But the argument here is going the other way—less permissive, not more. The equivalent analogy would be:
To hold that speech is interchangeable with violence is to hold that certain forms of speech are no more an appropriate answer than a bullet.
The issue at stake is why. Why is speech OK, but a punch not? Presumably because one causes physical pain and the other not. So, in Yvain’s salmon situation, when such speech does now cause pain should we treat it the same or different from violence? Why or why not? What then about other forms of mental torment, such as emotional pain, hurt feelings or offence? There are times I’ve had my feelings hurt by mere words that frankly, I’d have gladly exchanged for a kicking, so mere intensity doesn’t seem the relevant criteria. So what is, and why is it justified?
To just repeat “violence is different from speech” is to duck the issue, because you haven’t answered this why question, which was the whole point of bringing it up.
“But the argument here is going the other way—less permissive, not more.”
No, I’m defending a bright line which Yvain would obliterate. If they are interchangeable it follows that answering an argument with a bullet may be the efficient solution.
“To hold that speech is interchangeable with violence is to hold that certain forms of speech are no more an appropriate answer than a bullet.”
So which to which argument would you prefer a bullet?
“The issue at stake is why. Why is speech OK, but a punch not? Presumably because one causes physical pain and the other not. So, in Yvain’s salmon situation, when such speech does now cause pain should we treat it the same or different from violence?”
The brits are feeling the pain of a real physical assault, under the skin. That’s not mental torment, it’s electrodes.
A crucial difference is that we can change our minds about what offends us but we cannot choose not to respond to electrodes in the brain and we cannot choose not to bleed when pierced by a bullet.
“To just repeat “violence is different from speech” is to duck the issue, because you haven’t answered this why question, which was the whole point of bringing it up.
It is not my comprehensive answer but I think it is a sufficient answer. They are not interchangeable. Many words would have hurt me deeply 15 years ago but hardly any can now because I’ve changed my mind about them. It is within my power to feel zero pain from anything you might say. People really can change their minds to take less offense if they want to. They cant choose to not be harmed by a punch or a bullet.
What would you say to someone who replied “Many punches would have hurt me deeply 15 years ago but hardly any can now because I’ve studied martial arts. It is within my power to feel zero pain from any blow you might deliver. People really can change their physical capabilities to take less physical pain if they want to.”?
A series of physical blows can endanger a person’s life and, even more probably, incapacitate them for a prolonged period or permanently by breaking a bone, rupturing an internal organ, and the like. For this reason, a physical assault must be taken very seriously.
If an action proximally causes psychological suffering, that does not make the action, merely for that reason alone, wrong in the slightest. Suffering of the sort caused by speech is caused by disappointment of our desires, and we typically do not have an inherent right to have the desires in question fulfilled. If we suffer, there are two causes of our suffering: (a) that we desired a certain state of affairs, and (b) that our desire was thwarted. Someone who is insulted, desired to be treated with respect, and his desire was thwarted. Someone who has been rejected romantically, similarly, desired acceptance, and his desire was thwarted. In neither of these cases did the person have any right to get what he desired. That he suffered on account of his disappointment does not in the slightest increase his right to get what he wanted. If it did increase his right, then a person could thereby gain the right to anything he wanted merely by wanting it very very much. Rights would then be assigned to whoever could throw the most impressive temper tantrum.
I agree, or at least close enough, with all of that. But none of it is unique to psychological suffering.
For example, diseases caused by airborne pathogens can cause physical suffering. They can endanger a person’s life, incapacitate them for a prolonged period or permanently, and I therefore endorse taking them seriously. However, if someone’s immune system is so compromised that they cannot be around other people without becoming extremely ill, they don’t thereby gain the right to go wherever they like and have everyone else leave.
If your goal is to argue that suffering doesn’t give me the right to get what I want, I’m right there with you… but you don’t need to draw an artificial bright line between physically mediated suffering and psychologically mediated suffering in order to achieve that goal.
I agree, or at least close enough, with all of that. But none of it is unique to psychological suffering.
I’m not sure about that. Let’s look at the example.
