Topics Ethics

Question Why are insults that refer to a person's personality, lifestyle or hobbies considered more acceptable (or at least less serious) than insults to a person's race, sex or disability? I used to think that it was because personality, lifestyle and hobbies are mutable, whereas race, sex and disability are things a person has no control over - yet there are plenty of examples to the contrary (Many personalities don't change without outside intervention; transsexuals change their physiological sex; disabilities can be the result of one's own voluntary actions; Micheal Jackson went white; etc.). Not only that, but why should it matter whether or not a person has control over the things being made fun of? I only see two possibilities. First, it could be a question of fairness - in which case, why is it fair to insult things that a person can change but that are nevertheless a part of them as human beings? This brings me to the second possibility - maybe we are implicitly endorsing a norm like "If the insults bother you, change yourself." Yet this seems horrendously unfair and authoritarian. So why does society accept insults to or disrespect of a person based on their personality (shyness, clumsiness, taste in the arts, etc.), their lifestyle (polyamorists, hippies, S/M practitioners, etc.) or their hobbies (painting miniature soldiers, playing video games, carrying dogs around in their purses)?

Accepted:
May 18, 2011

Comments

Great questions and suggestions! Perhaps, though, one needs to back up a bit and consider whether anything we would call an insult is morally in the clear. Off hand, it strikes me that there is a huge difference between offering criticism about some practice or a person's behavior and insulting a practice or person's action. Isn't an insult a matter of abuse or defemation or to slur someone? If I give a student paper a C, have I insulted the student? It may feel that way, and I suppose it would be an insult if I intended to abuse the student and diminish his sense of self-worth (imagine that on a fair minded assesment the paper merits an A and I have a personal grudge against the student). In that sense, I suppose I would be not just insulting the student but I would be an embarassment to my profession and to my school. So, off hand, it seems that insults (by their very nature) are not good. I do not suggest you disagree, because you do describe insults in terms of disrespect, but I thought it worthy of observing the problem with all forms of such disrespect. Speaking to your specific concern, I think that one's race, disability, and sex are not just central to personal identity and more so than hobby, lifestyle and personality but these three domains have historically been used to promote great injustice. All three have been used to promote slavery, for example, whereas stamp collecting, etc, have not.

For a good view of appropriate praise and blame socially and ethically which has a bearing on the difference between respecting persons versus insulting them you might like Daniel N. Robinson's fine book Parise and Blame; Moral Realism and Its Applications (Princeton University Press, 2002).