such system is that some people will be wrongly punished, but that's already the case with the justice systems today (both the criminal one, and the civil and ad-hoc ones I mentioned), its just that those systems favor the powerful far more than cancellation does, so I see cancellation as something that ultimately reduces the power differential.

Yeah, it's not fair. But it's fairer, and ultimately that's what I value.

If you want to minimize the harms against the weakest, let's talk about stuff like UBI and strong social protections. Or workers rights and unions.

Or if you want to get really radical, I can point you to people who want to completely reimagine the economy so that employment isn't necessary. Those people are crazy, but I get the sentiment: if comfort wasn't tied to employment, the "danger" of cancellation is far reduced, since it can only cause the powerful to fall. But don't tell me that I shouldn't seek justice, or worse that it is unethical for me to speak up when I see someone doing a bad thing. You need an incredibly compelling reason to make that argument stick, and 'one guy got hurt unfairly', while tragic, isn't compelling enough.