Alright, let me get this straight: If I say one thing, which is based on a thought I’ve had, which is derived from a comprehensive worldview that dictates all my intuitions and behaviors, public and private, from morning to night, suddenly that’s who I am?
I’m sensing a straw-man argument.
We might ask ourselves: what kind of world do we live in where in 2026, we’re still judging books by their thoughts, feelings, guiding moral principles, and subsequent behaviors? I guess a world where it’s A-OK to just disregard all the other important aspects of a person’s character, like what they might think in a hypothetical universe in which they were a different person.
How about, instead of jumping to conclusions, people get it through their heads that there is such a thing as context. Let’s run a thought experiment, shall we? Let’s say I told you I believe incest is justifiable. Sounds pretty bad, right? But then what if I told you that alongside just saying incest is okay, I was also having regular, repeated sex with my first-cousin? If it were up to the online keyboard warriors, apparently that makes me some kind of incest-lover. All because I said it was okay, did it a bunch, and then publicly defended it.
Have we completely lost sight of the moral gray area? Have we forgone the classical American value of “I didn’t mean it, guys; just pretend I didn’t do that, OK”? It’s as if we live in a world where it doesn’t matter what you want other people to think you believe, and instead all people care about is what you seem to display by all available instruments of measure. Well, I won’t stand idly by while this change takes place; I think I speak for all Enlightenment thinkers when I say: stop using my words and actions to form opinions about me, unless you pinky-promise me they’re gonna be good ones.
