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Offense versus harm minimization
Imagine that one night, an alien prankster secretly implants electrodes into the brains of an entire country - let's say Britain. The next day, everyone in Britain discovers that pictures of salmon suddenly give them jolts of painful psychic distress. Every time they see a picture of a salmon, or they hear about someone photographing a salmon, or they even contemplate taking such a picture themselves, they get a feeling of wrongness that ruins their entire day.
I think most decent people would be willing to go to some trouble to avoid taking pictures of salmon if British people politely asked this favor of them. If someone deliberately took lots of salmon photos and waved them in the Brits' faces, I think it would be fair to say ey isn't a nice person. And if the British government banned salmon photography, and refused to allow salmon pictures into the country, well, maybe not everyone would agree but I think most people would at least be able to understand and sympathize with the reasons for such a law.
So why don't most people extend the same sympathy they would give Brits who don't like pictures of salmon, to Muslims who don't like pictures of Mohammed?
SHOULD EVERYBODY DRAW MOHAMMED?
I first1 started thinking along these lines when I heard about Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, and revisited the issue recently after discovering http://www.reddit.com/r/mohammadpics/.
I have to admit, I find these funny. I want to like them. But my attempts to think of reasons why this is totally different from showing pictures of salmon to British people fail:
• You could argue Brits did not choose to have their abnormal sensitivity to salmon while Muslims might be considered to be choosing their sensitivity to Mohammed. But this requires a libertarian free will. Further, I see little difference between how a Muslim "chooses" to get upset at disrespect to Mohammed, and how a Westerner might "choose" to get upset if you called eir mother a whore. Even though the anger isn't being caused by alien technology, it doesn't feel like a "choice" and it's more than just a passing whim. And if tomorrow I tried to "choose" to become angry every time someone showed me a picture of a salmon, I couldn't do it - I could pretend to be angry, but I couldn't make myself feel genuine rage.
• Muslims' sensitivity to Mohammed is based on a falsehood; Islam is a false religion and Mohammed is too dead to care how anyone depicts him. I agree with this statement, but I don't think it licenses me to cause psychic pain to Muslims. I couldn't go around to mosques and punch Muslims in the face, shouting "Your religion is false, so you deserve it!".
• It is necessary to draw pictures of Mohammed to show Muslims that violence and terrorism are inappropriate responses. I think the logic here is that a few people drew pictures of Mohammed, some radicals sent out death threats and burned embassies, and now we need to draw more pictures of Mohammed to convince Muslims not to do this. But it sounds pretty stupid when you put it in exactly those words. Say a random Christian kicked a Muslim in the face, and a few other Muslims got really angry, blew the whole thing out of proportion, and killed him and his entire family. This would be an inappropriately strong response, and certainly you could be upset about it, but the proper response wouldn't be to go kicking random Muslims in the face. They didn't do it, and they probably don't even approve. But drawing pictures of Mohammed offends many Muslims, not just the ones who send death threats.
• The slippery slope argument: if we allow Muslims' concerns to prevent us from drawing pictures of Mohammed, sooner or later we'll have to accept every two-bit group with a ridiculous superstition and we'll never be able to get anything done. I take this more seriously than the previous three arguments, but I've previously argued that granting large established religions special rights is relatively immune to slippery-slope. And anyway, drawing pictures of Mohammed is such an unusual thing to do that we can stop doing it without giving up our right to keep doing something else that's actually useful if the situation comes up later.
None of these excuses really does it for me. So my provisional conclusion is that yes, people who draw pictures of Mohammed where Muslims can see them are bad people in the same way that people who go around showing photos of salmon to Brits are bad people.
So the big question is: why is this so controversial in the Mohammed example, when it seems so obvious in the salmon example?
A BLAME-BASED CONCEPT OF OFFENSE
I think several features of the salmon example trigger consequentialist moral reasoning, in which the goal is to figure out how to satisfy as many people's preferences as possible; several contrasting features of the Mohammed case trigger deontological moral reasoning, in which the goal is to figure out who is a good person or a bad person and to assign status and blame appropriately. These two forms of reasoning give different results in the two different cases.
The word that comes up a lot in discussions of this sort of issue is "offensive". When someone draws Mohammed, it is considered offensive to Muslims. When someone writes a story where all the sympathetic and interesting characters are male, it is considered offensive to women.
For me, the word "offensive" brings up connotations of "It was morally wrong to say this, and you are either inexcusably ignorant of this fact or deliberately malicious. You must immediately apologize, and it is up to the group you have offended to decide whether they accept your apology or whether they want to punish you in some well-deserved way."
This means that ever admitting you were offensive is a huge status hit implying you are some combination of callous, ignorant, and racist. Sometimes people may be willing to take this status hit, especially if upon reflection they believe they really were in the wrong, but since most people's actions seem reasonable to themselves they will not be willing to accept a narrative where they're the villain.
More likely, they will try to advance an alternative interpretation, in which their actions were not legitimately offensive or in which they have the "right" to take such actions. Such an interpretation may cast the offended party as a villain, trying to gain power and control by pretending to be offended, or unduly restricting the free speech of others.
The controversy over drawing Mohammed has several factors that predispose to this sort of interpretation. There is already a history of misunderstanding and some enmity between Muslims and non-Muslims. Muslims' status as a minority makes ideas of "political correctness" readily primed and available, making people likely to miss the trees for the forest. Muslims are often of a different race than Christians, so conflicts with them risk tarring a person with the deeply insulting label of "racist". And because there are reports of Muslims rioting and hurting other people because of Mohammed drawings, they are easy to villainize.
This risks embroiling everyone in an unproductive argument about whether an action was "legitimately offensive" or not, with much status riding on the result.
A CONSEQUENTIALIST CONCEPT OF HARM MINIMIZATION
The British salmon example, on the other hand, was designed to avoid the idea of "offense" and trigger consequentialist notions of harm minimization2.
The example specifically refers to the displeasure that salmon cause the British as "psychic pain", priming ideas about whether it is acceptable to cause pain to another person. The British are described as politely asking us to avoid salmon photography as a favor to them, putting themselves in a low status position rather than demanding we respect their status. British are white and first world, so it's hard to think of this as a political correctness issue and wade into that particular quagmire. And because the whole salmon problem is the result of an alien prankster, there's no easily available narrative in which the British are at fault.
A consequentialist reasoner would consider how much disutility it causes not to be able to use pictures of salmon where the British might see them, then consider how much disutility it causes the British to see pictures of salmon, and if the latter outweighed the former, they'd stop with the salmon pictures. There's an argument to be made about slippery slope, but in this case the slope doesn't seem too slippery and other cases can be evaluated on their merits.
And a consequentialist British person, when considering how to convince a foreigner to stop using pictures of salmon, would try to phrase eir request in a way that minimizes the chances that the foreigner gets upset and confrontational, and maximizes the chances that they actually stop with the salmon.
If the foreigner refused to stop with the salmon pictures, the British person would try to shame and discredit the foreigner into doing so only if ey thought it would work better than any less confrontational method, and only if the chance of it successfully stopping the offending behavior was great enough that it outweighted the amount of bad feelings and confrontation it would cause.
This is a healthier and potentially more successful method of resolving offensive actions.
OFFENSE AND TYPICAL MIND FALLACY
I post on a forum where a bunch of regulars recently denounced the culture of verbal abuse. The abusers, for their part, said that the victims were making mountains out of molehills: exaggerating some good-natured teasing in order to look holier-than-thou.
I was friends with some of victims and with some abusers; neither side were majority bad people, and it surprised me that people would view requests to stop verbal abuse as a Machiavellian ploy.
Not to say that asking for verbal abuse to stop can't be a Machiavellian ploy. In fact, as far as Machiavellian ploys go, it's a pretty good one - take something your political enemies do, pretend to be deeply offended by it, and then act upset until your enemies are forced to stop, inconveniencing them and gaining you sympathy. A conspiracy such is this is not impossible, but why is it so often the first possibility people jump to?
I think it has to do with something I heard one of the abusers say: "I would never get upset over something little like that."
I know him and he is telling the truth. When someone is verbally confrontational with him, he takes it in stride or laughs it off, because that's the kind of guy he is.
I am of Jewish background. I've had someone use an anti-Semitic slur on me exactly once. My reaction was the same mix of confusion and amusement I'd feel if someone tried a vintage Shakespearean insult. And yet I also know of Jews who have been devastated by anti-Semitic slurs, to the point where they've stopped going to school because someone in school taunted them. These people may differ from me in terms of Jewish identity, extraversion, demographics, social status, anxiety, neurogenetics, and some hard-to-define factor we might as well just call "thin skin".
The point is, if I use my own reactions to model theirs, I will fail, miserably. I will try to connect their reaction to the most plausible situation in which my mind would generate the same reaction in the same situation - in which I am not really upset but am pretending to be so for Machiavellian motives.
In the case of anti-Semitism, it's easy to see factors - like a history of suffering from past prejudice - that make other people's responses differ from mine. It's less obvious why someone else might differ in their response to being called ugly, or stupid, or just being told to fuck off - but if these differences really exist, they might explain why people just can't agree about offensive actions.
A thick-skinned person just can't model a person with thinner skin all that well. And so when the latter gets upset over some insult, the thick-skinned person calls them "unreasonable", or assumes that they're making it up in order to gain sympathy. My friends in the online forum couldn't believe anyone could really be so sensitive as to find their comments abusive, and so they ended up doing some serious mental damage.
SUMMARY
Consequentialism suggests a specific course of action for both victims of offense and people performing potentially offensive actions. The victim should judge whether ey believes the offense causes more pain to em than it does benefit to the offender; if so, ey should nonjudgmentally request the offender stop while applying the Principle of Charity to the offender, and if ey wants the maximum chance of the offense stopping, ey should resist the urge to demand an apology or do anything else that could potentially turn it into a status game.
The offender, for eir part, should stop offending as soon as ey realizes that the amount of pain eir actions cause is greater than the amount of annoyance it would take to avoid the offending action, even if ey can't understand why it would cause any pain at all. If ey wishes, ey may choose to apologize even though no apology was demanded.
If the offender refuses, the victim should only then consider "punishment" by trying to shame the offender and make em appear low status, and only if ey thinks this has a real chance of stopping the offending behavior either in this case or in the future. Like all attempts to deliberately harm another person, this course of action requires of the victim exceptional certainty that ey is in the right.
Although people pretending to be offended for personal gain is a real problem, it is less common in reality than it is in people's imaginations. If a person appears to suffer from an action of yours which you find completely innocuous, you should consider the possibility that eir mind is different from yours before rejecting eir suffering as feigned.
FOOTNOTES
1) Thanks to Kaj Sotala, Vladimir Nesov, and kovacsa-whose-LW-name-I-don't-know for originally encouraging me to turn the original essay into an LW post.
2) The deontological notion of offense doesn't really supervene on an idea of pain to other people. If two white people, talking where no black people could possibly overhear them, make a racist joke about black people, that is still "offensive", because racism is wrong no matter what. A consequentialist notion of offense could better ground such examples by theorizing that whites telling racist jokes to other whites creates a climate in which racism is considered acceptable, which eventually will end up hurting someone directly. Or it could decide not to, if it decided the link was too tenuous and hokey - but now any disagreement on the matter is honest disagreement about empirical facts and not philosophical disagreement about who's a bad person.
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Comments (417)
The high-status vs low-status, demand vs request point is interesting. Is it possible that this is where the enmity begins? That a lot of people who wouldn't denigrate the Muslim faith normally end up calling it ridiculous because that's a good soldier, ditto for slippery slope and other arguments, and their real reason for joining draw a picture of Mohammed day is because they feel slighted by the way they were asked not to draw such pictures?
Another possibility is that such an event functions as a move in some game of conflict between them; doing something that is easily characterised as harmless fun which necessitates (what can be easily characterised as) a huge over-reaction is a powerful move.
Also, I really like the last part of your footnote, about consequentialist morality keeping disagreements honest and empirical.
This is a really good essay that makes some interesting points. The salmon example is a really clever way of separating some of the issues.
I think you underestimate the slipperiness of the slope in question. If for example, some religious people find that simply saying their religion is false is painful to them in the same way should that be outlawed? Note that this isn't a hypothetical, many countries have anti-blasphemy laws and many European countries have laws against criticizing religion or include such remarks under hate crimes statutes. Consider the case of a certain fellow in England, Harry Taylor, who was forbidden to carry anti-religious literature (and yes, there's no question that his behavior was jerkish but that's not the point). And it just gets worse from there. There are ultra-Orthodox Jews who don't want anyone to say anything negative about their Rebbes.
There seem to be two distinct issues here are also, how should potential victims and offenders act, and whether there should be government regulation. These are related but distinct questions. You start off talking about the first and end by talking about the second.
I think the salmon example is seriously misleading, and in a way that shows a very common pattern of fallacies in consequentialist reasoning. It presents a thought experiment that is contrived to be free of any game-theoretic concerns, and then this example is used as a rhetorical sleight of hand by positing a superficial analogy with a real-life example, in which the game-theoretic concerns are of supreme importance.
Subsequently, these concerns are dismissed with another misleading observation, namely that people rarely fake offense. Well, yes, but the whole point is that people's sincerely felt emotions are very much directed by their brains' game-theoretic assessment of the situation, which may well indicate that a seemingly irrational extreme emotional response is in fact quite rational given the circumstances. Those who ignore this point should read up on their Schelling.
Great counter-argument; perhaps you should post your own analysis of the offensiveness question.
That doesn't seem fair. Yvain explicitly points out that the salmon example is different precisely in that it doesn't have the same game-theoretic issues. From the OP:
So, Yvain isn't making a "superficial analogy". He is highlighting precisely the differences that concern you, because they are part of his point.
