The right threw a pre planned riot because they didn't like the outcome of an election. The left threw riots over unarmed black men being killed with impunity for generations. One of those groups has a moral right to riot.
Do people also have a moral right to not have their business burned to the ground, even when they had nothing to do with George Floyd's death? Asking for a friend.
I disagree heavily. The focus of this conversation seems misdirected, whether intentionally or not. It’s not about the fragility of morality as a system at all, which it of course is because it’s based on consensus. It’s about fundamental principles and upholding them, and how you prioritize those principles.
You seem to believe in upholding right to free speech, which, surely is crucial to the country. However, this other group you speak of is protesting their rights to life and liberty, which they are being actively deprived of by an oppressive regime. Isn’t it slightly unfair? What rights is the right being deprived of? Entitlement to a certain election result or a certain office? That opposes the very definition of this democracy. They have means for their voices to be heard and their issues to be heard, still, by the right’s representatives in Congress. Black people didn’t/don’t because law enforcement was/is being racist and oppressive in unfairly killing them.
To be clear, I don't think rioting is ever morally justified. Peaceful protesting is a different matter.
The issue people had with the protests this summer wasn't that they were out protesting. It was the fact that literally everything else about daily life had been upended and we were all supposed to be locked down away from friends and family, unless of course you wanted to go protest, in which case you had full government, medical, and corporate blessing to go do whatever you wanted. Then when you were at the protest, you could burn down buildings and cause untold damage to property and the media would look straight-faced into the camera and call it "mostly peaceful".
Great. To that same standard the protests last week were "mostly peaceful". Hardly any of the people who actually showed up in DC were part of the storming of the capital.
My point about morality is that it is a poor justification for why an action is justified in one case and not in another. It basically ends up with "it's right when I do it, and wrong when you do it."
I don't necessarily agree with the conclusions the protesters this summer came to, but I can follow their line of reasoning and see why it is something they felt strongly about. In the same manner, you might not agree that there is a evidence that vote counts were manipulated in the November election, but if you start from that assumption, I think you would agree that someone might want to protest that.
I've heard it phrased that the social contract is basically, "Your rights are my responsibility." I think that's something worth striving for no matter your political position. I hope we can find the will to de-escalate things on both sides to the point that we can actually work towards that goal.
