Offense versus harm minimization

Yvain:

The offender, for eir part, should stop offending as soon as ey realizes that the amount of pain eir actions cause is greater than the amount of annoyance it would take to avoid the offending action, even if ey can't understand why it would cause any pain at all.

In a world where people make decisions according to this principle, one has the incentive to self-modify into a utility monster who feels enormous suffering at any actions of other people one dislikes for whatever reason. And indeed, we can see this happening to some extent: when people take unreasonable offense and create drama to gain concessions, their feelings are usually quite sincere.

You say, "pretending to be offended for personal gain is... less common in reality than it is in people's imaginations." That is indeed true, but only because people have the ability to whip themselves into a very sincere feeling of offense given the incentive to do so. Although sincere, these feelings will usually subside if they realize that nothing's to be gained.

I think you are too quick to discard the Machiavellian ploy hypothesis. In particular, I think the term "Machiavellian" is misleading you. You (rightly) find a vast conspiracy of offense-pretending Muslims to be ridiculous. But the best way to run a conspiracy is not to run it, and the best way to pretend to something is not to pretend.

Have you stopped to ask why group X might find behavior Y of group Z offensive? I'm not doubting their pain, I'm not suggesting that group X cynically decides to find Y offensive, I'm just asking, how does offense arise in the first place? Why are human beings such that they take offense to things?

My view - taking offense begins as a response to a norm violation. "Not cool, dude," we say, because the dude has done something outside of what the group is prepared to accept. We feel uncomfortable when others violate norms, because if we just sit by and do nothing, we may be accused of being in on the norm violation.

But sometimes people take offense to things which are not norm violations. The general US norm is not that drawing the prophet Muhammed is forbidden, it's not that violent videogames are a sin, it's not that the casual treatment of women as nothing but sex objects is unacceptable. Yet people take offense to these things anyway! What is going on?

Here I am going to repeat again that I do not think that Muslims, game-pacifists, or feminists are consciously conspiring. I think, rather, that it is natural to take offense not only at things which are actual norm-violations, but also things which you wish were norm violations, things which would boost your status if they were norm violations. There is no conscious consideration of this, but somewhere deep in our hypocrite brains, we decide to pretend that our desired norms are the actual norms.

And the math gets even better for taking offense when you consider the meaning of being labeled offensive! "It was morally wrong to say this, and you are either inexcusably ignorant of this fact or deliberately malicious. You must immediately apologize, and it is up to the group you have offended to decide whether they accept your apology or whether they want to punish you in some well-deserved way," you say, and I think you have the right of it. This is a powerful weapon to use against your enemies, and a powerful threat to use to keep people from becoming your enemies in the first place. You think your brain isn't going to seize on it whenever possible?

Now, I know you are arguing from a harm minimization standpoint, you might say, "it is not these people's fault that their brains see an opportunity to score points by being offended and cause them pain". And that's true. The vast majority of people who take offense are, I'm sure, not doing it in a conscious, cynical manner. And by freely and gleefully offending them, we are doing them undeserved harm. It sucks to be them, and I say that in a spirit of sympathy. However, if we give in to offense, if we explicitly act to avoid giving offense rather than acting to right object-level wrongs, then we risk emboldening the true villains, the hypocrite brains who are torturing people to score cheap political points. Better to put our feet down now, because if being offended is a useful strategy, people will go on being offended, even if they don't want to.

I notice that I would not support showing British people pictures of Salmon.

I notice that I would support showing Muslim people pictures of Mohammad.

These two situations seem nearly identical.

I notice that I am confused.

I see two analogous situations, and yet I come to two different conclusions. Therefore, there must be some difference between them, even if it only lies in my perceptions. Perhaps by carving these situations at their joints, I can find why it is I come away with different conclusions. Explicitly, I remember the stated differences.

1) Race/Culturism - The British are British and not Muslim

2) Blame - The British are not "at fault" as victims of a prank while the Muslims are "at fault" by virtue of being members of a religion

As a detirminist, I cannot say that the Muslims chose to be Muslims any more than British people chose to be waylayed by a prankster in the night. That seems very damning; this only leaves the option that I must be racist. However, there is perhaps a third option that is missing. Implicitly, I notice a number of unstated differences that can only be assumed.

3) Treatability - The British people have an electrode installed, which implies to me they receive the same disutility for every salmon picture seen. After year of salmon pictures, the 366th day of seeing salmon pictures would hurt just as much as the 1st day. In Muslims, the disutility of seeing pictures of Mohammad decreases until it eventually disappears. It is possible to 'cure' a muslim of recieving disutility from pictures of Mohammad in a way it is not possible with the British.

4) Resistance - The British people do not want to have an aversion to salmon. If given the choice to remove the salmon reaction, they would do so. The Muslim people want to have an aversion to Mohammad. In fact, they consider it morally right to hate pictures of Mohammad.

5) Propagation - A salmon averse Briton would hate seeing pictures of Salmon all his life, and then would die. In the worst case, the world has to live without pictures of salmon for 100 years, assuming the singularity doesn't hit before then. Muslims will teach their children to have the same aversions they do. Worst case scenario, 10,000 years from now we'll be sending messages to our other planets across galaxies but we still can't make pictures of the prophet Mohammad.

6) Mutation - A Briton would be pained by pictures of only Salmon until their end of days. The aversion to pictures of Mohammad has already mutated into anything critical towards Islam. Specifically, Van Gogh died due to women's rights, a trait only marginally related to Mohammad in as much as his film used verses from the Quran. An appropriate analogy would be if salmon-aversion mutated to hating all pictures or discussion of fish, because they're somewhat similar to salmon.

7) Virulence - Losing the right to show salmon to British people would only hurt a small subset of nature photographers. Losing the right to criticize Islam already hampers a number of humanitarian efforts in the Middle East (eg women's rights). If we were to extend the salmon analogy, we would require the British to hate fighting climate change, because it's sort of related to saving fish.

8) Pathogenicity - The British seem to respond to seeing pictures of fish with polite inquiries to stop and social pressure. Muslim extremists respond to pictures of Mohammad or media critical of Islam with death threats, assassinations, and government blocks.

These are significant differences, and most of them I didn't notice until I started enumerating the differences. The question is, is the difference in my reaction caused by the explicit differences (#1-2) or the implicit differences (#3-8). I shall return to the original scenario and remove those explicit differences. If my reaction to the modified scenario remains constant, it means that I made my decision based on explicit differences. If my reaction to the modified scenario changes, it means I made my decision based on implicit differences.

Imagine that one night, an alien prankster secretly implants electrodes into the brains of an entire country - let's say Britain. The next day, everyone in Britain discovers that pictures of salmon suddenly give them jolts of painful psychic distress. Every time they see a picture of a salmon, or they hear about someone photographing a salmon, or they even contemplate taking such a picture themselves, they get a feeling of wrongness that ruins their entire day. The chip also modifies the British people's behavior such that they believe having this sense of wrongness is morally right. When their children are born, they implant these salmon hating electrodes in them. Interestingly, these electrodes have a number of flaws (or features), such as repeated exposure to salmon burns out the salmon-hating batteries. Another flaw (or feature) is that this aversion to salmon can mutate to an aversion of any sort of aquatic animal or cause relating to aquatic animals. Great Briton quickly becomes currently the only country attempting to fight against reduction of Global Climate Change. A number of climate change scientists and activists receive death threats by the British people for their work. Tragedy strikes when filmmaker Al Gore is assassinated for his quote "salmon-loving ways" unquote.

Sweet zombie jesus! That's a scenario that sends shivers down my spine. I would do everything I could to burn out those salmon-hating microchips. It seems that the difference in my reactions really is based on implicit differences I could not easily identify. On further reflection, Race and Nationality and even (surprisingly) Religion were irrelevant to my decision making compared to the consequences caused by the salmon/Mohammad meme.

