An even more logical target–actually, the only logical target–is the individual who resorted to violence to sate their “inflamed anger.” Inflaming someone’s anger does not constitute moral responsibility for the violent person’s reaction.
:rolleyes: Yeah, right. That’s why he made it a point to make sure it was known internationally he’d done it. No ill intentions there.
Let’s say you’re a peasant living in a village. The local bandits generally leave you alone, unless someone posts a sign at the village entrance mocking them. If such a sign is posted the bandits come into town and gang-rape a random woman.
You’re a man, so you are safe from the bandit’s ire. You think that the idea that the bandits behave like this is horrible and it pisses you off. You want to show others that the bandits are terrible people and they horribly over-react to being mocked by a sign.
So do you make and post a sign? You’re a free person. Do you think that by posting such a sign, and getting someone else gang-raped you don’t have a bit of culpability? Do you think the woman and her family will be in awe of your bravery?
Or perhaps, are you a sickening cockhole, only just barely above the bandits in the grand scheme?
Everyone knows that some small number of Muslims will go apeshit and kill people if you mock their holy book. As a matter of fact, by burning the book you increase the number of them.
You should be free to burn whatever book you want, but if you know it will get people killed you’re certainly carrying some of the blame.
As I noted over in the Pit, if one wants to point a finger of blame at Jones then fingers also need to be pointed at the media for covering and reporting on said event. Without the media, Jones and his little band would have been all alone singing Kumbaya over a Quran campfire
You keep expressing this same sentiment. Are you under the impression that Muslims – all Muslims, some Muslims, what? – are oppressing you somehow? Do you mistakenly believe that burning a Koran was a protection of some civil liberty? If so, from whom? In what way is the burning of a Koran attached to a freedom or the expression thereof? I’m aware that there are certainly Muslim groups who would like to take away freedoms, but I don’t think that fact is going to cut it. I’d like to know why this guy burning a Koran specifically was an act that has any bearing one way or another on our freedom of speech.
Yes; we’re a free people. Given that every actor here was a private one, and that the most significant event was the murder of non-Americans by non-Americans, none of whom were in any kind of position of authority, that really doesn’t have anything to do with anything, though. You’re stomping your foot about how we can, damn it, we can, and how we won’t be told what to do… only who was trying to tell us what to do, exactly? We’re talking about what happened after we did whatever the hell we wanted to do, so your point is moot already.
I think what you mean to say is that we won’t be told that there are repercussions for anything we wish to say and do. And 1. that’s not how that works, and 2. that doesn’t have anything to do with our status as a free people. From where I’m sitting it looks very much like a juvenile “can too!” Which, you know, you’re right, you can. We can, and nobody’s going to stop us. In fact, no one did. But that isn’t really the question, is it? Isn’t the question, given that you can, what do we do about the fact that if you do, these other dudes are going to kill somebody?
As to that question, like I said in the other thread, I think it’s more a matter of weighing the value of the statement against the likelihood that harm’s going to result. As a strict question of causation, I think it’s pretty obvious that the pastor was “responsible” for the deaths. But I think he’s only morally blameworthy to the extent that what he was intending to do wasn’t worth that chance of harm. Oakminster appears to think it’s worth it just because of the symbolic value, but I don’t think that’s enough. I think in order for the pastor to avoid blame for this, he has to be able to point to some benefit we’re deriving from burning a Koran. Since I don’t personally think we’re involved in any kind of ideological battle against Muslims, I don’t know what that benefit is.
That’s why those Christians killed all those people when Robert Mapplethorpe took a pic of a crucifix in a jar of piss! I remember now!
For the record, I have no use for Muslims or Christians or any other adherents of any other superstitions. But I’m a bit puzzled over why Islam seems to get a pass on violence since it’s a religion of peace, but Christianity (ie Westboro Baptist) gets pilloried over inflammatory language.
I realize that Christians are right up there in the death toll over the last few centuries, but it seems like nobody will stand up today and call Islam a violent religion. It is. I read of a 14 year old girl being whipped to death recently because she was raped and Sharia law dictated that as her punishment.
Just don’t burn the book that has that law written in it, lest you end up like those UN casualties.
Peace.
IIUC virtually all the media did ignore him when in his latest stunt (this was March 20) he ended up burning the Koran. The media was all there when the original stunt took place and the preacher claimed to back off and that was reported. Unfortunately, the preacher also knows how to use the internet so this latest act was posted on his site.
Timeline:
http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/04/01/timeline-of-floridas-quran-burning-pastor/
Yep. Jones is a fucking troll and a first rate asshole to boot. But you know what? There’s no law in this country against being either a troll or an asshole. And he didn’t force anyone to go on a killing spree.
In this case the media did seem to ignore it. In fact, I had no idea this had happened until I heard about the riots.
No; he manipulated them into doing in. In part I’m sure because of the attitude we have in the country that it’s taboo to hold right wingers responsible for whipping up fanatics into committing violence and murder. He knew that whatever else happened he’d not only not face any consequences but just as has happened on this board people would come out of the woodwork to defend him. Just as has happened with the anti-abortion terrorism, Tea Party thuggery, the demonization of gays, and so on; the demagogues whip up hatred, violence ensures and all over people insist the demagogues aren’t to blame.
But it seems to me that you’re conflating two different issues here; the question of responsibility, on the one hand, and the question of importance, on the other.
Even if we accept, for the sake of argument, your contention that one set of activities is “important to our culture” while the other is not, this doesn’t really change the question of responsibility.