… if someone’s immune system is so compromised that they cannot be around other people without becoming extremely ill, they don’t thereby gain the right to go wherever they like and have everyone else leave.
This is true. But the obvious explanation is this: a person who is harmed may have harmed himself. He may be to blame. So it’s not that there isn’t any harm in the first place, but merely that he may be to blame for any harm that results to himself. Someone with a compromised immune system who goes out in public has only himself to blame if he’s infected.
In contrast, someone whose desires are disappointed hasn’t typically been harmed to begin with. That’s where it typically stops. It doesn’t rise to the level of identifying a culprit, because there isn’t anything to be a culprit about, because no harm has been done.
If someone knowingly exposes himself to the possibility of infection, we typically think such a person deserves an Honorary Darwin Award and the ridicule that goes with it (with occasional exceptions, e.g. if he is being heroic). But if somebody deliberately exposes himself to disappointment—well, what’s so terrible about that? That only means that he’s shooting for the stars, etc. Usually it’s the people who avoid disappointment by never striving for anything that we think are approaching life the wrong way.
As far as I know, not even the Muslims who threaten the lives of artists who depict Mohammed are interpreting their own feelings of disappointment as a harm. They don’t seem to be interested in their own psychological state. They seem to be interested in the act of depiction itself, which they evidently believe they have a right and a religious duty to stop. I am talking specifically here about those who threatened artists for depicting Mohammed.
From Wikipedia:
Chesser wrote, “We have to warn Matt and Trey that what they are doing is stupid and they will probably wind up like Theo Van Gogh if they do air this show.”
That doesn’t seem particularly interested in the psychological suffering caused by the depiction of Mohammed. It’s focused on the depiction itself, which is called “stupid”. The word is not “hurtful”, but “stupid”. There is scant expressed interest here in the speaker’s own psychological state.
If your goal is to argue that suffering doesn’t give me the right to get what I want, I’m right there with you...
Okay, so we agree on that, and that’s a pretty important point. Maybe everything else is just splitting hairs.
A series of physical blows can endanger a person’s life and, even more probably, incapacitate them for a prolonged period or permanently by breaking a bone, rupturing an internal organ, and the like. For this reason, a physical assault must be taken very seriously.
I would like to second this and more generally point out that I am bothered by the focus on pain rather than damage from physical assaults. Of course, this is not LCPW; we can talk about attacks that are primarily about pain rather than damage, e.g. slapping someone. I just think we should be explicit about doing so.
If we suffer, there are two causes of our suffering: (a) that we desired a certain state of affairs, and (b) that our desire was thwarted.
This isn’t entirely accurate. The thwarting of a desire may be required for suffering, but it isn’t sufficient. One must also have an attachment to the object of desire—a belief that one should have the desire fulfilled, or that something bad will result if it is not.
Desire and attachment are commonly conflated, but they are distinct. One can have attachment without desire, and desire without attachment.
Yes, but also one that does a good job of describing certain situations.
For example: Alicorn has recently moved in with me. We have what should be a very agreeable situation when it comes to keeping the house clean: I don’t care and strongly prefer not to clean; Alicorn cares slightly more and doesn’t mind cleaning; we each clean only to the degree that we feel like cleaning or want the house to be clean, and so far that’s actually working quite well. (The fact that normal fairness is mostly not relevant here probably helps, though Alicorn and I being unusually compatible as roommates go may be a larger factor.)
However, I was raised with the idea that people will care about cleanliness to a degree that will cause them to consider the usual state of our living space unacceptable. This is not something I desire, but it is a thought to which I am attached, and as a result I find it mildly stressful to ignore that in favor of reality—I find myself worrying about whether it’s really okay, or if Alicorn is just putting up with it and will eventually start complaining, or silly things like that. It’s relatively minor in this case—I trust Alicorn enough in the relevant ways that I don’t really think she thinks those things—but if I were more predisposed to that kind of worry I could certainly see it turning into a significant source of discomfort even in the face of evidence. (And yes, I’m working on it. She’s only been here two and a half months and it’s already significantly better than it was.)
Because I stole the word “attachment” from them, yes. But really, it’s a matter of affective asynchrony—i.e., the ability to have mixed feelings.