Now another scenario. Imagine that those Muslims who hate seeing Mohammad got chosen by the prankster to get the salmon-hating electrodes in their brain. (The original salmon-chips Yvain made, not these nightmarish self-replicating, self-mutating ones I made.) They hate seeing both pictures of Salmon and pictures of Mohammad. In this case I would not support showing the Muslims pictures of Salmon, but I would support showing the Muslims pictures of Mohammad. This is consistent with my prior decisions and internally consistent with my morals.

Let me revisit my first statements now, with sticky and emotional words dissolved.

I notice that I would not support showing any people pictures of anything, if it caused pain but did not make the world a better place.

I notice that I would support showing any people pictures of anything, if it caused pain but helped make the world a better place.

These two situations are not nearly as identical as they appeared at first glance.

I notice that I am no longer confused.

Offense is a lot more cognitive than pain. How do I know that? Because I am a political writer (blogging at FeministCritics.org. I show people what parts of feminism they get offended by, and what parts they should take seriously.

Political writers are offense-mongers. Why? Because on their own, people don't always know what they are supposed to find offensive.

Pain has a cognitive dimension, but many types of pain are non-cognitive. In complex social situations, offense is highly cognitive. There could be many ways to view a particular phenomenon, and political writers will choose the way that is most offensive to the group they are backing.

Offense doesn't always just swoop in and attack innocent people, people go looking for it. They seek out political writers they identify with to learn what they are supposed to be offended about today. In a complex social world, this behavior makes a lot of sense. You don't always know what might threaten your status, so you look to knowledgeable people to show you what to make into a Schelling Point. They tell you what you should be offended about, to inspire you to action that will protect the status of the identity group that you share.

Of course, political writers themselves are generally quite sincere (I certainly am!), which is part of why they are effective (at least in getting people stirred up). It's their job to get offended and then write about it. Furthermore, they gain positive reinforcement and an echo chamber if they can consistently stir up their flock and provide them a constant diet of offense, so that people will feel properly vigilant about protecting the status of groups they identify with.

There is nothing wrong this ecosystem, as long as we have no illusions about how it works.

This reminds me that I need to make a post about male-bashing in music videos. There are some patterns that I'm sure people will see if I point them out. I am of course right, but it's possible that political writers other than me have biases that lead them to perceive spuriously offensive patterns.

I'm not convinced that "offense" is a variety of "pain" in the first place. They feel to me like two different things.

When I imagine a scenario that hurts me without offending me (e.g. accidentally touching a hot stovetop), I anticipate feelings like pain response and distraction in the short term, fear in the medium term, and aversion in the long term.

When I imagine a scenario that offends me without hurting me (e.g. overhearing a slur against a group of which I'm not a member) I anticipate feelings like anger and urge-to-punish in the short term, wariness and distrust in the medium term, and invoking heavy status penalties or even fully disassociating myself from the offensive party in the long term.

Of course, an action can be both offensive and painful, like the anti-Semitic slurs you mention. But an offensive action need not be painful. My intuition suggests that this is a principled reason (as opposed to a practical one) for the general norm of pluralistic societies that offensiveness alone is not enough to constrain free speech.

I'm not sure which category the British Fish thought experiment falls into; the description doesn't completely clarify whether the Britons are feeling pained or offended or both.

Another unpleasant implication of the consequentialist attitude towards offense is that societies should be as homogeneous as possible with regards to people's values and beliefs. (And I'm not talking about Aumann-agreement here!) As the diversity of a society increases, the set of statements and acts that can be done in public without offending one group or another necessarily shrinks, which implies an inevitable trade-off between the pain of offense and the pain of people who have their freedom curtailed and are increasingly forced to walk on eggshells. I'll leave the more concrete implications in the context of today's politics as an exercise for the reader.

It also implies that a certain level of isolation between societies is desirable, in direct opposition to the present trends of globalization. What is regular business in one society may well be extremely offensive in another. So, if there's an intense mutual interest and exchange of information between societies, we get the same problem as within a single diverse society. This can be mitigated only by isolating these societies from each other so that their members are not exposed to the painful sight of the offensive alien customs.

I'm not clear on the relevant Muslim sensibilities/doctrine, but are they upset merely by seeing pictures of Mohammed, or by the existence of pictures of Mohammed? It may be that without actual policies/norms/etc. stringently forbidding drawing Mohammed, they will experience a non-negligible background level of upset based on the probabilistic expectation that someone, somewhere, is drawing Mohammed where they can't see. What does this model of offense etc. say to this situation?

In the case of your alien-hacked British, they would notice their mass modification and be able to search for a cause. They would be able to scan their own brains and see the electrodes that were implanted by aliens. The idea of repudiating their new emotional reactions would be cognitively accessible, and this would inflect much of their behavior and the politics around the phenomenon.

Even as they outlawed pictures of salmon, they could (for example) put time limits on the laws, fund medical research into safe electrode removal, and make efforts to ensure that their foolish emotional reactions weren't memetically passed on into subsequent generations.

In the case of Muslims, there are no electrodes, and no hope of removing the electrodes. The material cause of their psychological situation is thus distinct and raises many of the issues from the diseased thinking essay. In practice, the people with the relevant emotional reaction were brought into being by cultural practices that include a philosophic endorsement of their over-reactions. The religious leaders benefit from the installation of this craziness in their followers by cultivating and directing the emotions it produces. People in their culture will publicly praise high fidelity memetic transmission of the emotional reactions and so the craziness can be expected to propagate like something living instead of receding like an injury healed by the passage of time.

The emotional reactions of Muslims to sacrilegious symbols are woven into their identities, and thus in some ways deserve more respect than the alien-hacked British with "photofishophobia", but in other ways they seem to me to deserve less respect.

Communities potentially have self-regulating agency over time. If a community has chosen to cultivate bad values over years and centuries (and partially succeeded in this project) , then the thing that gives them the most respect as self-regulating humans is to disrespect their poor regulatory choices.

This is an interesting post, but Yvain, your made-up pronouns hurt my head. Every time I come to one it disrupts my reading flow and feels like my train of thought crashes into a brick wall. It genuinely makes the post more difficult and less pleasant to read for me. Couldn't you just flip a coin for each new character you reference and give them male or female pronouns based on that?

"Say a random Christian kicked a Muslim in the face, and a few other Muslims got really angry, blew the whole thing out of proportion, and killed him and his entire family. This would be an inappropriately strong response, and certainly you could be upset about it, but the proper response wouldn't be to go kicking random Muslims in the face. "

Several times you seem to equate speech or illustration with a punch in the face. They don't seem interchangeable to me. The American founding fathers made a strong case for protecting speech, they argued that people should be able to say what they would without fear of violence in return. I'm pretty sure they never contemplated that face punching should be protected. I see the a bright line between the two behaviors.

Some of the people passing around pictures of Mohammed surely mean to insult. Others are demanding that a bright line between speech and physical harm be observed by all. They are appealing to more reasonable muslims to "police their area" and part of the plan is draw out the muslims who need policing.

I'm not defending that as an optimal plan but I sure think the bright line is a swell idea.

It is necessary to draw pictures of Mohammed to show Muslims that violence and terrorism are inappropriate responses. I think the logic here is that a few people drew pictures of Mohammed, some radicals sent out death threats and burned embassies, and now we need to draw more pictures of Mohammed to convince Muslims not to do this.

Of the motivations described above, I think this is the closest, but still not quite accurate. The point of Everybody Draw Muhammad Day, as I saw it anyhow, wasn't to show that violence and terrorism are inappropriate responses, but that they are ineffective responses. It isn't about teaching Muslims not to threaten others, but teaching others to defy threats of censorship. It's a group exercise in defying threats of violence; it's one of those "the pen is mightier than the sword" things.

