Over the past year I’ve been refining my understanding of the core claims of Kantian ethics. I’ve realised that I have deeply Kantian intuitions about a lot of issues, and I understand these intuitions better now that I can put them in Kantian terms. Consider two exercises of state power: riot police suppressing protesters by non-lethal means, and soldiers shooting protesters to death. I feel more uncomfortable thinking about the first: there’s something altogether more sinister about it than the second, even though the second is much more sad.
I think that the reason is that non-lethal weaponry is designed to take away people’s agency, and it often achieves this aim by means of emotional manipulation. Riot police use so-called “baton charges” to incite fearful retreat. Protesters have reasoned that in their political situation, they have a duty to resist the incumbent government. Riot police seek to unseat this conviction and cause fear to determine what the protesters will do. In Kantian terms, the riot police fail to respect the moral agency of the protesters by seeking to unseat the moral personality’s determination of what the protester will do.
A controversial example that Kant uses to make this point is the axe murderer case. Kant asks us to imagine that someone bangs on our front door and begs us to hide him in our house, because someone who wishes to kill him is coming up behind them. We do so. When the axe murderer arrives, he goes door-to-door and asks us whether the intended victim is in each house. Kant says that it is morally wrong to lie to the axe murderer and say that the victim is not in your house. How could this be? Surely there is a moral duty to protect the victim from being killed? Indeed there is, but when it comes into conflict with the duty not to lie, that second duty wins out. That’s because respecting the moral agency of individuals is paramount. In this case, we would fail to respect the murderer’s agency if we didn’t allow him to take the decision to murder or not murder the victim; by lying to him we (disrespectfully) bypass his choice as to whether to do it.
It’s obviously crazy to say that we are morally required to give up the victim. Kant gives the wrong answer in this case. However, the case definitely reveals a requirement to respect other people’s view of what they should do, and give them a chance to do it. Similarly it seems like we shouldn’t give semi-automatics to our riot police, but there’s something wrong with a lot of what they do.
During the recent campaigns about Britain’s EU referendum, some criticised Jeremy Corbyn’s campaigning on the grounds that he failed to make an emotional appeal, instead asking people to make their own rational decision when they come to cast their vote. So he lost out the emotional appeals other people were making. It seems that he was successfully respecting individual agency. You’ve got to give people a chance to live up to their own idea of what they should do.
I’m not sure how to reconcile these various ideas, and I’m not sure what it says about me that I find non-lethal weaponry as uncomfortable as I do.
This doesn’t appear to cover the other kind of comment-moderation problem: that where overmoderation and attachment to poster identity leads to an environment of stifling conventionalism.
Photography communities in particular (e.g. flickr, instagram, 500px) are vulnerable to turning into circlejerks where no-one is willing to say what they mean for fear of appearing the negative nancy (no pun intended) and where high post-count contributors’ poorly-supported opinions become elevated above said views’ merits. In such communities the typical discussion is at the level of tepid platitude: “good exposure!”, “nice depth of field!”, or “cool HDR!”. On the other end of the scale there’s the imageboard style of community where anonymity is the norm, feedback is uncompromisingly harsh, and uselessly opaque criticism appears such on its face; unsuited to the overly sensitive but hideously valuable to the advancing novice.
Ordinary web forums, with tools oriented towards a punitive “he said the n-word! delete his account and everything he’s posted! persona non grata, in damnatio memoriae!” school of moderation, strongly tend to the former.