Human motivational emotions aren’t a single scale, where disutility is subtracted from utility to yield an output value. Instead, they’re points on a plane, where utility and disutility are axes, and certain co-ordinates are unreachable.
So, it’s possible to have things whose absence causes pain, but whose presence doesn’t cause any pleasure (aka “satisficers”), and things whose presence creates pleasure, but whose absence doesn’t cause any pain. (Among other possible combinations.)
The “axes” for these things seem relatively independently programmable—that is, you can usually remove an “attachment” (conditioned displeasure) without affecting the “desire”. (I’ve never tried the reverse.)
(Also, this is still a bit of a simplification, since “desire” is kind of vague—we have things we feel driven to do, but which don’t provide us any pleasure, and things which provide us pleasure, but which we don’t feel driven to do. Human beings are seriously f’d up in the head. ;-) )
What would you say to someone who replied “Many punches would have hurt me deeply 15 years ago but hardly any can now because I’ve studied martial arts. It is within my power to feel zero pain from any blow you might deliver. People really can change their physical capabilities to take less physical pain if they want to.”?
There is play there, but the ability to your ability to change your body is really not remotely close to your ability to change your mind.
It seems to follow that the “bright line” between physical and psychological harm is a quantitative difference.
More precisely, it’s not that people are able to “choose not to be harmed” by psychological influences but unable to do so for physical ones, but rather that people are more able to choose not to be harmed by psychological than physical influences.
Based on that I conclude that the important factor here is how much ability the sufferer has to protect themselves from suffering, and what the cost to them of doing so would be. Whether the suffering is physical or psychological or neither is at best a stand-in for that; it is not important in and of itself.
Obliterating the “bright line” you want to draw here (as you claim yvain does) and replacing it with a consideration for ability to protect oneself does not justify “answering an argument with a bullet.”
Sure, if in a particular case we’re for some reason unable to come up with a better estimate of how much ability the sufferer had to protect themselves, we can select a prior based on a clumsy metric like “you can protect yourself from psychological harm but not physical harm.”
For example, if I know nothing more about a particular conflict than that person A was talking to person B and person B shot person A in response, I have a pretty high confidence that person B reacted inappropriately.
But I don’t have to embrace a misleading sharp line between physical and psychological harm in order to reach that conclusion.
For example, if I know nothing more about a particular conflict than that person A was talking to person B and person B shot person A in response, I have a pretty high confidence that person B reacted inappropriately.
But what it it’s one person A who is committed to drawing cartoons which offend a
billion muslims. He flatly refuses to stop over an extended period of time. Eventually one (or more) of them kills A..
Did the killer(s) act inappropriately in this case? It looks efficient under Yvain’s calculus, doesn’t it?
So, I’ll emphasize that the point that you quote was tangential to this, and had to do with the implications of reasoning under conditions of incomplete information.
But, to answer your question: I don’t endorse murder as an appropriate response to offense.
Why not? Well, one simple reason is that I would rather live in a culture where people offend one another without recourse than a culture where people kill one another without sanction over idiosyncratic grounds for offense, were those the only choices (which, of course, they aren’t).
That said, if you could convince me that no, actually, we’d all be better off if we established the cultural convention that killing people for drawing offensive cartoons was acceptable, I would (reluctantly) change my position. I can’t imagine how you could actually convince me of that in the real world, though.
Moreover, it seems to me that this sort of consequentialist reasoning for what is and is not an appropriate response is entirely consistent with Yvain’s post, and I don’t expect that he will disagree with my conclusion. (Though I’d be interested if he did.)
And, just to be clear about this, the difference between physical and psychological harm that you started out arguing the importance of is completely orthogonal to my reasoning here. If instead of killing A, the hypothetical muslims put A in a sensory-deprivation tank until A goes irreversibly mad, my answer doesn’t significantly change. (Does yours?)
Digressing a little… note that when the grounds for offense are sufficiently endorsed by the mainstream culture, we have a way of no longer calling it “murder”… or, if we do, we create special categories to distinguish it from, you know, real murder. For example, there exist municipalities where, if I walk in on my wife having sex with another man and kill him in response, this is considered different from if I walk in on my wife serving ice cream and kill him in response… and this is completely independent of my personal feelings about sex and ice cream.