Another modern event dealing with the preservation of freedom of speech is Banned Books Week, which celebrates defiance against censorship, especially in libraries and schools. It's an event that celebrates your right to read Huckleberry Finn, Lolita, Slaughterhouse-Five, or Heather Has Two Mommies by encouraging people to read books that have been, in one context or another, banned or threatened with being banned.

Is Banned Books Week offensive to people who think these books should be banned, and that encouraging people to read them is evil? Yes, in fact it is.

There are commenters who note that the use of "ey" and other gender neutral pronouns hurts their head. You may understand this and still use "ey" as part of a larger attempt to accustom people to language that is ultimately more convenient, even if it's worse in the short run. Which is a perfect example of what I was going to say:

When you do your harm minimization calculation, you really need to include the entire path over time, and not just the snapshot. It is often true that hurting people today makes them stronger in the future, resulting in a better outcome. It could be, for instance, that gay marriage today offends more people more deeply than it benefits, but that by pushing for its spread, many of the formerly offended people end up desensitized to it (see also any number of past civil rights issues). Or, if by showing the Brits enough pictures of salmon we could actually desensitize them to the pain, in the long run we may all be better off.

A big difference between the salmon and mohammed example is that you built into the first that Brits can't adapt to the pain. But some people may be imagining a future, better world where everyone has free speech and nobody has a problem with it. And they imagine that the way to get there is by exercising that freedom now, even if it's bad in the short run.

Personally, my feeling is that retaining offendability on some topics can easily confer benefits, but I am sympathetic to people who have not realized this, and I can understand why they would feel some compunction to wave their free speech rights in the faces of others, without necessarily being "bad" people.

I think the slippery slope you describe is not the correct slope to talk about. Rather, the argument I often hear is "if we accede to Muslims in this relatively trivial matter of pictures, they will see this as a sign of weakness, and expect stronger demands to be met as well."

A couple points.

You miss an important issue, which is the western concept as speech as a right. The Folsom street fair can have a promo poster of the last supper as Jesus as a naked black dude surrounded by transvestites, dominatrixes, and sex toys, and no major Christian organization will propose that anyone should be killed. They may try to get funding taken away from the fair, but that's their right. Westerners have a concept of appropriate levels of conflict, and if someone violates them, we want to punish them. If someone asks me politely to keep it down, I probably will. If they tell mento shut up or they'll kick my ass, my instinct is to talk even louder (especially if they're bluffing). This is sensible as annoy of punishing improper behavior.

I also take issue with your characterization of offense as pain. In some cases - where it's directed at someone, like racial slurs, it is. But in cases of taking offense at untethered actions, pain isn't accurate. It's not exactly painful when, say, a Klansmen sees an interracial couple, even if he finds their behaviour offensive. And even if it were, it seems obvious to menthat the couple should not allow that to affect their behaviour. If the Brits in your example just got arbitrarily angry about seeing trout pictures, I'm not sure the same reaction follows. Perhaps if you taboo offense, you get a more coherent picture of two separate emotional reactions.

Muslims' sensitivity to Mohammed is based on a falsehood; Islam is a false religion and Mohammed is too dead to care how anyone depicts him. I agree with this statement, but I don't think it licenses me to cause psychic pain to Muslims. I couldn't go around to mosques and punch Muslims in the face, shouting "Your religion is false, so you deserve it!".

This strikes me as a bad analogy. Seeing pictures of Mohammed is only offensive to Muslims because of their conviction in a poorly evidenced falsehood, whereas punching someone in the face is an offense regardless of what they believe. I think that a more apt comparison would be holding communion wafers hostage in order to offend Catholics.

If I thought that actions like these would discourage people from taking offense due to falsehoods, I would consider that to be a strong argument in their favor, but I don't see that they're actually doing much aside from fueling persecution complexes and feeding conflict.

I find this post offensive, please delete it.

My first reaction to this was "is this a guest post by Robin Hanson under Yvain's name, to see if anyone notices?"

You could argue Brits did not choose to have their abnormal sensitivity to salmon while Muslims might be considered to be choosing their sensitivity to Mohammed. But this requires a libertarian free will.

Well, no it doesn't. Muslims observably do make a choice in the matter (as proved by the fact that they discuss it and take different views). (Link.) To equate this with aliens hard-wiring our brains to graft on an arbitrary offense-trigger is plain no-free-will determinism, whereby the past reaches past the present to cause the future, just as the alien reaches past our internal functions to cause offense-taking at an arbitrary stimulus.

"Forward Defense" provides a better justification for Mohammed pictures than "slippery slope" does. By supporting people who create these pictures you implicitly support everyone who engages in a type of expression that's more defensible than creating Mohammed pictures is. Paradoxically, therefore, your well reasoned arguments against the pictures provide a strong "Forward Defense" free expression justification for supporting them.

Those who strongly support freedom of expression may have implicitly used the publicity generated by the Mohammed pictures to coordinate in supporting them and consequently, in the United States at least, created a defense protecting all other types of expression that are easier to justify than the Mohammed pictures. If there was some special social value in these pictures then the forward defense their "legitimacy" creates would provide less protective cover to other types of offensive expressions.

The slippery slope that applies is not that every random religion will taboo a certain activity, but that the more power you give to one religion the easier it is for it to get even more power. If, through outrageous overreaction, they can force people to stop one activity, they have zero incentive to not use this tactic against everything they are morally against, much of which is of MUCH greater utility than images of Mohammed.

Vladimir_M and Nominull have got it right.

Vladimir_M:

You say, "pretending to be offended for personal gain is... less common in reality than it is in people's imaginations." That is indeed true, but only because people have the ability to whip themselves into a very sincere feeling of offense given the incentive to do so. Although sincere, these feelings will usually subside if they realize that nothing's to be gained.

Nominull:

Here I am going to repeat again that I do not think that Muslims, game-pacifists, or feminists are consciously conspiring. I think, rather, that it is natural to take offense not only at things which are actual norm-violations, but also things which you wish were norm violations, things which would boost your status if they were norm violations. There is no conscious consideration of this, but somewhere deep in our hypocrite brains, we decide to pretend that our desired norms are the actual norms.

Although one function of offense is to alert about real threats, another function is to grab any status that it can (except when being thick-skinned grants more status).

Offense can scale depending on how much can be gained by it.

Btw, I first heard this concept from PUAs claiming that a girlfriend will "dial up" or "dial down" the drama that she gives (without any conscious goal-directedness) depending on how the man responds. This tendency seems to be a general principle of human psychology, not just female sexual psychology.

There was a time when Christians frequently did kill each other over seemingly minor religious differences. The wars of religion led to a backlash that eventually gave us the political theories of Hobbes, Locke etc. When people talk about the need for a reformation in Islam, they are really thinking of the period after those wars which we accept as normal.

I was going to link to Bryan Caplan on applying the Coase theorem to offense, but turned out I confused him with Alex Tabarrok on envy. He does extend his analysis to offense though.

I do recall Robin Hanson debating with Bryan Caplan and saying that it is a utilitarian best outcome for the majority of believers not to be subjected to atheist speech. I normally assume Caplan is wrong in any disagreement with Hanson, but there I lean more towards his free speech absolutism. That may be because my behaviorist leanings lead me to discount claims of psychic distress (or utility monsters) to zero. On the other hand, I don't value the ability to make atheist polemics all that highly and would be open to "make a deal" along those lines, though I'd be upset if the deal was made without my consent.

The Volokh Conspiracy often discusses the heckler's veto.

I think the world is better off without sacred cows, rather than with them. The only way to eliminate these kinds of reactions is via "exposure therapy". Admittedly, I say this as someone without many sacred cows. I'm non-religious, an anti-nationalist, and (other than a long career as a "non-denominational" anti-war activist) essentially apolitical.

