It's so depressing how arbitrary subjective responses are presented in public discourse as though they were legitimate reasons ('Shut up! Shut up! You're making me feel bad! So do as I say!'). We've developed a disastrous social norm according to which anyone can win instant brownie points by claiming to be a "victim" -- and doubly so if their claim is made qua membership in some "community" ('As an X, I'm offended...').
I'm actually inclined to regard this as an improvement rather than a disastrous social norm. To be sure, it may be abused, which I take it was Ophelia's point, but it seems to me that the requirement, that no appeal to emotion be allowed unless it can be shown to be 'warranted', has (at least) two significant flaws.
(1) As far as I can see, there is no clear sense of warrant or rational defense that is applicable here. One can see some sort of notion of warrant or rational defensibility that would apply to repeated and consistent emotional responses; it's the sort of thing to which virtue theorists appeal. Thus, for instance, we can urge that people develop the virtuous habits (rationally desirable acquired dispositions) that are needed in order not to be hurt by every little thing, not to be made angry by every single breach, not to be offended by every little thing with which one disagrees. But these take some discipline and work to develop; some people will, because of temperament, find some of them easier than others will, but it's an extended process of rational self-development. It's precisely this that makes it reasonable to talk about warrant or rational defensibility, because there is a definite and easily recognizable rational activity involved. If, however, we are talking about emotional responses that are not habitual, but occasional, it becomes a great deal more murky. For instance, I am not temperamentally inclined to worry; indeed, so far am I from having any particular inclination to worry that I very rarely worry about anything at all, and when I do it is usually only to some extent and for short bursts from which I am easily distracted. But some things, on occasion, do make me worry rather severely. Now suppose that some friend's plans for the weekend suddenly puts me into a worrying fit, and I get back into that worrying fit whenever I think about the plans. Even if I can't quite put my finger on what it was that made me worry, it is rather difficult to find a stable notion of warrant or rational defensibility that could be applied as a standard here: it is a spontaneous response, a combination of temperament and habit and circumstance, and we have and reasonably act on those all the time without any concern for warrant or rational defensibility. And rightly so: if we have no reason to think that they are pathological or signs of vice, then we have no reason to demand their credentials; there is, so to speak, no warrant for demanding their warrant, because they are simply facts that must be taken into account. If John is disgusted by someone's crassness, and John does not tend to be disgusted in a disproportionate number of cases (which would be a sign that John needs self-discipline in this department), and John's functioning as a rational person is not put into jeopardy by the disgust (which would suggest that John needs some sort of therapy on this point), then it is absurd to demand that John not say anything unless he can show (by some vague yet strangely demanding standard) that it is rationally warranted or defensible; and, while there will be many cases where John would be well-advised, as a matter of prudence, to exercise restraint and just let the matter go, in cases where prudence does not tend this way, John is entirely reasonable in expressing his disgust and expecting consideration for it because the mere fact of being disgusted is, ceteris paribus, the only sort of 'rational warrant' required for expressing disgust, and failure to regard the disgust of others is in fact a sin against sociability. (It might be, of course, that you have some very good reason for continuing in the behavior John is disgusted at, despite his disgust; but simply to ignore John's disgust as if it did not matter is to ignore John as if he did not matter.) To put it in simpler terms: If you are offended by something you have every right to express this and expect people to take that into account, without any need for rational defense, as long as the following conditions are met:
(a) there are no indications that the offense-taking is due to some emotional or mental pathology;
(b) there are no indications that the offense-taking is due to some character flaw that needs to be re-worked by self-cultivation;
(c) there are no indications that expressing this feeling of being offended would definitely be imprudent.
It is such cases that require rational defense and warrant; everything else, so to speak, carries its warrant with it, by virtue of being a natural response. Arguments like Ophelia's are only legitimate when they involve pointing out that there are reasons to think that this 'default' defensibility (so to speak) does not obtain. (So, I take it, Ophelia's real point is that there are reasons for thinking that the appeal, in the cases she is considering, fails to meet condition (b), namely, by showing a vicious, or at least potentially vicious, disregard for truth.)
(2) If we claim the following, as Richard does, we seem to run into some serious social problems:
Feeling offended is not a public reason that has any place in the discourse. It's a purely private fact about yourself (or your faction, if you're angling for the "community" bonus points) that has no claim on society at large.
