Taking offense: An emotion reconsidered

Abstract

A stranger in the pub bumps into you spilling your drink and then doesn't apologize, or someone pushes past to grab a seat on the train. A colleague makes a dismissive remark about your work in front of your boss. A man catcalls a woman on the street, or wears a T-shirt declaring, “keep calm, watch lesbians.” One reaction to affronts like these is to take offense. Philosophers have said a great deal about causing offense, especially whether we should punish or prevent it, but very little about what is to take offense, let alone whether we should.11 To illustrate, see, for example, Joel Feinberg's influential discussion in legal philosophy. Joel Feinberg, The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law: Volume 2: Offence to Others (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). For more recent discussions, see, for example, George Sher, “Debate: Taking Offense,” Journal of Political Philosophy 28, no. 3 (September 2020): 332–42; Jeremy Waldron, “Debate: Taking Offense: A Reply,” Journal of Political Philosophy 28, no. 3 (September 2020): 343–52. See also the philosophical work on slurs, for example, Luvell Anderson and Ernie Lepore, “Slurring Words,” Noûs 47, no. 1 (March 2013): 25–48; Mihaela Popa-Wyatt and Jeremy L. Wyatt, “Slurs, roles and power,” Philosophical Studies 17 (2018): 2879–2906. Hitherto, the focus of moral and legal philosophy has tended to be the offender, not the offended. Meanwhile, taking offense has captured popular attention, with a multitude of books and opinion pieces condemning “oversensitive millennials” and “generation snowflake.” 22 Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, “Microaggression and Moral Cultures,” Comparative Sociology 13, no. 6 (2014): 692–726; Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, “The New Millennial ‘Morality’: Highly Sensitive and Easily Offended,” Time, November 17, 2015, https://time.com/4115439/student-protests-microaggressions/; Claire Fox, I Find That Offensive! (London: Biteback Publishing, 2016); Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind (London: Penguin Books, 2018). There, however, being offended tends to be characterized, I will argue, mistakenly, as a kind of emotional upset, borne of oversensitivity or emotional fragility, or as a retreat into victimhood.33 As illustrations of this victimhood or emotionally upset interpretation of offense-taking, see most notably Campbell and Manning, “Microaggression and Moral Cultures”; Campbell and Manning, “The New Millennial ‘Morality.’” As they describe, “A culture of victimhood is one characterized by concern with status and sensitivity to slight combined with a heavy reliance on third parties.” Campbell and Manning, “Microaggression and Moral Cultures,” 715. In places where we find such a culture, they suggest, “personal discomfort looms large” in policymaking. Campbell and Manning, “Microaggression and Moral Cultures,” 716. Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, discussing offense-taking on university campuses, declare: “the current movement is largely about emotional well-being… it presumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche, and therefore elevates the goal of protecting students from psychological harm.” Lukianoff and Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind. Within philosophy, see Sher's characterization of offense as hurt feelings. Sher, “Debate: Taking Offense.” One thing that goes wrong in these contemporary debates is that the anger of marginalized groups is misread as “mere” offense. Another—and this article's target—is that offense is mischaracterized. In this article, I offer an analysis of what it is to take offense and what doing so is like, on which a more nuanced and positive appraisal of this emotion becomes possible as compared to its popular reputation. First, I survey the shortfalls of the limited discussion of offense by philosophers, before proposing an alternative analysis. Second, I distinguish offense from nearby emotions, like anger, disgust, and pride. Third, I examine the implications not only for how we conceptualize offense but also how we regard those who take it. On my account, offense tends to be a smaller-scale, more everyday emotion than those making claims about its threats to society suppose, and one ripe for a moral reassessment. While offense sometimes appears excessive, that is likely only in limited cases: namely, those requiring symbolic withdrawal or proxy forms of estrangement. Even there, the appearance of excess may be illusory, with the grander gestures of offense appropriate given the distance between the offended and offending parties. Furthermore, on my account, to take offense is to resist affronts to one's standing, rather than merely a reflection of hurt feelings. Concluding, I sketch a defense of this resistance as a sometimes valuable response to injustice. Taking offense has received relatively little attention from philosophers. When analyzing slurs, philosophers of language consider the pattern of our offense taking, such as how it varies when differently situated individuals use the same slur; when a slur is mentioned rather than used; or when presented with the negation of a slurring sentence.44 See, for example, Popa-Wyatt and Wyatt, “Slurs, roles and power”; Anderson and Lepore, “Slurring Words.” However, their interest is in conceptualizing slurs, not analyzing offense, and the resulting notion of offense is very thin. To illustrate, on one representative account offense is defined as the “achieved effect on audience members” of a slur, “determined in part by their beliefs and values.”55 Popa-Wyatt and