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casebash comments on Subjective vs. normative offensiveness - Less Wrong Discussion

2 Post author: casebash 25 September 2015 04:10AM

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Comment author: casebash 26 September 2015 08:15:29AM 0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Dagon 26 September 2015 07:40:51PM 0 points [-]

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.