Bah Fortiori

On the peculiarly specific character of our moral outrage

For a few years now I have been frustrated over—and made furious by—a puzzle concerning the public and academic reception of ideas. This puzzle can be summed up as follows: It is often considered more offensive, more transgressive, more evil to state some specific view than to state a general view which has that specific view as a consequence.

This is very abstract, so let me give an example. One could be shunned from polite society, fired from a job in academia or journalism (or indeed even from a job in retail or fast food), disowned by one’s family, defriended by one’s social media acquaintances, if one were to say: “It is false that the Holocaust was wrong.” Similarly for: “It is false that slavery was wrong.” (Other specific statements about mass death such as, “It is false that the Black Plague was a bad thing” might not be subject to such censure. More on that later.)

But then let’s take a general statement about whether things can even be right or wrong: the moral error theory. This a theory with a long philosophical pedigree; there are powerful arguments in its favor that demand, as a matter of intellectual integrity, to be taken seriously by ethicists, or at least by philosophers studying the metaphysics and epistemology of ethics.