JK Rowling isn’t even dead yet, and beliefs that would have put her at the liberal edge of the feminist movement thirty years ago are now earning widespread condemnation.
If you think that cancel culture is progress in morality, the future will judge you harshly, if acausally.
I believe fairly strongly that the future will agree Rowling’s current position is immoral. Whether cancelling her is an appropriate response is a whole different question.
the future will agree Rowling’s current position is immoral
This is vague. An exercise: can you quote specific sentences from Rowling’s recent essay that you think the future will agree are immoral?
Maybe don’t answer that, because we don’t care about the object level on this website? (Or, maybe you should answer it if you think avoiding the object-level is potentially a sneaky political move on my part.) But if you try the exercise and it turns out to be harder than you expected, one possible moral is that a lot of what passes for discourse in our Society doesn’t even rise to the level of disagreement about well-specified beliefs or policy proposals, but is mostly about coalition-membership and influencing cultural sentiments. Those who scorn Rowling do so not because she has a specific proposal for revising the 2004 Gender Recognition Act that people disagree with, but because she talks in a way that pushes culture in the wrong direction. Everything is a motte-and-bailey: most people, most of the time don’t really have “positions” as such!
If you think that cancel culture is progress in morality, the future will judge you harshly, if acausally.
I believe fairly strongly that the future will agree Rowling’s current position is immoral. Whether cancelling her is an appropriate response is a whole different question.
This is vague. An exercise: can you quote specific sentences from Rowling’s recent essay that you think the future will agree are immoral?
Maybe don’t answer that, because we don’t care about the object level on this website? (Or, maybe you should answer it if you think avoiding the object-level is potentially a sneaky political move on my part.) But if you try the exercise and it turns out to be harder than you expected, one possible moral is that a lot of what passes for discourse in our Society doesn’t even rise to the level of disagreement about well-specified beliefs or policy proposals, but is mostly about coalition-membership and influencing cultural sentiments. Those who scorn Rowling do so not because she has a specific proposal for revising the 2004 Gender Recognition Act that people disagree with, but because she talks in a way that pushes culture in the wrong direction. Everything is a motte-and-bailey: most people, most of the time don’t really have “positions” as such!
Then I’m guessing that you are explicitly or implicitly a moral realist...