I tried thinking about ~6 examples of community misconduct disputes around me, and indeed none of them involved disagreements about “material happenings”.
But it also seems to me that the post is lumping together under “disputing the character” two things that are important to distinguish. One is defending/attacking the parties via non-central examples/halo effect. The other is arguing about the person’s intentions, or even more broadly, the psychological and other factors that led them to behave the way they did (and sometimes also about what implications this has about how they are likely to behave in the future). Both are involved in community disputes, but it seems to me that “halo defense” is the second line of defense, when one cannot credibly claim to have had good intentions, or has caused too much damage for people to care much about intentions.
discourages people from speaking out about their experiences, both because they may be reluctant to ‘ruin the person’s life’ over something non-catastrophic
Not sure that I remember hearing this sort of explicit discouragement. To the extent that this happens, it seems bad that our culture (or the broader macro-culture it is embedded in) doesn’t leave a line of retreat in the form of some “absolution process”, which would weaken this pressure. IDK how to do it. Seems hard. But I think “absolution rituals” were somewhat common in pre-modern cultures? (E.g., the biblical parable of the prodigal son.)
Thanks for writing this.
I tried thinking about ~6 examples of community misconduct disputes around me, and indeed none of them involved disagreements about “material happenings”.
But it also seems to me that the post is lumping together under “disputing the character” two things that are important to distinguish. One is defending/attacking the parties via non-central examples/halo effect. The other is arguing about the person’s intentions, or even more broadly, the psychological and other factors that led them to behave the way they did (and sometimes also about what implications this has about how they are likely to behave in the future). Both are involved in community disputes, but it seems to me that “halo defense” is the second line of defense, when one cannot credibly claim to have had good intentions, or has caused too much damage for people to care much about intentions.
Not sure that I remember hearing this sort of explicit discouragement. To the extent that this happens, it seems bad that our culture (or the broader macro-culture it is embedded in) doesn’t leave a line of retreat in the form of some “absolution process”, which would weaken this pressure. IDK how to do it. Seems hard. But I think “absolution rituals” were somewhat common in pre-modern cultures? (E.g., the biblical parable of the prodigal son.)