You could, in the examples you give, argue that Van Gogh and Salmon Rushdie were justified in their actions, but by the logic you have outlined in the OP, they were still responsible for the consequences of those actions because they should have been able to foresee what those consequences would be.
Now to my own position:
I reject your OP. Jones is a fucking douchebag, but he bears no responsibility for those deaths half a world away. I agree with you that morality is not a zero-sum game, and that people can be fully responsible without being solely responsible. I strongly disagree, though, that Jones is at all responsible in this case.
I also agree with your general premise that we bear responsibility for the “reasonably foreseeable consequences of our actions.” This is simply not one of those cases. You are stretching the idea of “consequences” so thin that it has essentially no meaning. Burning a Koran might have been an idiotic thing to do, but it is, for the purposes of this argument, no more than an act of expression.
In our culture, we set up important protections for expression, and important demarcations between expression and action, precisely because we recognize that talking about something is not the same thing as doing something. And in cases where expression is regulated (such as laws regarding incitement to riot, etc.), a key aspect is the issue of proximity and immediacy. Even if we accept that words can lead people to do things like this, the connection is just too far removed to attached responsibility on this end.
Hey guys it’s Mohammad’s smilie depiction! He’s happy because he just watched Power Rangers, and it was Mighty Morphin’.
:)>
Just as against the murderer’s insane beliefs as a Koran burning.
When smiles are a capital offense it becomes clear the extremists exist to kill for any excuse. Fuck them, humiliate them further, they are trash. Maybe Korans need burned just for the sake reenforcing this is a free society, and they don’t own the planet.
Comparisons to people like Rushdie don’t work unless he was trying to incite violence by fanatics against other people. This isn’t the noble champion for free speech some people are trying to pretend he is; this is a guy who deliberately whipped up fanatics in foreign countries that he knew would never be a danger to him, personally. He just wanted an incident he could use to justify his fanatic hatred of the Satanic Muslims and he didn’t care who died in the process since it wouldn’t be him.
Wrong. It was easily foreseeable. Especially by a guy like this, who is basically the Christian counterpart of these fanatic Muslims; he knows how they think, they think like he does. And I’m sure that this is exactly the result he was hoping for.
Let me hone in on a distinction that I guess I wish I’d made more explicit in the OP (and that **Chitwood **also did a good job of elucidating).
The Pastor is clearly *responsible *for the deaths in that they were a known likely consequence of his actions, and while that alone doesn’t necessarily make him *culpable *or blameworthy, he is also that.
There are two possible objections. If you want to say that he is not even “responsible” in this sense, then you have a very difficult hill to climb, because you have to argue that it’s fine for Jones to say “I don’t have to be bothered with whether my actions will cause the murder of innocents because there’s nothing wrong with burning a book, La-Di-Da.” A moral system that doesn’t consider consequences is insane.
OTOH, you can say that he’s responsible but not culpable. In this case, what you have to show is not that it’s important that we’re able to burn the Koran. You must show why it’s important that this guy, Pastor Jones, did burn the Koran. What was gained, and was it worth the likely murder of innocents? If the answer is no, then he ought not to have done it.
Ironically, I don’t recall seeing anyone yet who disputes the bolded part; everyone who insists that you can’t possibly blame him in any degree for the bad actions of others also agrees that he’s an asshole and he shouldn’t have made a spectacle out of burning the Koran. But this position is inconsistent: if he can’t be held responsible for the harm that others may do in retaliation for his act, then why shouldn’t he do it? Or is it merely that he shouldn’t have done it because it was “tacky,” and the 12 resultant murders are just “meh.”
That is essentially what I’m saying; I got a little sloppy with my terminology in the quoted post. You can’t hand-wave away your responsibility for the known consequences of your actions just because said consequences are one or two steps removed from your specific act, but nor do those consequences necessarily bind you to inaction – there can be other, countervailing interests.
Why was it an idiotic thing to do? Just because it was tacky? Or was it also stupid because it was *dangerous *to lots of people who are not Pastor Jones? If you agree that the latter rationale carries some weight, then you’re stuck with Jones bearing some blame for the deaths. It was an “act of expression” with horrible, likely, known consequences; he does not get a pass on *his *bad decision just because someone else made a separate bad decision.
Those are some of the reasons why Jones is not, and should not be, legally responsible for his actions. The ethics of the situation are different: he should not have done what he did, for obvious reasons.
Sorry, to backtrack: though it was not inevitable, the consequence of his actions was undeniably foreseeable (as evidenced by the number of people who specifically foresaw retaliatory violence the first time he tried to pull this stunt). To the extent that the murders were less than certain, he is *less *responsible for them, but still not completely absolved.
“All I did was shout “Fire!” in the crowded theater. Everyone else made the decision to panic and run. I refuse to take any responsibility for the people who died by trampling.”
Jay Leno, cartoonists, media, ya ya ya + 10,000 other things that should have made some radical Muslim want to blow shit up.
sigh
Jones is morally responsible for being a jerk and for contributing to Islampohobia. There are other “atrocities” the West commited that were offensive to Muslims and nothing happened. He didn’t kill anybody.
Now, if Jones got punched in the face for calling someone a faggot, well…there’s a reasonable belief for direct cause and effect there. Still, he didn’t punch himself.
If what you say is true, then
*
Any abortion provider who is murdered by a wignut deserved it because it happens sometimes and the abortion provider was pissing someone off.*
yeah, exactly. pooey argument.
This is not even remotely relevant. All it demonstrates is a complete lack of understanding, both of the Jones incident, and of the “fire in a crowded theater” argument.