I support the Mohammed drawing day, Koran-burning, and similar attempts involving other religions and political doctrines. When people do these things, it helps create a safe space for people to speak their reasoned criticisms.

For me, the important distinction between the salmon thing and the Mohammad thing is that getting zapped when you see a picture of a salmon is a reaction that doesn't go away through exposure. It can't be desensitized. Drawing Mohammad, or really any form of trolling, eventually gets savvy people to change the way they react.

That's not to say that trolling is necessarily good, but it is functionally different than what's happening with the salmon. See this article by Clay Shirky.

Yvain's salmon analogy has drawn some criticism. I have to agree that it is not a perfect analogy. Analogies rarely are perfect. The best course, I find, is to offer a choice of analogies and let people choose the one with the most resonance. Pick one from this list:

Photoshop the Queen with a salmon day. We don't need to surgically alter the Brits. Just have a bit of fun with their national symbol. If insulting the Queen doesn't work, try Lady Di.

Tell an ethnic joke day. Stereotyping can be funny and is never physically harmful. If an ethnic group is capable of making fun of itself, then everyone should be able to make fun of them. It is all just in fun.

Use a bad word day. Isn't it ridiculous that people get offended at the use of certain four letter words - particularly those denoting body parts or normal biological functions. Isn't it clever to make people angry when they are unable to justify their anger rationally?

Let it all hang out day. And some people are offended not just by hearing about body parts, but also by seeing them. The occasional practice of public nudism (weather permitting) will help to make the world a better, less neurotic, place.

Use racial epithets day. Sticks and stones can break your bones, but words can never hurt you. Some people, though, don't seem to realize this. It is time to confront their irrational viewpoint that speech should not be completely free.

Desecrate a religious symbol day. Don't draw Mohammed - he already has a day. Instead, burn a Torah, feed a sacremental host to rats, pull the pins out of a voodoo doll. Lets show some imagination here. What can we do in Delhi to a sacred cow? Catapults can be fun.

Piss in someone's vegetable garden day. Some people have the uninformed impression that human urine is unsanitary. Not true, it is actually a sterile medium. People in India sometimes consume small quantities of their own urine much as people in the West drink herbal teas. Its time to dispell this anti-urine superstition.

Barbecue a cat day. Confront dietary prejudices head on, and also lend a hand to the Humane Society in addressing the cat overpopulation problem. Actually killing and butchering the cats publicly provides a more vivid demonstration. And as an added benefit, leading people to care less about kittens will make the internet a more productive environment and may even increase contributions to the SIAI.

I have to admit that if I actually encountered one of the protests on this list in real life, my initial reaction would be amusement. Repetition might change that to annoyance. But only one of those ideas actually offends me. Which one? I won't tell. YMMV.

I am still swayed by the slippery-slope argument. How far is it from “you must not offend us“ to “you must believe as we do?”

What would you think of Brits who could have their electrodes removed, but preferred to leave them in?

Personally, it would reduce my interest in being careful with salmon pictures.

Another case that's interesting to consider is the Penny Arcade dickwolves controversy. The PA fellows made a comic which mentioned the word "rape", some readers got offended, and the PA guys, being thick-skinned individuals, dismissed and mocked their claims of being offended by making "dickwolves" T-shirts. Hubbub ensues.

What's most interesting about this case is that, apart from perhaps some bloggers, many of the people taking offense appear to be rape survivors for whom reading the word "rape" is traumatic (I guess? This is what I gathered, but being thick-skinned and not a rape survivor it is impossible for me to understand). I don't think it's possible to claim Machiavellian maneuverings here, given that a feminist blog who made a dickwolves protest shirt eventually stopped selling the shirt on account of some rape survivors saying that the shirt acted as a trigger for them.

More to the point: there is apparently a small population for whom using the word "rape" causes psychic horror. So what, are we now not allowed to ever use that word? Or can we not even allude to the act? Of course, reasonable concessions should be made (i.e. not using the word when directly in the presence of such a person), but at what point do sensitive individuals need to take it upon themselves to relocate their attention elsewhere?

I think the central issue here gets folded into the "utility/disutility" distinction, which makes it easy to miss. The current thing with drawing Mohammed is probably best seen as a sort of culture war between East and West - we value free speech, they do not. The opening salvo was political cartoons in a Danish newspaper. If the opening salvo had been posting similar cartoons on the side of a Mosque, the West would look a lot worse.

Generally, though, targeted offensive behaviour - racial slurs, drawing Mohammed on churches, forcing very religious people to view hardcore pornography - is of virtually no social value and the offender suffers very little from having to avoid doing it.

Conversely, untargeted offensive behaviour - the Klansmen getting upset over seeing an interracial couple - tends to be much more expensive for the offender to avoid, so the appropriate solution is for the offended person to stop being offended.

How hard something is to avoid is obviously a bit fuzzy. It seems it can break down into "intended to harm" versus "not specifically intended to harm." The Mohammed cartoons are mostly in the latter category, as they were intended as a political criticism of a religion.

In other words, I think this is more of a debate over where the utility calculus should come out, because "offense" describes such a broad range.

This is a really good essay that makes some interesting points. The salmon example is a really clever way of separating some of the issues.

I think you underestimate the slipperiness of the slope in question. If for example, some religious people find that simply saying their religion is false is painful to them in the same way should that be outlawed? Note that this isn't a hypothetical, many countries have anti-blasphemy laws and many European countries have laws against criticizing religion or include such remarks under hate crimes statutes. Consider the case of a certain fellow in England, Harry Taylor, who was forbidden to carry anti-religious literature (and yes, there's no question that his behavior was jerkish but that's not the point). And it just gets worse from there. There are ultra-Orthodox Jews who don't want anyone to say anything negative about their Rebbes.

There seem to be two distinct issues here are also, how should potential victims and offenders act, and whether there should be government regulation. These are related but distinct questions. You start off talking about the first and end by talking about the second.

This is an interesting thread.

Here's a difference between the British-salmon and Muslim-Mohammed scenarios.

In the British scenario, you've postulated that the British politely ask the rest of the world to refrain from waving photos of salmon in their faces.

In the Muslim scenario, the ultra-religious are DEMANDING that the rest of the world obey their edicts on what is appropriate to draw.

I personally feel a very visceral reaction when I'm told that I'm not allowed to draw/write about/think about something. "Who are you," I think, "to presume to tell me what I can and can't express? Just who do you think you are that you get to have that sort of control over my expressions?"

My gut instinct then, is to write/draw/think about/talk about that forbidden thing.

It's the difference between a suggestion and a command. Were the Muslim community to say something like, "Ok, do as you please, but for the sake of civility, we hope you'll refrain from exposing us to the images of Mohammed you might create," you know, I'd probably say sure, ok. That's civilized. But to say, "You may not, UNDER THREAT OF DEATH, make any images or jokes about X," that's just too dictatorial for me to accept, on any level.

"A thick-skinned person just can't model a person with thinner skin all that well. "

Maybe so. And I'm a very thick skinned person. But if a thin skinned person takes offense when a thick skinned person intends none, then isn't it fair to say that the thin-skinned person isn't modeling the other very well either?

"And so when the latter gets upset over some insult, the thick-skinned person calls them "unreasonable", or assumes that they're making it up in order to gain sympathy. My friends in the online forum couldn't believe anyone could really be so sensitive as to find their comments abusive, and so they ended up doing some serious mental damage."

In your prescriptions for how to deal with this I don't see any consideration of the possibility that the offended could grow thicker skin. I really think this would be the most efficient protection of the offended from such offense in at least some cases, and perhaps in most cases.

If a person literally had thin skin such that he was vulnerable to being wounded by contact with rough surfaces it would be more efficient for him to put on protective clothing than to modify his entire environment.

