There are a number of situations where people cannot abide someone’s neutrality and want to enforce them to take a stance - for instance, the BLM demonstrators who were demanding that a woman at a restaurant raise her fist in support of BLM, or the practice of having schoolchildren recite the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, etc.
This is not a thread about legal right to remain neutral - that would be a different topic - but rather, moral right to remain neutral and not pick a side. For instance, there was one time when the men and women’s U.S. soccer teams both wore LGBT-supporting numerals on their jerseys. Presumably, it would have been risky for a player to say “I would prefer not to take a political side by wearing such statement-making jerseys”. What if, say, a factory boss demanded that all his employees wear MAGA hats?
People like to say “If you remain neutral in the face of oppression, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” So…is there a moral right for people to remain neutral or not?
Morals, presumably, would include an aversion to evil and bad stuff.
It’s not really about whether you have a right to be neutral. If you have morals, then you won’t be neutral about any issue where you see a moral, well, issue.
So, when you are neutral, you are demonstrating that you don’t have a moral problem with either side - or at least no problem compelling enough to override other factors and compel you to take a side.
So if you remain neutral in the face of oppression, you demonstrate that you do not have a problem with oppression.
No. But lots of these circumstances aren’t actually presenting this dilemma. Not reacting to an obnoxious mob demanding that you raise your fist while dining doesn’t actually do anything. It’s a meaningless gesture – it’s not remaining neutral (and acquiescing to them isn’t necessarily doing the right thing – it’s just silliness from misguided people).
In a real life circumstance – say, you see cops beating or shooting an unarmed black person, or you see your boss fire or otherwise mistreat someone for being gay, trans, etc. – remaining “neutral” is in fact immoral.
There’s a very relevant situation playing out in Australian sport at the moment - the case of Israel Folau who won’t kneel with his teammates in support of BLM.
Background to this story is that Folau is a staunch right-winger who has gotten into trouble in the past for other things (anti-gay rhetoric). I would say the general feeling here towards him is that he’s a bit of a dick, but most people also support his right not to join the protest if he doesn’t want to. Reason given here is ‘because his religious beliefs say he should only kneel to God’ - I rather suspect there’s more to it than that, I think he doesn’t want to come out in support of BLM because of this thing of it being ‘Marxist’. Anyway, his choice. He’d probably get more pushback if he was white.
Sure, and if I thought that there was no difference between terminating an unwanted pregnancy of a clump of cells and shooting an adult in the head, then I’d be against it too.
It’s not their commitment that I fault, it is their reasoning and motivations.
By your statement, then I also understand the feelings that SSM will destroy marriage, that miscegenation will destroy society, or that Jews are destroying the Weimar Republic.
Taking an ill-informed stand is worse than taking no stand at all.
It’s similar to the question of whether we have a moral responsibility to vote. Arguably, we do; but an ill-informed or capricious vote is worse than none at all.
I disagree with this, although I understand where it’s coming from.
I don’t think there’s a moral obligation to join any particular moral struggle. That is, I think you can see the police or your boss acting wrongly and also choose to not directly oppose them. If we were morally obligated to not remain neutral in all such situations, how could we ever focus on anything? If I devoted myself to every moral struggle I became aware of, I don’t think I could even manage to sign up for all the mailing lists. I certainly wouldn’t advance any cause meaningfully. Progress and accomplishment necessarily requires focus, and each of us gets to decide which moral issues demand our attention and which ones we will remain neutral on.
It’s when you actually have a real capacity to do something about it, in real time, that makes it a moral responsibility, IMO. Similar to the duty to aid - if you see someone bleeding on the street you’re obligated to assist.
For clarification, I am not asking for a debate on what is good and what is evil - that would go on forever. Rather, I’m asking if people have a moral right not to take sides (there’s a difference between taking a stand for evil, and not wanting to take a stand for good.)
Say a boss wants to order all his employees to wear Black Lives Matter shirts - does an employee have a moral (not legal) right to say “no, I don’t want to take a side?”
There is a difference between public neutrality and private neutrality. You can be neutral in your heart or in the intimacy of the voting booth, but when you belong to a group your mimetic behavior is usually highly expected. Exceptions are so rare and special, I don’t think they are worth mentioning right now.
