Kind of the thing with being in mass media with an enormous audience is that you lose the ability to just do what you've always been doing. I mean, he can, by abandoning his platform and starting over with something else, but the piles of money are too attractive.
Public figures who can heavily influence discourse and thought have an ethical obligation to not give unchallenged credence and a drastically increased audience to their nonsense. If Rogan thought that Goebbels was interesting and let him do his thing for hours to an audience of millions, he would be held to a higher standard. If Rogan thought that Ted Bundy was interesting and let him tell "his side of the story" without challenging it with the truth, he would be held to a higher standard.
This is a basic which we should expect of our society.
We can expect it but I'm not sure that means anything. I'd really like people to stop giving Tucker Carlson attention, but that doesn't seem to be happening.
The ethical obligation exists only in your own mind. Stop projecting. The rest of us are capable of thinking for ourselves and don't necessarily believe the random ramblings of a comedian or his guests.
And your hypotheticals about Nazis and serial killers are totally irrelevant. You are arguing in bad faith and trying to inflame the discussion.
> The ethical obligation exists only in your own mind.
Normative ethics really don't just exist in one person's head.
This is not a question of whether or not people can think for themselves or whether they believe what they hear, and whether he's a comedian, politician, or astronaut has no bearing on what our ethical standards should be as a society.
We should expect better.
> You are arguing in bad faith and trying to inflame the discussion.
The fact that you have seemingly never really read philosophy or considered what we, as society, should expect from public figures does not mean the argument is in bad faith or inflammatory.
It is, very simply, a reductio ad absurdum. If your position is that the "rest of us" are capable of thinking for yourselves, who we allow to influence/control public discourse/thought should be up to individuals, then surely there's nothing wrong with having Nazis or mass murderers given airtime.
If you do have a problem with this, then you draw the line somewhere, and it's just a matter of determining where. If you have a problem with it, then you believe that some discourse is antithetical to the principles of a well-functioning society, and that we have a duty to shield people from it.
The question is where you draw that line, and why "he's just a comedian" (with 11-12 million listeners who see him as having "interesting conversations" with people who are not comedians) absolves him of a duty not to use his platform to spread dangerous misinformation. Not that he does it all the time, but it does happen sometimes, and the same normative ethics apply all the time.
Do you think you would get his 11-12 million listeners to agree with you on what society should expect? Who gets to decide that?
> then surely there's nothing wrong with having Nazis or mass murderers given airtime.
You invoked Godwin's law twice. What sort of argument are you going to win by invoking Nazis and worst case scenarios? Surely the slipper slope fallacy applies here?
> Do you think you would get his 11-12 million listeners to agree with you on what society should expect? Who gets to decide that?
I'm not sure why you presume that "we, as society, should expect better" means "this applies only to Joe Rogan listeners and we need to convince them." It's a general stance on how society ought to operate, and the use of "ought" is in the "how ought one live?" question raised by ethics.
We get to decide that as society. This isn't a new concept. Society would not have advanced to a point that we were capable of having this conversation at all if "we" had not already agreed on basic principles, such as "you should not steal", and "you should not murder", and "be generally honest in your dealings with others if you want to keep your reputation". These are all inherent rules of society which you implicitly follow in order to be part of it.
Holding public figures who have a louder voice to a standard of behavior which does not actively undermine society by giving credence to disinformation isn't some horrible leap or infringement upon your freedom. It's avoiding the Gracchi.
> You invoked Godwin's law twice.
Mentioning Nazis isn't Godwin's Law. Feel free to substitute some other bogeyman who you feel giving an unfiltered platform to would deteriorate society.
> What sort of argument are you going to win by invoking Nazis and worst case scenarios? Surely the slipper slope fallacy applies here?
No, it doesn't. Honestly, I'm getting the sense that you've never engaged in any kind of philosophical discourse before, which this is sort of veering into, and throwing out the names of fallacies doesn't mean they apply.