"You could argue Brits did not choose to have their abnormal sensitivity to salmon while Muslims might be considered to be choosing their sensitivity to Mohammed. But this requires a libertarian free will. "

Absent free will I don't understand why you'd be more critical the supposed offending parties than the offended ones.

"And if tomorrow I tried to "choose" to become angry every time someone showed me a picture of a salmon, I couldn't do it - I could pretend to be angry, but I couldn't make myself feel genuine rage."

Some people born and raised in America who freely take up Islam in adulthood and proceed to take offense at such things as pictures of Mohammed which they previously would not have taken offense at. One may not directly choose to take such offense but it's a consequence of choices and one may choose otherwise.

Out of a billion muslims I'd bet there are many who are not deeply offended when outsiders print such pictures. The choice to take less offense is there.

Growing up I had a strong and deeply ingrained aversion to homosexuality. I could feel physically ill at the description or depiction of men kissing, for instance. The aversion was so strong that I identified it as an instinctive part of my nature. Over time however I chose to discount the aversion. I was able to do so. Presumably you would not have thought gays should have refrained from acts which offended me.

I'm confident muslims are also capable of discounting irrational beliefs. If one didn't think people could do this then what would be the point of lesswrong?

Alonzo Fyfe wrote an article in response to Yvain's article above, here.

I think this an excellent scheme for thinking about the issue because it really does help draw together different intuitions onto the same field in a way where we can imagine useful evaluations.

One issue which may create fractures in reasoning is that the alien brain implant is somewhat different than other psychological reactions. At least when I first interpret the mechanism, the brain implant would not attenuate with time. The idea of "thicker skin" is bound up with growing one, allowing our responses to offensiveness attenuate from "my god, how awful" to "whyd do people think that's funny".

I think this leads to an important objection: if we could, through photographic salmon exposure* attenuate the pain until it no longer is actually felt, we would object much less to showing salmonitypes to Brits. Indeed, we may perceive that they have a duty to therest of us, even on general utility grounds, to attenuate their impulse.

I don't think this is an unreasonable objection and it meshes well with our other general moral commands. Children, for example, no doubt are greatly harmed by not getting what they want but we perceive a need for adults not to remain shrill 8 year olds and cultivate some serenity in this regard. (In fact, I had a conversation interrupted just tonight when the table next to mine began making a scene about salad prices, with obvious disutility to the tables around them.)

So I think this is a critical difference which should be addressed as it is not unreasonable to believe, at least from the muted reactions in the first world, that these feelings can attenuate with socialization or small personal effort.

*If this is not the name of a band, it should be.

An important distinction between the salmon and Mohammed pictures was omitted. Namely, the potential to change the offended in the long run.

In both examples the differences between two groups are potentially dangerous. There is a direct risk of accidentally showing a salmon picture in presence of a Briton. There is a graver risk that the salmon thing would cause further distrust between Britons and non-Britons, because it's somehow hard to not laugh at somebody who becomes enraged because of a picture of a salmon. There may be bombings of printers who publish fishing books, or any other kind of violence. The world is almost certainly better without such controversies. So it may be reasonable to try to eliminate them.

In the salmon example, the Britons have a physical reason (chips in their brains) for their salmon obsession and they can't be (presumably) taught to ignore the salmon pictures. On the other hand, Muslims' rage over depicting the prophet is a cultural habit amenable to change. People are usually less offended (in whatever meaning) by stuff which they encounter on a daily basis. Exposing the Muslims to Mohammed cartoons may significantly move their offense threshold towards more tolerance.

Yvain, I would urge you to read this post on assigning blame on the subject of diseases, written by a quite eloquent and enlightening writer. There is a very relevant snippet in there regarding the difference between the consequentialist model of blame and the deontological model.

If giving condemnation instead of sympathy decreases the incidence of the disease enough to be worth the hurt feelings, condemn; otherwise, sympathize. Though the rule is based on philosophy that the majority of the human race would disavow, it leads to intuitively correct consequences. Yelling at a cancer patient, shouting "How dare you allow your cells to divide in an uncontrolled manner like this; is that the way your mother raised you??!" will probably make the patient feel pretty awful, but it's not going to cure the cancer. Telling a lazy person "Get up and do some work, you worthless bum," very well might cure the laziness. The cancer is a biological condition immune to social influences; the laziness is a biological condition susceptible to social influences, so we try to socially influence the laziness and not the cancer.

If showing pictures of Salmon to British people helped degrade the salmon-pain-electrodes, then we should show pictures of Salmon to British people. If showing pictures of Mohammad to Muslim people helped reduce their reaction, then we should show pictures of Mohammad to Muslim people. If it doesn't work, we shouldn't do it. If kicking them in the face worked, we should do it; if kicking them in the face doesn't work, we shouldn't do it. Pure consequentialism.

Make no mistake, Muslims taking offense to pictures is a disease of the mind and not just because it's based on religion (and religion is false). People have received death threats over depictions of Mohammad. Others have been assassinated for creating media relating to the Muslim religion. Those who wish to end the oppression of women and other human rights abuses have a harder time because they are unable to create media critical of those practices. These are all aside from the general issue of freedom of speech. There are real world results caused by Muslims being overly sensitive and turning to violence or threats of violence as a result of that sensitivity.

Remember that nobody felt the need to make a "Everybody Draw Mohammad Day" when they were being asked politely to stop. When sensitivity crossed the line to death threats and assassination is the exact point that an 'issue to be sensitive about' turned into a 'disease to be cured'. Once it is classified as a disease the only questions are 'how you can cure it most effectively' and 'is Everybody Draw Mohammad Day an efficacious cure'.

Muslims are often of a different race than Christians, so conflicts with them risk tarring a person with the deeply insulting label of "racist"

Why don't you use the terms European and Middle Easterner? Christianity as a religion is about as racially diverse as one can get and the same is true of Islam. Imagining a generic "average" global Christian insulting a generic "average" global Muslim and terming that racist makes little sense.

The charge of racism wouldn't be used by a Sudanese or PC minded Kenyan against a Christian Kenyan. In the context of Europe this is employed because of the inter-ethnic conflict present below the surface.

I think the crucial difference between the salmon/Brit and the drawings/Muslims is form-invariance, which is present in the latter, but not the former.

The Muslims in question don't merely say, "Hey, don't draw pictures that have the form of Muhammad." They say, "Don't express any critique coupled to our offense at that narrow part of artspace." (including, e.g., Drawing an anonymous stick figure and saying, "I call that Muhammad ... is that enough to offend you, or does it have to ...?")

In contrast, there are workarounds in the Brit/salmon case that allow one to reference salmon anywhere and everywhere -- even right in front of Brits! -- without triggering their hardwired response:

• use a euphemism for salmon
• when a diagram is needed, use one that doesn't look like salmon, but has a known mapping
• use indirect complex constructions that nevertheless, after some thought, are identified as referring to salmon

Heck, the Brit-requested prohibition would ever permit you to (incorrectly) argue that the kind of mod the aliens did is impossible.

Yet Muslims expect all of the analog activities to cease.

Now, you can revise the situation to force consideration of the least-convenient possible world, but then you'd be constructing a scenario in which the aliens implant strong AI that can identify every possible kind of salmon reference. But at that point, you're no longer talking about Brits at all, but beings with a different identity, which reduces your dilemma to "Brits are killed and replaced with robots. What else would start to suck about that situation?" Er, the problem was the identity deletion, and any further harm pales in comparison.

I think you can connect the dots from here: there is a difference between expecting others to restrict the manner in which they do something, vs. whether they do it at all. Indeed, even the Americans you criticize have no problem with time/place/manner restrictions of free speech: e.g. "Sure you can say a candidate's great, but not through spam, and not by blasting an airhorn at 3am."

