White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders went to have dinner at a local restaurant the other day. The owner, who is adamantly opposed to the policies of the Trump administration, politely asked her to leave, and she did. Now (who says human behavior is hard to predict?) an intense discussion has broken out concerning the role of civility in public discourse and our daily life. The Washington Post editorial board, in particular, called for public officials to be allowed to eat in peace, and people have responded in volume.
I don’t have a tweet-length response to this, as I think the issue is more complex than people want to make it out to be. I am pretty far out to one extreme when it comes to the importance of engaging constructively with people with whom we disagree. We live in a liberal democracy, and we should value the importance of getting along even in the face of fundamentally different values, much less specific political stances. Not everyone is worth talking to, but I prefer to err on the side of trying to listen to and speak with as wide a spectrum of people as I can. Hell, maybe I am even wrong and could learn something.
On the other hand, there is a limit. At some point, people become so odious and morally reprehensible that they are just monsters, not respected opponents. It’s important to keep in our list of available actions the ability to simply oppose those who are irredeemably dangerous/evil/wrong. You don’t have to let Hitler eat in your restaurant.
This raises two issues that are not so easy to adjudicate. First, where do we draw the line? What are the criteria by which we can judge someone to have crossed over from “disagreed with” to “shunned”? I honestly don’t know. I tend to err on the side of not shunning people (in public spaces) until it becomes absolutely necessary, but I’m willing to have my mind changed about this. I also think the worry that this particular administration exhibits authoritarian tendencies that could lead to a catastrophe is not a completely silly one, and is at least worth considering seriously.
More importantly, if the argument is “moral monsters should just be shunned, not reasoned with or dealt with constructively,” we have to be prepared to be shunned ourselves by those who think that we’re moral monsters (and those people are out there). There are those who think, for what they take to be good moral reasons, that abortion and homosexuality are unforgivable sins. If we think it’s okay for restaurant owners who oppose Trump to refuse service to members of his administration, we have to allow staunch opponents of e.g. abortion rights to refuse service to politicians or judges who protect those rights.
The issue becomes especially tricky when the category of “people who are considered to be morally reprehensible” coincides with an entire class of humans who have long been discriminated against, e.g. gays or transgender people. In my view it is bigoted and wrong to discriminate against those groups, but there exist people who find it a moral imperative to do so. A sensible distinction can probably be made between groups that we as a society have decided are worthy of protection and equal treatment regardless of an individual’s moral code, so it’s at least consistent to allow restaurant owners to refuse to serve specific people they think are moral monsters because of some policy they advocate, while still requiring that they serve members of groups whose behaviors they find objectionable.
The only alternative, as I see it, is to give up on the values of liberal toleration, and to simply declare that our personal moral views are unquestionably the right ones, and everyone should be judged by them. That sounds wrong, although we do in fact enshrine certain moral judgments in our legal codes (murder is bad) while leaving others up to individual conscience (whether you want to eat meat is up to you). But it’s probably best to keep that moral core that we codify into law as minimal and widely-agreed-upon as possible, if we want to live in a diverse society.
This would all be simpler if we didn’t have an administration in power that actively works to demonize immigrants and non-straight-white-Americans more generally. Tolerating the intolerant is one of the hardest tasks in a democracy.
Rationalizing sedition in a constitutional republic is a betrayal of the notion of peaceful exchange of power.
Suggesting that it is immoral to enforce law is naive. Skewing the lens of perception in order to advance one’s own political agenda outside of the legislative branch is leaving violence as the only true change agent.
Justifying attacks against people doing their best under the circumstances they find themselves in is reprehensible.
I basically agree with you on this. One thing is for sure, it ain’t physics or math.
It comes down to the Overton window. I can have plenty of civil discourse and productive mutual exchange of ideas with the right wing, ie, Hilary supporters. Cartoon villains, less.
“… if the argument is ‘moral monsters should just be shunned, not reasoned with or dealt with constructively,’ we have to be prepared to be shunned ourselves by those who think that we’re moral monsters (and those people are out there).”
Indeed. And Sarah Sanders is one of “those people”. And she has lent her support to those who argue that some “should just be shunned, not reasoned with or dealt with constructively”. So she should be prepared to be shunned.
Fair is fair.
sean s.
@Sean Carroll – good post
I understand the visceral hatred that some people have of Trump. He’s the sadistic bully who beat them up in high school. I understand the visceral hatred that some people have of Hillary Clinton. She’s the devious, masochistic teacher’s pet who got them into trouble when she couldn’t get her way.
It’s time to grow up.