Conversely, when an act offends enough of us, or offends powerful enough individuals, we often criminalize it… whereupon we respond to it by deputizing state agents to forcibly restrain the person and deprive them of safety, comfort, and liberty (and, in extreme cases, life).
All of which is to say that this business of responding to “merely psychological” offenses with “physical” retaliation is not solely the province of putative extremists from a different culture than my own. Not that you were stating otherwise, but I often find it helpful to explicitly remind myself of that.
Would you be willing to support/expand on that claim further? I have low confidence since I haven’t spent a whole lot of time thinking about it, but this runs counter to my intuition.
If they are interchangeable it follows that answering an argument with a bullet may be the efficient solution.
That’s clearly not the case. If they’re interchangable, it merely means they’d be equally appropriate, but that doesn’t say anything about their absolute appropriateness level. If neither are appropriate responses, that’s just as interchangable as both being appropriate—and it’s clearly that more restrictive route being advocated here (ie. moving such speech into the bullet category, rather than moving the bullet category into the region of such speech).
The brits are feeling the pain of a real physical assault, under the skin.
So what distinguishes that from emotional pain? It’s all electrochemistry in the end after all. Would things change if it were extreme emotional torment being inflicted by pictures of salmon, rather than pain receptors being stimulated? Eg. inducing an state equivalent to clinical depression, or the feeling of having been dumped by a loved-one. I don’t see an inherent reason to treat these differently—there are occassions where I’d gladly have traded such feelings for a kick in the nuts, so from a utlitarian perspective they seem to be at least as bad.
The intensity in this case is obviously different—offence vs depression is obviously a big difference, so it may be fine to say that one’s OK and the other not because it falls into a tolerable level—but that certainly moves away from the notion of a bright line towards a grey continuum.
A crucial difference is that we can change our minds about what offends us but we cannot choose not to respond to electrodes
This is a better argument (indeed it’s one brought up by the post). I’m not sure it’s entirely valid though, for the reasons Yvain gave there. We can’t entirely choose what hurts us without a much better control over our emotional state than I, at least, posess. If I were brought up in a society where this was the ultimate taboo, I don’t think I could simply choose not to be, anymore than I could choose to be offended by them now. You say “It is within my power to feel zero pain from anything you might say”, but I’ll tell you, it’s not within mine. That may be a failing, but it’s one shared by billions. Further, I’m not sure it would be justified to go around insulting random strangers on the grounds that they can choose to take no harm, which suggests to me that offending is certainly not morally neutral.
Personally, I think one answer we could give to why the situations are different is a more pragmatic one. Accept that causing offence is indeed a bad action, but that it’s justified collateral damage in support of a more important goal. Ie. free speech is important enough that we need to establish that even trying to prevent it will be met by an indescriminate backlash doing the exact opposite. (Though there are also pragmatic grounds to oppose this, such that it’s manipulable by rabble-rousers for political ends).
If they are interchangeable it follows that answering an argument with a bullet may be the efficient solution.
That’s clearly not the case. If they’re interchangable, it merely means they’d be equally appropriate, but that doesn’t say anything about their absolute appropriateness level. If neither are appropriate responses, that’s just as interchangable as both being appropriate—and it’s clearly that more restrictive route being advocated here (ie. moving such speech into the bullet category, rather than moving the bullet category into the region of such speech).
I don’t understand this… the notion of a “more restrictive route” doesn’t seem to make much of a difference to the objection—the suggested move involves placing a certain type of speech act into the realm of “bullets”, and as such makes bullets an appropriate response to such acts, whereas they were not before. Is that right?
Edit: That is, if speech B is now equivalent to shooting someone, it’s not a case of “harmless speech A can now be responded to with bullets or B,” but of “speech B can now be responded to with bullets.”
and as such makes bullets an appropriate response to such acts, whereas they were not before.
