I went into this with my eyes open, so I am accountable.

The U.S.’s  favorite racist, Woodrow Wilson.

When I poked the hornets nest of the nauseating racist website Chimpmania, I knew I risked having  Ethics Alarms being descended upon by the ideological clones of Simon Legree and Woodrow Wilson. My routine response would be to nix such posts, as I similarly make sure other vile screeds never see the light of a laptop.

However, the Ethics Alarms post in question was about the importance of not censoring vile websites, because of the First Amendment, naturally, but also because people with unethical views are more dangerous when they hide in the shadows. It is important that we know about them and their thought processes; sometimes, with persuasion and patience, we can even bring them back to civilization. It is also important that we consider and understand how such individuals came to have their humanity so darkened and warped.

I am not the government: like Facebook, Ethics Alarms is not obligated by law or principle to allow every comment, no matter how offensive, to be seen and read.  To the contrary, it is obligated to maintain an environment  conducive to productive ethics discourse, enlightenment and debate. In this case, however, I recognized the apparent hypocrisy of extolling the benefits of allowing racists to roam free on the web while personally censoring the comments from the very same racists whose rights the original post was defending.

My compromise is this: if a comment from one of Chimpmania’s resident racists about his or her home site is substantive, I will allow it, and subsequent posts that meet Ethics Alarms comment standards on other topics. However, any further posts of a racist nature will be trashed, and the commenter banned from future participation.

I think that is fair. Some may think it is too fair.

[On a related note, the discourse here has been unusually cranky and nasty lately, with skirmishes breaking out that seem to quickly degenerate into name-calling.  If I am doing something that is sparking that, please let me know what it is, and please, let’s try not to abuse each other. The thread on Barry’s blog launched based on his comments about one of my Martin-Zimmerman ethics train wreck posts (the one where I correctly noted that the prosecution hadn’t made its case) has been more civil and substantive than the thread here on the same topic. This isn’t a competition: Kudos to Barry and his readers. But we should be able to as well on Ethics Alarms.]