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Comment by naasking | Hacker News Reader

> What I find especially sad is I am a total believer in political correctness as a general courtesy to people

Yes, but we must recognise the difference between etiquette and ethics. Ethics are the things you must do, but courtesy is a matter of etiquette, behaviour that is optional but culturally polite.

PC culture these days raises etiquette to the level of ethics, and that's simply wrong.

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Not if you apply the point-of-view that etiquette is what the unethical use to keep their unethical practices under-questioned.

That seems to imply an assumption of lack of good faith, unless I’m misinterpreting what you’re saying.

While there’s no doubt that one can find cases to which this applies, I’d think that applying that broadly to the vast majority of people who are arguing in good faith would stifle debate.

I think you're taking as assumption that the vast majority of people are arguing in good faith, and many are no longer willing to take on that assumption without evidence.

Given what has been seen regarding both 4chan psychological operations and Russian intelligence operations on major message boards, I can see the vantage point where it's fair to not treat good faith as assumable.

There's no real limit to what bad-faith actors will use to appear legitimate. They'll use philosophy, science, religion, etiquette, etc - in constrained, self-serving ways, of course. We can't just assume anyone doing those things is evil and acting in bad faith - otherwise we're just elevating the ad hominem as our supreme, central dogma.

I have no objection to ignoring etiquette in general. The point I was trying to make is that treating etiquette as ethics is how people justify shutting down debate on controversial topics. They also use it to dehumanize their opponents on an issue, and that is unethical.

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