You continue:
It is important to keep these issues in mind, and I agree that Yvain downplays this possibility in the OP. But, in fairness, you seem to ignore the fact that your remark applies just as well to those who find themselves sincerely offended by Muslim demands not to draw Mohammed. They too should recognize that their offense is "very much directed by their brains' game-theoretic assessment of the situation, which may well indicate that a seemingly irrational extreme emotional response is in fact quite rational given the circumstances". And they should recognize that what that part of their brain considers to be rational may not really be rational in light of all of their goals.
Yvain:
In a world where people make decisions according to this principle, one has the incentive to self-modify into a utility monster who feels enormous suffering at any actions of other people one dislikes for whatever reason. And indeed, we can see this happening to some extent: when people take unreasonable offense and create drama to gain concessions, their feelings are usually quite sincere.
You say, "pretending to be offended for personal gain is... less common in reality than it is in people's imaginations." That is indeed true, but only because people have the ability to whip themselves into a very sincere feeling of offense given the incentive to do so. Although sincere, these feelings will usually subside if they realize that nothing's to be gained.
Beautifully put. So according to your objection, if I want to increase net utility, I have two considerations to make:
This seems like a very hard calculation. My intuition is that item 2 is more important since it's a higher level of action, and I'm that kind of guy. But how do I rationally make this computation without my own biases coming in? My own opinions on "draw Mohammed day" have always been quite fuzzy and flip-floppy, for example.
The incentive is weaker than you seem to suggest. Surely, I gain nothing tangible by inducing people to tiptoe carefully around my minefield. Only a feeling of power, or perhaps some satisfaction at having caused inconvenience to my enemies. So, what is the more fruitful maxim to follow so as to discourage this kind of thing?
or
Somehow I have to think that poking is a form of capitulation to the manipulation - it is voluntary participation in a manufactured drama.
Yes, you do. If everything unpleasant to you causes you a huge amount of suffering instead of, say, mild annoyance, other people (utilitarians) will abstain from doing things that are unpleasant to you as the negative utility to you outweighs the positive utility to them.
What you say is certainly true if the utility monster is simply exaggerating. But I understood VM to be discussing someone who claims offense where no offense (or negligible offense) actually exists. Or, someone who self-modifies to sincerely feel offended, though originally there was no such sensitivity.
But in any case, the real source of the problem in VM's scenario is adhering to an ethical system which permits one to be exploited by utility monsters - real or feigned. My own ethical system avoids being exploited because I accept personal disutility so as to produce utility for others only to the extent that they reciprocate. So someone who exaggerates the disutility they derive from, say, my humming may succeed in keeping me silent in their presence, but this success may come at a cost regarding how much attention I pay to their other desires. So the would-be utility monster is only hurting itself by feeding me false information about its utility function.
The crucial point is that the level of offense at a certain action -- and I mean real, sincerely felt painful offense, not fake indignation -- is not something fixed and independent of the incentives people face. This may seem counterintuitive and paradoxical, but human brains do have functions that are not under direct control of the conscious mind, and are nevertheless guided by rational calculations and thus respond to incentives. People creating drama and throwing tantrums are a prime example: their emotions and distress are completely sincere, and their state of mind couldn't be further from calculated pretense, and yet whatever it is in their brains that pushes them into drama and tantrums is very much guided by rational strategic considerations.
Only in the sense that a country with secure borders is hurting itself by forfeiting potential gains from trade. If what they want is to avoid being contaminated by your ideas, to avoid being criticized, that minefield is doing it's job just fine.
My real-world working theory on utility monsters of the type you describe is basically to keep in mind that some people are more sensitive than others, but if anyone reaches utility monster levels (roughly indicated by whether I think "this is completely absurd"), I flip the sign on their utility function.
So you consider it to be a major source of positive utility to antagonize them?
Tongue-in-cheek, yes.
My own real-world working theory is that if someone I respect in general expresses a sensitivity that I consider completely absurd, I reduce my level of commitment to my process for evaluating the absurdity of sensitivities.
Excuse me, but I think you should recheck your moral philosophy before you get the chance to act on that. Are you sure that shouldn't be "become indifferent with respect to optimizing their utility function", or perhaps "rescale their utility function to a more reasonable range"? Because according my moral philosophy, explicitly flipping the sign of another agent's utility function and then optimizing is an evil act.
I'm not sure people can voluntarily self-modify in this way. Even if it's possible, I don't think most real people getting offended by real issues are primarily doing this.
Voluntary self-modification also requires a pre-existing desire to self-modify. I wouldn't take a pill that made me want to initiate suicide attacks on people who insulted the prophet Mohammed, because I don't really care if people insult the prophet Mohammed enough to want to die in a suicide attack defending him. The only point at which I would take such a pill is if I already cared enough about the honor of Mohammed that I was willing to die for him. Since people have risked their lives and earned lots of prison time protesting the Mohammed cartoons, even before they started any self-modification they must have had strong feelings about the issue.
If X doesn't offend you, why would self-modify to make X offend you to stop people from doing X, since X doesn't offend you? I think you might be thinking of attempts to create in-group cohesion and signal loyalty by uniting against a common "offensive" enemy, something that I agree is common. But these attempts cannot be phrased in the consequentialist manner I suggested earlier and still work - they depend on a "we are all good, the other guy is all evil" mentality.
Thus, someone who responded with a cost/benefit calculation to all respectful and reasonable demands to stop offending, but continued getting touchy about disrespectful blame-based demands to stop offending, would be pretty hard to game.
One difference between this post and the original essay I wrote which more people liked was that the original made it clearer that this was more advice for how people who were offended should communicate their displeasure, and less advice for whether people accused of offense should stop. Even if you don't like the latter part, I think the advice for the former might still be useful.
People have motives to increase their status, so we can check this box. Of course, this depends on phenotype, and some people do this much more than others.
You can't self-modify to an arbitrary belief, but you can self-modify towards other beliefs that are close to yours in belief space. See my comment about political writers. You can seek out political leaders, political groups, or even just friends, with beliefs slightly more radical than yours along a certain dimension (and you might be inspired to do so with just small exposure to them). Over time, your beliefs may shift.
To protect/raise the status of you yourself, or of a group you identify with. I proposed in that comment that people might enjoy feeling righteous while watching out for the interests of themselves and their in-group. When you get mad about stuff and complain about it, you feel like you are accomplishing something.
The problem is that other people only care if you are with them or against them; they don't care about your calculation.
The second problem is that it can be hard to distinguish these two things. People who have a sufficiently valid beef might be justified in making blame-based demands to stop offending, and your demand that they sound "respectful" and "reasonable" is itself unreasonable. Of course, people without a valid beef will use this exact same reasoning about why you can't make a "tone argument" against them asking for them to sound more respectful and reasonable.
There might be a correlation between offense and the "validity" of the underlying issue, but this correlation is low enough that it can be hard to predict the validity of the underlying issue from how the offense reaction is expressed, which weakens the utility of the strategy you propose for identifying beefs.
However, your strategy might be useful as a Schelling Point for what sort of demands you'll accept from others.
It may have been tough to get the message, because the British salmon example is hypothetical. A real-world example of some group succeeding in claims of offensive might be useful.
Okay. I formally admit I'm wrong about the "should usually stop offensive behavior" thing (or, rather, I don't know if I'm wrong but I formally admit my previous arguments for thinking I was right no longer move me and I now recognize I am confused.)
I still believe that if you find something offensive, a request to change phrased in the language of harm-minimization is better than a demand to change phrased in the language of offense, but I don't know if anyone is challenging that.
I see at least two huge problems with the harm-minimization approach.
First, it requires interpersonal comparison of harm, which can make sense in very drastic cases (e.g. one person getting killed versus another getting slightly inconvenienced), but it usually makes no sense in controversial disputes such as these.
Second, even if we can agree on the way to compare harm interpersonally, the game-theoretic concerns discussed in this thread clearly show that naive case-by-case harm minimization is unsound, since any case-by-case consequences of decisions can be overshadowed by the implications of the wider incentives and signals they provide. This can lead to incredibly complicated and non-obvious issues, where the law of unintended consequences lurks behind every corner. I have yet to see any consequentialists even begin to grapple with this problem convincingly, on this issue or any other.
We may be talking at cross-purposes. Are you arguing that if someone says something I find offensive, it is more productive for me to respond in the form of "You are a bad person for saying that and I demand an apology?" than "I'm sorry, but I was really hurt by your statement and I request you not make it again"?
It depends; there is no universal rule. Either response could be more appropriate in different cases. There are situations where if someone's statements overstep certain lines, the rational response is to deem this a hostile act and demand an apology with the threat of escalation. There are also situations where it makes sense to ask people to refrain from hurtful statements, since the hurt is non-strategic.
Also, what exactly do you mean by "productive"? People's interests may be fundamentally opposed, and it may be that the response that better serves the strategic interest of one party can do this only at the other's expense, with neither of them being in the right in any objective sense.
"Request to change" is low status, while "demand to change" is high status. The whole point of taking offense is that some part of your brain detects a threat to your status or an opportunity to increase status, so how can it be "better" to act low status when you feel offended? Well, it may be better if you think you should dis-identify with that part of your brain, and believe that even if some part of your brain cares a lot about status, the real you don't. But you have to make that case, or state that as an assumption, which you haven't, as far as I can tell (although I haven't carefully read this whole discussion).
Here's an example in case the above isn't clear. Suppose I'm the king of some medieval country, and one of my subjects publicly addresses me without kneeling or call me "your majesty". Is it better for me to request him to do so in the language of harm-minimization ("I'm hurt that you don't consider me majestic"?), or to make a demand phrased in the language of offense?
So I can raise the status of my group by becoming a frequent complainer and encouraging my fellows to do likewise?
I won't say that it never happens. I will say that the success prospects of that sort of strategy have been exaggerated of late.
Sure. See, for example, the rise in prominence of the Gnu Atheists (of which I am one).
Status games. There's a satirical blog which addresses this, at least in the context of Western sophisticates:
ETA: In the context of Islamic reaction to the Mohammed cartoons as well as the burning of a Koran, there may be some value for a demogogue to conjure up atrocities by some demonized enemy in order to unite his (and in this case, it will be "his") followers. Westerners have done the same sorts of things as well, most obviously in wartime propaganda.
Surely there are a great many reasons other than offense why, for various different things X, it might be (or seem) useful to me to stop you from doing thing X. For example, if thing X is "mocking my beliefs": if my beliefs are widely respected, I and people like me will have a larger share of influence than if my beliefs are widely mocked.
It's a Schellingian idea: in conflict situations, it is often a rational strategy to pre-commit to act irrationally (i.e. without regards to cost and benefit) unless the opponent yields. The idea in this case is that I'll self-modify to care about X far more than I initially do, and thus pre-commit to lash out if anyone does it.
If we have a dispute and I credibly signal that I'm going to flip out and create drama out of all proportion to the issue at stake, you're faced with a choice between conceding to my demands or getting into an unpleasant situation that will cost more than the matter of dispute is worth. I'm sure you can think of many examples where people successfully get the upper hand in disputes using this strategy. The only way to disincentivize such behavior is to pre-commit credibly to be defiant in face of threats of drama. In contrast, if you act like a (naive) utilitarian, you are exceptionally vulnerable to this strategy, since I don't even need drama to get what I want, if I can self-modify to care tremendously about every single thing I want. (Which I won't do if I'm a good naive utilitarian myself, but the whole point is that it's not a stable strategy.)
Now, the key point is that such behavior is usually not consciously manipulative and calculated. On the contrary -- someone flipping out and creating drama for a seemingly trivial reason is likely to be under God-honest severe distress, feeling genuine pain of offense and injustice. This is a common pattern in human social behavior: humans are extremely good at detecting faked emotions and conscious manipulation, and as a result, we have evolved so that our brains lash out with honest strong emotion that is nevertheless directed by some module that performs game-theoretic assessment of the situation. This of course prompts strategic responses from others, leading to a strategic arms race without end.
The further crucial point is that these game-theoretic calculators in our brains are usually smart enough to assess whether the flipping out strategy is likely to be successful, given what might be expected in response. Basically, it is a part of the human brain that responds to rational incentives even though it's not under the control of the conscious mind. With this in mind, you can resolve the seeming contradiction between the sincerity of the pain of offense and the fact that it responds to rational incentives.
All this is somewhat complicated when we consider issues of group conflict rather than individual conflict, but the same basic principles apply.
For me, the important distinction between the salmon thing and the Mohammad thing is that getting zapped when you see a picture of a salmon is a reaction that doesn't go away through exposure. It can't be desensitized. Drawing Mohammad, or really any form of trolling, eventually gets savvy people to change the way they react.
That's not to say that trolling is necessarily good, but it is functionally different than what's happening with the salmon. See this article by Clay Shirky.
Actually, Yvain didn't say. Maybe Brits can overcome their salmon reactions through a course of cognitive therapy, or exposure therapy. The scenario is under-described. That's why Yvain's first bullet point is wrong about "choice": it uses a backward-looking notion, where a forward-looking one is wanted.
I think you are too quick to discard the Machiavellian ploy hypothesis. In particular, I think the term "Machiavellian" is misleading you. You (rightly) find a vast conspiracy of offense-pretending Muslims to be ridiculous. But the best way to run a conspiracy is not to run it, and the best way to pretend to something is not to pretend.
Have you stopped to ask why group X might find behavior Y of group Z offensive? I'm not doubting their pain, I'm not suggesting that group X cynically decides to find Y offensive, I'm just asking, how does offense arise in the first place? Why are human beings such that they take offense to things?
My view - taking offense begins as a response to a norm violation. "Not cool, dude," we say, because the dude has done something outside of what the group is prepared to accept. We feel uncomfortable when others violate norms, because if we just sit by and do nothing, we may be accused of being in on the norm violation.
But sometimes people take offense to things which are not norm violations. The general US norm is not that drawing the prophet Muhammed is forbidden, it's not that violent videogames are a sin, it's not that the casual treatment of women as nothing but sex objects is unacceptable. Yet people take offense to these things anyway! What is going on?