Wyatt, “Slurs, roles and power,” 2881; adapted from Christopher Hom, “A Puzzle About Pejoratives,” Philosophical Studies 159 (2012): 397. Such depictions tell us little about what it is like to be offended. Likely the most influential account of offense is that offered by Joel Feinberg. On what he terms a strict and narrow sense, offense is any disliked state that I attribute to another's “wrongful conduct” and for which I resent them.66 Feinberg, The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law, 2. This definition incorporates a wide range of disliked states including disgust, affronts to one's senses, shame, and annoyance.77 Ibid., 1–2, 10–14. Feinberg also offers an account of “profound offense” that is mostly a mix of moral outrage and disgust at sanctity violations; again, then, an account of offense that is disunified and diverse. Feinberg, The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law, 50–96. To illustrate, take the breadth of Feinberg's central examples: a series of untoward experiences you might have while traveling on a bus, such as someone masturbating next to you; eating a disgusting picnic; or running their fingernails down a slate tablet.88 Ibid., 10–14. On a plausible reading of Feinberg, his “offense” is taken at nuisances a person cannot easily ignore.99 Robert Simpson characterizes Feinberg's offense as “all subharmful mental states in which the agent's attention is frustratingly ‘captured.’” Robert Simpson, “Regulating Offence, Nurturing Offence,” Politics, Philosophy & Economics 17, no. 3 (2018): 237. However, his is not a depiction of any discrete emotion, nor does it describe what it is like to be offended; rather, any disliked state counts. Given Feinberg's aim, that breadth ought not be surprising; he examines what conduct a state might regulate beyond that which causes harm. Yet, there is a distinct way that to be offended feels as compared to being annoyed or disgusted. That distinct notion of offense, which I seek to capture below, should be familiar both from our ordinary experience in navigating social relations and from popular discussions of a “culture of taking offence.” Continuing with those who fail to see offense as distinct, some conflate it with anger.1010 For example, see Rini's “How to Take Offence,”which, despite its title, discusses anger. Regina Rini, “How to Take Offence: Responding to Microaggression,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 4, no. 3 (2018): 332–51. Martha Nussbaum's notion of status-focused anger may appear like offense if stripped of desiring payback. Martha Nussbaum, Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016): 17–21. However, one task of this article is to show that this would be misleading; indeed, in important respects offense is closer to contempt and pride. Another conflation sometimes found in popular discussion, often implicitly, is to regard being offended as a form of harm, as an injury to feeling or damaging self-esteem.1111 For examples, see Note 3. There are philosophical examples too: while legal philosophers often define offense in contrast to harm, John Shand characterizes “personal offense” as “feeling justifiably hurt” John Shand, “Taking Offence,” Analysis 70, no. 4 (2010): 704. Sher similarly characterizes offense as hurt feelings. Sher, “Ðebate: Taking Offense.” However, while offensive conduct might cause such harm that does not suffice as an account of what offense is. For a start, it fails to capture all the relevant instances. I am not harmed when someone fails to shake my outstretched hand or makes a mildly sexist joke, yet I could be offended.1212 Feinberg also describes offense as “a different sort of thing,” and explains that his bus cases are not instances of harm. Feinberg, The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law, 3, 14. Indeed, I think it is possible that sometimes taking offense, when others back you up on the rightness of your offense, can even be pleasant: feeling like an affirmation of one's standing, rather than constituting a harm. What, then, is it like to take offense? I start by offering three sets of cases likely to provoke offense. What they all share, despite their varying levels of seriousness, is that they are affronts to social standing: the standing we deem ourselves due, and that we expect to be respected, recognized, or expressed through our social interactions.1313 This is distinct from moral standing, in being a member of the moral community, and political standing, such as eligibility to vote. As paradigm cases of the first set, where our standing is disregarded, consider a stranger who queue jumps in front of you, who pushes past you to grab the last seat on the train, or who spills your drink without apologizing. Or take a colleague who repeatedly fails to remember your name. In these cases, someone disregards some ordinary token of respect or consideration that we deem ourselves due. Often, such instances cause offense by virtue of violating a widely held social norm of what counts as respectful, polite, or appropriate behavior, expected from all.1414 On how social norms let us communicate respect, or its absence, see Cheshire Calhoun, “The Virtue of Civility,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 29, no. 3 (2000): 251–75. For the second set of cases, of direct attacks on one's social standing, consider the man who wears a T-shirt declaring, “keep calm and watch lesbians!” waves a banner declaring, “iron my shirt,” at a rally for a female politician, burns an American flag, or defaces a bible.1515 “Iron my shirts” was a sign held up against Hillary Clinton; see Diana B. Carlin and Kelly L. Winfrey, “Have You Come a Long Way, Baby? Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, and Sexism in 2008 Campaign Coverage,” Communication Studies 60, no. 4 (2009): 326–43. Some of these Feinberg would label profound offenses, including flag burning and, perhaps, bible defacing. Feinberg, The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law, 50–96. However, as I shortly discuss, for offense I take these acts to be felt as personal, not impersonal as Feinberg proposes: personal both in that only those individuals who incorporate the affronted nationality or religion as a valued attribute of themselves could take offense, and that the act is then experienced as a strike against oneself/one's group. Alternatively, suppose a colleague reveals an embarrassing detail about your personal life to your boss. The third set is cases where someone dismisses another or mistakes her social standing in a downward direction: where person A assumes that person B has less standing than B takes herself to have, or less than B's situation would usually entail that B be attributed, were it not for some confounding feature. To illustrate, suppose that an estate agent talks only to the male companion of his female customer, even though she is the one selling the house. Or take Rebecca Solnit's case of a woman having her own book explained—“mansplained”—to her.1616 Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014), 8–28. Epistemic injustices are often affronts of this kind. See Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). A further case would be when academics or doctors who aren't white and/or aren't male often find that their title isn't used, where it is for their white male colleagues.1717 For a study amongst doctors, see Files et al., which found that titles were used in 95% of cases when the introducer was female and the speaker male, and only in 49.2% of cases with a male introducer and female speaker. Julia A. Files et al., “Speaker introductions at internal medicine grand rounds: Forms of address reveal gender bias,” Journal of Women's Health 26, no. 5 (2017): 413–19. Given the nature of the mistakes made, these instances often amount to indirect attacks on a person's standing.1818 Microaggressions, like the titles case, are paradigmatic examples. See Chester Pierce who coined this term, for instance, Chester Pierce, “Stress Analogs of Racism and Sexism,” in Mental Health, Racism and Sexism, eds. Charles V. Willie, Patricia Perri Rieker, Bernand M. Kramer, Bertram S. Brown (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995). On their general relevance for social standing, see Emily McTernan, “Microaggressions, Equality, and Social Practices,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 26, no. 3 (2018): 261–81. On microaggressions being “used to keep those at the racial margins in their place,” see Lindsay Pérez Hubar and Daniel G. Solorzano, “Visualizing Everyday Racism: Critical Race Theory, Visual Microaggressions, and the Historical Image of Mexican Banditry,” Qualitative Inquiry 21, no. 3 (2015): 223. Sometimes, these may be unintentional: the offending party might not mean to target the offended individual; indeed, they may not intend to affront anyone. Where instances like these do cause offense that emotion has three defining properties. First, the person who takes offense believes, judges, or perceives that her social standing has been affronted, whether being ignored, diminished, or attacked by the act at which she takes offense.1919 I remain neutral here amongst competing conceptions of emotions, for instance, as involving beliefs, judgments or perceptions, to the extent possible given that offense is a complex emotion. The affront is the intentional object of the emotion: that at which the emotion is taken. What counts for whether an individual takes offense is her own perception of her standing and how that standing ought to be reflected and acknowledged through the ways in which others treat and regard her in social interactions of particular kinds, within particular contexts. To illustrate, I might think that my standing is such that in a professional context people ought to greet me by shaking my hand, not patting my head, yet amongst friends find a handshake unduly formal or unfriendly. When I do not get the expected greeting, then I may take offense. For most of us, our sense of our social standing, and so the behaviors we expect from others, is heavily shaped by the socially salient groups to which we belong and our social roles. For example, a doctor expects deference from his patients, and a middle-class, white woman expects the police to treat her with courtesy. Some also incorporate other attachments into their conception of their social standing, say, a national identity, religion, or long-supported sports team, such that an affront to it can be experienced as an affront to them. the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact. Face is an image of self-delineated in terms of approved social attributes.2121 Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1967), 5. On the idea's origins, see Xiaoying Qi, “Face: A Chinese Concept in Global Sociology,” Journal of Sociology 47, no. 3 (2011): 279–95. Informed by the notion of face, when I discuss social standing there are two differences from the settled rank view. One is that standing is dynamic and context-sensitive, not static. It is up for negotiation and can vary across interactions with different people or in different settings: say, at work we present a different self-image to that we'd convey when in the park with other mothers, where the relevant socially valued traits differ. Admittedly, that variation is constrained by the social