Yvain:

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.

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.

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 ca... (read more)

I notice that I would not support showing British people pictures of Salmon.

I notice that I would support showing Muslim people pictures of Mohammad.

These two situations seem nearly identical.

I notice that I am confused.

I see two analogous situations, and yet I come to two different conclusions. Therefore, there must be some difference between them, even if it only lies in my perceptions. Perhaps by carving these situations at their joints, I can find why it is I come away with different conclusions. Explicitly, I remember the stated differences.

1) Race/Culturism - The British are British and not Muslim

2) Blame - The British are not "at fault" as victims of a prank while the Muslims are "at fault" by virtue of being members of a religion

As a detirminist, I cannot say that the Muslims chose to be Muslims any more than British people chose to be waylayed by a prankster in the night. That seems very damning; this only leaves the option that I must be racist. However, there is perhaps a third option that is missing. Implicitly, I notice a number of unstated differences that can only be assumed.

3) Treatability - The British people have an electrode installed,... (read more)

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.

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.

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?

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?

"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. "

Several times you seem to equate speech or illustration with a punch in the face. They don't seem interchangeable to me. The American founding fathers made a strong case for protecting speech, they argued that people should be able to say what they would without fear of violence in return. I'm pretty sure they never contemplated that face punching should be protected. I see the a bright line between the two behaviors.

Some of the people passing around pictures of Mohammed surely mean to insult. Others are demanding that a bright line between speech and physical harm be observed by all. They are appealing to more reasonable muslims to "police their area" and part of the plan is draw out the muslims who need policing.

I'm not defending that as an optimal plan but I sure think the bright line is a swell idea.

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.

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 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."

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.

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!".

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.