Here I am going to repeat again that I do not think that Muslims, game-pacifists, or feminists are consciously conspiring. I think, rather, that it is natural to take offense not only at things which are actual norm-violations, but also things which you wish were norm violations, things which would boost your status if they were norm violations. There is no conscious consideration of this, but somewhere deep in our hypocrite brains, we decide to pretend that our desired norms are the actual norms.
And the math gets even better for taking offense when you consider the meaning of being labeled offensive! "It was morally wrong to say this, and you are either inexcusably ignorant of this fact or deliberately malicious. You must immediately apologize, and it is up to the group you have offended to decide whether they accept your apology or whether they want to punish you in some well-deserved way," you say, and I think you have the right of it. This is a powerful weapon to use against your enemies, and a powerful threat to use to keep people from becoming your enemies in the first place. You think your brain isn't going to seize on it whenever possible?
Now, I know you are arguing from a harm minimization standpoint, you might say, "it is not these people's fault that their brains see an opportunity to score points by being offended and cause them pain". And that's true. The vast majority of people who take offense are, I'm sure, not doing it in a conscious, cynical manner. And by freely and gleefully offending them, we are doing them undeserved harm. It sucks to be them, and I say that in a spirit of sympathy. However, if we give in to offense, if we explicitly act to avoid giving offense rather than acting to right object-level wrongs, then we risk emboldening the true villains, the hypocrite brains who are torturing people to score cheap political points. Better to put our feet down now, because if being offended is a useful strategy, people will go on being offended, even if they don't want to.
"The general US norm is not that drawing the prophet Muhammed is forbidden, " There do exist places other than the US, you know. Those places have cultural norms of their own but also have internet access.
The "Everybody Draw Muhammed Day" festival that offense was being taken over was started by an American, though, so it's America's norms that would have jurisdiction over her.
But not over the people who took offence, which I thought was the point.
Either I'm being confused by a triple-negative, or we are living in very different contexts. Even people who are avowedly anti-feminist will usually say that casually treating women as nothing but sex objects breaks their norms. They might disagree that a model on a billboard is a sex object.
More generally, the problem is not manufacturing offense where none exists, but deciding where it can reasonably exist. And even if you don't think that this is a meaningful problem, and that the best answer is to simply not take offense, ever, note that this:
... sounds suspiciously like another kind of offense, the offense of anti-offense backlash. This line of argument also makes out feminists and game-pacifists to be "inexcusably ignorant" or "deliberately malicious," and thus is wielding a very similar rhetorical club to the one that was just denounced.
"The actual norms?"
Like "general US norm," that's a phrase that does not, as far as I can tell, dissect the space of possible norms in a useful way. If there were a single agreed-upon set of norms, or even an agreed-upon set of rules for describing an agreed-upon set of norms, these discussions would be a lot easier. As it stands, declaring offense can, in fact, shift norms if done enough. In some cases, it can shift them for the better.
Another unpleasant implication of the consequentialist attitude towards offense is that societies should be as homogeneous as possible with regards to people's values and beliefs. (And I'm not talking about Aumann-agreement here!) As the diversity of a society increases, the set of statements and acts that can be done in public without offending one group or another necessarily shrinks, which implies an inevitable trade-off between the pain of offense and the pain of people who have their freedom curtailed and are increasingly forced to walk on eggshells. I'll leave the more concrete implications in the context of today's politics as an exercise for the reader.
It also implies that a certain level of isolation between societies is desirable, in direct opposition to the present trends of globalization. What is regular business in one society may well be extremely offensive in another. So, if there's an intense mutual interest and exchange of information between societies, we get the same problem as within a single diverse society. This can be mitigated only by isolating these societies from each other so that their members are not exposed to the painful sight of the offensive alien customs.
All of this seems pretty true to me. There were even studies that showed pretty clearly that ethnically homogenous communities were happier than ethnically mixed ones.
There are lots of good reasons not to actually exclude different people from a society. Immigration's been shown to be a net good for most people involved, and of course uprooting people from a society they've grown accustomed to is harmful. But these only counterbalance the above claim, not disprove it.
I think it's pretty self-evident that anything that brings nudists together with those Arabs who freak out if every inch of a woman isn't covered by a burka is going to be a net loss for both groups.
I think the slippery slope you describe is not the correct slope to talk about. Rather, the argument I often hear is "if we accede to Muslims in this relatively trivial matter of pictures, they will see this as a sign of weakness, and expect stronger demands to be met as well."
While this might happen, isn't the nice thing to do to cooperate at least the first time? You can always later revise your position and refuse to concede further when pushed.
Where exactly do you draw the line, then? "I can quit whenever I want to" isn't much of a strategy.
Consider two timelines:
In A, the aggressive underdog starts by demanding a trivial concession under threat of violence, to which the complacent superpower accedes. Later, underdog wants a more significant concession, and again threatens violence. Superpower resists, underdog (considering superpower weak of resolve) follows through on the threat. People die, nothing is accomplished.
In B, the aggressive underdog starts by demanding a trivial concession under threat of violence, which the complacent superpower rejects derisively. Later, underdog wants a more significant concession, but has had no success with previous threats of violence and so considers what other bargaining chips they have. Superpower negotiates, and a mutually-acceptable compromise is reached.
Well what I had in mind is that the superpower could attempt to negotiate a compromise right from the start. And to show that it's willing to compromise (not only in words), it might make the small concession first. Get the "moral high-ground", so to speak.
Now this might not work depending on who they're dealing with. But I doubt that "Muslims" in general are a group that can't be influenced in such a way. It almost certainly isn't going to be good enough for the types of people who threaten violence and follow-up on it, but they themselves could be influenced by other Muslims.
I could be expecting people to be more reasonable and rational than they actually are, so I might be wrong on how this will play out, I guess. Any (historical) real-world examples (or counter-examples)?
Neville Chamberlain.
By making a concession first, you are not starting a negotiation. You are, effectively, concluding a negotiation by agreeing to a minor variation on the deal they initially proposed: whatever they want in exchange for not getting hurt. The geopolitical equivalent of saying you 'don't want no trouble' and reaching for your wallet.
You may be thinking of Reciprocity in Cialdini's Weapons of Influence. AFAIK, that works better on a person to person basis; if you're trying to negotiate between nation-states and religions, you're probably better off basing your work on the Strategy of Conflict.
I am still swayed by the slippery-slope argument. How far is it from “you must not offend us“ to “you must believe as we do?”
It seems pretty far to me. Yvain brings up two examples at the start of the article:
Does this apply to you? The "politely asking" case (case 1) brings a lot of sympathy from me.
The second case, "thou shalt not...", I understand, but I now have less sympathy.
The third case, I think, would be if the Brits forbade all photos of salmon, anywhere in the world and tried to enforce the rule worldwide. This still doesn't seem to get us to "you must believe as we do".
To get to "you must believe as we do" (case 4), the Brits would have to steal all our children and raise them to experience as much pain as they do upon seeing a photo of a salmon.
The slippery slope seems to lean the other way, such that the Brits (or Muslims) need to stay tempered. The closer the they get to case 4, the less sympathy they have. At case 3, all of my sympathies are gone, and I would be tempted to take photos of salmon and leave them lying around just for fun. At case 4, I'd consider fighting a war.
I find this post offensive, please delete it.
I find the very act of taking offense offensive, trump that.
I take offense at hypocritical abuses of recursion!
Stop hitting yourself.
It was a near probability one event that a thread like this would manifest in response to the top level post.
I think the world is better off without sacred cows, rather than with them. The only way to eliminate these kinds of reactions is via "exposure therapy". Admittedly, I say this as someone without many sacred cows. I'm non-religious, an anti-nationalist, and (other than a long career as a "non-denominational" anti-war activist) essentially apolitical.
I support the Mohammed drawing day, Koran-burning, and similar attempts involving other religions and political doctrines. When people do these things, it helps create a safe space for people to speak their reasoned criticisms.
I ask sincerely: why do you believe this?
I've known quite a few people who've left religion (among them, myself) or started to take it less seriously, and I can't think of a single case where the process was helped along by "exposure therapy" (e.g. atheists trying to offend their sensibilities). In fact, it's mostly the opposite.
Would you know if it did? People's stated reasons are often different than their actual reasons.
No one ever says "I changed religious beliefs for reasons completely other than the truth of the religion", even though one of the biggest predictors is the belief of their social circle.
Like I said, including me. And I am talking about social reasons.
Mocking religion can probably turn some agnostics into atheists, but in most cases it makes religious people more rigid in their beliefs- you're offering them the "choice" between their religion being true and them being an idiot.
The claim was that they would become thicker-skinned, not that they would become atheists.
Mockery of my religion helped me to change my mind, but I doubt it would have helped if I was not already suspecting those beliefs were wrong.
I think you're missing the point by ignoring the last part of knb's post. The specific instance of offensive behavior is not going to convince anyone. But being in a society where it is permitted is a huge difference from one where it is not. seeing that you can live your life without being constrained by silly commandments and still be happy and respected by your friends can make a huge difference.
I can disagree with one of his claims without bothering about the argument's bottom line.
I'm referring specifically to the angry emotional reactions to perceived slights, not what causes people to leave their religions.
I'm trying to think of the last time anything offended western Christians as much as the Mohammed drawings (apparently) offended Muslims in the middle-east. The anger over Piss Christ was mostly because that project was partially government funded by the NEA. There was no serious attempt to legally censor it. And of course, there were no riots and no one was harmed during that brief controversy.
I think that the difference is not primarily theological but rather cultural. In America, Christians have their beliefs mocked pretty regularly in popular culture. That largely inoculates them to outrage. My guess is that the difference between American Christians and Muslims in Afghanistan is not inherent in their religions, but a matter of exposure. Afghan Muslims have always had governments and strict cultural rules that insulated them from offensive treatments of Islam. With modern telecommunications they will be exposed to things that offend them, even if those things happen in Florida or Denmark. Either they will change or the rest of the world will change for them.
agreed
perhaps
You certainly have a point, but I'm not persuaded that you've identified the core of the difference. My guess is that at least one other component is the context in which the exposure takes place. In America, there is a fairly strong norm to at least pay lip service to freedom of speech, and anyone growing up here who has a religion, and who has heard it mocked, will probably also have heard that this mockery is defended by another national norm. Exposure to equivalent mockery in Afghanistan may not have equivalent effects.
I think a lot of Americans completely missed the subtle critique behind the plan to burn a Koran. Basically, they were telling the pastor, "hey, you have the right to burn one and all, but you really need to hold off, just out of sensitivity to others" -- not realizing that this was the exact argument people were making about the mosque near ground zero, and getting an unsympathetic ear. Instead, they just saw it as a crude shock-based attempt to get attention.
The West has had centuries of liberalization, as it has gradually transitioned from norms where behavior is highly restricted to prevent violations of people's sensibilities to norms where it's generally accepted that people can mostly do what they want, as long as it isn't directly harmful to others. Other cultures haven't gone as far through this process, and I don't think that poking at their most sensitive views is going to be a helpful kind of "therapy" for them.
What about calling black people the n-word, making Holocaust jokes to Jews, and insulting people's dead relatives?
I mean, all these things feel like they're in a different category than the things you described, but I wouldn't know how to describe that difference to a computer.
I feel like I read the answer already in this page. These offenses aren't just negligent (oops, I didn't realize you didn't like that) or insensitive (this is what I want to do, too bad if it offends you) -- they are pointedly hostile. The person receiving these offenses can rationally experience these offenses as an expression of hate and thus an intent to do harm. Depending on the status of the offender, the victim can feel threatened about their continued place in the clan.
Well, the same goes for "everybody draw Mohamed day", no? It's hostility, not negligence.
meh.. In this specific case it seems the organized, intended signal is 'defiance'. For some of the artists it is probably simple irreverence that motivates them. But I wouldn't doubt that a lot of people feel hostile too.
The distinction here is that if an outsider does these things it is clearly hostile.
Black people are reclaiming the word "nigger". Part of the stated reason is to take away the word's ability to harm, in other words, exactly the reason I mentioned. I am not black, so in context, it would seem hostile, just as bombarding the only Muslim family in a neighborhood with Mohammed cartoons would be hostile.
The example you gave above treats the images as harmful without context. (For a Muslim, seeing an image of Mohammed "hurts" [I don't accept this, btw, offense and harm are not the same thing.] regardless of the intention of the image creator.) So the comparable example would be using "nigger" by another black person or in an academic context, or a Holocaust survivor making jokes about the Holocaust, or a family member joking about the foibles of a dead relative. And yes, I have no problem with any of these things.
It doesn't really seem like you put thought into these examples. Rather, it seems like you made a list of doubleplusungood things and tried to tar me with the association.
I recall reading somewhere that there are different sources of moral rules, I think things being sacred was one of them, 'purity' might have been another one or the same one, and if anyone remembers the three things I would appreciate knowing.
So by rejecting sacred cows, does this mean you would eliminate the whole category of moral rules that depend on something bring sacred? (I don't think this is necessarily so from what you've said.)
I ask myself if I attach moral weight to anything sacred and I'm not sure.
Actually, I think so -- I can think of some things that I care about symbolically, rather than just at the object level -- but I attach the morality to my relationship with this thing rather than other people's, so I'm not easily as offended. (though I can now think of some cases where I am)
So I'm confused on the topic. What do you think of 'sacred' in general?
You probably have in mind the theories of Jonathan Haidt.
I am skeptical towards his theories, though. There may be some truth in them, but his approach is extremely ideologized and, in my opinion, biased accordingly. (On the other hand, I do appreciate that he is explicit and upfront about his ideology and its role in his work. It is certainly a welcome contrast to what is commonly seen in academia.)
The 3 are community, autonomy, and divinity, and they come from the work of cultural anthropologist Richard Shweder. Purity was a big part of the ethic of divinity, so much so that you could even argue that "purity" would be a more appropriate label for it.
