Some examples of empirical statements with questionable-to-bad ethical undertones. I present them to you as food for thought, not as some sort of knock-down argument.

These are food for thought indeed. My thoughts on some of them, intended as ruminations and not refutations:

"Your husband's corpse is currently in an advanced stage of decomposition. His personality has been completely annihilated. Remember how he sobbed on his deathbed about how afraid he was to die?" (Reminding a person of a bad thing they don't want to think about.)

I'm not sure what I think about this one. I do note that it would probably be perceived differently by someone who was aware of its truth (this person would certainly be hurt by the reminder of the bad thing), than by someone who was not (i.e. a religious person).

"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, here are twenty police case files on convicted child murderers, all of them Albanian just like the defendant, without any statistical context." (Facts presented in a tendentious manner.)

Exploitation of cognitive biases in the audience. Certainly an unethical and underhanded tactic, but note that its effectiveness depends on insufficient sanity in the listeners. Granted, however, that the bar for "sufficient sanity" is relatively high in such matters.

"Just thought it might be interesting for you to know that women tend to do about 10% worse on this test than men. Anyway, you may turn your papers over now - good luck!" (Self-fulfilling prophesies.)

This one is interesting. A tangential thought: have there been studies to determine the power of stereotype threat to affect people who are aware of stereotype threat?

"You're the only asian in our office." "Did you notice how you're the only asian in our office?" "Maybe you didn't realize you're the only asian in our office." (Drawing attention to & thereby amplifying the salience of an ingroup/outgroup distinction.)

I think I'd have to agree that harping on such a fact would be annoying, at best. I do want to note that one solution I would vehemently oppose would be to forbid such statements from being made at all.

"All I'm saying is that girls who wear revealing clothing are singling themselves out for attention from predators!" (Placing blame for a moral harm on a blameless causal link leading to the harm.)

There's something wrong with your assessment here and I can't quite put my finger on it. Intuitively it feels like the category of "blame" is being abused, but I have to think more about this one.

"If he dresses effeminately like that, he's going to get bullied." (Ditto; also, status quo bias.)

The problem here, I think, is that some people use "X is going to happen" with the additional meaning of "X should happen", often without realizing it; in other words they have the unconscious belief that what does happen is what should happen. Such people often have substantial difficulty even understanding replies like "Yes, X will happen, but it's not right for X to happen"; they perceive such replies as incoherent. The quoted statement can well be true, and if said by someone who is clear on the distinction between "is" and "ought", is not, imo, offensive.

"A black man will never hold the highest office in this country." (Self-fulfilling prophesy; failure to acknowledge shittiness of (purported) empirical situation.)

See above. Also, there's a difference between "A black man will never hold the highest office in this country, and therefore I will not vote for Barack Obama" and "A black man will never hold the highest office in this country; this is an empirical prediction I am making, which might be right or wrong, and is separate from what I think the world should be like."

If I think X will happen (or not happen), it's important (imo) that I have the ability and right to make that empirical prediction, unimpeded by social norms against offense. If people who are afflicted with status quo bias, or other failures of reasoning, fail to distinguish between "is" and "ought" and in consequence take my prediction to have some sort of normative content — well, it may be flippant to say "that's their problem", but the situation definitely falls into the "audience is insufficiently intelligent/sane" category. Saying "this statement is offensive" in such a case is not only wrong, it's detrimental to open discourse.

I happen to be reading Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate right now, and he comments on that well-known failing of twentieth-century social sciences, the notion that "we must not even consider empirical claims of inequality in people's abilities, because that will lead to discrimination". Aside from the chilling effect this has on, you know, scientific inquiry, there's also an ethical problem:

If you think that pointing out differences in ability will lead to discrimination, then you must think that it's not possible to treat people with equal fairness unless they are the same along all relevant dimensions. That's a fairly clear ethical failing. In other words, if your objection to "some people are less intelligent than other people" is "but then the less intelligent people will be discriminated against!", you clearly think that it's not possible to treat people fairly regardless of their intelligence... and if that's the case, then that is the problem we should be opposing. We shouldn't say "No no, all people are the same!" We should say, "Yes, people are different. No, that's not an excuse to treat some people worse."

Not lightly, no. But as I was saying to Daniel_Burfoot above, there is just no avoiding the fact that statements, including statements of truth, are speech-acts. They will affect interlocutors' probability distributions AND their various non-propositional states (emotions, values, mood, self-worth, goals, social comfort level, future actions, sexual confidence, prejudices). Inconvenient as human mind-design is, it's really hard to suppress that aspect of it.

Agreed. I just think that branding certain sorts of statements as "offensive" is entirely the wrong way to go about treating this issue with the care it deserves, because of the detrimental effects that approach has on free discourse.

But there is a big asymmetry here - you (the speaker) know what you mean, so if it really needs to be said, take an extra second to formulate it in the way that has the least perlocutionary disutility.

Agreed, and I think this is a special case of the illusion of transparency.

(P.S. Today I learned the word "perlocutionary". Thank you.)