[Vision2020] Exploiting the Prophet

Mon Sep 24 11:20:50 PDT 2012

Hi Joe,

Thanks for the brilliant refresher on "closed by entailment."  Could you point be made even better by speaking of "moral" freedom.  After all you said you were talking about logic and ethics together.  We abuse our free speech rights when use them to insult and offend.

You do our profession proud,

Nick

A society grows great when old men plant the seeds of trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in. 

-Greek proverb

-----Original Message-----
From: vision2020-bounces at moscow.com on behalf of Tom Hansen
Sent: Mon 9/24/2012 9:17 AM
To: Joe Campbell
Cc: vision2020 at moscow.com
Subject: Re: [Vision2020] Exploiting the Prophet

Courtesy of YouTube Community Guidelines at:

http://www.youtube.com/t/community_guidelines

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"We encourage free speech and defend everyone's right to express unpopular points of view. But we don't permit hate speech (speech which attacks or demeans a group based on race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, and sexual orientation/gender identity)."

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Perhaps YouTube should enforce its own policies and remove the hate-filled trailer video "Innocence of Muslims"!

Seeya round town, Moscow, because . . .

"Moscow Cares"
http://www.MoscowCares.com

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho

"We're a town of about 23,000 with 10,000 college students.  The college students are not very active in local elections (thank goodness!)."

- Dale Courtney (March 28, 2007)

