About 9 p.m., the Bible study concludes. As the group prepares to share a concluding prayer, Roof suddenly stands, pulls out a .45-caliber semi-automatic pistol and says he has come to kill black people. He shoots the Rev. Pinckney first, at near point-blank range. Simmons tries to protect the pastor, a father of two young children, but Roof shoots him multiple times, too.

As Roof unloads his gun into the remaining people who had welcomed him, they fall from wounds or to avoid being shot, first Coleman-Singleton, a 45-year-old church pastor and track coach at Goose Creek High School, then Thompson and on and on.

Somehow, Felicia Sanders remains composed enough to pull her 5-year-old granddaughter down with her and whispers: play dead. The two lie on the cold floor covered in the spilled, warm blood of their friends and family. Sanders feels the heat of each gun blast, hears the clank of casings echoing onto the hard tile and struggles to hold utterly still, even as Roof stops to reload. Her son, 26-year-old Tywanza Sanders, tries to take advantage of the halt in gunfire to calm Roof and talk him out of more bloodshed. But Roof replies that he’s there to do a job — and he must finish it. He shoots Sanders, then the rest, including Susie Jackson, a beloved aunt who Sanders couldn’t save with his final, most desperate words. At 87, she is the oldest worshipper there.

All of the dead and dying suffer multiple gunshot wounds.

As Roof starts out of the building, he passes Polly Sheppard, who is on her knees praying and has somehow avoided his rampage so far. He asks her if she’s shot. She says no. “I am going to let you live so you can tell the story of what happened,” Roof says, telling her he plans to kill himself.

With Felicia Sanders and her granddaughter still pretending to be dead, with Sheppard still alive, Roof returns to the church door, looks both ways as he opens it and climbs into his car and leaves.

The above is from The Post and Courier‘s account of the June 17th shooting inside Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. Nine people were killed. The suspect, Dylann Root, is reported to have been a white supremacist who authored “a nearly 2,500-word diatribe against African-Americans, Jews and Hispanics in which the author says he chose Charleston for his killing spree ‘because it is the most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to whites in the country.'”

The massacre and the issues surrounding it are being widely discussed around the world. I invited several philosophers to publicly contribute, in an abbreviated form, to this discussion. The idea behind posts like this (this is the second one at Daily Nous; the first was on Rachel Dolezal), is to prompt further discussion among philosophers themselves, and also to explore the ways in which philosophers can add, with their characteristically insightful and careful modes of thinking, to the public conversation about current events. Their remarks are below. Others are, of course, welcome to join the conversation. Additionally, if you are aware of other philosophical commentary on the shootings elsewhere on the web, please provide a link in the comments.

I am grateful to the philosophers who, on rather short notice, agreed to participate in this post. They are, in alphabetical order: David Boonin (Colorado), David Brax (Gothenburg), Robert Gooding-Williams (Columbia), Chike Jeffers (Dalhousie), Jeff McMahan (Oxford), Anne Schwenkenbecher (Murdoch), Amia Srinivasan (Oxford), Brad E. Stone (Loyola Marymount), and Jessica Wolfendale (West Virginia / U.S. Naval Academy). Their contributions are below. I’d like to also thank Meena Krishnamurthy for the suggestion to put this post together.

David Boonin:

Some Questions for People who Oppose Hate Crime Laws

Assume that Dylann Roof deliberately murdered nine innocent people, that he targeted his victims specifically because they were black, that laws against murder are justified, and that the state has the right to punish people who break justified laws. Many people who accept all of these assumptions nonetheless deny that Roof should be punished for committing a hate crime. This is because they oppose hate crime laws. I have some questions for such people.

Perhaps you oppose hate crime laws because you think the state should punish people for committing bad acts but not punish people for having bad mental states and you think that inflicting extra punishment on someone for specifically targeting his victims because they were black amounts to objectionably punishing that person for having bad mental states. If this is your reason for opposing hate crime laws, you should consider that the only difference between deliberately pulling the trigger of a gun that’s pointed at someone and accidentally doing so is a difference in the shooter’s mental states. Do you think it’s wrong for the state to treat first degree murder as a more serious offence than negligent homicide? If don’t think it’s wrong for the state to do this, why do you think it’s okay for the state to take mental states into account in these cases but not okay for the state to take them into account in the case of hate crimes?

Perhaps you think there’s a relevant difference between two kinds of mental states: intentions, which you take to be part of what makes a particular act the particular act that it is, and motives, which you take to explain why someone chose to perform the particular act they chose to perform. And perhaps you oppose hate crime laws because you think it’s okay for the state to take intentions into account, but not okay for the state to take motives into account, and you think that hate crime laws illegitimately inflict extra punishment on some people because of their motives while laws that distinguish first-degree murder from negligent homicide legitimately inflict extra punishment on some people because of their intentions. If this is your reason for opposing hate crime laws, do you think the difference between stealing money in order to buy medicine for your sick child and stealing money in order to help fund Al Qaeda is a difference in intentions or a difference in motives? If you think it’s a difference in intentions, and so something the law may legitimately take into account in determining the severity of the offender’s sentence, then why isn’t the difference between pulling a trigger in order to kill people and pulling a trigger in order to kill black people in particular also a difference in intentions, and so also something the law may legitimately take into account in determining the severity of the offender’s sentence? If you think the difference between stealing to help your child and stealing to help Al Qaeda is instead a difference in motives, do you think the former should be punished as severely as the latter? If you don’t really think this, why do you think that it’s okay for the state to take motive into account in these cases but not okay for the state to take motive into account in the case of hate crimes?

