Tin Pei Ling and the Ethical Justifications of the Blogosphere

[I wrote this in 1 Apr 2011, before the 2011 General Elections. It was first published on fearfullyopinionated.wordpress.com ]

To be honest, when the first salvos flew on Tin Pei Ling (Kate Spade photo and all) I’d thought that this wasn’t a big deal.  I thought this was a clear case of a bunch of faceless netizens who like to be provocative pouncing on some potential new material.  In fact, the material wasn’t quite juicy enough, which was why they had to fabricate a narrative regarding her love life and motivations for marriage.  Ethically, I thought this was straightforward enough – the netizens hurling such insinuations had absolutely no moral ground for doing so (never stopped anybody in the blogosphere, I know).  This was “gutter politics” clear and simple, and the mudslingers were clearly in the wrong here.

I thought wrong.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not saying that these attacks on Ms Tin were justified.  I don’t think they are.  But people have stepped forward to claim that they DO have moral ground for launching such attacks on Ms Tin, and that such attacks were justifiable at the very least.  This is a fascinating claim! I am tempted to attempt to break it down further.  What does the Tin Pei Ling incident reveal to us about our blogosphere and our ethical justifications?  This is what this post will try to explore.

These are the common lines of argument that defend the attacks on Ms Tin:

(1) This is her Baptism of Fire.

[This view was somewhat articulated by motochan.  Cherian George argues against this view.]  I think there are actually two possible variations of this argument. The first variation is: the reason why I decided to attack Ms Tin is because I believed that it would be good for her to go through this trial.  In other words, the rational motivation for attacking her is because I intentionally desired for Ms Tin to undergo this trial and to test her mettle.  Kind of like how a parent may intentionally punish a child for the child’s ultimate benefit.  This argument, I believe, is totally rational and probably defensible based on utilitarian grounds (i.e. it is for Singapore’s best interest that Ms Tin be attacked in such a fashion, hence I attack her).  The main problem with this view?  I don’t actually think anybody subscribes to this view.  Certainly, I have not heard any blogger articulate it as such. Instead,   I think everybody who says this subscribes to the second variation, which is: “testing Ms Tin isn’t the reason why I attacked her in the first place, but since testing her is a good thing, and my actions brought about a good thing, hence my actions are justified.”

Let’s break this down a little further.  A proponent of this argument appears to believe that as long as my actions bring about a good outcome, it does not matter why I did those actions in the first place.  In order words, my motivations are inconsequential, only the outcomes of my actions determine its ethical value.  Which is a very extreme form of utilitarianism known as Act Utilitarianism, and I believe this is unintuitive to most people.  Let me elaborate how unintuitive this is with a thought experiment (originally formulated by JJC Smart if I am not mistaken): supposing I am jogging by a lake and I see a man drowning.  I decided to jump into the lake and save the man because I wanted to save his life.  Turns out this man is a ruthless authoritarian ruler who will go on to kill millions of people (think Hitler) later in his life.  According to Act Utilitarianism, my saving him from drowning was the unethical action! Because if I decided to let him drown and live, this would have prevented the death of millions and is clearly the better eventual outcome.  It does not matter that I have no knowledge of who this man is, because my motivations does not matter according to Act Utilitarianism.  Is this how you understand ethics to be?  If not, it doesn’t quite make any sense for you to claim that your attacks on Ms Tin are justified, because a baptism of fire for her is good, regardless of your motivations for attacking her.

(2) The PAP did it first.

[This view was articulated by onesingaporean.  Cherian George also argued against this.]  I think we can all agree this argument is not as trivial as “I see my neighbour steal money, hence it is right for me to steal money”.  Even so, I think there are again two possible variations of this argument.  The first one is: “PAP is the one that sets the ethical rules for politics.  If they can do it, then it is alright for me to do it”  This view implies a certain arbitrariness to ethics – what determines right or wrong is not determined by some set of universal principles, but rather because of what PAP had done previously.  If PAP did something differently in the past, then the rules of political ethics would have changed.  This is certainly quite an odd way of looking at ethics, and I think onesingaporean cannot really subscribe to this view because it backfires on him.  If PAP precedence is the one that sets ethical right and wrong, then it is by definition morally right that the PAP detained Chia Thye Poh (and other stuff the PAP did to cripple opposition).  Surely this is a conclusion that onesingaporean would want to avoid.