Ah, I think I’ve misunderstood you—I thought you were talking about the initiating act (ie. that it was as appropriate to initiate shooting someone as to insult them), whereas you’re talking about the response to the act: that bullets are an appropriate response to bullets, therefore if interchangable, they’re an appropriate response to speech too. However, I don’t think you can take the first part of that as given—many (including me) would disagree that bullets are an appropriate response to bullets, but rather that they’re only an appropriate response to the specific case of averting an immediate threat (ie. shoot if it prevents killing, but oppose applying the death penalty once out of danger), and some pacifists may disagree even with violence to prevent other violence.
However, it seems that it’s the initiating act that’s the issue here: is it any more justified to causing offence as to shoot someone. I think it could be argued that they are equivalent issues, though of lesser intensity (ie. back to continuums, not bright lines).
I’m only interjecting, if there is a misunderstanding, it’s probably with jtk3. For my part I think the positions being argued are much clearer now, thank you!
So which to which argument would you prefer a bullet?
Any for which the consequences of the alternatives are less desirable than the consequences of a bullet. Such situations are rare but not unheard-of in practice, though it’s not hard to come up with hypotheticals to demonstrate this.
To hold that speech is interchangeable with violence is to hold that a bullet can be the appropriate answer to an argument.
But the argument here is going the other way—less permissive, not more. The equivalent analogy would be:
To hold that speech is interchangeable with violence is to hold that certain forms of speech are no more an appropriate answer than a bullet.
The issue at stake is why. Why is speech OK, but a punch not? Presumably because one causes physical pain and the other not. So, in Yvain’s salmon situation, when such speech does now cause pain should we treat it the same or different from violence? Why or why not? What then about other forms of mental torment, such as emotional pain, hurt feelings or offence? There are times I’ve had my feelings hurt by mere words that frankly, I’d have gladly exchanged for a kicking, so mere intensity doesn’t seem the relevant criteria. So what is, and why is it justified?
To just repeat “violence is different from speech” is to duck the issue, because you haven’t answered this why question, which was the whole point of bringing it up.
No, I’m defending a bright line which Yvain would obliterate. If they are interchangeable it follows that answering an argument with a bullet may be the efficient solution.
So which to which argument would you prefer a bullet?
The brits are feeling the pain of a real physical assault, under the skin. That’s not mental torment, it’s electrodes.
A crucial difference is that we can change our minds about what offends us but we cannot choose not to respond to electrodes in the brain and we cannot choose not to bleed when pierced by a bullet.
It is not my comprehensive answer but I think it is a sufficient answer. They are not interchangeable. Many words would have hurt me deeply 15 years ago but hardly any can now because I’ve changed my mind about them. It is within my power to feel zero pain from anything you might say. People really can change their minds to take less offense if they want to. They cant choose to not be harmed by a punch or a bullet.
Different.
What would you say to someone who replied “Many punches would have hurt me deeply 15 years ago but hardly any can now because I’ve studied martial arts. It is within my power to feel zero pain from any blow you might deliver. People really can change their physical capabilities to take less physical pain if they want to.”?
A series of physical blows can endanger a person’s life and, even more probably, incapacitate them for a prolonged period or permanently by breaking a bone, rupturing an internal organ, and the like. For this reason, a physical assault must be taken very seriously.
If an action proximally causes psychological suffering, that does not make the action, merely for that reason alone, wrong in the slightest. Suffering of the sort caused by speech is caused by disappointment of our desires, and we typically do not have an inherent right to have the desires in question fulfilled. If we suffer, there are two causes of our suffering: (a) that we desired a certain state of affairs, and (b) that our desire was thwarted. Someone who is insulted, desired to be treated with respect, and his desire was thwarted. Someone who has been rejected romantically, similarly, desired acceptance, and his desire was thwarted. In neither of these cases did the person have any right to get what he desired. That he suffered on account of his disappointment does not in the slightest increase his right to get what he wanted. If it did increase his right, then a person could thereby gain the right to anything he wanted merely by wanting it very very much. Rights would then be assigned to whoever could throw the most impressive temper tantrum.
I agree, or at least close enough, with all of that. But none of it is unique to psychological suffering.
