I wasn't trying to suggest that you believe that masks are not mandatory, my problem was only with that specific point of comparison you made. Perhaps I was too aggressive with my wording, but my point was that in the case of masks, I see no moral or social issue with mandating mask usage as doing so brings more benefits than not (and not doing so results in demonstrable harm). The worry about a slippery slope can only come from the people accepting changes that bring no clear benefit, such as decreasing the budget of an incredibly over-funded sector by a negligible amount.

Could there be other ways of deterring reckless behavior? Perhaps, but if there is any better evidence that doing so would be less effective, please consider the increasingly large amount of people in the U.S. who prefer to not wear a mask in spite of the growing number of cases. We can do everything short of mandating it with law, from distributing free masks to listing all of the health benefits, but you will still have risk-takers who decide that such do not apply to them. With a law, you set down the line for what is inexcusably risky behavior.

Aside from the horror stories that show up about how the virus can inflict total organ failure on some people, it has already been shown to be highly infectious. From an epidemiologic standpoint, its health implications for the very old (and then some) is indisputable, and thus not wearing a mask creates an unacceptable risk. I can compare this to common road laws. You are perfectly allowed to not drive on the right-hand partition of the road, if you are skilled enough to dodge incoming traffic and pedestrians. But who is to say that you are that skilled? You put many people on the left-hand partition in an unacceptable amount of risk with that behavior, so it is wiser to mandate with law that you must drive on the right-hand side.

I don't mean to be picky, but I do not believe that civil rights, gay rights, and same-sex marriage are comparable to wearing a mask. With the first three issues listed, we have no list of any sort of identifiable physical harm, whether logically or practically. There is no physical issue with granting people of different skin tones/colors rights as the only "harmful" outcome was that their population rivaled that of the white population. There is no physical issue with granting gay people rights, or at least immunity from legal persecution, because any reasonable study would demonstrate that their legal legitimacy would provide no physical harm to any person within or outside of that category. There is no physical issue with giving two people of the same sex a piece of paper declaring their marital status. But there are demonstrable physical issues with not mandating the wearing of an adequate mask.

I'm glad to hear (read?) that you enjoyed this exchange. Thank you for participating in kind.

Most of the rest of your arguments are interesting, and none I disagree heavily with. In a messy environment that is often the case, attribution should and must be done carefully, but perhaps my main point of contention was in the moderate cases of attribution. Disagreement with a speaker is no grounds to not correctly attribute statements to them, but any additional concerns from mere exposure are certainly points that, when salient, are of the utmost importance to consider. There is no reason to not quote a controversial figure such as Ben Shapiro if your only reason is that you personally disagree with his philosophy, that you find his worldviews offensive, or that you think he smells funny. But, as you mentioned, there is every reason to reconsider whether you would like to quote Hitler if you are unable to put in words the specific information required to divorce authority from attribution.

As for my second bomb scenario, I will concede its hypothetical construction is rather weak. We can still assign moral blame onto Person C if we declare that he was negligent in preparing the detonation site, in whichever specific context we use. The second scenario would have been strengthened if I declared that Person C was given no reason to believe that anyone would be nearby, and that chance had it that people either found or forced their way near the bomb.

I'll argue that my bomb scenario can still be directly applied to a person posting a message on social media. When we post a message, we aren't seeing how it affects people in real time. We are shut out from a world of strangers' reactions, and for those of us who are not followed by a few active users, we fail to understand if or when our posts will bring about any effect. We are blind to its results until much later, usually through reactions that are posted *after* the post has had its course. For those of us with a rather large following, the impact can be rather immediate, but that does not indicate that that we can directly observe the effect nonetheless. We are only experiencing a fraction of it, since the effects we're aiming to analyze will be entirely within the minds of others. We may have the means to make an inference as to what the effect is, but we won't have any means of directly observing those mental results.

If you choose to continue to treat people with the same level of respect to prove that you are better, then that is your burden to hold. But it does not hold that other people must share this burden. If they choose to drop the facade in the face of continued, sustained, or aggravated disrespect, then they have the right to. Without this freedom to dissociate from and not affirm harmful influences, no person could possibly make any attempt to better their lives or build their self esteem.

