A recent Twitter thread by @KGuilane got me thinking. (Here it is in situ, and here in unrolled form.)
We [need] to stop framing racism as offense and start to frame it as abuse. This [is] really not about hurt feelings. This is about health, psychological and economic abuse. We need to move away from the feelings discourse.
The hurt feelings discourse is what allows...fools to run the right to offend argument. You may have a right to offend but sure have no right to abuse.
...Abuse has long [term] consequences. Offence is short lived. Offence is about sensibilities. Racism is not, it is about our right to health & mental [health]. It is about our right to safety and dignity. It is about our right to freedom from psychological violence.
....when racism is framed as offence. You need to recognize it and reframe shit as appropriate... Trust me being offended is the least of POC [people of color]’s concern. No one gives a shit about being offended. POC are being harmed. Harmed not offended. Reframe shit...
[O]ffence does not cause depression/low mood. Offence does not make you despise yourself. And the world. Offence does not make [you] lose hope. Offense does not make you lose the will to live... Abuse does.
To forestall an anticipated counter-argument: The author doesn’t spend characters distinguishishing between moral right and legal right in this Twitter thread. I do distinguish them; but remember, I think that moral rights are real and respecting them is at least as important to the protection of human flourishing as is respecting legal rights. So.
I think she’s right. The question is, what to do about it?
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What she wrote made me notice something I hadn’t noticed before. Free speech advocates, including myself, assert that “nobody has the right not to be offended,” and we generally mean that “right” in both the legal and moral sense: the law doesn’t protect anyone from being offended, and we don’t have a moral right either: if we are offended, we can’t say we have been wronged either intentionally or unintentially.
But that’s only true if we’re careful about the meaning of the word “offended.”
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Feeling “upset, annoyed, or resentful; displeased” is something that can happen when we encounter opinions we disagree with or uncomfortable facts. Particular annoyance at a particular perceived insult or snub is natural and common. One of the reasons free speech advocates insist that there is no right not to be offended is because these feelings of annoyance and resentment and displeasure are so subjective. Sometimes they come from encountering wrongness and bad-faith arguments and irritating people; but other times, they come from being wrong and encountering the truth.
Sometimes muscle aches are a symptom of having done/encountered something wrong, but other times they are a symptom of being stretched and exercised. Being “offended” by discourse is like that. It’s uncomfortable to be right and to encounter arguments that are really wrong; it’s also uncomfortable to be wrong and to encounter arguments that are really right.
Insisting that no one has the right not to be offended—made uncomfortable—therefore supposedly protects normal, healthy discourse from being quashed. Remember “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable?” The second part only works at all if there’s no moral right not to be afflicted, no?
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So. I’ll be talking about moral rights and not legal ones in what follows (what I write will sometimes apply to legal rights too, but mainly I am talking about moral rights).
The temptation, I think, for free speech advocates, including myself, is to try to protect the moral right to speak freely by including—without speaking it, perhaps without interrogating it— far too much under the umbrella of “being offended” in the statement “no one has the right not to be offended.”
That’s a consequence of thinking only from the point of view of speech producers and failing to think from the point of view of speech targets.
No one has the right not to be offended. But everyone has the right not to be abused. And so when we say “no one has the right not to be offended” we cannot make the error of including things that count as abuse (whether by neglect or by malice) under the umbrella of offense (normal discomfort at encountering opposing opinions, discourse that’s heated in a way that’s not to our taste, or unpleasant facts).
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Let me reiterate that I am in the U. S. and just about an absolutist when it comes to freedom from government interference with speech and actions-as-speech protected by the First Amendment. That’s a legal, political, pragmatic position.
I’m also a personalist. Speech affects human persons. Speech carries responsibility to treat those persons with the dignity appropriate to their status as humans. That’s a moral position.
The consequence of holding those two positions? We have to reckon with the real harm that “mere” speech can cause to real, individual human persons.
If speech can do harm, then “more speech” is not always a sufficient remedy.
Can speech (leaving aside fraud and other unprotected categories) do real harm? Of course it can. Begin with the obvious case and then move away step by step through the ambiguous. I won’t pretend to know where the line should be drawn, but the line is there somewhere, because at the extreme, some rather common speech objectively, measurably harms people. Consider, for example, a child verbally abused by his or her parents, or a bullied teenager. Consider vulnerable adults, and adults made vulnerable by careful grooming and deliberate verbal abuse.