For example, diseases caused by airborne pathogens can cause physical suffering. They can endanger a person’s life, incapacitate them for a prolonged period or permanently, and I therefore endorse taking them seriously. However, if someone’s immune system is so compromised that they cannot be around other people without becoming extremely ill, they don’t thereby gain the right to go wherever they like and have everyone else leave.
If your goal is to argue that suffering doesn’t give me the right to get what I want, I’m right there with you… but you don’t need to draw an artificial bright line between physically mediated suffering and psychologically mediated suffering in order to achieve that goal.
I’m not sure about that. Let’s look at the example.
This is true. But the obvious explanation is this: a person who is harmed may have harmed himself. He may be to blame. So it’s not that there isn’t any harm in the first place, but merely that he may be to blame for any harm that results to himself. Someone with a compromised immune system who goes out in public has only himself to blame if he’s infected.
In contrast, someone whose desires are disappointed hasn’t typically been harmed to begin with. That’s where it typically stops. It doesn’t rise to the level of identifying a culprit, because there isn’t anything to be a culprit about, because no harm has been done.
If someone knowingly exposes himself to the possibility of infection, we typically think such a person deserves an Honorary Darwin Award and the ridicule that goes with it (with occasional exceptions, e.g. if he is being heroic). But if somebody deliberately exposes himself to disappointment—well, what’s so terrible about that? That only means that he’s shooting for the stars, etc. Usually it’s the people who avoid disappointment by never striving for anything that we think are approaching life the wrong way.
As far as I know, not even the Muslims who threaten the lives of artists who depict Mohammed are interpreting their own feelings of disappointment as a harm. They don’t seem to be interested in their own psychological state. They seem to be interested in the act of depiction itself, which they evidently believe they have a right and a religious duty to stop. I am talking specifically here about those who threatened artists for depicting Mohammed.
From Wikipedia:
That doesn’t seem particularly interested in the psychological suffering caused by the depiction of Mohammed. It’s focused on the depiction itself, which is called “stupid”. The word is not “hurtful”, but “stupid”. There is scant expressed interest here in the speaker’s own psychological state.
Okay, so we agree on that, and that’s a pretty important point. Maybe everything else is just splitting hairs.
I would like to second this and more generally point out that I am bothered by the focus on pain rather than damage from physical assaults. Of course, this is not LCPW; we can talk about attacks that are primarily about pain rather than damage, e.g. slapping someone. I just think we should be explicit about doing so.
This isn’t entirely accurate. The thwarting of a desire may be required for suffering, but it isn’t sufficient. One must also have an attachment to the object of desire—a belief that one should have the desire fulfilled, or that something bad will result if it is not.
Desire and attachment are commonly conflated, but they are distinct. One can have attachment without desire, and desire without attachment.
Sounds like a Buddhist analysis.
Yes, but also one that does a good job of describing certain situations.
For example: Alicorn has recently moved in with me. We have what should be a very agreeable situation when it comes to keeping the house clean: I don’t care and strongly prefer not to clean; Alicorn cares slightly more and doesn’t mind cleaning; we each clean only to the degree that we feel like cleaning or want the house to be clean, and so far that’s actually working quite well. (The fact that normal fairness is mostly not relevant here probably helps, though Alicorn and I being unusually compatible as roommates go may be a larger factor.)
However, I was raised with the idea that people will care about cleanliness to a degree that will cause them to consider the usual state of our living space unacceptable. This is not something I desire, but it is a thought to which I am attached, and as a result I find it mildly stressful to ignore that in favor of reality—I find myself worrying about whether it’s really okay, or if Alicorn is just putting up with it and will eventually start complaining, or silly things like that. It’s relatively minor in this case—I trust Alicorn enough in the relevant ways that I don’t really think she thinks those things—but if I were more predisposed to that kind of worry I could certainly see it turning into a significant source of discomfort even in the face of evidence. (And yes, I’m working on it. She’s only been here two and a half months and it’s already significantly better than it was.)
Because I stole the word “attachment” from them, yes. But really, it’s a matter of affective asynchrony—i.e., the ability to have mixed feelings.
