Recently, an extended discussion has taken place over the fact that a portion of comments here were found to be offensive by some members of this community, while others denied their offensive nature or professed to be puzzled by why they are considered offensive. Several possible explanations for why the comments are offensive have been advanced, and solutions offered based on them:
- to be thought of, talked about as, or treated like a non-person (Alicorn)
- analysis of behavior that puts the reader in the group being analyzed, and the speaker outside it (orthonormal)
- exclusion from the intended audience (Eliezer)
Each of these explanations seems to have an element of truth, and each solution seems to have a chance of ameliorating the problem. But even though the discussion has mostly died down, we appear far from reaching an agreement, and I think one reason may be the lack of a general theory of the phenomenon of "offense", in the sense of giving and taking offense, that we can use to explain what has happened, so all of the proposed explanations and solutions feel somewhat arbitrary and unfair.
(I think this article has it mostly right, but I’ll give a much shorter account since I can skip the background evo psych info, and I’m not being paid by the word. :)
Let’s consider what other behavior are often considered offensive and see if we can find a pattern:
- use of vulgar language (where it's not customarily used)
- failing to address someone by their honorary titles
- not affording someone their customary privileges
- to impugn someone’s beauty, intelligence, talent, morality, honor, ancestry, etc.
- making a joke at someone’s expense
What do all these have in common? Hint: the answer is quite ironic, given the comment that first triggered this whole fracas.
most people here don't value social status enough and (especially the men) don't value having sex with extremely attractive women that money and status would get them
As you may have guessed by now, I think the answer is status. Specifically, to give offense is to imply that a person or group has or should have low status. Taking offense then becomes easy to explain: it’s to defend someone’s status from such an implication, out of a sense of either fairness or self-interest. Let’s go back to the three hypotheses I collected and see if this theory can cover them as special cases.
“to be thought of, talked about as, or treated like a non-person” Well, to be like a non-person is clearly to have low status.
“analysis of behavior that puts the reader in the group being analyzed, and the speaker outside it” A typical situation in which one group analyzes the behavior of another is a scientific study. In such a study, the researchers usually have higher status than the subjects being studied. But even to offer a casual analysis of someone else’s behavior is to presume more intelligence, insight, or wisdom than that person.
“exclusion from the intended audience” To be excluded from the intended audience is to be labeled an outsider by implication, and outsiders typically have lower status than insiders.
But to fully understand why this particular comment is especially offensive, I think we have to consider that it (as well as many PUA discussions) specifically advocates (or appears to advocate) treating women as sex objects instead of potential romantic partners. Now think of the status difference between a sex object and a romantic partner...
Ethical Implications
Usually, one avoids giving offense by minding one’s audience and taking care not to use any language that might cause offense to any audience member. This is very easy to do one-on-one, pretty easy in a small group, hard in front of a large audience (case in point: Larry Summers’s infamous speech), and almost impossible on an Internet forum with a large, diverse, and invisible audience, unless one simply avoids talking about everything that might possibly have anything to do with anyone’s status.
Still, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to avoid giving offense when we can do so without affecting the point that we’re making, or consider skipping a minor point if it necessarily gives offense. After all, to lower someone’s social status is to cause a real harm. On the other side of this interaction, we should consider the possibility that our offensiveness sense may be tuned too sensitively, perhaps for an ancestral environment where mass media didn’t exist and any offense might reasonably be considered both personal and intentional. So perhaps we should also try to be less sensitive and avoid taking offense when discussing ideas that are both important and inextricably linked with status.
P.S. It's curious that there hasn't been more research into the evolutionary psychology and ethics of offense. If such research does exist and I simply failed to find them, please let me know.
But "status", itself, still seems like a black box.
I think "offense" is one emotion caused by a human-universal ability to recognize states of mind in other people that can motivate those people to take actions disadvantageous to oneself or one's allies, and to predict that tolerating an action associated with such a state of mind will set a disadvantageous precedent.
The precedent would be as if the other person had negotiated a right to take those disadvantageous actions, and as if they might later negotiate a right to take actions even more disadvantageous.
The state of mind "I am thinking of someone who has low status" is just one possible such state of mind. Other possibilities are "objectification", "depersonalization", "violent anger", "unwillingness to imitate sanity", "intent to theive", "intent to deceive", "sexual interest", "intent to slack", "unwillingness to obey a shared lord", "intent to obey the letter of the law and not the spirit", "intent to reduce a people to slavery"... But some of these cause "offense" and some cause other emotions. What is the pattern?
I think "offense" only happens for states of mind that might cause another person to think of oneself (or maybe one's group) as having some intrinsic property disadvantageous to oneself. "Low status" is one such property. "Non-personhood" is another one. And if you are offended at a peer's unwillingness to obey a shared lord, maybe it is because the lord might think of you as having the intrinsic property "disobedient" and that would be disadvantageous to you. But maybe there's something I didn't think of.
[ETA] Of the different states of mind that can cause "offense", it is possible to negotiate different precedents of levels of associated behavior. It is possible to negotiate a precedent of high toleration of "depersonalization"-associated behavior and low toleration of "sexual interest"-associated behavior or vice versa. If offense was only about status, these differences would have to be part of the machinery of status. [/ETA]
My explanation also uses the ideas of "negotiated", "precedent", and "right". I don't know exactly how those ideas can be reduced to many-player game theory. But some related ideas and intuitions are in David Friedman's "A Positive Account of Property Rights", George Ainslie's Breakdown of Will, and Eliezer Yudkowsky's post Interpersonal Morality. (Has anyone written about punishment of nonpunishers and punishment of too-eager punishers as two parts of the same problem?)
I also had comments here, here, here, and here that I thought had good ideas.
I agree that "offense is all about status" is probably too simple and that a more complex and refined theory can have greater explanatory/predictive value. On the other hand, the simplicity does have a benefit in that it's easier to apply when you're addressing an audience. It's probably easier to think "will what I write/say cause someone to lose social status?" (with a broad view of what constitutes status) than to try to keep more detailed models of the audience's minds (ETA: except in situations where your social brain works well and does the latter for you automatically).
If you disagree, can you try to distill your theory into some practical advice for writers?