Jonathan Haidt worked with Shweder at the start of his career and basically adopted Shweder's system, but he has since modified his views to include 5 moral foundations rather than 3: harm, fairness, ingroup, hierarchy, and purity.
"Exposure therapy". Could you explain how that works, doctor? How your cure makes the patient better?
Isn't it great that we have so many people here so sincerely concerned with making the world a better place rather than with rationalizing their own prejudices.
ETA: I Googled for "exposure therapy", and the 2nd item on the list informed me that:
For some reason, the karma that knb's comment received really annoys me. When did we come to define rationalism as "thinking about something just deeply enough to achieve self-affirmation, and then pushing the upvote or downvote button"?
"Forward Defense" provides a better justification for Mohammed pictures than "slippery slope" does. By supporting people who create these pictures you implicitly support everyone who engages in a type of expression that's more defensible than creating Mohammed pictures is. Paradoxically, therefore, your well reasoned arguments against the pictures provide a strong "Forward Defense" free expression justification for supporting them.
Those who strongly support freedom of expression may have implicitly used the publicity generated by the Mohammed pictures to coordinate in supporting them and consequently, in the United States at least, created a defense protecting all other types of expression that are easier to justify than the Mohammed pictures. If there was some special social value in these pictures then the forward defense their "legitimacy" creates would provide less protective cover to other types of offensive expressions.
Another case that's interesting to consider is the Penny Arcade dickwolves controversy. The PA fellows made a comic which mentioned the word "rape", some readers got offended, and the PA guys, being thick-skinned individuals, dismissed and mocked their claims of being offended by making "dickwolves" T-shirts. Hubbub ensues.
What's most interesting about this case is that, apart from perhaps some bloggers, many of the people taking offense appear to be rape survivors for whom reading the word "rape" is traumatic (I guess? This is what I gathered, but being thick-skinned and not a rape survivor it is impossible for me to understand). I don't think it's possible to claim Machiavellian maneuverings here, given that a feminist blog who made a dickwolves protest shirt eventually stopped selling the shirt on account of some rape survivors saying that the shirt acted as a trigger for them.
More to the point: there is apparently a small population for whom using the word "rape" causes psychic horror. So what, are we now not allowed to ever use that word? Or can we not even allude to the act? Of course, reasonable concessions should be made (i.e. not using the word when directly in the presence of such a person), but at what point do sensitive individuals need to take it upon themselves to relocate their attention elsewhere?
I think that the mechanism for rape trauma triggers is different from the mechanism for Muhammed representation offense taking, and so the two should probably be treated differently. The trouble with the Dickwolves controversy is that you wound up with offense-takers and trauma-havers on the same side, in the same camp, so they got conflated.
Hmm, but it does seem like trauma triggers and the psychic-distress-via-salmon work via the same mechanism. So probably the key here is to distinguish between actual psychic stress and feigned stress used for status maneuvers. It is not, however, clear to me how to do that in general.
No, the key here is to distinguish between actual psychic stress not used for status maneuvers and actual psychic stress used for status maneuvers. Which is of course even harder.
How about the classic "murder pill" test? If you could self-modify to no longer experience the psychic stress, would you?
I suspect the psychic-distress-via-salmon and rape victims would answer yes, whereas the Muslims would answer no.
I tentatively agree, except I think rape victims might be concerned about no longer holding their beliefs about the moral significance of how people in general talk about triggering topics. If those values could be maintained without the stress reaction I would expect them to want the pill.
Yes, I think it's a crucial distinction that the brits in question would almost all choose to have the electrodes removed immediately. And shortly they would take considerably less offense at pictures of salmon.
Far fewer of the offended muslims (it's not the case that all muslims are equally offended) would immediately choose to rewire their brains or rewrite their software to avoid the psychic pain. This is because their current configuration was chosen, to a far greater extent than the brit's was.
This is an important point. In this sense, the Brits are victims of something they can't control, but if the Muslims had a choice, they wouldn't control it. So they bear some responsibility for their own offense.
I think the point is that people shouldn't use it as a joke so much.
This only makes sense if you consider jokes to be of lesser social importance than, say, idle political talk.
I'm not convinced that "offense" is a variety of "pain" in the first place. They feel to me like two different things.
When I imagine a scenario that hurts me without offending me (e.g. accidentally touching a hot stovetop), I anticipate feelings like pain response and distraction in the short term, fear in the medium term, and aversion in the long term.
When I imagine a scenario that offends me without hurting me (e.g. overhearing a slur against a group of which I'm not a member) I anticipate feelings like anger and urge-to-punish in the short term, wariness and distrust in the medium term, and invoking heavy status penalties or even fully disassociating myself from the offensive party in the long term.
Of course, an action can be both offensive and painful, like the anti-Semitic slurs you mention. But an offensive action need not be painful. My intuition suggests that this is a principled reason (as opposed to a practical one) for the general norm of pluralistic societies that offensiveness alone is not enough to constrain free speech.
I'm not sure which category the British Fish thought experiment falls into; the description doesn't completely clarify whether the Britons are feeling pained or offended or both.
Extremely important point. And the "offense" variety of feeling is the dangerous one - the one we shouldn't accede to.
(A side note: one of the most insidious forms of procrastination is taking offense at a problem, rather than actually solving it. Offense motivates punish-and-protest behavior, rather than problem-solving behavior.)
Wow, this is so true. My least constructive response to being told to do something by my boss is taking offense, and I have to wait hours (or sometimes days) before I don't feel offended anymore so that I can focus on figuring out how to do what I've been asked.
A faster way: state your offense in the form of a "should" or "should not" that is being violated. (e.g. "I shouldn't have to do this stupid s...tuff."). Then, restate that in the form of a pair of statements about your preferences, first what you don't like, and then what you do.
e.g. "I don't like it that I have to do this stupid s...tuff", followed by, "I would like it if I didn't have to do this stupid stuff."
As you make the statements, pay attention to your emotional response to each one. The first should bring righteous agreement ("damn straight I shouldn't have to!"), followed by something more like, "Yeah, I really don't like it, but I guess I do need to do it" for the second one, and "Gosh, that really would be nice if I didn't have to do it. Maybe I could just try and get it over with quickly."
If you don't get responses like these, try playing with the phrasing or subject matter of the perceived offense. Oftentimes, there is more than one norm being violated, and sometimes your unconscious norms are not immediately obvious to conscious introspection.
It also helps to question the standards themselves -- offense and the corresponding protest-punish motivation is a terrible influence on clear thinking, because it deludes you into ignoring the facts of the situation. (e.g., you might not want to do something, but you probably still need to do it.) While our brains are concerned with protesting the situation, they essentially operate in a state of denial about the situation. Appropriate litanies can also be helpful here... i.e., "if I have to do it, then I want to know that I have to do it... and admitting it won't make it any worse."
Offense-taking is essentially the true antithesis of rational thinking and action, because at a fundamental level it is insisting that what's happening isn't "really" happening, on the grounds that it's "not supposed to" be!
And it thus directly prevents actual problem solving, since it keeps you from even admitting to the basic facts upon which any effective plan of action would actually depend. ;-)
Thanks. It seems like it would work, and I would be interested in being more introspective about the source of my indignation in any case.
So now I'm looking forward to being offended.. which will also help.
A couple points.
You miss an important issue, which is the western concept as speech as a right. The Folsom street fair can have a promo poster of the last supper as Jesus as a naked black dude surrounded by transvestites, dominatrixes, and sex toys, and no major Christian organization will propose that anyone should be killed. They may try to get funding taken away from the fair, but that's their right. Westerners have a concept of appropriate levels of conflict, and if someone violates them, we want to punish them. If someone asks me politely to keep it down, I probably will. If they tell mento shut up or they'll kick my ass, my instinct is to talk even louder (especially if they're bluffing). This is sensible as annoy of punishing improper behavior.
I also take issue with your characterization of offense as pain. In some cases - where it's directed at someone, like racial slurs, it is. But in cases of taking offense at untethered actions, pain isn't accurate. It's not exactly painful when, say, a Klansmen sees an interracial couple, even if he finds their behaviour offensive. And even if it were, it seems obvious to menthat the couple should not allow that to affect their behaviour. If the Brits in your example just got arbitrarily angry about seeing trout pictures, I'm not sure the same reaction follows. Perhaps if you taboo offense, you get a more coherent picture of two separate emotional reactions.
Social pain and physical pain seem to be strongly linked. A dyed-in-the-wool racist may indeed experience actual pain at the sight of an interracial couple.
"Speech as a right" is exactly how this appeared to me when it was all fresh and new, which casts the conflict as a bilateral jihad. Our sacred values are freedom of speech, and not being provoked to physical violence by speech. Islam's sacred value is not visually depicting Mohammed. Western civilization probably looks like Superhappies to them.
I've been offended once or twice in my life. It wasn't painful. It caused anger. I wouldn't call offense pleasant, but I would call it satisfying, to a certain degree. Pain generally isn't. Mental pain and physical pain may be related, but I don't think most offense (particularly of the generalized variety) is properly analogized.
I would like to believe the Klansman (I was considering changing this to Klansperson, but political correctness is probably inappropriate in this situation) doesn't feel anything like real suffering when he sees an interracial couple, but I have no evidence for this except my desire to sweep his feelings under the rug so I don't have to use them in ethical calculus.
For example, I am strongly pro gay rights and gay marriage, but I admit that seeing public displays of affection between gays gives me a negative visceral reaction more than the same displays among straights do. If I could self-modify to remove this feeling I'd do so in a second, but given that I can't self-modify it seems like this preference is worthy of utilitarian respect; eg insofar as they want to be nice to me, gay people should avoid PDAs around me when it's not too inconvenient for them (and if gay people have the same feeling in reverse, straight people who are nice should avoid hetero PDAs around them).
I have no reason to think I can model Klansmen well, but when I try, I imagine their feelings around an interracial couple as being a lot like my feeling around gay people having PDAs.
How should this interact with people who are interested in seeing the display in question? (E.g. I once made out with a girl on a bus full of people and we got lots of, er, positive attention. How should I have weighted that vs. your discomfort with public displays of gay affection if you had been on the bus with us?)
I just realized that when I said "gay", I meant "gay male".
Although to answer your question, you'd have to sum up the positive and negative preferences of people who might see you. I expect you'd probably be in the clear at a college pub, less so at the Retired Baptist Womens' Convention.
Yeah, I thought that might be it. (Of course, when I see gay guys being affectionate my response is "awwwwwww", so the same sort of question can be constructed.)
Yes, except the feelings of the Klansman are far stronger - more similar in intensity to the feelings of many muslims toward depictions of Mohammed.
From my own experience I suspect you could self-modify but have insufficient incentive to do so. (That's not intended as a criticism.) I once had a very strong revulsion to gay PDAs, now I have a very mild aversion to it, perhaps similar to what you describe:
Since you are apparently behaving decently toward gays and not massively uncomfortable in most situations with them there's not much reason to change. No doubt you have bigger fish to fry.
I feel similar to that but I'm confident that my mild aversion would decrease if I became close friends with a gay couple and spent a lot of time with them. My aversion would easily be swamped by more important values.
I agree. When I hear people say the equivalent of "I can't self-modify" I always want to ask "what have you tried so far," and "how long have tried for." Normally that answer is not much(only a few approaches) and not very long. It often comes from lack of incentives and a belief equivalent to "thats just the way I am."
It seems to me that encouraging this sort of behavior has many, much larger consequences that you either aren't thinking of or are deliberately omitting. Consider, for example, the closeted classmate of the gay couple, who knows that they are gay and takes a bit of strength from seeing them express their love publicly--it gives him hope that one day he can do the same. Upon the gay couple taking your advice, however, he sees that even people who proclaim themselves his ally (you) don't actually want him to be affectionate with people of his sex (this is by far the most common interpretation of your request, in my ample experience. Recall that in this framework your intention doesn't matter, merely its effects). On the contrary, he sees you and people like you punishing gay behavior and not doing the same to equivalent straight behavior (note that you don't request straights not to have PDAs, you merely think it OK for others to do so, and in an environment where gay PDAs have already been shot down as inappropriate, this is an extremely risky request for the closeted fellow to make). Thus, this heavily encourages people to remain closeted, which is a very harmful condition. So much moreso than being offended that I venture to say that I cannot think of an offense I would not inflict if it meant that a frightened, closeted queer* could come out without negative consequences.
Edit: I am leaving the following sentence here because it has provoked an interesting discussion, but please think of it as a separate post from the preceding one, as it seems to sharply change people's opinion of the rest of the post:
*similarly to nigger, this is our word, not yours, and so my use of it is not offensive, but if you were to use it in a way other than by quoting me, it would be
Goshdarnit, I had you upvoted until you pulled the "our word" thing. That really irks me. I adhere to rules like that because I usually don't want words that "belong" to other groups more than I want to avoid the firestorm, but... Hey, I'm bisexual. Suppose I declare that it's okay with me if Yvain uses the word "queer" to describe people who identify as queer. Then is it okay? I mean, it's my word, right? Can't I share it?
The slippery slope that applies is not that every random religion will taboo a certain activity, but that the more power you give to one religion the easier it is for it to get even more power. If, through outrageous overreaction, they can force people to stop one activity, they have zero incentive to not use this tactic against everything they are morally against, much of which is of MUCH greater utility than images of Mohammed.
I acknowledge that slippery slope argument has some validity, but what I haven't seen so far is a good criterion of where to apply it.
I feel confident being upset at people who draw swastikas where they expect Jews to see them, or burn crosses outside the houses of black people. Although one can make all the same arguments ("if we embolden the blacks and Jews by giving in now, then they'll start demanding more and more rights until we have to believe as they do") I still think doing either of those actions is wrong.
