Offense and Offensiveness

A Philosophical Account

Andrew Sneddon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367546670
• eBook ISBN: 9781000218244
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

This book offers a comprehensive study of the nature and significance of offense and offensiveness. It incorporates insights from moral philosophy and moral psychology to rationally reconstruct our ordinary ideas and assumptions about these notions.

When someone claims that something is offensive, others are supposed to listen. Why? What is it for something to be offensive? Likewise, it's supposed to matter if someone claims to have been offended. Is this correct? In this book, Andrew Sneddon argues that we should think of offense as a moralized bad feeling. He explains offensiveness in terms of symbolic value. We tend to give claims of both offense and offensiveness more credence than they deserve. While it is in principle possible for there to be genuine moral problems of offense and offensiveness, we should expect such problems to be rare.

Offense and Offensiveness: A Philosophical Account will be of interest to scholars and students working in moral philosophy and moral psychology.

1 Introduction

We have all heard someone claim that an action or remark or event is offensive. Odds are that either you have been offended or you have offended someone else; probably both. These are not exotic phenomena. But how much do we really understand the nature and significance of offense and offensiveness? Sometimes familiarity obscures the extent of our lack of understanding. We neglect to think about that which seems so obvious. I think that this is the case with offense and offensiveness. This book is an attempt to shed some light on these topics.

It is not just that these topics have not received much explicit study (which they haven’t).¹ It is that our own descriptions of things as offensive, our claims to have been offended, and our shared sense of the appropriate reactions to offense and offensiveness exhibit such diversity that we might well wonder whether we aren’t quite confused about the topics. To get a sense of our muddle, let’s consider some examples. What follows are real-world applications of the idea of offensiveness; I shall turn to offense in Chapter 2.

First, if you are like me, you are very familiar with content advisories on television. Where I live these run before and during programs. Their job is to delineate certain sorts of content, thereby giving viewers a chance to prepare to experience the content in question or to avoid it altogether. City-TV in Canada uses a variety of content messages, two of which mention offensiveness. Here’s one: “This program contains adult content and may be offensive to some viewers. Viewer discretion is advised.” The other is similar but subtly different: “The following program contains content and language that some viewers may find offensive. Viewer discretion is advised.” There are various implications here. If we take the advisories literally, one implication is that offensiveness varies with individual perception. Things are not offensive in themselves, but rather are offensive in an audience-relative way. Another is that offensiveness is not very important.² It’s worth mentioning in advance to people, but it is not worth the effort to avoid producing or disseminating offensive material. After all, the advisories are for programs that are on the air at that very time. Viewers are directed to take their exposure to offensiveness as their own responsibility. As far as I can tell, viewers generally agree with this: there is no groundswell of support in Canada to remove this sort of putatively offensive material from the air.

The City-TV advisories operate in a broadcast framework governed by the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC). The CBSC classifies programs according to age/maturity of the audience and accordingly sets guidelines for appropriate content for each age group. Some of these guidelines make explicit reference to offensiveness. “Offensive language” is prohibited in programs for children under eight years of age. In programs for children between 8 and 12, “infrequent use of language which may be considered by some to be socially offensive” is allowed provided that it serves story or character development. In programs deemed appropriate for all age groups, “offensive slang” is allowed.³ These guidelines are underwritten by a CBSC code of ethics. This requires that programs for adult audiences—that is, for people over 18—with “offensive language” be shown between 9 pm and 6 am. Importantly, Clause 11 of this code addresses content advisories, such as the one from City-TV. Besides nudity and sex, such advisories are needed for programs containing “coarse or offensive language, or other material susceptible of offending viewers.”⁴

There are several things notable about the CBSC use of “offensive.” By the standards of the CBSC, offensiveness is primarily but not solely a matter of what shows up in language. The first City-TV content advisory is neutral on this: it is content, whether spoken or depicted, that might be found offensive. The second one distinguishes content from language, but I take it that the boundary is not a rigid one. This advisory does not prioritize either language or content. The CBSC differs from City-TV on the audience relativity of offensiveness as well. Four of the five references to offensiveness are unqualified. The fifth refers to “socially offensive” language. I must confess that I do not know what this means. We are all part of one society of Canadian television viewers, presumably, for CBSC purposes, so this qualifier does not mark off some groups from others. My best interpretation is that this means that, to the CBSC, offensiveness is not very important.⁵ It is a matter of social custom perhaps, but not part of a significant code governing right and wrong. The view might be that offensiveness is governed by etiquette but not morality. Still, the spirit of the CBSC approach is that offensiveness is sufficiently important for the Canadian broadcast industry to have a code of rules about it. Finally, the CBSC equates offensiveness with susceptibility of offense. Just how we should understand “susceptible” in the code is not specified. The general meaning is something like “tending to cause,” in which case, for the CBSC, the offensive is that by which people tend to be offended. While there might well be something correct here, we shall see that it is a deeply problematic idea.

