Andrew Sneddon (University of Ottawa), "Towards a Theory of Offense"

Forthcoming in Philosophical Explorations

By Andrew Sneddon

asneddon@uottawa.ca

    I became interested in offense and offensiveness as philosophical and psychological topics after a conversation with a non-philosopher friend. He was concerned about some advertisements for atheism proposed for display on the side of local buses. He said that these offended him and that they shouldn’t be allowed. I said that they should be allowed because (good Millian liberal that I am) offense is not a harm. (The city eventually declined to allow them to be displayed, to their discredit.) At the time it seemed straightforward, but as I reflected I realized that I wasn’t sure about a lot of things in this territory. I couldn’t pin down just what a harm was; I wasn’t entirely sure that this sort of legal force should be restricted to harm prevention; and, centrally, I was unclear about the nature of offense experiences. The more I thought, the deeper the issues seemed. I eventually wrote a book about all this (Offense and Offensiveness: A Philosophical Account, Routledge 2021). My forthcoming paper, “Towards a Theory of Offense”, summarizes and extends some of the book’s arguments concerning offense.

     If we’re going to understand whether offense is a harm, the relationship between offense and offensiveness, what sorts of moral issue arise with offense, then we need to know just what it is to be offended. The simplest possible views equate offense experiences with either an affective experience or a judgment. The most common view is that to be offended is just to have some garden variety negative experience, such as disgust or anger or shock, about, well, something. Alternatively, one might think that to be offended just is to judge that something is offensive. But these simple views share a problem: they count overly much as offense. Not all of our disgust experiences involve offense, by normal standards. And it seems that we can judge something to be offensive without thereby being offended. I like to imagine a person late in life. This person has spent her life devoted to a particular cause. Early in life, certain ways that people spoke and acted about this cause stirred her feelings in various ways. Some buoyed her spirits, but others “hurt” her deeply. It’s natural to say that these latter experiences counted as offense. Late in life, this person has seen it all. She is no longer affectively moved by what she sees, but she still makes judgments of various kinds about her cause. She judges some ways that people speak and act about this issue to be offensive, but she is not disgusted or angered, etc. I find it inapt to describe this person as being offended.

     I take these views and their problems to show that we need to introduce more complexity into our understanding of offense. Here is my suggestion. We should think that offense experiences come in various forms. There is a psychological core form, what I call “lean offense”—you can see the details in my paper and book. Think of this as the typical variety of offense. It is psychologically complex, involving both judgment and affect. In two words, offense is a “moralized feeling”. Other forms of offense are related to this core historically and functionally.  When we have experienced lean offense about something, then “mere” bad feelings about this topic should be taken as indeed counting as offense, due to their historical and functional relationship to one’s lean offense experiences. The same goes for “mere” judgments about offensiveness. So, the pure affective and pure cognitive views are vindicated after all, in a fashion.

     This is only a piece of a theory of offense: without an account of offensiveness, we lack an explanation of the content of offense experiences. Here’s a gesture at such an account, starting with a feature of offense that has so far been overlooked. Consider some paradigmatically offensive act: the burning of a national flag and the painting of swastikas on a synagogue are good cases to consider. While we can allow that lots of different sorts of people might be offended by, e.g., the burning of the flag of Canada, we should also expect that Canadians would be more likely to be offended than Americans or Australians. Jews are more likely to be offended by the defacing of a synagogue with Nazi symbols than non-Jews. This sort of pattern can be expected with other cases too. It seems that offense is identity-implicating. We take the things that offend us personally; where we lack this sort of personal connection to something, it’s more difficult to be offended about it, but not impossible.

     The most general and informative way I have come up with to explain this is via the idea of “ways of living”. I mean this as a rough-and-ready term for the collective sense of achievements, hopes, ideals (and more) that “a people” (in a loose sense) share and that arguably make them “a people”. My suggestion is that judgments about offensiveness are best understood in terms of judgments about certain sorts of insults and threats to ways of living. Sometimes the stakes are grave, literally involving life and death. But more often they are not, and what we are responding to is symbolism. At the core of offense and offensiveness is the symbolic value involved in ways of living. Understanding the nature and significance of symbolic value is hence needed for a full account of offense and offensiveness, but that’s a task for another day.