The Problem with Always Siding with the Underdog

The cartoonist Garry Trudeau recently gave a speech in which he condemned the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, and by implication four shoppers in a Parisian kosher supermarket, for getting themselves murdered. Key to his argument was the principle that it is permissible for satire to be offensive when it attacks the powerful and the privileged, but not when it attacks weak and defenseless victims—the latter category including, in the current instance, people who might kill those with whom they disagree. David Frum investigates this theory of morality: