GREAT MOMENTS IN MORAL EQUIVALENCE: Sam Harris: ‘Donald Trump Is a Worse Person than Osama bin Laden.’
“I’ve said on several occasions that I think Donald Trump is a worse person than Osama bin Laden. A statement is obviously meant to get your attention. I get that it’s surprising, but it’s not meant to be hyperbolic. I can defend every word of a statement like that. What I can’t defend are people’s misunderstandings and erroneous extrapolations of a statement like that. Perhaps I should just clarify that statement again, because it actually goes a long way to explaining my view of Trump, why I think he’s such a terrible person, but not nearly as scary as some people think he is, and not nearly as scary as many people think I think he is. I think Osama bin Laden was a more or less normal human being psychologically. He was just living in the grip of a dangerous and idiotic worldview. The moral structure he imagined he was living under and wanted to impose on the rest of the world given his beliefs was despicable, so he created immense harm and it’s very good that we killed him. But within the framework of his odious beliefs, he demonstrated many virtues. He was a man who certainly seemed to be capable of real self-sacrifice and he was committed to ideals beyond his narrow self-interest. He was by all accounts personally quite courageous. I don’t claim to know that much about him, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if he was generally a person of real integrity and generosity and compassion in his dealings with his fellow Muslims*. None of these things can be said about Donald Trump.”
* Remembering the Muslims who were killed in the 9/11 attacks. “The victims were 28 Muslims who died in the twin towers of the World Trade Center, in addition to three Muslims who were among the passengers on two hijacked planes; one of them crashed on a Pennsylvania field before it reached its target, and the second one hit the Pentagon.”
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