Perhaps you oppose hate crime laws on the grounds that there’s no way to draw a sharp and non-arbitrary line between the groups that should be protected by such laws and the groups that shouldn’t be. If this is your reason for opposing hate crime laws, do you think there’s a way to draw a sharp and non-arbitrary line between those who are old enough to be legally permitted to drink, smoke, vote, buy a gun, or get married and those who are not yet old enough to be permitted to do these things? Or between the amount of alcohol that is too much to have in your blood to legally drive and the amount that is not too much? If you don’t think there’s a way to draw a sharp, non-arbitrary line in these cases, why should the inability to draw such a line undermine hate crime laws but not undermine these other laws?

Perhaps you think hate crime laws objectionably set us down a slippery slope to laws that punish people purely for having bad thoughts, or that it’s unreasonable to ask a jury to determine what was going through the mind of the person accused of committing a hate crime. If you oppose hate crime laws for one of these reasons, do you also oppose all other laws that take the offender’s thoughts into account? If not, why not? Do you oppose hate crime laws for some other reason? If so, is there a reason to think that this reason isn’t subject to the same kinds of problems that the other reasons seem to be subject to? I don’t want to insist that these are unanswerable questions. But I do want to suggest that opponents of hate crime laws have not satisfactorily answered them.

David Brax:

Was it a hate crime? Was it an act of terrorism? The answer seems to be obviously ”yes” to both. Statements reportedly made by the suspect, the symbols he wore, the choice of victims and place, the reported premeditation, etc. speaks to this being racially motivated and committed with the intent to cause fear and bring about societal change. Here, I will put most emphasis on the hate crime angle.

On most conceptions of what a hate crime is, the Charleston case seems to count as one. The most common idea is that hate crimes are distinguished by motive, i.e. the reason why the crime was committed. Some jurisdictions understands it as intentionally selecting targets associated with a protected class. A third conception understands hate crimes as defined by intent; to strike fear in the targeted community. A fourth identifies hate crimes as expressing a message to the targeted group. The Charleston case seems to qualify as a hate crime on all these accounts.

South Carolina, however, does not have a hate crime law. Such laws are held to be part of the dealing with the repercussions of past institutional racial injustice.That SC has not taken this measure is worthy of note. But it is not the end of the matter; the case will probably be run as a federal case. Since the Matthew Sheppard and James Byrd Jr Hate Crime prevention act was signed into law in 2009, federal authorities have extended power to handle cases states are unable or unwilling to take. There is one complication: Given the gravity of the case, it is possible that the penalty, if it had stayed in SC, would have been death. The probability that this would happen in a federal court may be lower. So: In order for it to be judged as a hate crime, it may lead to amilder penalty. But even if a penalty enhancement cannot come into effect, there is a point to treating this as a hate crime. Many victims say that the penalty enhancement is less important than ismentioning the motive in these cases. Recognizing and officially condemning these types of crimes is more important than raising penalties.

What is the significance of calling it a hate crime? Hate crime are seen as worse than similar crimes absent the hate element. There are a number of reasons why, but the most common account is harm-based. Hate crimes, according to scholars like Paul Iganski and Frederick Lawrence, hurt more. The primary victims typically experience more psychological harm, which is not relevant when it comes to murder. But the additional harm also concern the victimized group – which is reminded of their status as potential targets – and society in general – it may increase tensions between groups. Both these factors are relevant here.

Was this an act of terrorism? Again, the answer seems to be straightforwardly ”yes” by most definitions. What makes an act of terrorism is arguably the intent to cause fear in a population and/or to force societal change. Roof seems to be a conservative terrorist, i.e. one that wants to stop change, or to change things back the way they were. The ”typical” terrorist is somehow alien to the system which he/she wants to change. One reason why Roof might not be perceived as a terrorist, then, is that he is (as Åsne Seierstad stated in her book about Norwegian terrorist Breivik) ”one of us”, i.e. as someone not that different from normal members of the (white) population. The reluctance to accept a terrorist as thus part of ”our” culture is probably one reason why we turn to questions about mental health. Why would a person congruent with the dominant culture go to these lengths? Of course, racism should be alien to our culture. A person with this mind-setshould be as alien to our culture, and thus be as easily perceived as a terrorist, as a member of ISIS.

Another reason why Roof might not be understood as a terrorist is if there is no organization behind him – such a background is typical of what people think of as terrorism, and the hunt for them is the typical reaction to a terrorist attack. Of course, the need for such organizations to facilitate acts of terrorism is weakened by the internet, which makes it possible to cherry-pick an ideology, a support base, and a methodology to suit you.

The significance

Is this act a sign of things getting worse, a symptom of growing racism? Or (counter-intuitively) may it be a sign of things getting better? Racist offenders may find their justification in others expressing the same views. But they also find their justification in thinking of themselves and the society and values they care about as being somehow threatened. While hate crime criminals are often part of the majority, it is when some members of that majority think of themselves as loosing their privilege that the need to commit crimes to defend that privilege arise. Hate crimes are often understood as a response to people of the hated group ”stepping out of their place”, and there being no other way of putting them back. Segregation, privilege and power means rarely having to worry. But, of course, privilege should be threatened. People with the beliefs that Roof seem to have should be feeling threatened, because the order they want should be collapsing. Ifthis is how it works (note that this is just a hypothesis), a rise in these types of crimes may occur as a reaction to things becoming better at a more everyday level.

Robert Gooding-Williams: