Saturday, July 11, 2020

enhanced puzzlement

followup to this

The people who've been kind enough to respond to this post have been informing me that my reaction doesn't have to be controlled by the victims' response. Well I knew that. Only one of them has insistently doubled down on the observation that, not only am I free to do anything I want to do, I'm free to do anything I've already said that I don't want to do. This is not helpful, and indeed I find it morally obtuse.

This is not about my feelings about the incident. I'm appalled, shattered, dismayed, and very sad. It's about the practical question of, what exactly should I do about it? The thing that I don't want to do is express a reaction through a towering anger far greater than that of the actual victims of the actual crime. I've seen that position in cases of this kind before, and I find that very problematic. (This doesn't work the other way around, by the way. Vengeance and mercy are not commutative.)

I'm trying to tread carefully here, and what an appropriate response might be is guided - not controlled, but triangulated - by what other people find appropriate. So here we have a situation where the broadcaster feels it necessary to say that the victims specifically desire that no action be taken against the perpetrator. And then he immediately says that he's going to boycott, which seems at first glance to be the exact opposite of the advice he's just passed on. He's free not to follow it, of course, but he doesn't even address the question. There's a cognitive dissonance here that leaves me quite uncertain of what kind of a response to make.

3 comments:

  1. Again you are over thinking it. The broadcaster mentioned what the victims said so that his audience can decide for themselves if that is an issue for them. He is also telling them what he intends to do, again in case that is a component of their decision making process. It's called providing information, in this case all the information the broadcaster thinks the audience needs to decide on what to do next.

    ReplyDelete
  2. "so that his audience can decide for themselves if that is an issue for them." And that's precisely what I'm trying to do. What you'd ordinarily call "deciding for yourself" is what you call "overthinking it" if you don't like the resulting line of reasoning.

    "Providing information" - except for any information as to why he's decided to ignore the advice he's just passed on. That would be a major piece of relevant information.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Granted, his line of reasoning would have been valuable. I suspect he (obviously incorrectly) believed the reasoning was self evident. For at least some of his audience, it probably was. For the rest of us, not so much.

      Delete