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> You shouldn't expect other people to feel the same way as you either. You can't decide how offended someone should be, as that's their own reaction to you. It

> You shouldn't expect other people to feel the same way as you either. You can't decide how offended someone should be, as that's their own reaction to you. It might seem extreme or overboard to you, but how much do you know about them to judge that? That's a difficult argument. It's totally fine to physically defend yourself if you're being attacked, and what constitutes an attack is obviously perfectly subjective, but we do very much have a common understanding of what it means. Whether someone feels attacked is of importance to themselves, but generally of little importance to how we judge their actions. The same is true for being offended. While people don't control what they feel, I don't believe it's helpful to reach for complete relativism and say "all feelings are valid, therefore you must act a certain way". It's also not what anybody seems to actually believe. When I trollishly ask them to stop doing something because it offends me, they respond that I'm lying (which I usually am, but they cannot know, they cannot judge that, as you wrote). It seems "do it, because they feel offended" is only the motto when they are sympathetic to the person claiming to be offended. Moral arguments that are based on personal sympathy are pretty problematic.

ljm 6y ago
I'm not really sure what you're trying to say; I can see where you're coming from but I'm not sure how you draw your conclusion. > "all feelings are valid, therefore you must act a certain way" Thank you for proving my main post under this topic correct, where I state that people will choose what they hear and respond to that, and not respond to what was actually said. Total failure of communication.
- luckylion 6y ago
  > I'm not really sure what you're trying to say; I can see where you're coming from but I'm not sure how you draw your conclusion. I'm trying to say that while I do believe we should try to understand whether and why someone feels offended or attacked, we shouldn't use them feeling attacked or offended (or claiming to) as a strict guideline for actions, and we should judge their actions and reactions not based on whether they felt offended, but on whether a reasonable person would have felt offended, much like we do for e.g. self-defense. > Total failure of communication. That may be a total failure in the way I'm trying to communicate. I didn't mean to suggest that that's what you said, I exaggerated what I understood your position to be to make it obvious why I believe it to be a difficult approach. When we allow subjective things like feeling offended to be used as general facts, we're going to end up with two opposing parties both claiming offense - if there was no opposition, there would be no issue. Once we're there, we are back to square one: who is right in being offended? If we then say "well, I like that person, so they are right", we really don't need to talk about the whole thing, because sympathy-based decision making has always been a thing and everybody understands how it works, and very few people would claim any sort of fairness or system (after all, we cannot deduce anything from any previous decision, as the decisions depend on who the parties are, not on the issue itself). If we instead try to find some general rule, we can just skip the whole "I'm feeling offended" stage and proceed directly to this one, that is, to the claim "this is offensive", which implies "a reasonable person will agree, it's not about my feelings, my tribal membership, my background, my experiences and personal convictions".

ljm 6y ago

I'm not really sure what you're trying to say; I can see where you're coming from but I'm not sure how you draw your conclusion. > "all feelings are valid, therefore you must act a certain way" Thank you for proving my main post under this topic correct, where I state that people will choose what they hear and respond to that, and not respond to what was actually said. Total failure of communication.

luckylion 6y ago
> I'm not really sure what you're trying to say; I can see where you're coming from but I'm not sure how you draw your conclusion. I'm trying to say that while I do believe we should try to understand whether and why someone feels offended or attacked, we shouldn't use them feeling attacked or offended (or claiming to) as a strict guideline for actions, and we should judge their actions and reactions not based on whether they felt offended, but on whether a reasonable person would have felt offended, much like we do for e.g. self-defense. > Total failure of communication. That may be a total failure in the way I'm trying to communicate. I didn't mean to suggest that that's what you said, I exaggerated what I understood your position to be to make it obvious why I believe it to be a difficult approach. When we allow subjective things like feeling offended to be used as general facts, we're going to end up with two opposing parties both claiming offense - if there was no opposition, there would be no issue. Once we're there, we are back to square one: who is right in being offended? If we then say "well, I like that person, so they are right", we really don't need to talk about the whole thing, because sympathy-based decision making has always been a thing and everybody understands how it works, and very few people would claim any sort of fairness or system (after all, we cannot deduce anything from any previous decision, as the decisions depend on who the parties are, not on the issue itself). If we instead try to find some general rule, we can just skip the whole "I'm feeling offended" stage and proceed directly to this one, that is, to the claim "this is offensive", which implies "a reasonable person will agree, it's not about my feelings, my tribal membership, my background, my experiences and personal convictions".