Compassion and Deference Rarely Mix Well...
Real-world ethics question: In a well-used city park, a man with a history of erratic behavior attacks a dog and its owner with a stick; five days later, the dog dies. The man is Black, the dog owner white; the adjoining neighborhood is famously progressive, often critical of the police and jail system. At the same time, crime is up in the neighborhood, with attacks by emotionally disturbed people around the city putting some residents on edge.
In a dog-loving, progressive enclave, where pushing law and order can clash with calls for social justice, what’s the right thing to do? How do you protect the public without furthering injustice against this man?
As we all do our level best to progress through progress, thorny issues are certainly going to pop up and challenge the narratives (rather than facts or truth) we adhere to with such quasi-religious belief. This is not one of them. Nothing thorny about this nor is acquiescing to the most idiotic of feeble minded perspectives required.
Issues are always more complicated than they seem at first blush. In the immediate reaction to Amy Cooper calling the cops on the black birdwatcher, it seemed that obvious racism was present but if you bothered to dig just a few inches beneath the headlines, it was almost nothing like the white vs black narrative presented. The birdwatcher had a history of antagonizing dog owners, threatened her in a section of the park where she was isolated, and she called the cops on him with a crappy signal that required her to repeat herself.
In this case, it really is pretty simple even with the complexities. Black man with known mental issues and a history of threatening violence to passers-by strikes out at white woman and her dog while ranting about immigrants in the park. He hits the dog hard to severely injure the dog. The dog dies. The fact that she's white and he's black has fuck-all to do with the killing of the dog, right?
I find a strange kind of switch going on with the Edgecase Left lately. Watching the Season 2 premiere of The Problem with Jon Stewart I hear Jon and others suggest that children are developed and smart enough to determine their own genders and therefore must be treated as functioning adults while those focusing on race seem to insist that black American adults are simply too simple-minded to be held accountable for their own actions because of racism as if racism rendered poor blacks into childlike creatures unable to decipher the complexities of right and wrong.
Sure, the man in the park is mentally ill and an obvious danger to anyone around him. Certainly, his tirade about immigrants taking over the park is deranged and racist. Absolutely, he killed a woman's dog for no reason whatsoever. But he's black and thus, due to slavery and Jim Crow, he isn't to be held accountable because he just can't help himself and white people are just awful. What a crock of shit.
The compassionate thing for Jon Stewart's gender dysmorphic children is to provide counseling, give the children a place to experiment with gender without altering their bodies, work with the parents to give them gender affirming strategies, and promote the basic dignity of all humans to the mainstream community. Deference to children is not compassionate nor is it pragmatic. Kids have neither the capacity to understand what permanence feels like nor the maturity to effectively deal with what is, at least in current medical parlance, a mental health issue. Gender dysphoria is not a fad but a genuine condition but not one to be taken at face value anymore than a kid who decides to become a world record holder for wearing roller skates without actually knowing what the record he's challenging is in the first place.
The compassionate approach to the mentally unstable black dog killer is not to excuse his behavior by posing a faux ethical dilemma but to fund and require medical intervention for all homeless with mental health issues with little to no regard for race. Rather than throwing up our hands and accepting crime as a natural byproduct of a lack of resources and, you know, whiteness, perhaps working to provide those resources is more compassionate and pragmatic.
If the black mutt eradicator is not to blame for his actions due to cultural issues then neither are the poor white racists in Alabama. Cultural issues as an excuse for violent behavior is the ultimate moral relativism and facetiously exonerates everyone from being held accountable for crimes against one another.
Let's approach the real world ethics question this way:
An Asian homeless man, known to be mentally unstable and frequently threatening, is seen howling about immigrants taking over the park. A Pakistani woman tries to move past him, he hits her and then hits her dog, mortally wounding the dog. The ethics dilemma is gone. Arrest that fucker or at least get him off the streets and into some sort of programmed rehab or treatment center. No question. Deference to him is the least compassionate thing we can do. If the man needs help, allowing him to continue menacing park-goers is simply avoiding giving him assistance because assistance requires a bit more skin in the game.
Another real world ethics question:
A black homeless man is rummaging through a dumpster and a white woman with a rabid, rabies-laden dog approaches. The dog attacks the man and he dies a few days later from the bites. Society loves dogs, right? Is there an ethical dilemma here? Not a chance. The dog gets put down, the woman gets arrested or fined for walking a dangerous animal around a city park, and the NYT will publish an opinion piece about white people’s dogs proliferation of white supremacy.
For the same reason elevating the status of children to functioning adults in deference to some need to validate ideology it is likewise counterproductive to infantilize racial minorities as if they are simply too burdened by historical horrors to know the difference between good and evil. The mentally ill need help not deference.
