Victims and Opposing Views

Joan over at Common Gunsense has a great screed up about victims. Her belief is basically:

• Victims have a unique insight and passion into issues.
• Questioning a victim's political beliefs is equivalent to personally attacking them.
• Victims should be allowed to establish policy for the rest of society.

The interesting this is, what happens when two victims disagree? Joan linked to a quote from Mr. Dallas Green, who is the grandfather of the child tragically slain by Laughner in Arizona. Mr. Dallas Green has stated that he supports bans on high capacity magazines for glock handguns. However, Mr. John Green, the father of the child, has said:

“This shouldn’t happen in this country, or anywhere else, but in a free society, we’re going to be subject to people like this. I prefer this to the alternative.”

He apparently opposes restricting freedoms. So now we have two victims, each who have suffered a tragedy, but who have opposing viewpoints. How do we decide? If we evaluate any of their views critically then in her mind it is basically the same as a vicious personal attack. Maybe we should just flip a coin?

I then brought up 9/11 families against the mosque in NYC. Personally, I don't feel that government should block the mosque. I may find the specific location to be distasteful, but I also value freedom of religion and private property rights. If you watch the videos they've put out, their anguish and suffering over this mosque issue seems real. Joan agrees with me on this issue. However, it is interesting to see Joan's reasoning.

She can't accept that the 9/11 families really are distraught about it. She states:

I sort of understand the views of some of the victims' families but don't think that the Islamic Center ( not just a Mosque as it was made out to be) would be something that would violate those victims.

This makes sense. If they are victims (which she seems to think they qualify as), then their views cannot be questioned using logos or ethos based arguments. Thus, the victims must not really stating their views accurately, or maybe they actually aren't being violated by the proposed mosque. In summary:

1) Person A is a victim.
2) Victims always support good things. Victims are also always informed.
3) Person A supports policy choice X. Therefore X must be good.
4) I oppose X, and I am a victim and a good person, so X cannot be good.
5) ???

Not all of those things can be true. For Joan to reject premise 2 or 4 would be to upset her world view apple cart; either Person A is not really a victim or they don't actually support policy choice X. That is why she has to reject premise 3; those 9/11 victims must not really oppose the mosque, or maybe the mosque isn't actually that offensive to them (i.e. they are mistaken). She does the same thing with the Green family (and her own relatives) to reconcile the logical inconsistency; clearly John Green and her other relatives just don't actually support what they say they do (or maybe they aren't actually victims).

I personally choose to reject premise 2. That is, I don't believe that victims always support good things, and I don't think that it is evil or wrong to question the political beliefs of a victim. As an extreme example, Hitler claimed to be a victim and he was not a good person that supported good things. Much more mundanely, victims might be good people who are not well informed on an issue and thus support ill-conceived policies; just because someone lost a relative in a bridge collapse doesn't make them a structural engineer. Someone who lost a child to a disease doesn't hold an MD.

It really is interesting to see her tortured logic on display. It makes many things much clearer. I do think it is interesting to present pathos-based arguments both for and against something and see what happens. She is incapable or unwilling to evaluate such arguments critically so there are some real mental gymnastics occurring to reconcile what are fundamentally opposed ideas.