= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
khafra comments on Offense versus harm minimization - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (417)
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.
Noticing this again, I feel I went much too easy in my other comment.
This science you cite is completely irrelevant to the dispute. My objection was not that emotional pain and physical pain are different, but that offense is not pain in any sense. That I admit emotional pain is real is quite obvious because I said that targeted racial slurs cause pain.
You cite a study to prove that emotional pain and physical pain are similar - a point that was never in contention. You then use a counterexample that simply assumes that offense is a form of emotional pain - assuming away the exact problem you are trying to address. My entire point is that the emotion of untargeted offense is distinct from the emotion of pain, which you haven't actually addressed.
I wouldn't typically re-comment on something like this, but the "Citing science for a tangentially related point, then following it with an unfounded assertion that is implicitly (but not actually) supported by said science," really, really bothers me, even if you did this unintentionally.