What this seems to me to do is strip away a great deal of the means by which underprivileged groups (I don't say 'minority', because depending on the society in question the underprivileged group may actually be a majority) can fight back against injustice. It no longer becomes possible for blacks to say, "Hey, look, this is offensive to us as blacks, so cut it out"; instead they'd have to go the long way about to show that it's problematic for society at large. And for that to be a reasonable approach requires that they have pretty good reason to think that people are going to stop long enough to listen seriously to their whole argument in an open manner that springs from good faith and good will. There are going to be many cases in which this cannot be reasonably assumed. In any case, if an underprivileged group comes to the conclusion that society at large does not have sufficient regard for what offends that group, they will eventually make it an issue for society at large; and when riot and revolution rise, it will be a little disingenuous to say that feeling offended is not a public reason and has no claim on society at large. In truth, there are public reasons for restraints on how we express our feelings of being offended; thus there is no good reason to deny that there may be public reasons for expressing them.
To this extent, I think Richard would perhaps do better to distinguish sharply cases in which someone simply expresses their personal mood or emotional response from those in which people express their reactions as members of a community. When I do this, I put myself as representing or personating (to use Hobbes's term) a segment of public life; this makes my claim a matter of public reason automatically. I might, of course, be lying, or, without regard for truth, simply putting up the claim (which may or may not be true) as a front for my own personal interest; but such may be the case with any public reason that anyone brings forward. Appeals to truth, to justice, to freedom, to reason -- each of these is very often abused in precisely this way.
With more purely private opinions Richard's suggestion sounds less implausible and more feasible. It is less easy than one might suppose to distinguish such cases from cases involving the at-least-implicit representation of a community. The tricky part here, though, is how we are really going to adjudicate what has a "place in the discourse" or not. After all, public discourse does not exist independently of any public; it is created by the public as part of their lives. And, what is more, it is created by negotiation. It thus does not seem possible to have any univocal notion of 'public reason', i.e., of things that have a legitimate place in the discourse, because the very nature of the discourse will change depending on the society engaging in the discoure. Public reasons are what you get when you find that everyone's private reasons cluster around particular points that are not set aside by rules that are generally agreed upon. Of course, one can argue that it would be wiser to set aside this or that sort of appeal, in the sense that this would be more appropriate to the type of discourse at hand, and I take it that this is what Richard is really trying to do here. But when Richard says, that it is important "for the progress of civilization that there be a space for open debate and unhindered intellectual inquiry into controversial issues," he is, I think, exaggerating. No one actually believes in unhindered intellectual inquiry; everyone draws a line somewhere, and will hinder any intellectual inquiry that tries to cross it. No one would justify, say, Nazi medical experiments on the grounds that intellectual inquiry must be unhindered; they would say, instead, that such an approach to intellectual inquiry must be not merely hindered but stopped entirely. And while this is an extreme case, most people will agree that in controversial issues standards of inquiry must be raised quite a bit -- more must be done to show objectivity, rationality, etc., precisely because it is a controversial area. And raised standards, too, are a hindrance. But they are a hindrance, like friction for a machine, that is essential to good functioning. If people are offended, a genuinely truth-seeking society will take that as a sign that it needs to make doubly sure (1) that the inquiry is conducted responsibly; and (2) that it is presented responsibly to the public. (I would suggest that our repeated failure to do the latter even in the face of major reactions is far and away a more serious problem for our status as a 'truth-seeking society' than hypersensitivity to what offends.)
Now, I do think Richard makes an excellent point here:
The underlying problem, I suspect, is that our public culture has become so infected with subjectivist assumptions that people don't realize that there's a difference between desires and reasons. Sentiments are taken as given; no-one ever stops to question whether their reactive attitudes are warranted. Any kind of negative emotion is not just evidence, but constitutive, of suffering injustice. You're offended, therefore they're in the wrong. It's fucked up.
I think Richard has put his finger on the real problem; I just don't think he has diagnosed it quite right. The real problem, I think, is that people take these feelings of being offended as adequate reason for blame, and thus take them to be evidence of some culpability in the other. But as we can see from thinking through the case of John's disgust, this may not be so; there are plenty of circumstances in which John may be disgusted, and may reasonable express this, and may reasonably expect that people will take it into account in their behavior, where, nonetheless, no one is culpable. Rather, what has happened is that there was a fact -- that John would be disgusted by this -- that was simply unknown. Now that it is known, it would be absurd to ignore the fact -- a fact's a fact, and simply ignoring it or dismissing it does no good, since it's obviously relevant. Thus, what people need to be weaned from is not the reactive attitude, nor expression of the reactive attitude without explicit defense, but rather the assumption that "You're offended, therefore they're in the wrong."
UPDATE: Fixed some typos.