I feel there are some significant differences between drawing Mohammed and showing the British person a picture of the salmon:

• In case of Britain affected with the salmon ailment, it is not actually necessary to stop depicting salmon. For example, if you are a proud owner of a salmon-fisher’s blog, it is sufficient to put up a “CONTAINS SALMON” warning on the front page to prevent some unlucky Brit from wandering inside and getting a jolt. We do not stop selling peanut products because some people are allergic to them and might actually die from consuming those – we just put a highly visible “CONTAINS NUTS” label on the packaging. However, if you have a religious issue discussion blog that may contain some Mohammed art, posting a “CONTAINS PICTURES OF MOHHAMED” warning on the front page will only attract the kind of Muslims that are particularly averse to Mohammed art.

• Another interesting point to consider is that being atheist, I do not have a duty or commandment not to draw a picture of Mohammed and neither do Christians, Buddhists, Jews or Hindus. Technically, if your commandments do not forbid it you are not committing a sacrilege. Now, waving a Mohammed pic in the Muslims’ face would be definitely a dick move, but publishing it in your blog/journal/whatever other media that a Muslim would have to actively seek out in order to be exposed should be ok.

• A tit-for-tat argument – suppose that while Britain was affected by salmon aversion the rest of the world was struck by an aversion to cat pictures (the horror! Oh, the fluffy horror!). Now, if the British demand that we get rid of our salmon pics but keep flashing the cat pics all over the place, would you still feel that it is a dick move to keep your salmon? Getting back to the Mohammed issue, this is exactly what we see – the same Muslim groups that react most aggressively to the Mohammed pics are known for damaging and destroying various objects that hold cultural and religious value to non-Muslims. Is it right to cooperate when your opponent is known for defecting?

However, I do feel that my thinking might be influenced by a tribal-rivalry bias against Muslems. If you find anything of that sort – feel free to dig in.

I think the difference here is that “Mohammed” (for sake of argument) does not exist outside of the context of Islam. To reference “Mohammed” is to reference a character that exists only as a historical character described through historical texts that deliberately do not offer an official image of him (…and no one is saying "you can't talk or write about Mohammed," at least not yet). The presumption here is that the Islamic character and the prohibition regarding his depiction are inseparable aspects of the same idea of “Mohammed.”

Salmon, on the other hand, exist outside of such context. One can draw or photograph a salmon without ever knowing what it is, but one can’t depict a Mohammed without referencing Islam.

Which is a roundabout way of saying, one has to go out of their way to create a visual depiction of Mohammed. To do that, one has to (1) know enough about Islam and Mohammed to even know what to depict, (2) presumably understand that there are few existing depictions of Mohammed because depiction is a cultural taboo; and (3) to label their drawing as specifically a depiction of Mohammed (so that someone else can't get confused and think it is just some random schmuck).

This is, so far as I understand it, a deliberate act of challenging a social norm. So when someone uses the defense of 'free speech,' someone else could counter with the claim that the depiction of Mohammed is by nature libelous/slanderous -- you are knowingly and willingly creating a false depiction (as all depictions are false) that defames or otherwise harms a group of people/beliefs and/or their reputation.

(Again assuming here that the Islamic character and the prohibition regarding his depiction are inseparable aspects of the same idea of “Mohammed.” I suppose one can compare this to how “Voldemort” must not be named because to name him is to cause deliberate harm/offense to any non-Muggles. Muggles will never find out about Voldemort unless some non-Muggle tells them about Voldemort, and even then, the Muggle will learn about Voldemort as “He-who-must-not-be-named” for reasons “x,y,z”. So for a Muggle to name Voldemort is to deliberately harm/offend the non-Muggle then).

Perhaps a better comparison and a better question would be as follows: A homeowner has put up a sign in front of their home saying "Do not draw pictures of QfwfQ." And what the heck is a "QfwfQ"? It is something the homeowner believes in, and inseparable from the belief in QfwfQ is the belief that QfwfQ does not like to be drawn (or it will punish the owner with twenty lashes when the owner meets the QfwfQ in an indeterminate future.) The homeowner has put that sign out as a special –and perhaps irrational-- precaution. An ordinary passerby would not think to draw pictures of the whatever it is, or even /why/ that rule might exit, and would generally ignore it.

However, there seem to be a group of people who, upon hearing of this sign and this rule and this person with their belief in QfwfQ, take it all as a provocation to challenge a rule simply because the rule exists. The homeowner, upon hearing this, reacts in a disproportionate manner. More people hear about this QfwfQ and his silly rules, and criticize the homeowner and his beliefs. The homeowner again reacts disproportionately, and this goes on in perpetuity until everyone has some idea of QfwfQ and the homeowner.

This continues until knowledge of QfwfQ and his silly rules reaches a hyper-logical culture that holds nothing sacred (not even things like “love” and “friendship,” unless there are explicit cost/benefit analyses supporting those ideas). To lampoon QfwfQ and to criticize it are permissible and in fact encouraged as a show of how tolerant and egalitarian this culture is (“Your QfwfQ is no better and no worse than anyone else’s sacred ideas!”).

This leads to what some may call a ‘culture war,’ which is what it seems to me is going on between the West’s caricatures of Mohammed, and the conservative Muslim reaction.

Now, if someone had spontaneously, halfway around the world, drawn a picture and called it QfwfQ, how would that homeowner have reacted? Perhaps the homeowner would request the artist's death. Perhaps, if on not being to explain the drawing as a deliberate aim on part of the artist to insult, defame, or otherwise comment on the homeowner's belief in QfwfQ, the homeowner might conclude that there was an act of divine inspiration, and the rules governing the depiction/non-depiction of QfwfQ will change. Except for in the case of divine inspiration, everyone else who drew a picture of QfwfQ would have done so having learned about QfwfQ from a sign that says "Don't draw QfwfQ"! So the act of their drawing would have been a deliberate rule-breaking, however arbitrary that rule is. Similarly, "Mohammed" does not exist outside of Islam, so in engaging "Mohammed," you are inadvertently also engaging Islam. There is no Jewish or Christian or Buddhist or American or British "Mohammed", though there may be American and European genii of salmon. It would be interesting to explore how people would react if Muslims were to say, "Do not depict the Islamic character of Moses, but feel free to depict Christian or Jewish variants of the same character." in specifying that the varient of "Moses" one had drawn was the Islamic version, would that be a deliberate offense then? This is worth exploring further because there is no explicit Quranic ruling forbidding the depiction of Mohammed (though one could make a case regarding 'though shalt not make false idols and fall into idoltry'): the “ban” regarding depiction comes from a particular set of interpretations of Islam. At prior times, Muslims have in fact created depictions of Mohammed, and onyl certain groups of Muslims get upset with the depiction of Mohammed -- other Muslims with other varients of belief don't care.

This is one of those philosophical arguments where the premise is so absurdist as to make it impossible to take seriously, but at the end of the day I'm far less inclined to kowtow to the British example than the Islam.

Restricting an image is, at it's heart, restricting thought. Restricting nerve impulses and the way they interact with the brain. The Islam restriction is, to an extent, silly in this day and age - there are no pictures of Mohammed, therefore there can be no pictures of Mohammad; You can't commit that 'sin' anymore than you can commit the sin of operating heavy machinery while deceased.

Unless I go to the trouble of labelling, you can't even know I tried

O

/|\ <-- May or may not be Stick Man representation of Mohammad in XKCD

/ \

We obtain data from pictures, and the blow to nature photographers, is hardly the issue. Think about the problems regarding ecologists, wildlife preservationists, biologists, fisherman, et al.

As a matter which impinges upon no impulse to do so past contrarily labeling stickmen, of course I can politely consent not to draw Mohammed. Not photographing Salmon causes active harm.

Jonnan

This would be an inappropriately strong response, and certainly you could be upset about it, but the proper response wouldn't be to go kicking random Muslims in the face. They didn't do it, and they probably don't even approve. But drawing pictures of Mohammed offends many Muslims, not just the ones who send death threats.