The point is, as I said in my last post, a reductio ad absurdum. It is constructing a contrapositive. It is saying "if we follow your reasoning to its logical conclusion, this is where it leads; verify whether that's true or false, less black and white."
And it was false/shades of grey. Clearly there is some level at which even ardent JRE listeners believe giving people a platform is harmful. So the question is "what are the guidelines for when something is too much?"
My position is, as repeatedly restated, that those with a greater platform have a duty to not do harm to society by allowing crackpots to talk without being challenged, whether that's denying climate change, believing lizard people run the government, believing we are secretly in contact with aliens, taking veterinary antiparasitics on the advice of one person rather than the guidance of literally every medical organization on Earth, etc.
It has no been made clear anywhere what the position of Joe Rogan defenders is other than "he's just a comedian; you shouldn't take him seriously; people can think for themselves; he doesn't have any obligation to question them". But again, it's apparent that having Nazis or murderers on with an unfiltered platform would cross some line. So where is that line? Where are Joe Rogan defenders drawing the line of what is "too much" to air? What is the basis for drawing it there and not somewhere else?
Comedians don't qualify as "public figures" in that context. I'm not a Joe Rogan defender and don't particularly care about him one way or another, but you're obviously just making things up and trying to gaslight us. Let us know when you have a valid point to make instead of resorting to inflammatory comments about imaginary Nazis.
As for a "line", how about this. Comedians can say whatever asinine shit they like and the rest of us are free to laugh or ignore them as we please. There are no lines in comedy. Grow up.
Isn't this a "court jester" interpretation of comedy? The comedian debases themselves on all issues so thoroughly that it creates a convenient bi-directional fiction: I can ignore things that bother me, because they are just the ramblings of a clown. And so they can say whatever they want, with no requirement that it make sense (because there is no "low" they won't sink beneath).
I doubt it. High standards are rare in journalism, most will go along with high profile figures if it serves their own interests. If you want to bring Nazis into this then how about all of the practically fawning interviews that US media had with Adolph Hitler right up until he invaded France?
> I doubt it. High standards are rare in journalism, most will go along with high profile figures if it serves their own interests.
The debasement of "journalism" to the point where it applies to Joe Rogan and/or "news networks" which have actively fought (and won) court battles on the basis that no reasonable person would believe the statements were actually true, or news radio which for decades gave equal airtime to "both sides" even if one of those sides believed in a Hollow Earth does not mean that "journalism" has lost high standards, merely that the term has been horrifyingly diluted in the United States.
> If you want to bring Nazis into this then how about all of the practically fawning interviews that US media had with Adolph Hitler right up until he invaded France?
Whataboutism is an intellectually bankrupt argument. Nobody is defending those journalists, but if you're going to try to make a whataboutist argument, apples-to-apples works a lot better than "with the benefit of hindsight, we know that Hitler was bad and that Ford would have actively led a fifth column if he could have, so they were bad". You could equally say "if you want to bring Dwayne Johnson into this, then how about all of the love for Cosby as America's Dad?"
The known facts are different.
If you want to assert that a comparison to Nazis (and I used Goebbels as an example because he was principally a radio propagandist rather than Goering, Himmler, Heydrich, etc; he's the sort of person who would have seemed like a harmless marketing geek) is bad in a whataboutist sense, you would do much better to say "if you want to bring Nazis into this, then how about Speer? He wasn't (actively) involved in the Holocaust and he could have had a lot of interesting things to say about architecture and designing an imperial capital?"
Public figures who can heavily influence discourse and thought have an ethical obligation to not give unchallenged credence and a drastically increased audience to their nonsense. If Rogan thought that Goebbels was interesting and let him do his thing for hours to an audience of millions, he would be held to a higher standard. If Rogan thought that Ted Bundy was interesting and let him tell "his side of the story" without challenging it with the truth, he would be held to a higher standard.
This is a basic which we should expect of our society.