Drawing Mohammed seems designed to harass Muslims in the same way that drawing swastikas seems designed to harass Jews. So where is the critical difference that makes one necessary and the other abhorrent?
both actions are bad, but the right to engage in them is good. I think there is a lot of value in having a permissive rather than prescriptive society. You can condemn them all you want, force the people who make them into lower social status by mocking and insulting them, but you should not be able to stop them through force. If the KKK burn a cross on your lawn, they should be arrested for damage to property. But if they hold a rally where it is their legal right to do so, we should not physically attack them.
They key difference between these actions to me is not the action itself but the context for it. Drawing a Mohammed to piss off a muslim is a dick move by itself. Drawing a Mohammed to show that you stand for a world where you can draw whatever the hell you want and no organization has the right to threaten you with death is another thing entirely.
I've been trying to come up with a good way to articulate my thoughts on the topic and this is what I've come up with so far. Assuming you value it, freedom is important to defend far above and beyond any particular use of that freedom. I don't care about Mohammed pictures beyond the fact that I strongly believe people should have the right to draw them. I even don't like septum piercings, but I would strongly protest any campaign to get them banned. The value of any given insult to human society is negligible, probably even negative, but the value of being allowed to insult is incalculable.
"I feel confident being upset at people who draw swastikas where they expect Jews to see them, or burn crosses outside the houses of black people."
The vileness of the swastika doesn't come form the subjective reactions of Jews who see it. A swastika is an implicit call to genocide. I think you are far too hung up on what are relatively insignificant subjective consequences, to the point of ignoring the overarching political significance of the acts in question. (Such microscopy is indeed Dr. Hanson's method.) Depending on context drawing a picture of Mohammed can be (among other things) a call to persecution of persons professing Islam, an objection to Islamic censorship, or serve some purely artistic purpose, each having consequences that far outweighs "offensiveness."
I'm not clear on the relevant Muslim sensibilities/doctrine, but are they upset merely by seeing pictures of Mohammed, or by the existence of pictures of Mohammed? It may be that without actual policies/norms/etc. stringently forbidding drawing Mohammed, they will experience a non-negligible background level of upset based on the probabilistic expectation that someone, somewhere, is drawing Mohammed where they can't see. What does this model of offense etc. say to this situation?
I think you're right that the seeing vs. existing is a big part of why people's intuitions about salmon vs. Mohammed may differ in the example. British people (in the example) aren't trying to stop the existence of salmon pictures they can't see, whereas some Muslims are trying to stop the existence of Mohammed pictures they can't see. Even if only a minority of Muslims holds that attitude, it might be sufficiently annoying and scary to some non-Muslims that they are willing to annoy other Muslims by making pictures as a protest.
Yvain almost covers this case:
Except kicking someone in the face violates Western notions of rights, while drawing pictures of Mohammed somewhere doesn't. Drawing pictures of Mohammed to protest Muslims who try to deny the right of others to do so is not a violation of anyone's rights, according to Western concepts of rights. Westerners feel they must treat any attempt to deny their rights as a Schelling Point.
Yes, it is still annoying for the set of Muslims-who-are-bothered-by-pictures-of-Mohammed-but-aren't-trying-to-take-away-the-right-of-people-to-do-so. Yet people who draw pictures of Mohammed might feel they are justified in annoying those Muslims in order to protest the subset of Muslims that attempt censorship. Perhaps they hope that moderate Muslims will understand why they must defend that Schelling Point, or perhaps they hope that moderate Muslims will bring the radicals in line.
I don't understand this use of Schelling point- could you explain?
When there is a potential for conflict over some issue, people can communicate and negotiate as much as they like, but the most important piece of information is hard to communicate reliably and credibly: namely, the line that one is committed to defend without backing off, even if the cost is higher than the value of what's being defended. (Such commitment is usually necessary to defend anything effectively, since if you defend only when the cost of defense is lower than the value defended, the opponent can force you to back off without fighting by threatening an all-out attack whose cost is disproportionate to the prize, and which would not be profitable if you defended at all costs.)
The key insight is that such commitment is easier to assert credibly by drawing the line at a conspicuous focal point, which will enable both parties to come to a tacit mutual agreement. However, if you're not really committed to defend a particular focal point and your opponent senses that, he has the incentive to mount an attack that will make defense too costly and make you back off. And you can't back off from a focal point by giving just a small concession -- you can only withdraw to the next conspicuous focal point, and even then, it will be harder to assert commitment to defend it given your history.
I recommend this essay by David Friedman, which explains how the concept of Schelling point applies to property rights, in a way that's clearly generalizable to all other issues of rights and social norms:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Property/Property.html
From that essay:
This is where all the slippery-slope arguments come from. Without "speech free from repercussion" as a Schelling point, there appears to the West be no other natural point until you reach complete submission to Muslim dictates. The Muslim tradition would prefer if the conflict was resolved on their side of the issue - in itself a strong strategy for moving towards more complete submission to Muslim tradition. (Given this, an unreasonable attachment to what the West perceives as the Schelling point is a sound strategy for the West - cue cries of free speech).
What Vladimir_M said. The line in the sand being defended in this case is the right of Westerners to create media that is offensive to the beliefs of some Muslims, even though it doesn't tangibly harm Muslims in any way.
Analogously, If this theoretical scenario were to take place, I would be doing wrong if I were to force British people to look a salmon against their will, same as if I hurt them against their will buy punching them in the face.
But they would have no justification for acting against say the "Australian Salmon photographers association" who happen to enjoy taking pictures of Salmon themselves but have no intention of exposing British people to them against their will.
In the Danish cartoons example, they were originally given a very minor circulation in Denmark, they were not airdropped into Mecca or whatever. The objection to Muslim 'offense' is that they are attempting to restrict others self regarding actions that do no harm to them. [Also in that specific case there was deliberate political manipulations.]
It seems to me that the right way to try to decide many political questions, and this is a political question, is to look at it in terms of whether it allows the society using that rule to correct its errors. If Islam is both factually and morally flawed as all other human institutions are, then preventing a specific type of criticism, namely criticism involving pictures of Mohammed, will make correcting the errors of Islam more difficult. There may be other errors involved that are more difficult to correct, like the error that the appropriate response to somebody acting offended at squiggles of ink on a page is to ban the ink squiggles concerned. Finally, I don't buy consequentialism because what counts as a consequence is ambiguous and depends on your theories about the world. For example, I would count damaging our error correcting institutions as a serious consequence of a ban, legal or social, on drawing Mohammed, you would not. So consequentialism doesn't solve the problem, it's just a way of sweeping the real problem under the "consequence carpet".
My first reaction to this was "is this a guest post by Robin Hanson under Yvain's name, to see if anyone notices?"
Well, no it doesn't. Muslims observably do make a choice in the matter (as proved by the fact that they discuss it and take different views). (Link.) To equate this with aliens hard-wiring our brains to graft on an arbitrary offense-trigger is plain no-free-will determinism, whereby the past reaches past the present to cause the future, just as the alien reaches past our internal functions to cause offense-taking at an arbitrary stimulus.
Part of me wants to feel complimented by that, another part wants to challenge you to pistols at dawn.
That wacky Robin Hanson, eh? Never can tell whether there's method in his madness, or madness in his method!
Will the pistols be near or far?
In the salmon example, I would consider it inappropriate to take as many pictures of salmon as possible and try to get them shown to as many Brits as possible. I wouldn't, however, ask a business selling fish in America to not use salmon in their advertisements. In other words, the negative utility of creating such images is non-negligible, but it is small enough that it can be outweighed by other factors. In the case of Mohammad, however, I have never in my entire life been in a situation where I had a particular need to depict Mohammad visually. Most depictions presently seem like deliberate attempts to antagonize Muslims, which I consider immoral. People do it, of course, because of in-group-outgroup behavior. If the alien arrived in England in 1812, Americans would be making as many photographs of salmon as they could.
Vladimir_M and Nominull have got it right.
Vladimir_M:
Nominull:
Although one function of offense is to alert about real threats, another function is to grab any status that it can (except when being thick-skinned grants more status).
Offense can scale depending on how much can be gained by it.
Btw, I first heard this concept from PUAs claiming that a girlfriend will "dial up" or "dial down" the drama that she gives (without any conscious goal-directedness) depending on how the man responds. This tendency seems to be a general principle of human psychology, not just female sexual psychology.
Offense is a lot more cognitive than pain. How do I know that? Because I am a political writer (blogging at FeministCritics.org. I show people what parts of feminism they get offended by, and what parts they should take seriously.
Political writers are offense-mongers. Why? Because on their own, people don't always know what they are supposed to find offensive.
Pain has a cognitive dimension, but many types of pain are non-cognitive. In complex social situations, offense is highly cognitive. There could be many ways to view a particular phenomenon, and political writers will choose the way that is most offensive to the group they are backing.
Offense doesn't always just swoop in and attack innocent people, people go looking for it. They seek out political writers they identify with to learn what they are supposed to be offended about today. In a complex social world, this behavior makes a lot of sense. You don't always know what might threaten your status, so you look to knowledgeable people to show you what to make into a Schelling Point. They tell you what you should be offended about, to inspire you to action that will protect the status of the identity group that you share.
Of course, political writers themselves are generally quite sincere (I certainly am!), which is part of why they are effective (at least in getting people stirred up). It's their job to get offended and then write about it. Furthermore, they gain positive reinforcement and an echo chamber if they can consistently stir up their flock and provide them a constant diet of offense, so that people will feel properly vigilant about protecting the status of groups they identify with.
There is nothing wrong this ecosystem, as long as we have no illusions about how it works.
This reminds me that I need to make a post about male-bashing in music videos. There are some patterns that I'm sure people will see if I point them out. I am of course right, but it's possible that political writers other than me have biases that lead them to perceive spuriously offensive patterns.
An important distinction between the salmon and Mohammed pictures was omitted. Namely, the potential to change the offended in the long run.
In both examples the differences between two groups are potentially dangerous. There is a direct risk of accidentally showing a salmon picture in presence of a Briton. There is a graver risk that the salmon thing would cause further distrust between Britons and non-Britons, because it's somehow hard to not laugh at somebody who becomes enraged because of a picture of a salmon. There may be bombings of printers who publish fishing books, or any other kind of violence. The world is almost certainly better without such controversies. So it may be reasonable to try to eliminate them.
In the salmon example, the Britons have a physical reason (chips in their brains) for their salmon obsession and they can't be (presumably) taught to ignore the salmon pictures. On the other hand, Muslims' rage over depicting the prophet is a cultural habit amenable to change. People are usually less offended (in whatever meaning) by stuff which they encounter on a daily basis. Exposing the Muslims to Mohammed cartoons may significantly move their offense threshold towards more tolerance.
This strikes me as a bad analogy. Seeing pictures of Mohammed is only offensive to Muslims because of their conviction in a poorly evidenced falsehood, whereas punching someone in the face is an offense regardless of what they believe. I think that a more apt comparison would be holding communion wafers hostage in order to offend Catholics.
If I thought that actions like these would discourage people from taking offense due to falsehoods, I would consider that to be a strong argument in their favor, but I don't see that they're actually doing much aside from fueling persecution complexes and feeding conflict.
I don't think this is completely true. Speaking as a former Orthodox Jew, the idea of someone desecrating a Torah scroll fills with me with deep emotional pain even though I know that there's nothing at all holy or sacred about it. Once that sort of offense becomes ingrained it is very hard to remove even when one understands that it isn't based on any actual part of reality.
Huh. That sort of reaction is completely alien to me. Do you still have a strong cultural allegiance to Judaism which you feel is being affronted by this?
I can't speak for JoshuaZ, but speaking as another nonbeliever-raised-Orthodox-Jew, my reaction is similar to his.
And, yes, I think it's fundamentally a cultural thing. That is, the Torah scroll in this example is functioning as an icon of cultural Judaism, much as flags do for various kinds of nationalism.
Just to unpack that a little: if someone behaves disrespectfully towards an icon of a culture, I react as though they'd expressed disrespect towards that culture. If it's a culture I identify with, I react as though they'd expressed disrespect towards me. All of this seems entirely unremarkable and to be expected, to me at least.
The idea that any of this (be it with respect to Torah scrolls or the image of Mohammed or American flags) has anything to do with specific beliefs about divinity is, I think, a complete distraction.
I may have overgeneralized from my own mentality. My own outlook is very different from yours or joshua's; I am of Jewish extraction, but after a couple of years attending Brandeis university, I found the in-group dynamic sufficiently oppressive that I now refuse to self identify as Jewish, and become offended when people refuse to accept my distinction between being Ashkenazic on my mother's side and being Jewish. That sort of cultural affiliation, absent any particular beliefs or ideals to associate it with, is something I've only observed from the outside.
I think it's worth asking though, whether, once you winnow out all the absurd and unjustified beliefs in these various cultural packages, there are any sane beliefs that justify taking offense at actions such as drawing pictures of Mohammad, keeping a transubstantiated wafer rather than eating it, or urinating on the Torah. I think that the first two are only comparable to the last one if they are performed as deliberate attacks on a cultural icon, and if they're not, then I'm not sure what sane reason that could leave to object to them.
I'm not quite sure what a sane reason for offense is. More generally, I'm not sure what a sane reason for any emotional reaction is.
But I guess I can see saying that since fear evolved "in order to" encourage us to avoid danger, it's sane to feel fear with regards to genuinely dangerous situations, and insane to feel it with regards to situations that aren't dangerous. On that account, being scared while standing on the edge of a cliff in high wind is sane, but continuing to feel scared after someone someone clips a safety cable to my belt is insane.
And adopting the same stance with respect to offense, I would say that offense evolved "in order to" encourage us to defend our status, and is therefore sane when our status is genuinely at stake and not when it isn't. Using that standard, it seems entirely sane to be offended at the actions you list: they all have the effect of lowering the status of various symbols of my tribe, which in turn lowers my status.
