Towards a theory of offense

ABSTRACT

We are all familiar with claims about being offended. There is reason to think that taking offense is particularly characteristic of the moral psychology of our times. When someone claims offense, others are supposed to take notice. This suffices to make offense a topic of philosophical and practical interest. However, we lack a persuasive account of the nature of offense. The present partial theory of offense portrays typical offense experiences as negative feelings interpreted as responses to something offensive.

KEYWORDS:

• Offense
• offensiveness
• Joel Feinberg
• emotion
• moral judgment
• expression

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The principal challenge that I will present in the next section for the hybrid view also applies straightforwardly to purely cognitive views.

2 It is more common to call this sort of view ‘normative’. However, since it is the psychological complexity of these views that I wish to emphasize, and not their normative content, I have chosen ‘hybrid’ as a label.

3 It is more common to call this sort of view ‘normative’. However, since it is the psychological complexity of these views that I wish to emphasize, and not their normative content, I have chosen ‘hybrid’ as a label (Scarantino and De Sousa 2021).

4 This is a truncated version of the defense of this view provided in my Offense and Offensiveness: A Philosophical Account (2021).

5 Piss Christ is a photograph of a fairly common Christian object – a physical representation of Christ being crucified – submerged in yellow liquid. The title (and other sources) reveal that the liquid is the artist’s urine. Given that urinating on something is a conventional way of disrespecting it, it is not surprising that Christians have been offended by the image.

6 It is worth adding that the man in question got the license plate before 2010. In that year Ontario changed its license plate practices so that they would no longer contain the sequence ‘666’. Before this many plates were issued with this sequence of figures.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrew Sneddon

Andrew Sneddon is a professor in the department of philosophy at the University of Ottawa. He studies ethics and philosophical psychology. He is the author of Offense and Offensiveness: A Philosophical Account (Routledge 2021), Autonomy (Bloomsbury 2013), Like-Minded: Externalism and Moral Psychology (MIT 2011), and Action and Responsibility (Springer 2005).