This leads us to our second variation:  “it is not right for me to attack any other politician, but it is okay for me to attack a PAP politician because the PAP had been guilty of this in the past”.  This sounds a little like “an eye for an eye”, but actually goes a little further than that.  I don’t think it is absolutely indefensible, but this stand does seem to be advocating some kind of vengeance-based vigilantism, e.g. “if you rape my wife and kill my family, it is okay for me to rape your wife and kill your family in return”.  I suspect this brand of ethics is already unappealing to most people, but there is one other implication to note if you subscribe to this view: if you did a personal attack on Ms Tin, it makes it okay for other people to do a personal attack on you.

[To onesingaporean’s defense, he did say that the personal attacks on Ms Tin were “of course unwarranted”, but he does appear to go on to explain that it might be warranted after all.  Of course, it may not be that he is contradicting himself, but rather I am reading him wrongly.]

(3) It is our democratic right to do so.

[This view is not clearly articulated anywhere, but appears to be implied by this quote attributed to Martyn See.  I am unable to find primary source anywhere, can someone help give me a link?

“I think it is okay to make fun of Tin Pei Ling. If we are a properly functioning democracy, she would’ve been torn asunder by comedians and caricaturists.” ]

I considered a couple of ways to attempt to deconstruct this, but ultimately I felt that the most charitable position would be one regarding freedom of speech.  In other words: “the things we said about Ms Tin, fall perfectly within our rights to free speech, and hence is morally permissible”.  There is often one  set of arguments when freedom of speech is used to justify such behaviour that I won’t go into (Is there really such a thing as freedom of speech? Is freedom of speech truly desirable? Is slander freedom of speech? Who determines what is morally permissible speech and what is not? How about balancing freedom of speech against other rights?).  However, the comment about comedians and caricaturists seems to imply another added dimension: the rules of freedom of speech apply differently to Ms Tin because she is a public figure/politician.  Certainly everyone agrees that a politician ought to be able to stand up to public scrutiny, but at this point I would like to recall Siew Kum Hong’s admission that these kinds of “public scrutiny” (i.e. being susceptible to personal attacks) partly deterred him into entering politics.  I believe most of the people who attack Ms Tin have a desire to see alternative politicians replace the PAP as the incumbent political party.  By practicing their rights to free speech then working against this desired state of affairs by further discouraging any new politicians to enter the arena?

(4) She’s going to end up being paid $15,000 a month on taxpayer’s money.

[This argument is implied at the end of onesingaporean’s post, and is also implied in Martyn See’s quote:

But alas, we are not. In the end, she will stroll into her MP office, with make-up and handbags intact, and she’ll look back on this week as being the most trying period of her political career, and then she’ll have the last laugh, at your expense. ]

To me, this is the most interesting justification of all.  Why does Ms Tin’s potential salary, or whether or not her handbags would be intact after this episode have any bearing at all on whether or not it is justified to launch personal attacks at her?  It appears that this is a statement about sympathy and antipathy.  A proponent of this argument seems to imply that Siew Kum Hong and Cherian George are criticizing the attacks on Ms Tin because they feel sympathy for her (“look at this poor girl, let us come to her help”), and the counter to this is that Ms Tin actually does not deserve our sympathy (“she is going to be richer than you or me”), and hence criticizing the attacks on Ms Tin are unwarranted.  I suspect both Siew Kum Hong and Cherian George would both deny that what they were saying is out of sympathy for Ms Tin.  Rather, they would claim that they are arguing for a principled position that it is wrong to attack Ms Tin, regardless of whether or not she deserves our sympathy.

Which brings us to a very interesting question: why does Ms Tin being not deserving of our sympathy have anything to do with whether it is right or wrong to attack her? Turns out that such moral justifications have plenty to do with our emotions and emotional response towards certain individuals.  In other words, a good part of our moral justifications have to do with whether or not we like the person on the other side.  This is kind of like a primary school bully: “It is okay for me to beat you up because I just don’t like you.”  I suspect, in fact, that this is the real motivation behind most of the attacks on Miss Tin: “we feel it is okay to personally attack you because we just don’t like the PAP, and hence we just don’t like you”.

I won’t go into criticizing reason (4) for being immature, I’m sure plenty others have done that already, but rather I wonder if all this could be due to the influence of postmodernist views, and in particular the deconstruction of ethics to the point where the only moral justification necessary for any action is an emotional justification.  I am probably thinking too much, but I believe this much is true: it would be silly to disregard emotions and emotional responses when it comes to the singapore politics on the internet.