Verval abuse from people who are supposed to protect you, or who share a space and protection by your own protectors, harms you. It deprives you of a measure of the security that human persons require to thrive.
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Consider, too, the accumulation of many “little” abuses even from strangers, even at a distance. Those add up, no? Those add also to more personal, close-up abuses.
If a thousand strangers each hurl a single abuse at you, perhaps it harms you the way you would be harmed if one person with the opportunity abused you a thousand times.
Are we thinking too much from the point of view of one of those thousand strangers, each committing one sin, something they might repent of and be forgiven for? Or are we ever thinking from the point of view of the person who bore a thousand insults? This is the difference between focusing on “intent” and focusing on “impact.”
(It’s one reason why I am unsatisfied by the current term “microaggression” to describe this phenomenon. I understand that the goal is to call something out as more harmful than it has been acknowledged to be, but I fear that it misses the mark: it focuses on intent rather than impact and literally minimizes it (“micro”). It allows the people who commit small hurtful acts to excuse themselves by interrogating their own perception and intent rather than the perception of the target: I cannot have committed a microaggression because I did not feel aggressive. I’m not sure exactly what term would be better, but I would like to see something that acknowledges the total impact and wearing-down, the bleeding from many wounds, the oblivious just as dangerous and exhausting as the malicious.)
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When bad speech damages the public discourse, I believe that more speech and better speech is the correct remedy.
The remedy for the discourse, that is.
The better and more convincing ideas may win the day, may shed a cleansing light on harmful nonsense and drive it out.
But it likely leaves behind harmed human beings who still need a remedy for the damage that they sustained. More speech may improve the discourse, but on its own it will not make them whole.
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I do not have a good answer for this.
Non-governmental consequences for “bad speech” that rises to the level of abuse are surely one corrective. Employers do not have to keep on a verbally abusive employee. Forum owners do not have to harbor abuse. Shunning and shaming for abuse, setting boundaries that clearly communicate it won’t be tolerated, enforcing those boundaries, are all fair game.
Government regulation of bad speech that rises to the level of abuse? Something to be wary of. Bad actors, confronted with deft arguments against their positions or evidence of their misdeeds, whine about being attacked and abused, and may succeed in getting the arguments and evidence suppressed. Who is in charge of drawing that line?
Private, non-governmental punishment for speech that’s wrong or unwise but isn’t abusive? Allowed, if we’re not talking about tortious interference, or abuse in return; because it’s also speech. But maybe unwise too, like the speech it counters.
I am not wise enough or good enough to write the “rules” defining abuse on my own.
But let’s start reckoning with remedies, for harmed persons, that go beyond “more speech.” Can we shield, at least, children and vulnerable adults from abuse by strangers or not? Can we reverse or mitigate the damage done? Can we help the abused recover? To even a small degree? If not, what obstacles stand in our way?
It’s a first step.
And what about when we think we need to say, “okay, but sometimes, the truth hurts?”
Let’s pause, and be very careful, and listen first, and consider our own fitness and authority to speak, when we think we might be holding that truth. Am I distributing bread, or am I casting a stone?
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Freedom is not free. It turns out that often one person, without consenting, pays the cost for another person’s freedom. The rest of us who enjoy liberty and value strong protections for it need to share and bear some of those costs, by getting behind efforts to help people who get hurt by bad actors who use their liberty maliciously, or even cluelessly.
True freedom is the freedom to act with justice. The right reason, the correct end, of declining to suppress bad speech—including much speech that causes real harm—is to allow sufficient freedom for good speech to flourish without fear of repression. This is the end of all human freedoms: legal protections for free markets, free association, freedom of religion or of no religion; and speaking of religion, I believe it’s the purpose of the free will that we were created to possess and exercise.
It’s my hope that people of good will can value and protect the freedom because of its intended end (the flourishing of good uses of freedom), without mistaking the entirely foreseeable abuses of that freedom as something valuable in itself. That we can value and protect it while at the same time confronting and remedying and trying to prevent the real harms caused by the malicious or negligent use of that same freedom.
It might require experiencing discomfort in the face of heated discourse, challenging opinions, and uncomfortable facts.
Good thing we don’t have the right to avoid those feelings.
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