rules in play as to what kinds of “moves” can be successfully made, having uptake from others.2323 The emphasis in sociology and linguistics is on the co-construction of standing in each encounter. See Goffman's discussion of the line that someone takes within a particular interaction. Goffman, Interaction Ritual. Or see Locher and Watt's depiction of face as “socially attributed in each individual interaction,” or as “masks” “on loan to us for the duration of different kinds of performance.” Miriam A. Locher and Richard J. Watts, “Politeness Theory and Relational Work,” Journal of Politeness Research, Language, Behaviour, Culture 1, no. 1 (2005): 12. However, constraints from social position are often referenced; for instance, Locher and Watts continue their description with someone who “performs in the role of a Prime Minister, a mother, a wife…,” someone, then, occupying a particular set of social positions. Locher and Watts, “Politeness Theory,” 13. Among these, socially salient identities tend to shape one's standing across interactions. The other difference is in what one's sense of one's standing encompasses. Our sense of ourselves will be informed by various aspects of our identity, social position, and social roles.2424 Standing is not therefore reducible to identity: it concerns the self-image I project and construct in this setting, not “who I am.” However, while social standing in my sense has a comparative element, in that it is something we construct with and contrast to others, it need not include a ranking against others. Furthermore, as noted above, our self-image can incorporate various attachments, such as moral or religious commitments, if one takes these to be valuable or socially important attributes. If I attack, dismiss or fail to recognize some aspect of yourself that you take to have value, which is a threat to how you wish to present yourself. As a result, my act may be a fitting thing at which to take offense. As the second property of taking offense, the offended person, regarding her standing to have been affronted, will feel estranged from the offending party. That estrangement comes in varying degrees: she might feel alienated from the other person or simply taken aback by what they did, a phrase which gives a sense of how this is a small, temporary moment of estrangement. Alternatively, she might feel bored by the interaction, or even amused at the person and what they have done. Repeated cases of being offended in the same way are particularly liable to be characterized by amusement, as are notably egregious instances of commonly experienced phenomena, such as Solnit's case of a woman having her own book “mansplained” to her.2525 Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me. The woman is not laughing with the man explaining her own book to her, but at the situation and perhaps the offender too: at the absurdity of such slights, and the absurdity of the person committing them. What unites these varying feelings as ones of estrangement is that all distance the offended from the offender. Third, the person who is offended will tend toward actions expressing her estrangement: actions of withdrawal.2626 The notion of an action tendency I borrow from psychology; on its use, see Jonathan Haidt, “The Moral Emotions,” in Handbook of Affective Sciences, eds. R. J. Davidson, K. R. Scherer, and H. H. Goldsmith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 853. An emotion motivates or disposes one toward particular types of action. As a result, to defend the appropriateness of offense involves defending as appropriate, to some extent, the actions that usually follow from taking it. At first glance, the behaviors associated with taking offense look highly varied. For example, at one end of the scale, the offended party may raise an eyebrow, turn away, pointedly refrain from laughing at a joke, or leave slightly too long a silence. At the other, they might refrain from any future relationships with the offending party, seek to publicly expose them, or call for the imposition of further costs, like losing an honorary position. However, what unites these is that all are ways of withdrawing from the other in our social relations, of pushing the other away, or out. A pointed silence can be a very effective, if temporary, way to express our estrangement from another. While we may not always act on our offense, say, if we fear another will retaliate, this tendency toward withdrawal is a relatively strong one: usually there is a reason where we do not, such that the default is that we would express our emotion. Sometimes, we even communicate our estrangement unintentionally, say, by being silent for just a moment too long. This account of offense makes it a particular and unified emotion, unlike Feinberg's cluster of disunified states. What it is like to have this emotion is to take it that one's standing has been attacked, dismissed, or ignored, to feel estranged from the person who commits the offensive act, and to tend toward acts of withdrawal. At least to those of us not too deeply steeped in Feinberg's way of thinking, this emotion ought to appear familiar. It is an everyday emotion that you might feel when a colleague makes a sexist joke, someone pushes in front of you, or your partner is condescending. It also comes in degrees: sometimes, being taken aback for a moment; other times, being so offended that we break off relations for good. The analysis accords too with the way in which sociolinguists and social psychologists regard offense as an emotion concerned with affronts to one's “face,” such as the impoliteness or disrespect of others.2727 See Jonathan Culpepper, “Reflections on