[lbo-talk] What is genocide?

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Sun May 7 07:23:51 PDT 2006


Free speech is an instrumental good, not a good in itself. And it needs to be a pretty absolute right or it loses its instrumental value. Hence the state must be prohibited from controlling expression even of the most detestable views.

But that does not mean that there are not views that ought to be crushed -- there's just no safe way state power can be invoked to crush them as views, for there is no way to entrust the capitalist state with such power. One complex of views that should be crushed are all those views with give support, directly or indirectly, to structural racism, and any act grounded in that complex is far far worse than the same act grounded in merely an individual motive.

For P to murder Q for motives of greed, passion, pleasure is undesirable. I mean the understatement here. It is merely undesirable not a threat to the social order -- not a crime against humanity. Social arrangements ought to be made to discourage the occurrence of such acts. For P to murder Q because Q is black or a Jew or gay is a threat to the very existence society, it is a crime against humanity, and hence is a crime of a different order of magnitude than for P to murder Q to lift Q's wallet.

That said, the untrustworthiness of the capitalist state and the problem of the slippery slope (the need to protect the instrumental value of free speech) make it an iffy thing to embody that difference in criminal law.

But even if for these practical reasons we do not criminalize "hate crimes," let there be no ambiguity about it -- to murder a person for greed is simply trivial in comparison to murdering a person because of his/her race.

Carrol



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