No, Trump is not Hitler, he does not enjoy locking up little Mexican children in cages and torturing them. That’s insane. No, Clinton is not advocating that some big hairy guy be let into the women’s restroom so he can watch your daughter take a pee. That’s insane. But to the rabid partisan, it rings a bell.
If we are going to be scientific about this, we can’t analyze the situation while consumed with blind love or hatred. We have to put our morality, our sense of right and wrong, on a shelf, and coldly analyze what is going on. THEN bring our morality, our sense of right and wrong off the shelf and judge the situation. It can be a painful process, all the beautiful blacks and whites turn into shades of gray and we are in danger of, as Shakespeare put it, “the native hue of resolution being sicklied over with a pale cast of thought”. But if we are truly scientists, thats what we do, danger be damned.
I would suggest a criterion for the difference between a “moral monster” and someone whose beliefs are simply objectionable. In a democratic society, if roughly, say, 30 percent of the people vote for a particular person for president, then they are, by definition, not “moral monsters”. To the people that believe they are, please, there is something else going on, you’re missing something. Yes, Hitler was elected, and a lot of people in America and England thought is was a good thing, law and order, a determined pupose to make Germany great again, etc. But Hitler then became a dictator and if free elections were held in the late thirties by people unafraid to vote their conscience, I bet Hitler would have lost. I trust that there is a large core of Americans, left and right, who would never allow this to happen. Sorry, but neither Trump nor Clinton are “moral monsters”, by definition, and we need to shun hate-mongering rabid partisans of both sides. There are true moral monsters waiting on the sidelines to step in if things fall apart, and trust me, they will make Trump and Clinton look like angels.
People can be forgiven for not thinking Trump a moral monster when they voted for him. He was obviously a demagogue, a dogwhistling racist, and a phony con man, but I understand people angry with government, “elites,” and the Clintons voting for him. That was then. It’s now 19 months later: 19 months of demagoguery, daily lies, patent know-nothingism about literally everything a president should at least know something about, the subverting of our alliances and the cozying-up to our enemies, refusal to even acknowledge that our main enemy interfered with and may have determined our presidential election. Trump has, for 19 months, demonstrated every day his active desire to vilify the press, obliterate the idea of truth, and conduct a kleptocracy to enrich himself and his cronies at the expense of government, the American people, and decency itself.
If that’s not a moral monster, I don’t know what is. No, Trump is not Hitler. But, as Adam Gopnik said in the New Yorker during the campaign, neither was Hitler–until he was.
Are his loyal supporters moral monsters? No. They’re morally tone deaf. They’re suckers. They’re cultists who would burn down their own homes if it made the liberals next door cough. They’re dupes whose politics consist of nothing but resentment–dependably of people who are not the cause of their problems.
Yes, there are worse people out there. And if they get anywhere near public office, we’ll have Trump and his apologists and his credulous army of cultists to thank.
If Mrs. Sanders did her job with respect for other’s opinions and without evasion and lies then despite the fact that she works for someone unfit for his office I wouldn’t go out of my way to disparage or shun her, but she is an enabler. At some point there is no longer room for error as to what sort of person Trump is and his enablers are, and that point has been reached. I wouldn’t expect a Jewish restauranteur to serve a Nazi and I don’t expect anyone of Mexican heritage to serve a willing, active member of the Trump administration. That’s where we are. We are not talking about abstract differences of opinion; these people are doing active harm . They are destroying our civilization and they expect civility? The answer to that is the same as to the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
Google’s on-line dictionary defines tolerate: allow the existence, occurrence, or practice of (something that one does not necessarily like or agree with) without interference
The question becomes, what is appropriate interference?
Professor Carroll frequently participates in discussions with creationists. I imagine he does so politely and also that he declines invitations when he knows the environment will not meet his basic expectations of civility. He expects interference, but appropriate interference.
I believe anyone should be able to go into a public establishment (restaurant or bakery) and respectfully make a purchase. If the door is open, it is open to everyone. Don Corleone might have said, “It’s business.” Afterward, the owner may request that the patron go elsewhere in the future, and explain why.
If it’s okay for a fundamentalist baker to refuse to make a wedding cake for a gay couple, why isn’t it okay for a restaurant owner to refuse service to those who have increased the number of tender age children separated from their asylum-seeking parents, drugged, caged, and sent to foster homes where 86% of child sex trafficking victims originate?
For how much Sarah Sanders gets caught trying to cover up everything Donald Trump says on Twitter, she might as well just be up at the podium telling everyone, “Wake up America, you have been lied too!”