impoliteness, relational work and power,” in Impoliteness in Language: Studies on its interplay with power in theory and practice, eds. Derek Bousfield and Miriam A. Locher (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008); Francesca D'Errico and Isabella Poggi, “The lexicon of feeling offended,” paper presented at Symposium on Emotion Modelling and Detection in Social Media and Online Interaction, University of Liverpool, April 4–6, 2018, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326096901_The_lexicon_of_feeling_offended; Goffman, Interaction Ritual; Locher, “Situated Politeness”; Locher and Watts, “Politeness theory and relational work”; Amy Aisha Brown, Caroline Tagg, and Philip Seargeant, Taking Offence on Social Media: Conviviality and Communication on Facebook (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Finally, it accommodates many of Feinberg's classic bus cases as ones where we might take offense in my sense, yet makes clear how some fall short of being paradigmatic or clear instances of offense.2828 I include as instances of offense cases that Feinberg's “profound” offense would not, such as mildly sexist jokes and failures to shake hands. To illustrate, we can reframe his cases of disgust, such as vomiting up a meal in public or engaging in public sex acts, as also failures to attend to other's comfort, and so manifesting a disregard for others that may offend. Yet in such cases disgust, not offense, would be the primary emotion. Some might object that, nonetheless, my analysis wrongly excludes some cases of apparent offense. First, we appear to use the notion of offense to describe things other than affronts to social standing. Take the idea of an offensive smell or other affronts to the senses; or the notion that one's aesthetic sensibilities have been offended, say, by some hideous interior décor. In such cases, we perceive no affront to our social standing. So, too, we are not necessarily estranged from anyone when something smells or looks bad. All that is shared with the standard cases above is a desire to withdraw, here, from that affront to one's sensibilities. Thus, these would not count as offense proper, as I define it—unless the interior décor is done to spite you, the smell is inflicted deliberately, or these otherwise manifest another's disregard of you. However, on a plausible reading, in these cases the term “offense” is used merely to capture the way in which our senses are affronted, rather than our truly feeling offended. It is a dramatic use of language to describe someone's decorating attempts as offensive but odd to be genuinely offended, and the best characterization of one's reaction to a terrible smell is as disgust. Still, all I need for this article is to insist that at least in paradigmatic cases of offense, all three properties are present. Furthermore, the target of current debates over offense concerns such offense at affronts to standing (despite the fact that these debates often confuse this with claiming victimhood) and not people becoming more sensitive to smells or interior décor. Second, it appears that we can be offended even where there is no particular agent to whom we can attribute the affront; for instance, taking offense at a sign when we don't know who erected it, or at the actions of an institution that express disrespect for people like us, even if no agent within the institution intended that outcome. To reply, clearly, some relation to agency is required. There is no affront to social standing from the mere fact that it rains, say, even where that frustrates one's interests in staying dry: no agent disregards one's interests. However, in the cases of the institution and sign, we know that agents are involved in the resulting state of affairs. On my account, taking offense does not require the direct intent of an agent to affront; given its dependency on uptake from others, our construction and projection of our image is more vulnerable than limiting it to only such direct threats would suggest. I might be also offended, say, by another not noticing my presence, or an unintentional putdown. Hence, there is no reason to rule out the arrangements of an institution or a sign put up by an unknown other from presenting an affront to our social standing. Nonetheless, there is good reason to restrict offense to acts where there is some agent(s) involved, in that standing is constructed through our social interactions. That raises the issue of in what sense an interaction must be social in order to provoke offense. This ought not be confused with how public an affront is. Our social standing is something negotiated in particular interactions, and thus can be threatened in classically private settings, such as one's partner making a dismissive comment at home, as well as in cases with more witnesses. Still, our standing is something we construct with and for others. One may think, as a result, that restricting offense to affronts to standing still rules out too much. Suppose that I find out through reading someone's private diary that they hold a very low opinion of me. Mightn't I still be offended, even if they have never expressed their view to anyone? In general, can I be offended by the private attitudes of others, where I come to know these?2929 With thanks to a referee for raising this issue and example. Clearly, unknown private attitudes do not offend. I suspect that in the particular case, one's offense may be driven, or at least compounded, by the diary writer's hypocrisy in presenting a falsely pleasant public face, and so chiefly by one's interactions with the writer. To compare, if knowing that someone dislikes me, I read their private diary