ON THE ALT-RIGHTING OF PHILOSOPHY BY RC

Let's distinguish doxxing from signal-boosting, as the RC people would like us to do. Doxxing is two-fold: 1) revealing the real identity of someone using an anonymous or pseudonymous screen name, or 2) making public what is private. Signal-boosting is taking what was public in a small sphere and broadcasting it to a wider audience. Critics of RC claim they doxxed our colleagues, while the RC people say it was signal-boosting. 

Let's accept it was signal-boosting, even though there is a strong argument to be made that some instances really are doxxing.

IN ANY EVENT, IN THIS PARTICULAR CASE SIGNAL-BOOSTING WAS ETHICALLY WRONG BECAUSE IT EXPOSED OUR COLLEAGUES TO STOCHASTIC HARASSMENT. 

Stochastic harassment occurs when someone is exposed to mass vitriol by 3rd parties. The exposer initiates and mediates the harassment but does not directly conduct it. Having the RC story picked up by Dreher, Washington Times, and so on exposed our colleagues to vastly larger audiences and thereby predictably exposed them to harassment. (It seems plausible that the first move, from RC to Dreher, occurred via backchannel emails, though the idea that Dreher was simply a reader, while implausible, is not impossible.)

[EDITED] The real problem here is that our colleagues were falsely portrayed as hating traditional Christianity and Christians, when in fact the real target of their anger was 1) those who made a queer colleague's professional life miserable because of beliefs about sexual orientation similar to Swinburne's, and 2) people who were acting like cursing was less civil than Swinburne's disability claim.

WHEN YOU FALSELY PORTRAY JEWS AS HATERS OF CHRISTIANS IN 2016 AMERICA YOU EXPOSE THEM TO HARASSMENT AND INCREASED CHANCES OF PHYSICAL HARM.

Corollaries: 

1) Swinburne suffered no comparable harm by having his "disability" claim cursed out on Facebook to that suffered by our colleagues. So RC can't be said to be evening the score. 

2) Even if one were to say our colleagues acted imprudently by not taking sufficient notice of the danger of RC exposing them to stochastic harassment, that has no bearing on the ethical evaluation of RC's behavior. 

Comments

[Utz McKnight]

Yes!