Human motivational emotions aren’t a single scale, where disutility is subtracted from utility to yield an output value. Instead, they’re points on a plane, where utility and disutility are axes, and certain co-ordinates are unreachable.
So, it’s possible to have things whose absence causes pain, but whose presence doesn’t cause any pleasure (aka “satisficers”), and things whose presence creates pleasure, but whose absence doesn’t cause any pain. (Among other possible combinations.)
The “axes” for these things seem relatively independently programmable—that is, you can usually remove an “attachment” (conditioned displeasure) without affecting the “desire”. (I’ve never tried the reverse.)
(Also, this is still a bit of a simplification, since “desire” is kind of vague—we have things we feel driven to do, but which don’t provide us any pleasure, and things which provide us pleasure, but which we don’t feel driven to do. Human beings are seriously f’d up in the head. ;-) )
There is play there, but the ability to your ability to change your body is really not remotely close to your ability to change your mind.
It seems to follow that the “bright line” between physical and psychological harm is a quantitative difference.
More precisely, it’s not that people are able to “choose not to be harmed” by psychological influences but unable to do so for physical ones, but rather that people are more able to choose not to be harmed by psychological than physical influences.
Based on that I conclude that the important factor here is how much ability the sufferer has to protect themselves from suffering, and what the cost to them of doing so would be. Whether the suffering is physical or psychological or neither is at best a stand-in for that; it is not important in and of itself.
Obliterating the “bright line” you want to draw here (as you claim yvain does) and replacing it with a consideration for ability to protect oneself does not justify “answering an argument with a bullet.”
Sure, if in a particular case we’re for some reason unable to come up with a better estimate of how much ability the sufferer had to protect themselves, we can select a prior based on a clumsy metric like “you can protect yourself from psychological harm but not physical harm.”
For example, if I know nothing more about a particular conflict than that person A was talking to person B and person B shot person A in response, I have a pretty high confidence that person B reacted inappropriately.
But I don’t have to embrace a misleading sharp line between physical and psychological harm in order to reach that conclusion.
But what it it’s one person A who is committed to drawing cartoons which offend a billion muslims. He flatly refuses to stop over an extended period of time. Eventually one (or more) of them kills A..
Did the killer(s) act inappropriately in this case? It looks efficient under Yvain’s calculus, doesn’t it?
So, I’ll emphasize that the point that you quote was tangential to this, and had to do with the implications of reasoning under conditions of incomplete information.
But, to answer your question: I don’t endorse murder as an appropriate response to offense.
Why not? Well, one simple reason is that I would rather live in a culture where people offend one another without recourse than a culture where people kill one another without sanction over idiosyncratic grounds for offense, were those the only choices (which, of course, they aren’t).
That said, if you could convince me that no, actually, we’d all be better off if we established the cultural convention that killing people for drawing offensive cartoons was acceptable, I would (reluctantly) change my position. I can’t imagine how you could actually convince me of that in the real world, though.
Moreover, it seems to me that this sort of consequentialist reasoning for what is and is not an appropriate response is entirely consistent with Yvain’s post, and I don’t expect that he will disagree with my conclusion. (Though I’d be interested if he did.)
And, just to be clear about this, the difference between physical and psychological harm that you started out arguing the importance of is completely orthogonal to my reasoning here. If instead of killing A, the hypothetical muslims put A in a sensory-deprivation tank until A goes irreversibly mad, my answer doesn’t significantly change. (Does yours?)
Digressing a little… note that when the grounds for offense are sufficiently endorsed by the mainstream culture, we have a way of no longer calling it “murder”… or, if we do, we create special categories to distinguish it from, you know, real murder. For example, there exist municipalities where, if I walk in on my wife having sex with another man and kill him in response, this is considered different from if I walk in on my wife serving ice cream and kill him in response… and this is completely independent of my personal feelings about sex and ice cream.
Conversely, when an act offends enough of us, or offends powerful enough individuals, we often criminalize it… whereupon we respond to it by deputizing state agents to forcibly restrain the person and deprive them of safety, comfort, and liberty (and, in extreme cases, life).
