Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

In reply to mlyoung57. The key thing is defining ‘canceling’. My proposed definition is an attempt to find something that fits the bill for what the right-wingers are complaining about, but is not just a grab-bag of partisan grievances. I don’t take th…

In reply to Irfan Khawaja. I agree that there are many cases of moral activism that use non-logical, non-argumentative tactics to get people to stop doing wrong things or notice morally salient things that they should notice. The question is the ethics…

In reply to Irfan Khawaja. The key thing is defining ‘canceling’. My proposed definition is an attempt to find something that fits the bill for what the right-wingers are complaining about, but is not just a grab-bag of partisan grievances….

[…] inspire more of the same.) These digressions rarely contribute to advancing the plot, but as I’ve explained recently, I’m not a fanatical devotee of plot advancement; what matters is that the digressions contribute […]

So I sit down and look at my phone for a minute, and out pops the perfect example–cancellation gone right. Not hard to find, honestly. Just under-acknowledged. Take just this one cancellation described in an Op-Ed in the New York Times today (lin…

In reply to mlyoung57. I don’t think Vallier offers a definition of “canceling” or “cancel culture.” He simply claims that if X is canceling Y, X must regard Y as (a) morally culpable, and (b) the culpability has to merit …

Thanks, Irfan, for making me think more (and hopefully better) about this stuff. Here are some thoughts (related to what you say, but nothing like a point-by-point commentary). I haven’t read Vallier’s post, but the kind of argument that he…

In reply to Roderick T. Long. Hadn’t even thought of that. By the way, I corrected my comment. Apparently, when I wrote it, I left out a whole phrase that rendered the second point unintelligible. I was going to plead the lateness of the hour, bu…