For the general case you are bringing attention to, I do agree that it is not wise or prudent to treat disrespect with disrespect. The axis of respect you demonstrate for a perfect stranger is different than that of an accomplished scientist, or that of your manager, or that of your employees, and so on. Within each axis is a level of respect that you can choose to demonstrate, however strict or lax you choose to make each end of your scale. Dependent on the axis of which you treat the person in your exchanges, if you are shown disrespect, you have no moral obligation to treat them with either less or more respect. But you are also not obligated to hold the same respect for them, or heighten your level of respect. To claim otherwise calls for rather extenuating circumstances that would prove difficult for me to make much argumentative grounds on.

With the point on respect, there seems to be a disconnect between what I intended to convey and what I actually did. Of course, in a setting that's not a formal debate, replying to absurdity with absurdity does not produce any fruitful result, but my point is not that the absurd counterpoint should be made with no regard to the context of the theoretical debate. My point was only that the contents of the point is valid to make, since it draws upon the fact that no extra responsibility is granted by the creator to the created being. No child has the responsibility of affirming every statement their parents make. If the parent wishes to impose that false responsibility, I would claim that it is well within the child's right to reject that responsibility (whether privately or publicly, whichever imposes a lesser risk to the child's well-being). It is not an act of disrespect to do so, if anything it affirms the child's self-esteem and devalues any external attempt to do otherwise.

Let me reiterate that "I gave birth to you" alone is not an acceptable defense. The act of giving birth, or more generally creation, is no greater indicator of knowledge or experience. This can be loosely extended to "I am your mother/father" in the case where the argument does not involve lineage in any way. If experience is to be drawn upon, the less damning statement to be made is "I experienced Event X before, and this is what I think based on that." Whether or not we think the child will listen is irrelevant, since the child should understand within context that the parent is guiding the child's action based on the parents' own experiences. Declaring one's authority by the means of invoking their loins or their blood relation is inexcusable in a debate. Appealing to "special bonds" is also inexcusable, since these typically follow the same pattern as emotional blackmail. If a point is valid, it should be made without attempting to extort a sense of obligation from the child.

Seems to be a lot you're taking from the comic than is there. From the most basic view, the counterpoint of "I gave birth to you" (or similarly, "I am your mother/father") is inexcusably silly. The retort of "my birth is not my fault" becomes an acceptable counterpoint in that light. The act of birth gives the parent no more argumentative ground than any other kind of manipulation or logical fallacy you can list, but the moment the statement is uttered it has the potential to become a point of refutation. By noting that you are not responsible for your own birth, you demonstrate how flawed it is to believe that you ought to be grateful that you are born, and furthermore how little being the creator of an intelligent entity means in an argument that doesn't directly involve the act of creation itself.

I don't believe I fully understand your second point. It seems to be to be an accusation of claiming to avoid use of authority while discreetly wanting to use authority. In this case, this is simply the speaker lying about their intended purpose. This is an entirely different issue, and is not relevant to my speaker or my arguments.
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You claim that the "action" of saying something is making the implicit claim that "Person A is an expert in Matter Y." I don't believe that this is in any way tenable. Simply because people will reach that conclusion through psychological flaws and manipulations doesn't imply that that's what the speaker intended to do. That is what the listener assumes you've said, and as I mentioned before it becomes a salient point to educate the listener on your actual claim and not a false claim.

... educate their listeners if they become aware of the misunderstanding, but this does not place them in any worse a place than before. Without the intent to mislead the listeners, my speaker is not blameworthy for the listeners' misunderstanding of the claim.
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To address your two numbered points, I'll revert back to my general claim. The first point is circumstantial. If Statement X is indeed a statement that has fallen victim to quote mining, then my speaker can be faulted with misrepresentation. They still would not be morally responsible for causing any perceived harm as long as they are not aware of the mental state of their listeners, but it is dishonest enough that we can assign my speaker with the fault of misleading others. That is about as far as we can take the responsibility without any more information relevant to the specific incident.