This is a very Eurocentric way of thinking (not saying its appropriate or inappropriate according to my values). I hope that after some careful thought it will be obvious to most LWers why this is so. Virtual cookie to the first one that gets it right.

It is necessary to draw pictures of Mohammed to show Muslims that violence and terrorism are inappropriate responses. I think the logic here is that a few people drew pictures of Mohammed, some radicals sent out death threats and burned embassies, and now we need to draw more pictures of Mohammed to convince Muslims not to do this. But it sounds pretty stupid when you put it in exactly those words. Say a random Christian kicked a Muslim in the face, and a few other Muslims got really angry, blew the whole thing out of proportion, and killed him and his entire family. This would be an inappropriately strong response, and certainly you could be upset about it, but the proper response wouldn't be to go kicking random Muslims in the face. They didn't do it, and they probably don't even approve. But drawing pictures of Mohammed offends many Muslims, not just the ones who send death threats.

There is another way to view this... And I think it would be fair to point out that the basic popular arguiment for "draw Mohammed day" is behind it. Suppose you are subject to a law you consider unfair. Suppose many other people are as well. If you have the possibility of public collective action that makes the consistent enforcement of such a law impossible. Why not take it?

You might quibble that drawing Mohamed isn't illegal (though in some countries hate speech laws can be used to ban it, since Koran burnings have been punished), but this is a bit irrelevant. If there exist widely known formalized rules with organizations dedicated to punishing offenders, what difference does it make if the rules are formalized in a code of law or religious book? Indeed the distinction between the two is no where near universal to begin with. And what difference does it make if they are enforced for everyone not by my government but another state's or perhaps by a non-governmental organization?

The organization enforcing the rule and the popular will to enforce it are likley to erode. If every week a cartoonist draws Mohamed will Muslims bother to riot every week? Humans are lazy. What was once outrages can simply through repetition become a unsightly "feature" of those accursed infidels, much smaller in emotional affect and its impact on punishing a specific offender. It might become part of a wider motivation to act against the West in a organized fashion ... but the West has historically been pretty good at using organized violence.

Now you might ask why do they consider the law unjust and worth fighting?

Simple. Arguing for the enforcement of the law is enemy attire. Having the law upheld gives the other group a "privilege" (a form of protection we don't have because we've given it up in the past) and indicates high status for them.

I think people are implicitly confusing two levels of thinking.

Level 1 thinking is "drawing Mohammed is bad", "people who get offended at drawings of Mohammed are silly", "we should punish them", etc. I think most people on this forum are beyond this sort of thinking.

Level 2 thinking is about status, evo-psych and harm minimization.

Problems occur when you mix the levels of thinking. You end up with "People who get offended at pictures of Mohammed are genuinely offended but they're still doing it for status reasons, so they're bad people and we should punish them by drawing lots of Mohammeds".

Think of Draw A Mohammed Day. It's the exact opposite of a good idea. Its organizers incur a status hit - they make America look like dicks - and they commit the massive strategic failure of letting their opponents frame the debate. And then on top of that they create some disutility by offending people.

A much more effective approach would be to think of a game-theoretic strategy which would win the status game (or at least stop others winning by ramping up the display of being offended).

I'll concede that some sort of game-theoretic "punishment" may be needed to disincentivize the "getting offended" behaviour. But that punishment doesn't have to be in the form of more offense. It can be to make the opponent look silly. It can be to portray him as a violent thug who flips out over nothing (though this is not to be preferred as it will tend to incur a "racism" status hit).

And once you've got a good strategy for playing the status game, you can then try and tune it to remove as much offense-disutility as possible.

The high-status vs low-status, demand vs request point is interesting. Is it possible that this is where the enmity begins? That a lot of people who wouldn't denigrate the Muslim faith normally end up calling it ridiculous because that's a good soldier, ditto for slippery slope and other arguments, and their real reason for joining draw a picture of Mohammed day is because they feel slighted by the way they were asked not to draw such pictures?

Another possibility is that such an event functions as a move in some game of conflict between them; doing something that is easily characterised as harmless fun which necessitates (what can be easily characterised as) a huge over-reaction is a powerful move.

Also, I really like the last part of your footnote, about consequentialist morality keeping disagreements honest and empirical.

It seems to me that the people who are offended at requests that they modify their behavior so as not to be offensive might also be able to self-engineer so they wouldn't feel so strongly about the matter. Do they have any obligation to do so?

This means that ever admitting you were offensive is a huge status hit implying you are some combination of callous, ignorant, and racist. Sometimes people may be willing to take this status hit, especially if upon reflection they believe they really were in the wrong, but since most people's actions seem reasonable to themselves they will not be willing to accept a narrative where they're the villain.

More likely, they will try to advance an alternative interpretation, in which their actions were not legitimately offensive or in which they have the "right" to take such actions. Such an interpretation may cast the offended party as a villain, trying to gain power and control by pretending to be offended, or unduly restricting the free speech of others.

Sociopathy 101: the best response in this situation is usually to admit wrongdoing. If you try and defend yourself, you'll just dig yourself into a bigger hole. ("I'm not a racist, I just think ... " - we all know how that sounds). You don't need to actually believe you've done wrong, but make it at least sound like you've realised the error of your ways.

You still need to avoid a big status hit, so don't grovel. You should stay "on-message", and your message should be on the lines of "I'm sorry, I didn't realise I was being offensive, but I accept that I was. Thanks for helping me to be less prejudiced. I'm going to try and change in future". How you deliver this message depends on context - if you're not a public figure it's not like you can just hold a press conference, so you'll probably have to deliver this message to individuals, in which case you'll have to make it sound more personalised and natural.

Accepting a small status hit in this way can actually be high status. This strategy also works in the more general situation whenever someone accuses you of being X, where X is some negative trait. Ignore the overwhelming desire to explain why you are not X, with reasons. It will just make it sound like you don't "get it". Even if the criticism is totally invalid, the correct response is to accept it and promise to change.

Exceptions: if you think people will agree that your infraction was minor and the other party is overreacting (especially if they keep throwing new accusations at you after you accept the first), you can (and should) stand up for yourself.

If your infraction was very serious, or you've overused this tactic to the point people realise your tricks, it can backfire badly. I don't really know what to advise you in this situation, but you might need to accept some more-than-token punishment.

I think most decent people would be willing to go to some trouble to avoid taking pictures of salmon if British people politely asked this favor of them. If someone deliberately took lots of salmon photos and waved them in the Brits' faces, I think it would be fair to say ey isn't a nice person.

See, this is exactly where your analogy falls apart for me. The Muslims to whose behavior people are objecting in "everybody draw Muhammad" are not politely asking for the favor of avoiding creating images of Muhammad in future. They are approaching creators of existing images with serious threats of violence. In situations like the South Park incident, it seems quite distinct from the infliction of psychic pain in that - well, to blow another hole in the salmon analogy, does it mean that Americans should stop making television programs about how to cook salmon? So... yeah.

In the salmon example, I would consider it inappropriate to take as many pictures of salmon as possible and try to get them shown to as many Brits as possible. I wouldn't, however, ask a business selling fish in America to not use salmon in their advertisements. In other words, the negative utility of creating such images is non-negligible, but it is small enough that it can be outweighed by other factors. In the case of Mohammad, however, I have never in my entire life been in a situation where I had a particular need to depict Mohammad visually. Most depictions presently seem like deliberate attempts to antagonize Muslims, which I consider immoral. People do it, of course, because of in-group-outgroup behavior. If the alien arrived in England in 1812, Americans would be making as many photographs of salmon as they could.