That said, you seem to be using some other standard for a sane emotional reaction, one I don't entirely understand. Can you clarify it further?
My first thought was to characterize a sane belief that justifies an emotional reaction reaction as one that creates a connection to one's terminal values without being clearly counterfactual, but I'm not sure whether this is adequately transparent; I'm biased by having my own meaning in mind.
I'm not sure this is true. For instance, in the case of urinating on the Torah, it's an act that would be widely agreed to represent contempt for a symbol. It would be reasonable to interpret it as a deliberate assault on a representation of the group with which you affiliate.
In the case of drawing Mohammad, it's not an act which generally denotes contempt; drawing symbols of various other cultural groups doesn't constitute an attack. So for it to be a sane source of offense, you would need some justified belief which could complete the connection between the drawing and an attack on your group's status. If you had reason to belief that the artist had drawn it to make a mockery of your traditions, that would be a sane belief which could complete the connection, but if you know the act was not done in ill spirits, what might you believe which could complete the connection?
(EDIT: You edited the parent after I replied; I take no responsibility for whether my reply has any relationship to the new parent. I really wish people would stop doing that. I may come back to this later and reconcile.)
Not quite transparent.
I more or less understand what it means for a belief B to not be clearly counterfactual, and what you mean by my terminal values V.
I don't understand what it means for B to "justify an emotional reaction" E, and I understand what it means for B to "have a connection to" V, and I'm not sure what the relationship between B and V has to do with E.
For what it's worth, your response wasn't there when I started making the edit, and I didn't see it until after I had changed my comment. I frequently find a few seconds after leaving a comment that I had more to say, and revise my comment to reflect it.
Yes, I understand that people do this. One consequence of doing it is that other people's replies are retroactively disconnected from the thing they appear to reply to.
I just don't like my replies being treated that way, is all.
Of course, I can't do anything to prevent it, and nobody else is obligated to respect my preferences. The best I can do is edit my replies to note that any disconnections might be retroactive, which is what I did.
Careful, if you judge the validity of your emotions by whether they're serving their evolutionary role, you'll end up arguing that the purpose of life is to maximize your inclusive genetic fitness.
True enough. There can be also other motivations for finding damaging an icon of a culture to be distasteful. When the Taliban was destroying Buddha statues in Afghanistan I found that sad, simply because the statues were ancient and irreplaceable, irrespective of their religious significance.
Even so, the offense in your case is still the result of your previous belief in a falsehood. If you had never been an Orthodox Jew in the first place, it's unlikely that you would feel the same indignation/offense/pain upon contemplating that particular sacrilege. This may be a case of your visceral reactions not having caught up to your conscious beliefs.
So holding communion wafers hostage is still a better analogy than punching someone in the face (in fact, there are probably former Catholics reading this who would take some kind of visceral offense at the former, and I'd likewise encourage them to try to get over it if they can).
Agreed that communion wafers are a better analogy than punches in the face, and that the offense is a product of cultural indoctrination. (That said, the question of how offensive a punch in the face is is not completely separable from cultural indoctrination, either.)
Disagreed that the truth or falsehood of the belief itself has anything to do with the issue, though.
My getting offended if you disrespect my cultural icons has to do with my (true) belief that I am a member of the culture being disrespected. Someone who identifies as an American might be offended by someone urinating on an American flag in the same way that someone who identifies as a Jew might be offended by someone urinating on a Torah scroll or someone who identifies as the child of their parents might be offended by someone urinating on their parents' wedding photo; talking about any of that in terms of true or false beliefs seems unnecessarily confused.
Yes -- but my feeling is that if you no longer believe X, you should accept the fact that you're no longer a member of the culture-defined-by-belief-in-X.
In general I am suspicious of the often-heard argument that religion is not really about belief. You only hear this from people looking for an excuse to remain in a tribe they've been in their whole life, because (understandably) it's psychologically difficult to leave a tribe. But sometimes it has to be done -- and I see religion, quite frankly, as one of the clearest examples of a case where one simply needs to let go and be over with it.
That's not to say you can't embrace your identity as a former religionist. But that's a distinct cultural identity, involving your fond memories of formerly being offended by sacrilegious acts, as opposed to still currently being offended by them.
Well, you can be as suspicious as you wish, of course.
And, sure, if I agreed with you that cultural affiliation was contingent on belief -- for example, if I agreed that to be Jewish I must embrace whatever theological beliefs are consensually held among Jewish theologians (supposing that there are any, and that I could figure out what beliefs they were)... or at least embrace only theological beliefs that are held by some Jewish theologians (though there's a circularity there... who counts as a Jewish theologian, after all?), or... well, to be honest, I'm not actually sure what beliefs you're saying I need to embrace in order to genuinely be Jewish, but regardless, if I agreed with you that there were some beliefs that fell into this category, then it would follow that when I stop believing those beliefs (whatever they are), it follows that I'm no longer Jewish.
But I don't in fact agree with that -- in fact, as above, I'm not sure it's even coherent enough to disagree with.
Just to make this more concrete: I don't believe, for example, that the universe was deliberately created by anything remotely person-like, nor that any such entity (supposing I were wrong about that first belief) shares in any singular sense identity with whatever entity or entities provided to early Jews the laws and tribal history currently known as the Torah, nor that those entities have any relationship worth mentioning to do with what happens to me upon my death.
If (as I suspect) you consider Judaism to be contingent on those beliefs, you would conclude that I'm not Jewish, and I would disagree.
Also: you seem to be saying, in addition, that I'm mistaken if I respond to expressed disrespect of Jewish cultural icons as though it were my culture being disrespected (for example, by being offended). I'm not quite sure that's true, either, leaving aside the whole question of whether it actually is my culture.
I am in no sense a Canadian, for example, but I'm not sure I'd be mistaken if I respond to expressed disrespect of Canadian cultural icons as though it were my culture being disrespected (for example, by being offended on their behalf).
More specifically, what I would conclude is that your self-identification as "Jewish" (rather than "of Jewish parentage") is a misguided effort to continue affiliating with a tribe that you're used to belonging to, but that you would never have joined in the first place had you had your current beliefs at the time of joining and had you been taking them into account in deciding which tribe to join; and if, for example, it turned out that you were avoiding the use of electric lights on Saturdays, I would have no hesitation in labeling such behavior as irrational, even silly -- and I would be entirely unsympathetic to the extent I viewed the behavior as a tribal affiliation signal rather than, say, a psychological compulsion (which I can understand and relate to).
In all honesty, I would tend to view that with suspicion also -- my instinctive perception would be of an obsequious attempt to curry favor with Canadians. This perception could be overridden, of course, depending on the circumstances; but I would sympathize with disapproval on the part of a non-Canadian more than offense per se.
Mostly, I think the place I disagree with you is that you see the beliefs as primary and the tribal membership as contingent on beliefs, at least when it comes to Judaism, and I see them as largely unrelated.
That is, I no more decided to be Jewish on the basis of religious beliefs than I decided to be American on the basis of national beliefs, and being Jewish no more constrains my Saturday activities than being Hispanic does. They are all affiliations I was born into and choose to endorse, despite not practicing them in traditional ways.
Trouble is, your identity is about much more than that in practice. It's deeply entangled with your way of life, your family, community, and social network, and also with the way others see and treat you. An offensively blasphemous act may (note: may, depending on the situation) be a credible signal that someone is hostile towards the group you identify with, and given the power to do so, would act so as to endanger your way of life, your community, and perhaps also your personal well-being. (This could range anywhere from making your life miserable in petty ways to outright violence.) In many cases, you must also take into account that those hostile to your group see it as your inherent identity that you can't disown and escape from even if you wanted to.
With this in mind, often it is irrational to get riled up over some provocative act that is best ignored, or that isn't even meant to be provocative but has it as an unwanted side-effect. However, sometimes it is also irrational to ignore clear signs of genuine hostility, some of which can plausibly translate into real danger. In the latter case, the visceral reaction is well adapted to reality.
(There are of course also various other cases where it's less clear if a visceral reaction can be reasonably called "rational," such as when some instrumental goal is best furthered by throwing a tantrum and creating drama to extract concessions.)
Not true.
I've never been Jewish, and I personally find the act of deliberately desecrating objects of belief, faith and following--from blowup up Buddhas to burning flags to pissing on crucifixes to be extremely distasteful in ways ranging from mild annoyance at juvenile attempts to shock (Piss christ, Dung Madonna) to rather enraging (Blowing up thousand year old statues or burning flags as a political protest).
Things like the Torah, the Koran and the Bible (a bit less so, but still) (I have no idea about the Shruti/Smirtis, but I'll lump them in here anyway) are not just religious texts, they are cultural icons, relics and touchstones to hundreds of millions of people. By desecrating those artifacts you are desecrating those people's beliefs and culture. This is, at minimum rude and is a mind killer.
Now things like shitting on a torah, blowing up a church or burning a flag are distinctly different than drawing Mohammad in that drawing Mohammad (or anyone else really) is not desecration, but blasphemy. It is roughly the same as me, or anyone else "taking the lords name in vain".
Can you explain what criteria you're using to draw that distinction? Do you expect people with different cultural norms to be able to acknowledge those criteria as objectively valid?
I don't think this offense is without any basis in reality. If someone goes around desecrating Torahs, you would be completely rational to conclude that he probably has an issue with Jews in general and feel threatened. Even if you no longer believe in Judaism, and even if you no longer identify as a Jew, this doesn't mean that Jew-haters will leave you off the hook. You may disown your religious, ethnic, or tribal affiliations, but this doesn't mean others will stop perceiving and treating you as still bound by them. (As many found out the hard way in Germany in the 1930s, to give only the most dramatic example.)
To get back to the question from the original post, this also implies that it may be rational for Muslims to sense hostility and feel threatened by people who go around committing blasphemy according to their norms, and similar for every other religion. However, it still doesn't mean that every feeling of offense is a legitimate response to hostility -- as with any human interaction where interests clash, we see a complicated interplay of signaling, Schellingian strategy, and dancing around focal points looking for ways to move them in a favorable direction. Of course, things also depend on the more explicit relations of power, wealth, status, alliances, etc. between the parties involved.
The error of the original post is to assume that these complex and highly situation-dependent questions can be analyzed with a naive consequentialist approach, but it would also be an error to simply reverse its conclusion. In different situations when offense is felt and expressed, many different scenarios may be taking place.
Here's a possible litmus test: how would you feel about another former Orthodox Jew desecrating a Torah scroll as a symbol of eir change in belief.
"Another"? I assume this question is directed at Joshua Z. I am not a former Orthodox Jew, nor any other kind of Jew for that matter. I'm Catholic.
That said, as I wrote in my above comment, clearly the context of an offensive/blasphemous act or utterance matters a lot. As for the concrete scenario you list, I find it hard to imagine that a Jew who has left the religion would symbolically desecrate Torah -- the act has such a strong connotation of anti-Jewish pogroms that I'd imagine even a non-religious Jew would find it scary, almost like brandishing swastikas. That's my outsider's impression at least; I'd be curious to hear the opinion of someone more knowledgeable.
Just out of curiosity, in what sense are you Catholic (heritage, culture, belief)? (No need to answer if you prefer not to.)
Someone damaging physical artifacts of one's religion is a reasonable thing to make into a Schelling point. That's quite different from someone creating media that is counter to your religion.
Sure, we can make that distinction (and there are other possible distinctions). I was merely making my remark in the context of Derstopa's claim that the offense is that strongly tied to the actual belief.
How's this for a metaphor: suppose I thought my mother had died in the Holocaust, when in fact she'd escaped the Holocaust without incident and simply lost contact with me. Someone makes Nazi jokes around me, or says that everyone who died in the Holocaust deserved it and went to Hell, or something equally offensive.
Suppose my interlocutor knows that my mother did not die in the Holocaust, and knows that if I believed my mother didn't die in the Holocaust I wouldn't be offended by what ey's saying. Ey also knows that since I do believe my mother died in the Holocaust, I definitely will be offended.
Even in this situation - in which I am only suffering because I have a false belief, and for reasons directly related to that false belief - I still think my interlocutor is very much in the wrong.
Your interlucotur clearly wouldn't be behaving nicely and would clearly be pushing for some confrontation - but does it mean that it is wrong or not allowed? This feels the same as if (s)he simply and directly called you a jackass in your face - it is an insult and potentially hostile, but it's clearly legal and 'allowed'; there are often quite understandable valid reasons to (re)act in such a way against someone, and it wouldn't really be an excuse in a murder trial (and the original problem does involve murders as reaction to perceived insults).
I think the central issue here gets folded into the "utility/disutility" distinction, which makes it easy to miss. The current thing with drawing Mohammed is probably best seen as a sort of culture war between East and West - we value free speech, they do not. The opening salvo was political cartoons in a Danish newspaper. If the opening salvo had been posting similar cartoons on the side of a Mosque, the West would look a lot worse.
Generally, though, targeted offensive behaviour - racial slurs, drawing Mohammed on churches, forcing very religious people to view hardcore pornography - is of virtually no social value and the offender suffers very little from having to avoid doing it.
Conversely, untargeted offensive behaviour - the Klansmen getting upset over seeing an interracial couple - tends to be much more expensive for the offender to avoid, so the appropriate solution is for the offended person to stop being offended.
How hard something is to avoid is obviously a bit fuzzy. It seems it can break down into "intended to harm" versus "not specifically intended to harm." The Mohammed cartoons are mostly in the latter category, as they were intended as a political criticism of a religion.
In other words, I think this is more of a debate over where the utility calculus should come out, because "offense" describes such a broad range.
Can you point to an example where that actually happened? The vastly more frequent occurrence is of religious people objecting to the mere existence of pornography.
This?
In all seriousness, it's a hypothetical example. If it is something that happens, it's not going to make the news, or probably even the interweb. I'm thinking of something like the scene in Clerks where a customer at a store expresses offense at an extremely lewd conversation the employees are having, to which an employee responds, "If you think that's offensive, look at this!" and shows him the spread in the porn mag he's holding.
