The Barefoot Bum takes a look at the notion of taking offense. First, it’s OK to feel offended; in a society of diverse views, beliefs and cultures it’s inevitable.
If you’re offended, you’re free to say so. It might be important that you’re offended. Sometimes I offend people unintentionally, and a civilized person should never give offense unintentionally. A civilized person also never gives offense gratuitously, for no other reason than to make someone else feel bad. If you’re going to give offense, you should do so intentionally and with reason and purpose.
(And that, I think, should be PZ Myers’ retort to Andrew Sullivan.) The point is not whether we feel offended, but what we do about it. Civilization is about talking, not rioting.
So far, so good. But then The Bum makes an interesting leap:
Fundamentally, all ethical beliefs are about being offended; without the concept of taking offense, each person would object only to physical harm he or she personally suffered. It is taking offense when we care about harm caused to others and condemn acts that harm others.
I don’t think that this quite works. First, there’s a large class of ethical beliefs which have deeply non-rational roots. (Yes, I’m thinking of Fischer and Ravizza’s famous “trolley” problem.) In such cases, expressions of being “offended” are almost certainly no more than social convention (One is expected to express ethical conflicts in this kind of language.) There are other ethical dilemmas which don’t seem to fit The Bum’s broad brush. Consider what we might call the “ACLU problem”, Evelyn Hall‘s “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” The “disapprove” bit fits The Bum’s model, but “defend” is also viewed as an ethical stance.
To get a full picture of this, I think that we need to go beyond “offended”, and introduce another one of today’s “fighting words”, “disrespect”. “Offense” is generally a reaction to an action by another person, while “disrespect” speaks to the other’s attitude. With “offense”, the situation is clear: X did Y, Z was offended by Y, and we can debate about the ethics of Y. The problem with “disrespect” is that it is… well, “inchoate” feels close, though it’s not quite right. X did Y, Z felt that this showed that X disrespected him, and even if we resolve the question of Y we can’t clear the air about Z’s perception of X. Typically Z demands a compensating action from X to demonstrate X’s respect.
So I think that The Bum’s attempt to define ethics in terms of taking offense is backwards. We take offense over questions of an ethical nature which also arouse feelings of disrespect. (Not all ethical questions do.) And the way in which we act when we’ve taken offense is strongly (completely?) determined by the feelings of disrespect that are triggered, and may have little to do with the “Y” of the matter.