Should you go to a conference where somebody with morally abhorrent views is speaking? Arguments for why you should

Should you go to a conference where somebody with morally abhorrent views is speaking?

If I shouldn't attend conferences with speakers with morally abhorrent views, then I wouldn’t be able to go to virtually any conference, because I think speciesism is morally abhorrent and leads to people literally paying for the torture and rape of trillions of defenseless beings.

And speciesism is explicitly endorsed by almost all humans, including conference speakers.

But just because some people have bad views doesn’t mean that all of their views are bad and you can’t learn from them.

OK, but speciesism is normal. Doesn’t it tell you more about a speaker if they hold really out there moral beliefs?

Well, for one thing, most of the time when people decide to boycott a conference, it’s not actually talking about “out there” moral beliefs.

It’s usually saying things like there are genetic differences between groups, such as races or genders, that explain some of the differences in outcomes.

This is actually just standard beliefs among a huge percentage of the population, so doesn’t really give you evidence of underlying psychopathy.

Imagine that the speaker doesn't hold a common belief and it’s morally abhorrent.

Well, first off, moral progress is made by people pushing the envelope, and people are terrible at telling whether it’s moral progress or moral decay.

Most people originally thought homosexuality was morally reprehensible, and would have seen activists promoting acceptance of it the same way people would see people promoting pedophilia.

Of course, pushing the moral envelope is not always progress. 

How do you tell?

Societies have come up with many ways to deal with this problem. 

And by far the best solution is having a thriving marketplace of ideas and letting ideas duke it out in the court of public opinion.

If somebody says that the earth is flat, you don’t silence them and deplatform them.

You post pictures of earth from space.

Yes, some people are idiots and will continue to have dumb beliefs regardless. 

But trying to make one group and ideology the decider of what’s true or good for people to see does not lead to good results.

What if the beliefs of certain speakers make a certain group feel bad and unwelcome? 

Isn’t it better to create a welcoming environment?

Banning people who have certain beliefs definitely creates an unwelcoming environment.

Feeling unwelcome is different from being unwelcome.

If people are actually being unwelcoming towards a certain group for unethical reasons, that’s obviously bad.

But most of the issues here actually have nothing to do with welcoming somebody or not.

An intuition pump: a conference could have a talk about how men commit more violent crime than women, and very few people would say that this means most men won’t come to the conference because they feel unwelcome.

I’m a high IQ woman and I feel perfectly fine with people discussing IQ differences between men and women. 

I find it interesting actually! 

If it turns out that men on average have higher IQs than women, that doesn’t change my IQ at all, anymore than the fact that women are shorter than men on average affect the fact that I’m taller than most men.

And I want to believe what is true, not what is palatable.

I even have a prominent friend who thinks that women going into the workforce is net negative. 

He doesn’t make me feel unwelcome. 

He clearly values our friendship and thinks I’m good in the workplace. 

I just debate it with him and talk about a bunch of other things.

I think one of these days I’ll persuade him, and if not, oh well. 

I can be friends with I deeply disagree with. 

Otherwise I’d be incredibly lonely and depressed.

I get why people might feel like they’re not welcome at events where there are speakers who speak about something negative about a group they belong to, but people need to distinguish between feelings and reality.

Validating everybody’s feelings might feel like the compassionate thing to do, but it’s short term compassion.

If you tell somebody with social anxiety that yes, people do actually secretly hate them, you are not helping them.

When somebody says they feel unwelcome when they aren’t unwelcome, the kind thing to do is to help them overcome their social anxiety.

Even if that speaker didn’t welcome you, don’t judge the many based on the actions of a few.

There are a few people in my community who I know really don’t like me in particular and are actively unwelcoming to me. They even have proactively gone out of their way to harm me in the past. 

They are often speakers at these events.

I go anyways. 

Because the rest of the community is welcoming and I judge people as individuals, not groups.

Also I value the virtues of courage, tolerance, anti-fragility, and empathy.

I cultivate courage and push myself to go to events, even if I’m scared.

I practice anti-fraglity, and if they do try to harm me, I use that to improve my systems and learn how to become a better human.

I practice empathy and remember that they are flawed humans who are trying their best, just like the rest of us.

I appreciate that they tolerate me and I tolerate them, and we can go about our businesses

In summary, you should attend conferences even if there are speakers with morally reprehensible views because:

• Just because some people have bad views doesn’t mean that all of their views are bad and you can’t learn from them.
• Moral progress comes from people pushing the moral envelope
• The best way we’ve found to distinguish between moral progress and moral decay is to let ideas duke it out in the marketplace of ideas
• Just because an idea makes you feel unwelcome doesn’t mean you actually are unwelcome
• Even if one person actually doesn’t welcome you, don’t judge the many from the actions of the few.
• It is better to cultivate the virtues of courage, tolerance, anti-fragility, and empathy

​Also, there's a fairly decent chance that you misunderstood the speaker's views. 

People misunderstand each other all the time and it's worse on the internet, where one misunderstanding can linger on the internet forever, despite being corrected many times. 

Sensationalism and the way attention works, the more scandalous interpretations of words spread and stick more than the boring and normal explanations of ordinary events.