This kind of little thing probably does actually happen, but I agree that general objections to the existence of pornography are more common, and they fall cleanly into the other category.
Absent free will I don't understand why you'd be more critical the supposed offending parties than the offended ones.
Some people born and raised in America who freely take up Islam in adulthood and proceed to take offense at such things as pictures of Mohammed which they previously would not have taken offense at. One may not directly choose to take such offense but it's a consequence of choices and one may choose otherwise.
Out of a billion muslims I'd bet there are many who are not deeply offended when outsiders print such pictures. The choice to take less offense is there.
Growing up I had a strong and deeply ingrained aversion to homosexuality. I could feel physically ill at the description or depiction of men kissing, for instance. The aversion was so strong that I identified it as an instinctive part of my nature. Over time however I chose to discount the aversion. I was able to do so. Presumably you would not have thought gays should have refrained from acts which offended me.
I'm confident muslims are also capable of discounting irrational beliefs. If one didn't think people could do this then what would be the point of lesswrong?
In the case of your alien-hacked British, they would notice their mass modification and be able to search for a cause. They would be able to scan their own brains and see the electrodes that were implanted by aliens. The idea of repudiating their new emotional reactions would be cognitively accessible, and this would inflect much of their behavior and the politics around the phenomenon.
Even as they outlawed pictures of salmon, they could (for example) put time limits on the laws, fund medical research into safe electrode removal, and make efforts to ensure that their foolish emotional reactions weren't memetically passed on into subsequent generations.
In the case of Muslims, there are no electrodes, and no hope of removing the electrodes. The material cause of their psychological situation is thus distinct and raises many of the issues from the diseased thinking essay. In practice, the people with the relevant emotional reaction were brought into being by cultural practices that include a philosophic endorsement of their over-reactions. The religious leaders benefit from the installation of this craziness in their followers by cultivating and directing the emotions it produces. People in their culture will publicly praise high fidelity memetic transmission of the emotional reactions and so the craziness can be expected to propagate like something living instead of receding like an injury healed by the passage of time.
The emotional reactions of Muslims to sacrilegious symbols are woven into their identities, and thus in some ways deserve more respect than the alien-hacked British with "photofishophobia", but in other ways they seem to me to deserve less respect.
Communities potentially have self-regulating agency over time. If a community has chosen to cultivate bad values over years and centuries (and partially succeeded in this project) , then the thing that gives them the most respect as self-regulating humans is to disrespect their poor regulatory choices.
I think the crucial difference between the salmon/Brit and the drawings/Muslims is form-invariance, which is present in the latter, but not the former.
The Muslims in question don't merely say, "Hey, don't draw pictures that have the form of Muhammad." They say, "Don't express any critique coupled to our offense at that narrow part of artspace." (including, e.g., Drawing an anonymous stick figure and saying, "I call that Muhammad ... is that enough to offend you, or does it have to ...?")
In contrast, there are workarounds in the Brit/salmon case that allow one to reference salmon anywhere and everywhere -- even right in front of Brits! -- without triggering their hardwired response:
Heck, the Brit-requested prohibition would ever permit you to (incorrectly) argue that the kind of mod the aliens did is impossible.
Yet Muslims expect all of the analog activities to cease.
Now, you can revise the situation to force consideration of the least-convenient possible world, but then you'd be constructing a scenario in which the aliens implant strong AI that can identify every possible kind of salmon reference. But at that point, you're no longer talking about Brits at all, but beings with a different identity, which reduces your dilemma to "Brits are killed and replaced with robots. What else would start to suck about that situation?" Er, the problem was the identity deletion, and any further harm pales in comparison.
I think you can connect the dots from here: there is a difference between expecting others to restrict the manner in which they do something, vs. whether they do it at all. Indeed, even the Americans you criticize have no problem with time/place/manner restrictions of free speech: e.g. "Sure you can say a candidate's great, but not through spam, and not by blasting an airhorn at 3am."
Are the effects of the alien practical joke curable?
This is an interesting post, but Yvain, your made-up pronouns hurt my head. Every time I come to one it disrupts my reading flow and feels like my train of thought crashes into a brick wall. It genuinely makes the post more difficult and less pleasant to read for me. Couldn't you just flip a coin for each new character you reference and give them male or female pronouns based on that?
Another option would be to use "they".
I always use "one" as an indefinite pronoun, similar to how I would do it in German. Is that wrong?
or
It's generally correct in English to use "one" as an indefinite pronoun, but it's not common casual usage and is not easy to do smoothly.
Though I would nevertheless consider it preferable every time to using made-up pronouns. Singular "they" generally works more smoothly than either alternative.
From what I've heard, these days there are attempts to condemn man in German as sexist.
In English, I also like using "one" but it's often too clumsy. As for those "ey" and "eir" pronouns, I find them not just extremely ugly, but also a very annoying obstruction while reading.
True (because it is pronounced the same way as "Mann"), but what can we do about such problems? It seems that using "made up" pronouns until they are integrated is the most natural way of fixing the problem?
You could also work around the problem though, but it requires some effort:
versus
Or you simply use "an agent" so that you can use "it"...
In the grammars of Slavic languages, including my native one (Croatian), grammatical gender is so pervasive that it would be altogether impossible to speak without using the masculine gender as the default. For example, in the past tense even verbs have gender, so if you want to ask, say, "who was that?", you have to say "who masculine-was that?" Asking "who feminine-was that?" is ungrammatical, even if the answer is certain to be female. There are countless such situations where you simply have to accept that the male subsumes the female to be able to speak at all.
Therefore, when someone claims that using masculine by default is evil, he (hah!) is thereby claiming that my native language is evil, and irreparably so. Should I get offended?
Sometimes I wonder why it's called "grammatical gender" at all, when it so often has no connection to actual gender whatsoever. In your example, there's no gender information transferred at all! It may as well be called "grammatical colour" or "grammatical arbitrary class".
On the other hand, you'd be lucky to be able to exert enough control on convention to make "he" into that kind of word.
As it turns out, that's exactly the original meaning of the word "gender" -- of which the French translation is genre.
The Chinese and Japanese character for "sex" (as in, which reproductive organs you have) can also be translated as "a quality" or "nature": 性 is the same character used for "nature" in the expression "Buddha-nature", i.e. "the characteristic quality of a Buddha". The concept could possibly also be expressed as "distinction", as in the limerick of the young lady from Exeter; or as "difference" as in the French expression "Vive la différence" ("Long live the difference" between men and women).
The concept of "grammatical gender" in linguistics is often taken to be a specialization of the more general concept of "noun class". Some languages, particularly African languages closer to the likely point of origin of human language, grammatically distinguish a large number of different noun classes, for particular kinds of things. Some European languages make a distinction between animate and inanimate nouns, but most preserve only the distinction between masculine and feminine nouns.
This may be taken as indicating that as human languages continually diversify and mix in human societies, that the distinctions which are preserved are those which human societies find the most significant: distinctions of sex. Which isn't surprising, since humans do need language to talk about and perform mate selection, where (for almost all humans) sex is highly significant.
English does not express grammatical gender on nouns in general, as French or German do. Indeed, even remaining feminizing suffixes such as -ess are falling out of use: uses such as "poetess" and "authoress" are now seen as dated (and sexist), and even "actress" is obsolescent. However, like other Indo-European languages (but unlike the Finno-Ugric languages, or many East Asian languages) English retains gendered pronouns.
It is not at all clear that removing gender from pronouns is a step in the direction of a less sexist society. Japanese does not use gendered pronouns except for intimate relations; but few would assert that Japan had perfect sexual equality. Sweden is often identified as a society with an unusually high level of sexual equality; but Swedish has gendered pronouns. However, deliberately using gender-neutral pronouns in English draws attention to the gender distinction, and implicitly asks, "Why are we making this distinction here, when we're not doing mate selection right now?"
(shrug) "Evil" confuses the issue.
Just to get away from the politics around real-world examples, suppose I speak a language that genders its verbs based on the height of the object -- that is, there are separate markings for above-average height, below-average height, and average height.
It's an empirical question whether, if I'm figuring out who to hire for a job, asking the question "Whom should we tall-hire?" makes me more likely to hire a tall person than asking "Whom should we short-hire?" If it's true, it is; evil doesn't enter into it under most understandings of evil. It's just a fact about the language and about cognitive biases.
If the best available candidate for the job happens to be tall, but I ask myself whom I should short-hire, the way I'm talking about the job introduces bias into my hiring process that makes me less likely to hire the best available candidate. This also isn't evil, but it's a mistake.
If my language's rules are such that this height-based gender-marking is non-optional, then this mistake is non-optional. My native language is, in that case, irreparably bias-ridden in this way.
Suppose I want to hire the best candidates. What can I do then?
Well, one thing I might do is deliberately alternate among "short-hire," "tall-hire," and "average-hire" in my speech, so as to reduce the systematic bias introduced by my choice of verb. Of course, if my language forces me to use "short-hire" for an unspecified-height target, then doing that is ungrammatical.
Another option is to make up a new way of speaking about hiring... perhaps borrow the equivalent verb from another language, or make up new words, so I can ask "whom should I hire?" without using a height-based gender marking at all. But maybe, inconveniently, my language is such that foreign loan verbs must also be marked in this way.
A third option is to systematically train myself so I am no longer subject to the selection bias that naive speakers of my language demonstrate. But there are opportunity costs associated with that training process, and maybe I don't want to bother.
Ultimately, what I do will depend on how important speaking grammatically is to me, how important hiring optimal employees is, and so forth. If I lose significant status or clarity by speaking ungrammatically, I may prefer to hire suboptimal employees.
Should I get offended if someone points that out? Again, it depends on my goals. If I want to improve my ability to choose the best available candidate, then getting offended in that case is counter-productive. If I want to defend my choice to speak traditionally, then getting offended works reasonably well.
My above comment was made in a bit of jest, as I hope is clear. Still, some people do make a deep moral issue over "sexist" language, and insofar as they do, moral condemnation of much more heavily gendered languages than English is an inevitable logical consequence.
Regarding the supposed biases arising due to gendered language, do you think that they exist to a significant degree in practice? While it's not a watertight argument to the contrary, I still think it's significant that, to my knowledge, nobody has ever demonstrated any cross-cultural correlation between gender-related norms and customs and the linguistic role of gender. (For what that's worth, of all Indo-European languages, the old I-E gender system has been most thoroughly lost in Persian, which doesn't even have the he-she distinction.)
Also, when I reflect on my own native language and the all-pervasive use of masculine as the default gender, I honestly can't imagine any plausible concrete examples of biases analogous to your hypothetical example with height. Of course, I may be biased in this regard myself.
Is that what that was? I had assumed that the text had been copied from some typesetting system that made a 'th' ligature glyph which didn't survive the copying process.
I actually stopped noticing it pretty quickly. That's what comes from reading a lot of poorly OCRed ebooks.
I think this an excellent scheme for thinking about the issue because it really does help draw together different intuitions onto the same field in a way where we can imagine useful evaluations.
One issue which may create fractures in reasoning is that the alien brain implant is somewhat different than other psychological reactions. At least when I first interpret the mechanism, the brain implant would not attenuate with time. The idea of "thicker skin" is bound up with growing one, allowing our responses to offensiveness attenuate from "my god, how awful" to "whyd do people think that's funny".
I think this leads to an important objection: if we could, through photographic salmon exposure* attenuate the pain until it no longer is actually felt, we would object much less to showing salmonitypes to Brits. Indeed, we may perceive that they have a duty to therest of us, even on general utility grounds, to attenuate their impulse.
I don't think this is an unreasonable objection and it meshes well with our other general moral commands. Children, for example, no doubt are greatly harmed by not getting what they want but we perceive a need for adults not to remain shrill 8 year olds and cultivate some serenity in this regard. (In fact, I had a conversation interrupted just tonight when the table next to mine began making a scene about salad prices, with obvious disutility to the tables around them.)
So I think this is a critical difference which should be addressed as it is not unreasonable to believe, at least from the muted reactions in the first world, that these feelings can attenuate with socialization or small personal effort.
*If this is not the name of a band, it should be.
I'm sure you don't actually have any confusion here, but I feel compelled to point out that you kind of did that thing where you only expect a member of Minority X to be offended by *ism against Minority X, where in fact everyone should join in sharing the offense caused by it, because that's just part of being a decent person.
(I probably wouldn't have mentioned this but for the fact that we're having a meta-discussion about how offense works!)
Yvain didn't write "considered offensive by women". He wrote "to", which only very weakly implies the idea you criticize and can be charitably read as saying no such thing.
I see, thanks. I was thinking of "to" as just being the other direction of "by", but you can interpret it as more like "towards" and then it's all good.
Oh, I bet it's because the previous sentence was "When someone draws Mohammed, it is considered offensive to Muslims.", and that one seemed like a straightforward "no-one except Muslims is being offended by this" mapping, which was then extended to cover sexism.
There are commenters who note that the use of "ey" and other gender neutral pronouns hurts their head. You may understand this and still use "ey" as part of a larger attempt to accustom people to language that is ultimately more convenient, even if it's worse in the short run. Which is a perfect example of what I was going to say:
When you do your harm minimization calculation, you really need to include the entire path over time, and not just the snapshot. It is often true that hurting people today makes them stronger in the future, resulting in a better outcome. It could be, for instance, that gay marriage today offends more people more deeply than it benefits, but that by pushing for its spread, many of the formerly offended people end up desensitized to it (see also any number of past civil rights issues). Or, if by showing the Brits enough pictures of salmon we could actually desensitize them to the pain, in the long run we may all be better off.
A big difference between the salmon and mohammed example is that you built into the first that Brits can't adapt to the pain. But some people may be imagining a future, better world where everyone has free speech and nobody has a problem with it. And they imagine that the way to get there is by exercising that freedom now, even if it's bad in the short run.