It seems to me that the right way to try to decide many political questions, and this is a political question, is to look at it in terms of whether it allows the society using that rule to correct its errors. If Islam is both factually and morally flawed as all other human institutions are, then preventing a specific type of criticism, namely criticism involving pictures of Mohammed, will make correcting the errors of Islam more difficult. There may be other errors involved that are more difficult to correct, like the error that the appropriate response to somebody acting offended at squiggles of ink on a page is to ban the ink squiggles concerned. Finally, I don't buy consequentialism because what counts as a consequence is ambiguous and depends on your theories about the world. For example, I would count damaging our error correcting institutions as a serious consequence of a ban, legal or social, on drawing Mohammed, you would not. So consequentialism doesn't solve the problem, it's just a way of sweeping the real problem under the "consequence carpet".

My basic issue is that an outright Machiavellian lie and a true, real, cast-in-stone kind of amount of unchangeable felt pain are not the only two options.

Imagine that you are untrained but largely healthy, and forced (or strongly encouraged) to run 2-3km. It can be pretty painful, having to stop to pant for breath 10 times and so on, but how many repetitions it takes (with two days of rest) to make it okay? 20? 30 ? It is possible to get pretty quickly to a state where it does not hurt anymore, in mere months. Also factor in how the psychological pain can be different if you are for example doing it alone, or you are in a group of friends and a great trainer, great leader excellently motivating you all the way. The difference can be huge. In those circumstances, you get even quicker to the level where the whole thing is not negative sum, i.e. even before you get fit enough to enjoy it already the disutility of the panting etc. is small enough to offset by the positive emotional stuff like pride or togetherness.

Let's suppose emotional reactions to offense work the same way.

In such a world, it would be reasonable for the offense-giver to say society should be shaped so that everybody gets a certain amount of thick-skin training and then we all don't have to tiptoe around each other.

Your solution involves some kind of etiquette-and-sensitivity training. That is probably what isolated stoppages of offensive behavior lead to if organized with any sense of social efficiency. The question is, why not also desensitization training?

So why don't most people extend the same sympathy they would give Brits who don't like pictures of salmon, to Muslims who don't like pictures of Mohammed?

1. Because people who take their religion and its taboos seriously are low status in the West.

2. Mind projection fallacy: We assume most Muslims don't take their religion seriously like most Christians or Jews don't. We see them using a technicality to claim offence where there is none in order to control us or display dominance over our tribe.

3. They aren't part of our tribe. And worse they belong to a culturally powerful, demographically ascendant and politically threatening tribe.

Another thing I find interesting is that such a argument would never be set up using the example of piss Christ or a desecrated Talmud. I think the reason such a argument is employed using the Muslims as an example is because we quietly accept that Christians, Hindus, Shintoist and Jews are very unlikely to retaliate with violence compared to Muslims. We hide this so it seems that we are arguing about general principles but we are actually arguing about this specific situation based on appeal to consequences.

Note: I don't think this is the case with this LW article but I do think it is the case with many other ones available in the media and on-line.

PS: Excellent article! The debate it provoked is very much intriguing. Upvoted.

When someone writes a story where all the sympathetic and interesting characters are male, it is considered offensive to women.

I'm sure you don't actually have any confusion here, but I feel compelled to point out that you kind of did that thing where you only expect a member of Minority X to be offended by *ism against Minority X, where in fact everyone should join in sharing the offense caused by it, because that's just part of being a decent person.

(I probably wouldn't have mentioned this but for the fact that we're having a meta-discussion about how offense works!)

Hm. Interesting piece. I'm partially sold, but not on this: 'Further, I see little difference between how a Muslim "chooses" to get upset at disrespect to Mohammed, and how a Westerner might "choose" to get upset if you called eir mother a whore.'

I'm pretty content to call that a sort of choice, especially if you make it a fair comparison, ie a general remark not victimising one person that all mothers are whores. After all, there’s still a pretty big difference between that (or even the rather more inflammatory ‘all Western mothers are whores’), and (a sincerely offensive) ‘your mother is a whore’. One is basically bullying someone, assuming they’re not in a position to hurt you back equally; the other is the sort of casual prejudice that (cough) some of us discourage but don’t actually seek to ban.

On top of that, there’s a significant difference between drawing a picture of someone and drawing a picture of someone in a way calculated to piss people who like them off. In the Muhammad cartoons furore, it initially seemed to be Muslims who were trying to elide the difference – specifically by positioning the latter as very bad and the first as (almost) equally bad. If drawing the former is a political action against such a sentiment (or just an aesthetic statement, standing against those who’d repress a portrayal of something they thought was beautiful), then I hardly think it’s a reprehensible one. Here I think actual 'whores' - or rather porn stars - give a better analogy. Their portrayals offend a lot of people, but few sensible people think there’s a good argument for banning them a) because overturning our anti-censorship sentiments should require a pretty strong burden of evidence and b) because a lot of people very much like them, and why should they be deprived? After all, the naysayers choose not to look at something that exists, but the fans can’t do the reverse.

Lastly, (and leastly), there’s the question of accuracy of the original criticism. If your mother does sell herself for money, then, while victimising you for it is still pretty unpleasant, we would be more inclined to tolerate borderline cases of people pointing it out in a potentially offensive way than if it weren't true. But most of the times when someone’s mum is aggressively called a whore, she probably isn’t. On the other hand, by most accounts Muhammad was a brutal sex pest, who most likely would have ordered suicide bombings had the technology existed for him to do so.

An interesting comment by Yvain but the thought experiment seems to not reflect the virulence of the meme involved. When I heard of the reaction of the Muslims to the Muhammed image I thought of the mindset behind shouting "Banzai" intensified by generations of feelings of inferiority and thousands of times more people. Muslims appear to me to be extremely unfortunate people. Their societies have been plagued by a centuries long irrationality as powerful as the Sendai earthquake in its cumulative effect but of course not as noticeable because it is stretched out over time.

And if tomorrow I tried to "choose" to become angry every time someone showed me a picture of a salmon, I couldn't do it - I could pretend to be angry, but I couldn't make myself feel genuine rage.

Actually, I think you're wrong about this. Pretending to be angry, offended, or sad has the effect of making one angry, offended, or sad, in my experience. Not as much as you pretend, at least at first, but it really can become genuine, even if you actually don't care about salmon at all, as long as you choose to pretend convincingly enough.

[Edit: ...but I see Vladimir M has already made this point, better.]

But drawing pictures of Mohammed offends many Muslims, not just the ones who send death threats.

I'm not sure that this is clear to most non-Muslims. In fact, I think that if you took a survey of Westerner non-Muslims, you'd find that they expect that Muslims more likely to (actually rather than ritually) be offended by such pictures are also more likely to send death threats.

Timely related issue.

The confusion here is that the whole problem isn't about humans but cultures. There are two opposing meta-beings with mutually exclusive goals. A Qur'an-minimizer and a Bible-minimizer will eventually go to war.

Are the effects of the alien practical joke curable?

A bit of a side note, but from what I've read/heard from Muslims, what they object to isn't the drawing of Mohammed per se, but the mocking of Mohammed. I've also heard some express annoyance that the media would misrepresent their view as if the problem was a religious edict against drawing Mohammed and not the mocking (I don't think the media represents the views of Muslims any more faithfully than it represents the views of Singularitarians).

If you're American want a better idea of how Muslims feel, imagine if for some reason Chinese people had a national "draw Martin Luther King with big lips eating watermelon" day. Would the reactions be very different?

The premise of your essay is deeply flawed... SOME Muslims are offended by depictions of Mohammed. OTHERS are not and see a looser standard as part of a generally more tolerant and functional environment in which to worship.

So if you were to refine your premise a bit and more strongly acknowledge the struggles WITHIN Islam, the decision of how the "rest of the world" ought to behave starts to get rather murky. Cultural is probably way more permeable than we all at first imagine.

I'm afraid you've tripped up on a stereotype whereby "Muslims" march lock-step in antipathy to "everyone else"

Islam isn't a country, which, ISTM, kills the comparison.