A couple weeks ago I saw an article about Ellen Degeneres sitting next to George Bush at a football game. For those of you who didn’t see this story, this gained a lot of media attention and prompted Ellen to respond on her show “What is a gay Hollywood liberal doing sitting next to a conservative republican president?” She said on her show that she is friends with a lot of people with different beliefs and ended with a call to action: “When I say, ‘be kind to one another,’ I don’t only mean the people that think the same way that you do. I mean be kind to everyone.” If any of you have been on the internet in 2019 you might guess how this ends. Multiple celebrities spoke out in response and not all of the responses were positive. One of the biggest celebrities who responded was Mark Ruffalo said “Sorry, until George W. Bush is brought to justice for the crimes of the Iraq War, (including American-lead torture, Iraqi deaths & displacement, and the deep scars—emotional & otherwise—inflicted on our military that served his folly), we can’t even begin to talk about kindness”
This exchange stuck in my mind. I remember feeling curious thinking which perspective I could agree with. I thought about the arguments on both sides. What I think was missing in the raging online debate was an acknowledgement of the difficulty of this question. The question here stated more generally is the central question of a field called ethics of engagement: How do we evaluate whether a person deserves a response? I started doing some research. I discovered lengthy discussions about this question going all the way back to Aristotle. This question is even addressed in the bible. In Proverbs verses 26:4 and 26:5 both address this question but give completely conflicting views about it. The lesson we are supposed to learn from this is that there isn’t an easy or right answer. No matter how you feel about religion the fact that the most prominent moral framework of all time doesn’t give a straightforward answer should give us pause about jumping to conclusions.
Online there’s an immense pressure to instantly pick one side of a debate. The reality is that we all disagree on many of these issues because they’re hard. Not hard like taking a test in school. Hard because they involve our values and require us to think deeply about what we believe. So maybe next time you see a debate online take a few minutes of your time to think before jumping into the fray.