logan clarke :
I think, as a general principle, every human is owed some amount of compassion, even people whose views we find hateful.
Consider someone who says bigots deserve to die. What makes bigotry wrong, at its core, is writing off an entire group of people and wishing harm on them because of the category they fall into. But wishing death on "bigots" as a group does exactly that. By their own standard, they've become what they condemn, and if bigots deserve death, so do they. The only way out is to make a special exception for themselves, and once they do that, they're no longer following the principles their position was built on.
Even if we imagine someone who is, by some objective measure, a genuinely bad person (which we can rarely know for sure), death still isn't the answer, because it can never be taken back. Beliefs, on the other hand, can change. Nobody is born a bigot; it's learned, which means it can be unlearned. Many people who once held hateful views have left them behind, usually because someone engaged with them, challenged them, and treated them as a person worth reaching. Daryl Davis, a Black musician, spent decades befriending members of the Ku Klux Klan, and many of them eventually gave up their robes. Nobody wishing them dead would have accomplished that.
2026-09-11 16:15:23