I’m less interested in the blameworthiness angle, and more in the question of how one should use this sort of evidence when deciding how to interact with / relate to a given writer in the future. (For this and other reasons this seems quite different to the historical figure case to me.)
There are some defences I could see reducing the size of the update I would make on seeing that someone wrote something I find mean/uncharitable/otherwise unvirtuous – for example, “I wanted to reach that audience on some key issue, and needed to write in a nastier style to do that”, or “journalism work is hard to come by, sometimes you have to hold your nose and jump in the mud”. But these seem like pretty small counter-updates relative to the first-order evidence that someone wrote something mean and uncharitable.
I’m less interested in the blameworthiness angle, and more in the question of how one should use this sort of evidence when deciding how to interact with / relate to a given writer in the future. (For this and other reasons this seems quite different to the historical figure case to me.)
There are some defences I could see reducing the size of the update I would make on seeing that someone wrote something I find mean/uncharitable/otherwise unvirtuous – for example, “I wanted to reach that audience on some key issue, and needed to write in a nastier style to do that”, or “journalism work is hard to come by, sometimes you have to hold your nose and jump in the mud”. But these seem like pretty small counter-updates relative to the first-order evidence that someone wrote something mean and uncharitable.