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Sewing-Machine comments on A Rationalist's Account of Objectification? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (325)
The relevance of that link isn't lost on me, but it's not obvious to me that lukeprog's question is equivalent to "why does objectification offend people?"
Riding my cruelty hobby-horse a little more: I think that I find cruelty offensive. I'm open to a status-seeking explanation for that but it seems likely to me that more is going on.
I think you can get on fine just knowing the answer to the question "how to tell if something will offend someone?", and avoid cluttering your mind with irrelevant stuff like "objectification" and "the criterion of violability".
cousin_it,
Apparently, lots of people think objectification is relevant. I'm asking "Why?"
And no, I'm not asking about offense.
Well, the status hypothesis easily explains why the Playboy photo will displease many women in a way the mud photo won't. Do you have any other puzzling questions?
It gives an answer, but it doesn't necessarily give complete answer, or at least not a complete answer in relation to the reference class 'feminists'.
Lowered status is not just bad in and of itself. It also has other effects - making a certain reference class be considered less desirable for certain jobs or social positions, making a certain reference class be less likely to have their complaints or observations taken seriously, making it more likely that a certain reference class will not have their rights upheld or their needs taken into account when laws are passed, and so on. Feminists and other activists - at least the ones that I'm aware of - tend to focus much more on those kinds of issues, some of which are life-threatening, than on the simple emotional discomfort of being offended.
I know very well that status isn't about "simple emotional discomfort"! Did anyone ever say that it was? Status is up there with money and health among the most important stats of every human being, a huge factor in pretty much everything. Which makes it an even better idea to "follow the money" or "follow the status" whenever you see two parties arguing over something that doesn't look like a factual issue. Even when you yourself are one of the parties.
The comment I replied to doesn't make that clear, and can fairly easily be interpreted as 'they're just complaining because they feel offended; there's no reason to take them seriously, it's just status'. That's not the only possible interpretation, obviously, but it's the one I was speaking to. I'm glad that it's not what you intended.
Do you think that accurate predictions of people's behavior is most of what's required from a theory of right and wrong?
(Sorry for deleting my previous reply, it missed the mark.)
I wasn't trying to answer the question "why is objectification wrong", but rather "why do many people think objectification is wrong?" I think offense is a big part of the answer to the latter. See Righting a Wrong Question. This trick seems to be be especially useful with moral questions, e.g. "why is it wrong to kill" leads to making up stuff like unalienable rights, while "why do people think it's wrong to kill" leads to evolutionary psychology and other issues that at least have the potential of becoming scientific.
Agreed with this as far as it goes, but I think it can go further.
A real understanding of the status issues involved does more than answer "will people be offended by objectification?" It also answers "does objectification harm people?"
This isn't a moral question. That is, whether it's wrong to harm people or not, and in what ways and under what circumstances it's wrong, is a different question.
Yes! Thanks a lot for pointing this out, it makes the picture even more complete.
Doesn't it seem likely that the algorithm for determining whether something will offend someone will contain a reference to objectification or something related to it pretty closely?
Just because you can conceptually draw a larger box around something doesn't mean it hasn't got parts.
Such an algorithm probably wouldn't work for people from past epochs, who had a concept of offense quite similar to ours, but didn't have a concept of objectification. And it wouldn't work very well even today in my home country (Russia). Linking offense to status seems more robust to me.
To clarify, when A is cruel to B and C observes it (maybe not directly) who is being offensive to who?
A to C
Same question as to lucidfox above: can you say more about what you think the "more" is? What's left over?
I might have been understating it: it sounds funny to say "what's left over when you take away status" when I meant to express skepticism that status had much at all to do with the bad evaluation of cruelty.
I was trying to point out an abstract bad thing that doesn't seem to be political or coalitional, and therefore not so related to status-seeking. Cruelty seems to be such a thing, much more so than objectification. That I think it's accurate to say that instances of cruelty "offend" me then seems to contradict the thesis that offense is all about status. Maybe this is a semantic problem and you could say that I find cruelty to be horrible not offensive, or something like that.
Yes, I agree that there's a semantic problem here... specifically, as you say, the problem of understatement.
The planet Jupiter is, in fact, larger than a duck... but saying so is a strange linguistic act because there are so many more important things you could have said instead. Cruelty is, in fact, offensive -- but more importantly, it has net negative consequences.
And status actually turns out to be a fairly useful way to talk about the consequences of cruelty (over and above the consequences of equal amounts of non-cruel suffering).
The status explanation doesn't leave as much room for a similar statement about objectification -- in fact it explicitly disclaims that there's a more important aspect of objectification than its offensiveness. I think this is what's at stake for a lot of the comments here that defend the concept and reproach of objectification.
If I see what you're getting at I disagree. For instance it's not usually possible to lower an animal's status, but cruelty to animals is deeply upsetting for me.
I agree with you that this notion that status is something unimportant -- that it's all about "high school popularity contests and all that sort of thing" (to quote Skatche) -- underlies a lot of the discussion so far.
And as I said here, I think this is simply wrong... unwarrantedly dismissive of the real effects of status. Low status gets people killed.
As for animals, yes, we disagree: I would say that an animal being treated cruelly is in a lower-status position, one in which it has less ability to effect its preferences, than one being treated kindly.