Tag: rawls

Mozi: Punching Nazis directly contributes to the basic good and harmonious needs of the State. A Nazis pointless and a threat to social stability; they should be resisted and driven out.

Utilitarianism: The increase in pleasure gained from punching a Nazi, and the pleasure derived from seeing a Nazi get punched, and the consequent alleviation of suffering that having said Nazi injured and thus removed from Nazi activities, scaring off potential Nazi recruits, limiting public Nazi activities, and otherwise making Naziism unacceptable, outweighs the pain felt by the individual Nazi being punched, and the hurt feelings of the Nazis viewing the act, because there just aren’t that many of them.

Pragmatism: He’s a damn Nazi. Of course you should punch him.

Confucianism: The role of the Nazi in society is to be the abused enemy against which good people define themselves against. It is as virtuous to punch a Nazi as it is for a son to show fealty and respect to his father, a mother love to her children, or a King to give proper orders to his ministers.

Rawls: Under the veil of ignorance, knowing no details about the puncher or the Nazi, or the circumstances under which the Nazi was punched, their places in society, their class positions or social statuses, nor their fortunes in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, their intelligence, strength, and the like, and even assuming that the parties do not know their conceptions of the good or their special psychological propensities, it is still ethical to punch the Nazi. Even were I the Nazi, I would wish to be punched, once I realized what I was.

Hedonism: Punching Nazis feels good, and minimizes the pain of those oppressed by Nazis. Proceed. Perhaps wear boxing gloves weighed with quarters or fishing weights, so you don’t injure your knuckles, and don’t need to exert so much effort.

Moore: Punching Nazis produces the most good, regardless of whatever naturalistic fallacy people may ascribe about the innate nature of Nazi punching. The consequences of Nazi punching are good, therefore it is a moral action, and it is also pleasing from an aesthetic standpoint, so go right ahead.

Foucault: Ethical conduct consists of the actions performed and capacities exercised intentionally by a subject for the purpose of engaging in morally approved conduct. A moral obligation is an imperative of a moral code that either requires or forbids a specific kind of conduct, whereas an ethical obligation is a prescription for conduct that is a necessary condition for producing morally approved conduct. The moral valorization of conduct might be, as it was with the ancients, weighted toward the satisfaction of ethical obligations, or, as it is in modernity, weighted toward the satisfaction of the moral obligations that comprise a moral code. Naziism, being universally condemned in the Western world, and forming an “Other” which has been designated as “fair game” in the power relationship of Master to Slave, and, unlike with race or sexuality or gender, being a self-chosen Otherization chosen due to a desire for victimization and an understanding that, by holding one’s self up to an impossible goal of racial purity and Aryan supremacy, one is by default designating oneself as impure and unworthy in one’s own eyes. One turns oneself into the imaginary enemy against which goodness is set (“The Nazi is that which is unethical, amoral, that which our fathers and grandfathers fought so that we might be free”). One reveals one’s own self-loathing. “Parrēsia,” Foucault says, “is the free courage by which one binds oneself in the act of telling the truth. Or again, parrhesia is the ethics of truth-telling as an action which is risky and free” (The Government of Self and Others, p. 66). The language that Foucault uses to describe parrhesiastic freedom throughout this lecture is incredibly suggestive of its source: it is the language of Kantian self-legislation. For Kant, autonomy does not consist in giving oneself the moral law, since the moral law is a necessity of the rational will; rather, autonomy consists in binding oneself to the law by freely conforming one’s conduct to it. By designating oneself as impure and worthless, akin to the Indian “untouchables”, one freely invites the punching that one desires. And thus, one must punch the Nazi. Society as currently constructed will not allow one to do otherwise.

Derrida: Let us examine the word “Nazi”. “Not See”, something unseen, hidden, placed away from sight, invisible. By its very nature, a contemptuous word, something not to be revealed in public. A hidden shame that, even in its native Germany cannot be displayed. None of their symbols, none of their marches, nothing outside of the historic context in which is first occurred. The law demands that it is an object of the past. But let us look at it further. “Nationalsozialist”, a compound that was too much to speak aloud, that demanded contraction to birth itself into a party, that contained that which they fought against, the very socialism they claimed to despise when they fought the Russians. So the word must be hidden, it must be buried, it must be concealed, made unseen, a relic of a past which never existed, a false secret history. They are haunted by the very socialism they claim to oppose. And this very “hauntology” that I spoke of in the Spectre of Marx epitomizes the new “Ironic Nazi” that exists in the non-space of the internet. They are Nazis only to the extent that they are not nazis: they simply believe in the extermination of the Jews and non-white races, but, if pressed, admit that they are simply doing it to get a rise out of you, but no, really, they do with the Jews to be destroyed. A denial of a denial of a denial. A non-non-non-existence. Post-post-irony. Their atemporal naziism is located precisely in its hidden non-existence. And so, the only conclusion is to fill in the void that they have left in their non-Naziism with a very concrete French resistance, with an “ironic” punch in the face.