You do make some interesting psychological points, but it seems to be attempting to place false blame. I'll try to tackle a few things at once. The general claim "Statement X from Person A is correct" makes no claim to Person A's wisdom on Matter Y, so your example including "Well as Adolf Hitler wisely once said" is not an accurate representation of my argument. This is a semantics choice made by the hypothetical speaker that you constructed, and is no way reflective of the hypothetical speaker that I've constructed. But I'll ride this wave for a moment, let's change my speaker's claim to "Person A wisely told me Statement X." If the intention is to demonstrate a moment of wisdom and not to encompass Person A with an aura of wisely knowledge, then my speaker still escapes moral responsibility for what other people take of this claim as long as the speaker has no direct knowledge of the listeners' mental states. My speaker may still have yet to clarify what they mean or otherwise...

... A is correct."
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I don't intend on saying that everyone should feel free to make claims similar to "Statement X from Person A is correct" with reckless abandon. The moment you consider the listener's psychological state, that becomes a salient piece of information, and so it becomes your responsibility as to how to communicate your claim properly. But that being said, it is ridiculous to claim that we can't perform basic attribution for people we find disagreeable. If the concern is that people cannot make the distinction between attribution and endorsement, then the problem lies in the education of the listener. Since that becomes a salient point, it becomes our responsibility not to control who we attribute statements to, but to educate the listeners so that they will be more mindful of exactly what they make of basic logic claims.

This is where things become trickier to make additional arguments. Even if Person B escapes moral responsibility as long as they don't intend on causing harm with their words, is it just to believe that they would be responsible for the future harm they caused? My immediate inclination is to answer no, since I believe that justice shouldn't be proactive. Justice is best applied retrospectively or concurrently. We cannot claim that anyone is responsible for a future act of harm if they never intended for that act to come about in the first place, nor can we accuse someone of having such an intention in the future if they don't have that intention in the present or past. This is akin to an accusation of psychological flaws. We give the accused no way to defend themselves, and in doing so prevent justice from coming fairly. So no, I still hold that no one is responsible for the implied claim "Person A is an expert on Matter Y" when they make the basic claim of "Statement X from Person...

... that Person A made a correct statement despite Person A's predisposition to making false claims, then we have the third version of the bomb scenario. Person B is not morally responsible for anyone else believing that Person A is trustworthy, they are only responsible for accomplishing their specific goal.

Now, let's have Person B make the claim that at least one of Person A's statements have some truth value. Of course, if Person B knew ahead of time exactly how to manipulate people and worded their claim in such a way as to elevate Person A, then we can hold Person B morally accountable for Person A's rise to power (should it occur). For the sake of the argument, we'll assume that Person B makes the simplest claim possible, namely "Statement X from Person A is correct." If the intention of Person B is only to repeat a statement they found to be correct and named the person from whom they heard the statement, then Person B wouldn't hold moral responsibility, even if we use causal analysis to trace back from some future atrocity to Person B's claim. Person B lacks the intent to cause the future atrocity, and so escapes moral responsibility for what happened. This is precisely the same as the second version of the bomb scenario. If Person B's intent is to bring attention to the fact...

The fourth is that Person C accomplishes the goal set out in the third scenario, but knows that others will be harmed by the explosion. The moral responsibility will lay totally on Person C, as in the first scenario, since it was immediately salient that they would bring direct harm to others with their actions.

So now let's assume that Person C wanted to kill or maim a very specific target, perhaps a single person or a small group. Our third scenario will be that Person C manages to accomplish this goal, but unknowingly harmed bystanders that they were unaware of. In this case, Person C clearly has moral responsibility for killing the targets, but is not morally responsible for harming the bystanders. Again, without the specific intent, we cannot claim that Person C shoulders the burden of wanting to hurt the bystanders.

The second is that Person C ordered the detonation with no awareness that anyone would be hurt. Perhaps they had it detonated in a mountainside, hoping that it would be far enough away to avoid damaging civilization, but it happened to be that a group of 30 tourists were walking near the bomb when it exploded. I will make the claim that Person C has no moral responsibility for what had happened, since it was not salient to them that there would be people near the bomb when it exploded. If Person C is unaware of the potential to cause direct harm at the time he ordered the detonation, it would be hard to say he had any harmful intentions.