On Sep 24, 2012, at 9:06 AM, Joe Campbell <philosopher.joe at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm not sure what happened but I intended to post a slightly different version of this.
> 
> The real question can't be (as Kristof says): "Should we curb the freedom to insult religions that are twitchy?"
>  
> There is no "freedom to insult religions." Think of the consequences of saying otherwise. Suppose your son or daughter intentionally insults a school mate, making fun of his or her religion in front of other school children. How would the argument for free speech look then? Are you telling me that you wouldn't scold your child for that behavior? Of course, you would as you should. You can't scold someone for doing something that they have a RIGHT to do. Yet there is no right to offend.
>  
> Here is how I would characterize the situation. We have freedom of speech, a right to say whatever we please - so long as our speech does not rub up against other individual rights and moral obligations. Free speech allows us to say what we want, critique and criticize whatever we wish, including religions and religious figures.
> 
> How does this differ from Kristof's way of characterizing the situation? Later he writes: "The freedom to be an imbecile is one of our core values." But that makes it seem as if the "freedom to offend" belongs on the list of inalienable rights. It doesn't.
>  
> This presents a dilemma. If speech can be limited, then how can there be true freedom of expression? If speech can't be limited, then we have the right to be offensive (and worse). Forget about lecturing your kids about civility since the Bill of Rights allows them to be jackasses - and you wouldn't want to limit the absolute freedoms in the Bill of Rights, would you? Neither option is acceptable.
> 
> Let me climb on my philosophical soapbox for a moment and explain the way out of this dilemma. The real issue is a logical one: freedoms are not "closed under entailment," as the logician would say.
>  
> Entailment is the relationship between the premises and the conclusion of a valid argument. Thus, if one proposition entails another, then if the former is true, the latter must also be true. Example: That Joe is a bachelor entails that Joe is unmarried.
>  
> To better see the point, consider this argument:
>  
> Joe has the right to criticize religion X.
> That Joe criticizes religion X entails that Joe says something offensive.
> Therefore, Joe has the right to say something offensive.
>  
> If this argument is valid, then freedoms are closed under entailment: Joe has the right to do X; that he does X entails that he does Y; therefore, Joe has the right to do Y. Here the right in the first claim transfers to the (supposed) right in the second claim. My point is that this is an invalid inference; freedoms are not closed under entailment. Joe has the right to free speech but no one has a right to offend. Freedoms and rights are limited to particular cases and do not always logically transfer to other similar cases for the simple reason that no one has a right to say something that is intentionally offensive to others. Maybe you have the legal right, which is to say that no one should stop you. Still, you shouldn't do it.
>  
> Why is this important? We should stop offending others and stop pretending that we have a right to do so. We wouldn't tolerate this behavior from our children, so why tolerate it from other adults? Again, I'm mostly talking about cases of intentionally offensive speech. Thus, the insult must be intentional and it must also be offensive, meaning something that causes (in normal persons) "repugnance, revulsion and shock" (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freedom-speech/).
>  
> Don't limit free speech. I'm doing ethics and not suggesting more laws in an already too law-governed society. Clearly some people (religious and otherwise) are touchy and that shouldn't stop you from speaking your mind if you think you have something worth saying. Trying to deliberately offend another is another matter. That is not "protected" speech. It is merely a case of someone abusing actual rights in order to do wrong.
> 
> 
> On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 9:00 AM, Joe Campbell <philosopher.joe at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Nice article but I still disagree with the way this debate is sometimes framed. The real question can't be (as Kristof suggests): "Should we curb the freedom to insult religions that are twitchy?" 
>> 
>> I don't think there is a "freedom to insult religions" or a freedom to insult anything for that matter. Here is how I would characterize it: We have freedom of speech. That freedom allows us to critique and criticize whatever we wish, including religions. If the religious find that insulting, too bad for them. My advice: stop listening to what you find insulting.
>> 
>> How does this differ from Kristof's way of characterizing it? Later he writes: "The freedom to be an imbecile is one of our core values." But that makes it seem as if the "freedom to offend" is a positive freedom and with that comes a dilemma: I have the freedom to offend; being intentionally offensive is wrong; therefore I have the right to do wrong.
>> 
>> On Sun, Sep 23, 2012 at 1:15 PM, Art Deco <art.deco.studios at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> September 22, 2012
>>> Exploiting the Prophet
>>> 
>>> By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
>>> 
>>> "PISS CHRIST," a famous photograph partly financed by taxpayers, depicted a crucifix immersed in what the artist said was his own urine. But conservative Christians did not riot on the Washington Mall.
>>> 
>>> "The Book of Mormon," a huge hit on Broadway, mocks the church's beliefs as hocus-pocus. But Mormons haven't burned down any theaters.
>>> 
>>> So why do parts of the Islamic world erupt in violence over insults to the Prophet Muhammad?
>>> 
>>> Let me try to address that indelicate question, and a related one: Should we curb the freedom to insult religions that are twitchy?
>>> 
>>> First, a few caveats. For starters, television images can magnify (and empower) crazies. In Libya, the few jihadis who killed Ambassador Chris Stevens were vastly outnumbered by the throngs of Libyan mourners who apologized afterward.
>>> 
>>> Remember also that it's not just Muslims who periodically go berserk, but everybody - particularly in societies with large numbers of poorly educated young men. Upheavals are often more about demography than about religion: the best predictor of civil conflict is the share of a population that is aged 15 to 24. In the 19th century, when the United States brimmed with poorly educated young men, Protestants rioted against Catholics.
>>> 
>>> For much of the postwar period, it was the secular nationalists in the Middle East who were seen as the extremists, while Islam was seen as a calming influence. That's why Israel helped nurture Hamas in Gaza.
>>> 
>>> That said, for a self-described "religion of peace," Islam does claim a lot of lives.
>>> 
>>> In conservative Muslim countries, sensitivities sometimes seem ludicrous. I once covered a Pakistani college teacher who was imprisoned and threatened with execution for speculating that the Prophet Muhammad's parents weren't Muslims. (They couldn't have been, since Islam began with him.)
>>> 
>>> I think a few things are going on. The first is that many Muslim countries lack a tradition of free speech, and see ridicule of the prophet as part of a larger narrative of the West's invading or humiliating the Islamic world. People in these countries sometimes also have an addled view of how the United States handles blasphemy.
>>> 
>>> A Pakistani imam, Abdul Wahid Qasmi, once told me that President Bill Clinton burned to death scores of Americans for criticizing Jesus. If America can execute blasphemers, he said, why can't Pakistan?
>>> 
>>> I challenged him, and he plucked an Urdu-language book off his shelf, thumbed through it, and began reading triumphantly about the 1993 raid on David Koresh's cult in Waco, Tex.
>>> 
>>> More broadly, this is less about offensive videos than about a political war unfolding in the Muslim world. Extremist Muslims like Salafis see themselves as unfairly marginalized, and they hope to exploit this issue to embarrass their governments and win public support. This is a political struggle, not just a religious battle - and we're pawns.
>>> 
>>> But it would be a mistake to back off and censor our kooks. The freedom to be an imbecile is one of our core values.
>>> 
>>> In any case, there will always be other insults. As some leading Muslims have noted, Islam has to learn to shrug them off.
>>> 
>>> "Why should we feel danger from anything?" Nasr Hamid Abu Zyad, one of the Islamic world's greatest theologians, said before his death in 2010. "Thousands of books are written against Muhammad. Thousands of books are written against Jesus. O.K., all these thousands of books did not destroy the faith."
>>> 
>>> A group called Muslims for Progressive Values noted a story in Islamic tradition in which Muhammad was tormented by a woman who put thorns in his path and went so far as to hurl manure at his head as he prayed. Yet Muhammad responded patiently and tolerantly. When she fell sick, he visited her home to wish her well.
>>> 
>>> For his time, Muhammad was socially progressive, and that's a thread that reformers want to recapture. Mahmoud Salem, the Egyptian blogger better known as Sandmonkey, wrote that violent protests were "more damaging to Islam's reputation than a thousand so-called 'Islam-attacking films.' "
>>> 
>>> He suggested that Egyptians forthrightly condemn Islamic fundamentalists as "a bunch of shrill, patriarchal, misogynistic, violent extremists who are using Islam as a cover for their behavior."
>>> 
>>> Are extremists hijacking the Arab Spring? They're trying to, but this is just the opening chapter in a long drama. Some Eastern European countries, like Romania and Hungary, are still wobbly more than two decades after their democratic revolutions. Maybe the closest parallel to the Arab Spring is the 1998 revolution in Indonesia, where it took years for Islamic extremism to subside.
>>> 
>>> My bet is that we'll see more turbulence in the Arab world, but that countries like Egypt and Tunisia and Libya won't fall over a cliff. A revolution isn't an event, but a process.
>>> 
>>> I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook and Google+, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> -- 
>>> Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
>>> art.deco.studios at gmail.com
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
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