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casebash comments on Subjective vs. normative offensiveness - Less Wrong Discussion
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No, the point was to simply argue that people often leave out the important step of going from them being subjectively offended to them having a right to act as though the comment was objectively offensive.
Here's another example. Suppose I'm a grammar Nazi, and someone uses where instead of we're. I might be personally (or subjectively offended), but that wasn't objectively offensive. If I wrote a long angry rant at that person, most people would think that I was in the wrong.
I'm confused by the phrase:
What right is this? What specific act is allowed in reaction to "objectively offensive" communications that's not allowed for "subjectively offensive"?
If something is objectively offensive, you have much more of a right to shout at them and demand an apology, while if it is only subjectively offensive, people will often think you should grin and bear it.
Hmm. that's not a right I recognize. This doesn't sound like objective vs subjective, but rather "which groups support the victim and which support the offender".
It's all subjective, but an excuse to practice in/out group politics.
Suppose a really ugly person walks into the room and people start heckling them purely based on their physical characteristics. Doesn't the person who is being harassed have a right to respond strongly to being treated horribly? This is because the harassers are acting offensively.
If someone walks into a room and others heckle them, the heckling victim has a right to react (sometimes by leaving, sometimes by calling police, sometimes by changing to better fit the social norm in that room). Those choices don't indicate anything about what type of offensiveness the hecklers or the heckle victim have committed.
Those choices only indicate who has power and what various groups of humans are willing to encourage or punish. There's nothing objective involved.
Flip it around. An unpopular person walks into a room, gets heckled, and apologizes and leaves. Was the unpopular person objectively offensive in injecting themselves where they weren't wanted? I say no.
Unless of course you're an English teacher at a grammar convention.
Correct me if I'm wrong but to rephrase your point (which I now think I get) - You have the right to be offended at anything, but you can't complain about it if that offense is within the norms of the groups where you feel offended. So your point about "normative" offensive wasn't "absolute normative offensiveness" but "normative in the context of where you were offended".
My argument was agnostic to the relativism debate. Regardless of whether you are considering an "absolute normative offensiveness" or a contextual normative offensiveness, this will typically differ in certain cases from one's own personal, subjective standard of offensiveness.