💾 Archived View for splint.rs › callouts.gmi captured on 2023-09-08 at 16:25:44. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I find myself without a side when it comes to the notion of calling people out on bad behaviour. I couldn't give a hoot about which celebrities Twitter lambasts, I'm talking more about the small, day-to-day disapprovals people have of others' professions, what they're allowed to have opinions on, and how they comment on others.
On the one hand, I imagine a supporting summary would go something like this:
'Call-out' culture has encouraged a wide-scale discussion. It's not always perfect, but the analysis itself can benefit people. The price might be a few people being snarky on the internet, or even in the pub, but the price is worth it. In general, feeling open to have polite disagreements, and raise ethical issues that people may not have been aware of, or feeling able to place a little social pressure on clearly horrible actions, leads to a net positive.
That looks reasonable. I certainly don't want to hold high standards, or object to a little snark too much. But an immediate problem springs to mind.
This behaviour's short-sighted and self-centred. You don't call people out for 'unethical' behaviour in general, you call people out for violating your own ethical standards. Your diet contains meat, which pollutes the environment and causes suffering. Failing that, your continued support of Facebook gave powers to Cambridge Analytica, which aided Trump and Brexit. And failing that, you run unethical software. This entire cultural movement is about privileging certain political movements over others, with no justification.
This seems line of reasoning seems damning, until it goes too far.
This whole tirade commits some perfectionist fallacy. You can start by saying 'you run Windows and eat bacon', then conclude that it's hypocritical to tell someone in your office that they're being sexist. Even if it were hypocritical, that wouldn't stop them being sexist, so the statement could still be correct and useful.
On the contrary, your whole initial argument shows the fallacy of special pleading. Never mind the notion of not calling people out unless you eat only locally-sourced vegetables, ordered through ssh, using an FSF-approved version of GNU. Your claim suggests we should all feel more free to politely call out unethical behaviour, but only in regards to some things, and not others. We should call out sexist behaviour, but not software-based problems. We should feel free tell people they're being ignorant by commenting on people's weight, but should not feel free to point out their ignorant social media choices.
Your argument starts by arguing in favour of a call-out culture, but you don't want to actually have a call-out culture for ethical problems. You want a call-out culture for your own issues, and for everyone else to stay silent about their issues.
I can see a number of ways to save the issue, but I don't know if any work.
Yes, I want call-out culture for all issues. Lots of people read about the Cambridge Analytica and acknowledged the problems. This doesn't mean they could all leave Facebook immediately, but they still recognized the problem, so people should and have addressed issues with Facebook. Same goes for meat - raising awareness about the issues works well if done politely, and without the expectation that people will change instantly. I want a world in which people raise all ethical considerations which people have not noticed before, even if that means a certain level of repetition and nagging.
That sounds plausible, but I guess it depends on exactly *how much* repetition and nagging we should expect. Could we really live in a world where people - not everyone, just those with a bone to pick - repeatedly bring up every little thing?
Yes, call-out culture should not really apply to all possible problems in the world. We should feel more free to speak about local issues. Someone making comments about your weight at the pub should be different from wider political problems. Wider political abstractions, such as global warming have nothing to do with call-out culture.
I guess this one works? Though it seems to threaten to just reduce the entire thing to 'people should be properly defensive when the need arises'. And it's not clear that special interests will never affect people locally. Someone annoyed about environment might be annoyed about all manner of local issues.
Everyone's doing sexism right now, but sure -
I like seeing valid complaints. Who doesn't? But in the details, I feel a nagging inconsistency still.