All of which is to say that this business of responding to “merely psychological” offenses with “physical” retaliation is not solely the province of putative extremists from a different culture than my own. Not that you were stating otherwise, but I often find it helpful to explicitly remind myself of that.
I think this is very nicely put, and is sort of what I was thinking when I commented, but couldn’t articulate. Thanks!
Would you be willing to support/expand on that claim further? I have low confidence since I haven’t spent a whole lot of time thinking about it, but this runs counter to my intuition.
That’s clearly not the case. If they’re interchangable, it merely means they’d be equally appropriate, but that doesn’t say anything about their absolute appropriateness level. If neither are appropriate responses, that’s just as interchangable as both being appropriate—and it’s clearly that more restrictive route being advocated here (ie. moving such speech into the bullet category, rather than moving the bullet category into the region of such speech).
So what distinguishes that from emotional pain? It’s all electrochemistry in the end after all. Would things change if it were extreme emotional torment being inflicted by pictures of salmon, rather than pain receptors being stimulated? Eg. inducing an state equivalent to clinical depression, or the feeling of having been dumped by a loved-one. I don’t see an inherent reason to treat these differently—there are occassions where I’d gladly have traded such feelings for a kick in the nuts, so from a utlitarian perspective they seem to be at least as bad.
The intensity in this case is obviously different—offence vs depression is obviously a big difference, so it may be fine to say that one’s OK and the other not because it falls into a tolerable level—but that certainly moves away from the notion of a bright line towards a grey continuum.
This is a better argument (indeed it’s one brought up by the post). I’m not sure it’s entirely valid though, for the reasons Yvain gave there. We can’t entirely choose what hurts us without a much better control over our emotional state than I, at least, posess. If I were brought up in a society where this was the ultimate taboo, I don’t think I could simply choose not to be, anymore than I could choose to be offended by them now. You say “It is within my power to feel zero pain from anything you might say”, but I’ll tell you, it’s not within mine. That may be a failing, but it’s one shared by billions. Further, I’m not sure it would be justified to go around insulting random strangers on the grounds that they can choose to take no harm, which suggests to me that offending is certainly not morally neutral.
Personally, I think one answer we could give to why the situations are different is a more pragmatic one. Accept that causing offence is indeed a bad action, but that it’s justified collateral damage in support of a more important goal. Ie. free speech is important enough that we need to establish that even trying to prevent it will be met by an indescriminate backlash doing the exact opposite. (Though there are also pragmatic grounds to oppose this, such that it’s manipulable by rabble-rousers for political ends).
I don’t understand this… the notion of a “more restrictive route” doesn’t seem to make much of a difference to the objection—the suggested move involves placing a certain type of speech act into the realm of “bullets”, and as such makes bullets an appropriate response to such acts, whereas they were not before. Is that right?
Edit: That is, if speech B is now equivalent to shooting someone, it’s not a case of “harmless speech A can now be responded to with bullets or B,” but of “speech B can now be responded to with bullets.”
Ah, I think I’ve misunderstood you—I thought you were talking about the initiating act (ie. that it was as appropriate to initiate shooting someone as to insult them), whereas you’re talking about the response to the act: that bullets are an appropriate response to bullets, therefore if interchangable, they’re an appropriate response to speech too. However, I don’t think you can take the first part of that as given—many (including me) would disagree that bullets are an appropriate response to bullets, but rather that they’re only an appropriate response to the specific case of averting an immediate threat (ie. shoot if it prevents killing, but oppose applying the death penalty once out of danger), and some pacifists may disagree even with violence to prevent other violence.
However, it seems that it’s the initiating act that’s the issue here: is it any more justified to causing offence as to shoot someone. I think it could be argued that they are equivalent issues, though of lesser intensity (ie. back to continuums, not bright lines).
I’m only interjecting, if there is a misunderstanding, it’s probably with jtk3. For my part I think the positions being argued are much clearer now, thank you!
Any for which the consequences of the alternatives are less desirable than the consequences of a bullet. Such situations are rare but not unheard-of in practice, though it’s not hard to come up with hypotheticals to demonstrate this.
I wouldn’t consider a picture of Muhammad to be an “argument”, would you?