Wikipedia also has a sort of content advisory: a “disclaimer,” as they call it.⁶ It notes both language and imagery as potentially offensive. More explicitly, its first warning points out that some Wikipedia articles address as topics “words or language that are considered profane, vulgar, or offensive by some readers.” The disclaimer also addresses images and videos, “some of which are considered objectionable or offensive by some readers.” Violence, sex, and human anatomy are offered as examples. Understandably, the Wikipedia disclaimer works differently from Canadian television content advisories. Readers are not required to read or acknowledge the disclaimer before reading Wikipedia articles. Wikipedia considered using a ratings scheme for articles, but the proposal was rejected.⁷

Wikipedia has guides for writers, and some of these address the offensive. There is a content guideline concerning “offensive material” for writers.⁸ Such material is countenanced only when its omission would result in a less informative or accurate article. The content guideline addresses the use of “a vulgarity or obscenity” and “a vulgar or explicit image or verbal expression” as examples of offensive material. There is no extended treatment of just what offensiveness amounts to. There is also a set of style guidelines for images.⁹ It is here that Wikipedia comes closest to spelling out a standard of offensiveness. The thing for article writers to consider is a putatively typical Wikipedia reader:

Here a “typical Wikipedia reader” is defined by the cultural beliefs of the majority of the website readers (not active editors) that are literate in an article’s language. Clarifying this viewpoint may require a broad spectrum of input and discussion, as cultural views can differ widely.¹⁰

Writers must determine whether material would be “vulgar or obscene” for such a reader. Nevertheless, this seems to be a more sophisticated version of the idea used by the CBSC: that which would tend to offend a typical Wikipedia reader is what is offensive and hence worth taking extra care with.

The Wikipedia disclaimer and guides suggest a stance between City- TV and the CBSC: offensiveness is worth taking seriously, to the extent of avoiding certain uses of imagery and language, but it’s not worth much regulation nor the routine exposure of readers to ratings or other sorts of advisory. Offensiveness is sort of audience-relative since the standard to consider is the cultural beliefs of the majority of Wikipedia readers. However, it is not taken to be altogether audience-relative. What is offensive to a minority, for instance, is not something that the Wikipedia guidelines prohibit or warn against. For Wikipedia, the offensive is neither completely unproblematic nor altogether worth avoiding.

It is not difficult to find examples of people treating the offensive as a more serious consideration than what we have seen so far. The University of British Columbia has a First Nations and Indigenous Studies Program. However, the experience of instructors and students was that people often came into the program with scant understanding of Canadian and North American First Nations and Indigenous cultures and issues. This lack of knowledge undermined the ability of the program to offer appropriately deep studies. To address this, the program developed a resource to get people up to speed, called Indigenous Foundations.¹¹ This resource has a statement about language usage.¹² The Foundation notes that “A term that might be acceptable to some might be offensive to others.”¹³ This is an ambiguous sentence. If we interpret it in terms of individual taste, it seems not to be about much important: what some like will be disliked by others. But if we focus instead on the contrast between “acceptable” and “offensive,” something much more serious is intimated. The offensive is, somehow and to some extent, unacceptable. This treats the offensive, at least as found in language, as a more serious topic than do the behaviour and stances of City-TV, the CBSC, and Wikipedia. That the Foundation is inclined to something like this more serious interpretation is suggested by their subsequent discussion of the power dynamics and the opportunities for both damage and empowerment found in language. Like our prior examples, the Indigenous Foundations statement about terminology implicitly treats the offensive as relative to audiences.

There is an important difference in the domains associated with offensiveness among our examples. Wikipedia focuses on vulgarity, obscenity, violence, sex, and the human body. By contrast, the Indigenous Foundations statement focuses on terminology for referring to First Nations peoples, cultures, and issues. For example, they offer definitions and usage suggestions for such terms as “native,” “Peoples,” and “Indigenous” itself. The CBSC code is silent; presumably the “socially offensive” can include both vulgarity and cultural issues. The link between cultural sensitivity and problematic offensiveness can be explicitly found in the next example. Vice media published an article about “culturally offensive” outfits seen at the 2016 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival (Serrell 2016). “Culturally offensive” wearing of clothing happens when an outfit or clothing item that is part of a specific culture is worn by a person who has no particular link to that culture. Examples from the article include Caucasians wearing a Native American headdress and an African Dashiki (respectively). Kwele Serrell, the writer, begins by pleading, “Come on, guys. It’s 2016. After going over this many, many, many times, we’ve all decided that wearing someone else’s culture as a fashion statement shouldn’t be a thing anymore.”¹⁴ The broader background for the Coachella instances is rising consciousness about cultural appropriation in general, especially when members of a majority culture use culturally specific items or practices from a minority culture. Serrell’s exhortation that this “shouldn’t be a thing” amounts to a claim that culturally offensive fashion is unacceptable. Moreover, there is no built-in audience relativity here: offensiveness is portrayed as unacceptable, full stop. This is the most stringent implicit understanding of the significance of the offensive that we have seen so far.

If the offensive is sometimes thought to be outright unacceptable, then it would not be surprising to learn that official procedures for handling it, including but not limited to those deployed by the state through law and law enforcement, are sometimes considered. Our next examples show exactly this. In April 2016, a man in Alberta posted protests against the provincial and federal governments on his truck. With regard to Premier Rachel Notley and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the messages read “Next elections: Ditch the Bitch! Punt the Cunt!” (Rieger 2016).¹⁵ The RCMP, prompted by 660 News, commented: “Things that are offensive are not necessarily criminal . . .”¹⁶ This is an important distinction. The RCMP remark is telling, as it leaves open the possibility of the offensive being subject to regulation via the law and police enforcement: they might be treated by the law as criminal, sometimes. It is also important to note the at least one member of the press thought that this might be something that would be prohibited by Canadian law.

Other examples present cases which feature actual regulation by law or other formal regulations. For instance, Canada has a Human Rights Commission, the job of whic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• 1 Introduction
• PART I The Nature and Significance of Offense
• PART II The Nature and Significance of Offensiveness
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index