Personally, my feeling is that retaining offendability on some topics can easily confer benefits, but I am sympathetic to people who have not realized this, and I can understand why they would feel some compunction to wave their free speech rights in the faces of others, without necessarily being "bad" people.
Of the motivations described above, I think this is the closest, but still not quite accurate. The point of Everybody Draw Muhammad Day, as I saw it anyhow, wasn't to show that violence and terrorism are inappropriate responses, but that they are ineffective responses. It isn't about teaching Muslims not to threaten others, but teaching others to defy threats of censorship. It's a group exercise in defying threats of violence; it's one of those "the pen is mightier than the sword" things.
Another modern event dealing with the preservation of freedom of speech is Banned Books Week, which celebrates defiance against censorship, especially in libraries and schools. It's an event that celebrates your right to read Huckleberry Finn, Lolita, Slaughterhouse-Five, or Heather Has Two Mommies by encouraging people to read books that have been, in one context or another, banned or threatened with being banned.
Is Banned Books Week offensive to people who think these books should be banned, and that encouraging people to read them is evil? Yes, in fact it is.
I basically agree. The point is to show would-be intimidators that we will not be intimidated. The point is to resist those would would impose an unjust law.
" if British people politely asked this favor of them"
The problem is that the Muslims are not asking nicely. Fundamentally, this is no different from civil disobedience.
Well, "the Muslims" don't do anything at all. Individual people do. Some of them do violence; others do peaceful protest; others write letters-to-the-editor and blog posts.
As Eliezer said way back here, and as many other advocates of the Enlightenment have said before: "Bad argument gets counterargument. Does not get bullet. Never. Never ever never for ever."
The Enlightenment difference is not between "the Muslims" and "the West", or any other sectarian difference. It is between those who respond to bad argument with bullet, and those who do not.
"Well, 'the Muslims' don't do anything at all. Individual people do"
I disagree, sometimes people act in concert. For example, it's reasonable to say that the US invaded Afghanistan even though at another level, it was a few hundred thousand soldiers, all wearing the same uniform, who did so.
To be sure, "Muslims" is a significantly less coherent group than the US. However, there seems to be reasonably broad consensus among Muslim leadership that their principle -- that Koran burning should be seen as a crime -- is more important than the Western principle that it should not be so.
In any event, your point is a bit of a side point since the original post speaks of "British People" in the same group-oriented way. Reasonable people reading the original post will understand the phrase "British people asked politely" to mean some consensus of British leadership. I was referring to "Muslims" in the same way.
And sometimes people coerce or trick other people into supporting them or identifying with them. I'm in the US, and pay taxes to the US government, but I didn't invade Afghanistan. Joe Storeowner may pay "protection money" to the New York Mafia, but Joe didn't have a gang war with the New Jersey Mafia. Yet from the point of view of a Mafia historian, "New York had a war with New Jersey" and Joe's opinion is irrelevant; he is merely a citizen of the New York Mafia's territory.
The original thought-experiment asked us to imagine that all British people suffered from salmon-phobia. This assumes a level of distinction that in real life, we would regard as a fallacy — because in the thought-experiment world, we could truly say that if someone wasn't offended by salmon, that proved they weren't British.
In other words, in the world of the thought-experiment, the "no true Scotsman" fallacy is not a fallacy at all, but defined to be true.
"I'm in the US, and pay taxes to the US government, but I didn't invade Afghanistan."
I agree, that's exactly the point. When I said that "Muslims are not asking nicely," I was not referring to every last Muslim.
"The original thought-experiment asked us to imagine that all British people suffered from salmon-phobia. This assumes a level of distinction that in real life, we would regard as a fallacy"
Agree, the original thought experiment would be more accurate if British people had the same sort of general feeling about fish which Muslims have about Koran-burning.
And in that case, my original point still stands.
I think people are implicitly confusing two levels of thinking.
Level 1 thinking is "drawing Mohammed is bad", "people who get offended at drawings of Mohammed are silly", "we should punish them", etc. I think most people on this forum are beyond this sort of thinking.
Level 2 thinking is about status, evo-psych and harm minimization.
Problems occur when you mix the levels of thinking. You end up with "People who get offended at pictures of Mohammed are genuinely offended but they're still doing it for status reasons, so they're bad people and we should punish them by drawing lots of Mohammeds".
Think of Draw A Mohammed Day. It's the exact opposite of a good idea. Its organizers incur a status hit - they make America look like dicks - and they commit the massive strategic failure of letting their opponents frame the debate. And then on top of that they create some disutility by offending people.
A much more effective approach would be to think of a game-theoretic strategy which would win the status game (or at least stop others winning by ramping up the display of being offended).
I'll concede that some sort of game-theoretic "punishment" may be needed to disincentivize the "getting offended" behaviour. But that punishment doesn't have to be in the form of more offense. It can be to make the opponent look silly. It can be to portray him as a violent thug who flips out over nothing (though this is not to be preferred as it will tend to incur a "racism" status hit).
And once you've got a good strategy for playing the status game, you can then try and tune it to remove as much offense-disutility as possible.
I think this is a winning strategy. They are easily made to look like dicks - and then their opponents either embark on what could be easily represented as a murderous rampage, or renege on their threat. Either option is a bigger status hit for the opponent.
These are good points. I was just curious as to why the conversation wasn't framed as "accept that offense is a type of harm; now let's discuss the winning strategy"
I believe this is called the "Rage Boy" meme. But the actual person who is depicted in the "Rage Boy" meme is apparently a torture victim and demonstration organizer, not a killer.
The premise of your essay is deeply flawed... SOME Muslims are offended by depictions of Mohammed. OTHERS are not and see a looser standard as part of a generally more tolerant and functional environment in which to worship.
So if you were to refine your premise a bit and more strongly acknowledge the struggles WITHIN Islam, the decision of how the "rest of the world" ought to behave starts to get rather murky. Cultural is probably way more permeable than we all at first imagine.
I'm afraid you've tripped up on a stereotype whereby "Muslims" march lock-step in antipathy to "everyone else"
The premise of the essay is not flawed. In fact, your criticism could be completely addressed by appending "some" in front of every instance of "Muslim" in the essay. You should get into the habit of always appending "some" in front of every generalisation anyone ever makes.
While a generalisation is technically for all x, x has property y and can be falsified with a single example this x has property z which is opposite of y, our best model of how generalisations work in the human brain is something more along the lines of for enough x that it matters, x has property y. Also, a narrowing of x to only those x that have property y.
So to actually address the premise of Yvain's post, you'd want something more like "This characterisation isn't even close to what most Muslims are like. This behaviour is exhibited by fundamentalists, who in most cases are disowned by Muslim communities in the same way that most Baptists would disown Jerry Falwell. Because the people you are dealing with are fundamentalists, several of the assumptions made in the post fall down: this, this, and this." And so on.
There was a time when Christians frequently did kill each other over seemingly minor religious differences. The wars of religion led to a backlash that eventually gave us the political theories of Hobbes, Locke etc. When people talk about the need for a reformation in Islam, they are really thinking of the period after those wars which we accept as normal.
I was going to link to Bryan Caplan on applying the Coase theorem to offense, but turned out I confused him with Alex Tabarrok on envy. He does extend his analysis to offense though.
I do recall Robin Hanson debating with Bryan Caplan and saying that it is a utilitarian best outcome for the majority of believers not to be subjected to atheist speech. I normally assume Caplan is wrong in any disagreement with Hanson, but there I lean more towards his free speech absolutism. That may be because my behaviorist leanings lead me to discount claims of psychic distress (or utility monsters) to zero. On the other hand, I don't value the ability to make atheist polemics all that highly and would be open to "make a deal" along those lines, though I'd be upset if the deal was made without my consent.
The Volokh Conspiracy often discusses the heckler's veto.
Yvain's salmon analogy has drawn some criticism. I have to agree that it is not a perfect analogy. Analogies rarely are perfect. The best course, I find, is to offer a choice of analogies and let people choose the one with the most resonance. Pick one from this list:
Photoshop the Queen with a salmon day. We don't need to surgically alter the Brits. Just have a bit of fun with their national symbol. If insulting the Queen doesn't work, try Lady Di.
Tell an ethnic joke day. Stereotyping can be funny and is never physically harmful. If an ethnic group is capable of making fun of itself, then everyone should be able to make fun of them. It is all just in fun.
Use a bad word day. Isn't it ridiculous that people get offended at the use of certain four letter words - particularly those denoting body parts or normal biological functions. Isn't it clever to make people angry when they are unable to justify their anger rationally?
Let it all hang out day. And some people are offended not just by hearing about body parts, but also by seeing them. The occasional practice of public nudism (weather permitting) will help to make the world a better, less neurotic, place.
Use racial epithets day. Sticks and stones can break your bones, but words can never hurt you. Some people, though, don't seem to realize this. It is time to confront their irrational viewpoint that speech should not be completely free.
Desecrate a religious symbol day. Don't draw Mohammed - he already has a day. Instead, burn a Torah, feed a sacremental host to rats, pull the pins out of a voodoo doll. Lets show some imagination here. What can we do in Delhi to a sacred cow? Catapults can be fun.
Piss in someone's vegetable garden day. Some people have the uninformed impression that human urine is unsanitary. Not true, it is actually a sterile medium. People in India sometimes consume small quantities of their own urine much as people in the West drink herbal teas. Its time to dispell this anti-urine superstition.
Barbecue a cat day. Confront dietary prejudices head on, and also lend a hand to the Humane Society in addressing the cat overpopulation problem. Actually killing and butchering the cats publicly provides a more vivid demonstration. And as an added benefit, leading people to care less about kittens will make the internet a more productive environment and may even increase contributions to the SIAI.
I have to admit that if I actually encountered one of the protests on this list in real life, my initial reaction would be amusement. Repetition might change that to annoyance. But only one of those ideas actually offends me. Which one? I won't tell. YMMV.
All of the above days seem quite fun and fine to me.
As for the original article point - I agree that there isn't any significant difference between the hypothetical British salmon case and Mohammad's case, but it this fact doesn't change anything. There isn't a right to never be offended. There is no duty to abstain from offending others. It's nice if others are nice, but you can't demand everybody to be nice - most of them will be indifferent, and some will be not nice, and you just have to live with it and deal with it without using violence - and if you don't know how to handle it without violence, then you are still a 'child' in that sense and have to learn proper reaction, so everybody can (and probably should) provoke you until you learn to deal with it.
Healthy urine is sterile. Unhealthy urine may not be. (To say nothing of the desirability of adulterating others' food with even the most harmless additives - I don't want mint oil on my vegetables, even though I'm certain it won't do me physical harm. I don't like the taste of mint.)
A bit of a side note, but from what I've read/heard from Muslims, what they object to isn't the drawing of Mohammed per se, but the mocking of Mohammed. I've also heard some express annoyance that the media would misrepresent their view as if the problem was a religious edict against drawing Mohammed and not the mocking (I don't think the media represents the views of Muslims any more faithfully than it represents the views of Singularitarians).
If you're American want a better idea of how Muslims feel, imagine if for some reason Chinese people had a national "draw Martin Luther King with big lips eating watermelon" day. Would the reactions be very different?
As far as I know, there are significant differences in this regard between different Islamic denominations, sects, schools, and folk practices, but many Muslims consider even respectful portrayal of Mohammed as unacceptable because it constitutes idolatry. Basically, anyone wishing to portray Mohammed is in a Catch-22 situation: if it's done in a spirit of veneration, it's idolatry, and otherwise it's mocking and disrespectful.
What, you think Americans would react by rioting and killing people?
A lot of people around the world and in the United States hate the United States and make no secret of it, so we don't need to imagine. The very fact that you didn't talk about actual American reactions to the actually expressed loathing for the United States (by mockery of cherished American symbols among other means) suggests that you already intuit that the reaction of the average American to the very visible seething hatred for the US does not give us much of an idea of how Muslims feel.
If you are not aware of the seething hatred for the US, which I think is possible if you live in the US and limit yourself to American mainstream media, it is not because the hatred is not inherently visible - it is, for example by appearing on the covers of major European magazines - but because Americans don't magnify its visibility within the US by obsessing about it in their own publications. In contrast, the visibility of the notorious cartoons of Mohammed is almost entirely an effect of the extreme reaction to it on the part of many Muslims.
But the US parallel is not even close to the best parallel. Islam isn't a country, it's a religion, so a much better parallel would be to Andres Serrano's Piss Christ, which mocks Jesus Christ, or Chris Ofili's Holy Virgin Mary, which mocks the mother of Jesus Christ. As far as I know neither of these artists were murdered by a Christian, as the filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was murdered by a Muslim. The Christian reaction to these artistic provocations was massively more muted than the Muslim reaction to the Mohammed cartoons.
That doesn't make sense because the cartoons weren't actually mocking Mohammed. Have you seen them?
Empirically this isn't the case. See e.g.the initial cartoon for Everyone Draw Muhammad day which resulted in the artist having to go into hiding from the death threats.
Also if you look at the relevant Wikipedia talk pages, there are almost daily Muslims showing up demanding that we remove all pictures of Muhammad. In another instance, at one college, the Muslim students were sufficiently offended by smiling stick figures labeled Muhammad that they added "Ali" after each so they would instead say they were Muhammad Ali. There might be some moderates claiming to only be offended by mockery, but it seems pretty clear that there are a lot of Muslims who are offended by any attempted depiction.
See, this is exactly where your analogy falls apart for me. The Muslims to whose behavior people are objecting in "everybody draw Muhammad" are not politely asking for the favor of avoiding creating images of Muhammad in future. They are approaching creators of existing images with serious threats of violence. In situations like the South Park incident, it seems quite distinct from the infliction of psychic pain in that - well, to blow another hole in the salmon analogy, does it mean that Americans should stop making television programs about how to cook salmon? So... yeah.