- if you are in the habit of defending rights, you will necessarily spend a lot of time defending the worst kinds of people: Good, wholesome (non edge case) people typically do not behave in a way that conflicts with others, and if they do, they are unlikely to invoke “muh rights” as a defence.
- the same with social justice: Who else is going to require social justice advocacy other than people who are considered disgusting enough by society to be treated unjustly?
I felt the same sense of cautious optimism because this journal seems to be another manifestation of the two examples I just mentioned above. They are doing the grunt work of allowing people with coherent but unpopular arguments to air them, hopefully leading to a better society for the rest of us.
>> - the same with social justice: Who else is going to require social justice advocacy other than people who are considered disgusting enough by society to be treated unjustly?
Ehh, maybe there is something I'm not picking up, but there's plenty of bad things happened to people (and are happening right now) that were not justified by any 'disgusting behavior'. Ethnic cleansing for example - something that happened in my country, I do not think that people who lived somewhere for hundreds of years and killed due to some lofty ideas about the 'nation' really deserved that treatment.
I think you shouldn't read "considered disgusting" as "disgusting." If one religion in power starts exterminating a minority religion, that's at least hatred, if not disgust. And if you find yourself defending those minorities based on principle, it isn't because you think they deserved how they were treated.
Disgust was a motivation for things like sodomy laws and antimiscegation laws. Genocide's dehumanization phase frequently involves evoking disgust, calling the target vermin, parasites, or a disease.
What does it mean for something to be controversial? Basically, it means there is strong disagreement about the morally justified level of Type I versus Type II errors--how many false positives are worth one false negative, in the wages of morality?
This is of course complicated by the realization that across society, achieving "more" of one kind of justice often necessarily comes at the expense of another kind. In a stable society, the justice hierarchy is fairly well agreed-upon (at least by the "good, wholesome people" you refer to) but things can really go off the rails when profound disagreements develop.
This is how you get "good, wholesome people" to participate in xenophobic genocide or political extermination. The lesson of the 20th century is that these catastrophically tragic inversions of the justice hierarchy can come from extreme positions on either the right or the left of the ideological spectrum.
I think the space of "controversial" ideas is essentially created by the interplay between those who are hypervigilant about extreme ideas on the right which might lead to tragedy, and those who are hypervigilant about extreme ideas on the left which might lead to tragedy. These two groups will likely be mortal enemies for obvious reasons, but a well-functioning liberal society should be able to view both sides impartially and determine when one of them is on to something.
Accordingly, a dysfunctional society is one which starts swallowing the ideas of one side or the other... and I suppose the aim of this journal is to help slow our descent into an internally fractured society of two equally dysfunctional halves.
- if you are in the habit of defending rights, you will necessarily spend a lot of time defending the worst kinds of people: Good, wholesome (non edge case) people typically do not behave in a way that conflicts with others, and if they do, they are unlikely to invoke “muh rights” as a defence.
- the same with social justice: Who else is going to require social justice advocacy other than people who are considered disgusting enough by society to be treated unjustly?
I felt the same sense of cautious optimism because this journal seems to be another manifestation of the two examples I just mentioned above. They are doing the grunt work of allowing people with coherent but unpopular arguments to air them, hopefully leading to a better society for the rest of us.