Among the more civilized pundits, there have been two basic lines of thought. One is that the right to speech is paramount, and as satire is a very important part of that, there should be no equivocations that what happened yesterday is nothing less than a crime against everyone. The other is that while the murders were absolutely uncalled for, the victims shouldn't have been provoking extremists as they did. Irrespective of any issues with the particular pieces*, the first argument can be summarized as the idealist argument, while the second can be thought of as the practical argument.
*I agree with some of the premise of the second article. That said, it has two major failings:
1. Calling the paper "racist." While it may indeed be racist (I am not hyper-familiar with the inner-workings of French culture), the article doesn't offer any evidence of that.
2. Concluding that since the drawings would knowingly provoke extremists, they were bad, and shouldn't have been published....more on this one in a bit.
This touches directly on one of the things I've been learning, in what I think is an enlightening manner. I am currently reading a book on Bayesian statistics, largely because it's an important and ever more relevant field that is largely ignored in modern schooling. After covering the basic of Bayesian statistics, the book then moves towards a discussion of the implications on decision theory. This begins by laying out several scenarios where a decision needs to be made (ie. whether or not to carry an umbrella on a potentially rainy day), and then assigning monetary amounts to the various outcomes and using probabilities to determine the expected payoff (ER) and/or the expected loss (EL). As a clarification, in all well-defined scenarios, the decision with the highest ER will also have the lowest EL, so the two are effectively equivalent.
Of course, this alone is insufficient to explain how we make decisions. The following passage illustrates this, and thus makes the case for the similar but distinct concept of utility:
The concept of utility says that there are additional non-monetary things that a model like expected payoff can't account for. In the above example, the issue is clearly people's tendency to be loss averse. This circles back to the dual perspectives of the earlier article. The idealist argument appears to approach things from the expected payoff side of things. The path to becoming the best society that we can be is by standing strong in the face of terror. There may be individual defeats along the way, but the highest sum total of good is achieved by adhering to the principles of liberty. Meanwhile, the practical argument embodies the utility approach. It understands the benefit of free speech, but concludes that the potential losses that result from unbridled liberty are too much.
In the end, which argument describes the world in which you'd like to live? The first one, right? We can twist ourselves into knots arguing about the pragmatism of the utility approach, but why argue passionately for something that doesn't at least come close to our ideal vision of the world. The problem is that even if we agree to support the ideal vision, the majority of us make our decisions by way of the utility approach, just like the book says. For most of us (myself included, if I'm being honest), the potential loss of fortune, comfort, or life is too much to justify making truly optimal decisions. This is one of the inherent tragedies of everyday life, that even the most aware of us can feel powerless to avoid. If there is one lesson to take away from the terrorism and subsequent debate, it is that we cannot afford to be afraid of the consequences of actions that we deem to be necessary and even noble. Life is too short anyway, and the potential reward is too great.
