This paper critically assesses Chapters 6 and 7 of On Taking Offence. Chapter 6 defends the idea that an inclination to take offence can be a ‘corrective civic virtue’ against threats to social equality. Chapter 7 argues that the practice of taking offence does not change much when we turn to analysing our lives online. With respect to Chapter 6, I argue that the instrumental vindication of offence-taking as a virtue is in tension with arguments earlier in the book, and (...) needs more empirical support. Earlier chapters of the book defend offence-taking as intrinsically apt and justified, regardless of its effects. What is more, if the case for offence-taking is grounded on its effects, then we need solid empirical backing; and an initial obstacle to that might be that the marginalised are probably less likely to be able to produce positive effects through their offence-taking. With regard to Chapter 7, I suggest that McTernan overlooks some potentially relevant differences between real-world and online interactions, which might make the adjustment of our norms to social media interaction more complex than she suggests. (shrink)

In his 1963 essay ‘Supererogation and Offence: A Conceptual Scheme for Ethics,’ Roderick Chisholm describes a category of human acts which he calls ‘offences’:A system of moral concepts which provides a place for what is good but not obligatory, should also provide a place for what is bad but not forbidden. For if there is such a thing as “non-obligatory well-doing” then it is plausible to suppose that there is also such a thing as “permissive ill-doing.” There is no term (...) in moral literature, so far as I know, which has been used to designate just this latter class of actions; I shall refer to them as “offences.”Some recognize the possibility of acts, commonly called acts of supererogation, which are morally good or praiseworthy but not obligatory to perform. In this passage, as well as in a later article co-authored with Ernest Sosa, Chisholm calls attention to the possibility of acts which are morally bad or blameworthy to perform, but whose performance is nevertheless not forbidden. (shrink)

This introduction explains the main contributions of On Taking Offence, summarises its overall argument, and outlines how the comments in this symposium engage with, and challenge, different parts of the argument.

This article replies to the insightful contributions to the book symposium for On Taking Offence, These range from theoretical questions about how we should conceptualise an emotion like offence and the role of empirical evidence when justifying it, to practical questions about who has the power to take offence effectively and how to dispute another's offence-taking. In this reply, I first defend offence as a distinct emotion. Second, I argue against the implicit conception of social standing that underpins some of (...) these challenges, as static and fixed rather than dynamic, emerging from the particularities of particular social interactions, and easily threatened. Third, I address the instrumental justification of offence. I conclude with some unanswered questions, and some reasons to remain optimistic about what taking offence can do. (shrink)

I present the first systematic account in the literature of a Husserlian response to Natorp’s critique of Husserl’s account of the pre-givenness of both the absolute stream of lived-experience and its essencesEssences to reflectionReflections. My response is presented within the broader context of what I argue is Heidegger’s misappropriation of Natorp’s critique of the phenomenological limits of reflectionReflections in Husserl’s transcendental phenomenologyTranscendental phenomenology and the misguided French attempt to address Heidegger’s critique by introducing the dialectical notion of “pre-reflectivePre-reflective” consciousness to (...) phenomenology. My Husserlian response shows that Husserl’s account of reflectionReflections in Ideas I is able to rebut Natorp’s critical claims that transcendental phenomenologyTranscendental phenomenology cannot access the streaming of the stream of lived-experience without “stilling” its flow and that a gap in Husserl’s account of the transformation of the natural phenomenonPhenomenon of reflectionReflections into transcendental reflectionReflections provides justification for Natorp’s criticism of the ambiguity of Husserl’s account in Ideas I of the givennessGivennesses of the essenceEssences of lived-experience investigated by transcendental phenomenologyTranscendental phenomenology. (shrink)

In On Taking Offence Emily McTernan argues that when it comes to taking offence there is nothing special about humour. Pointing out that you were ‘only joking’, she argues, will almost always fail to prevent others from being offended at what you’ve said. In this article I argue that McTernan does not correctly identify the conditions under which taking offence at humour is justified. I suggest an alternative view and explore some of its practical implications.

This book aims to rehabilitate taking offence. In an era of public criticism of those deemed too easily offended, it is easy to overlook the significance and social value of this emotion. Offence, the book argues, is better understood as a way to defend one’s standing than as a mere expression of hurt feelings. The book defends the significance of offence as one way to resist everyday social inequalities: those details of interactions that, together, pattern social hierarchies. As a result, (...) the defence of offence is of that taken at apparently trivial and small-scale details of social interactions, and so the very form that its opponents find most objectionable. Within societies marred by hierarchies of unequal social standing, and when taken by those who face systematic attributions of lower social standing, an inclination to take offence is a civic virtue. First, this book offers an analysis of offence that depicts a distinctive emotion ripe for moral reappraisal. To take offence resists an affront to one’s social standing and is one way to negotiate the social norms and practices that structure social interactions, often in socially unequal ways. Second, the book defends the significance of our social standing, the cumulative importance of apparently small details of interactions, and offence as an act of insubordination against a social hierarchy. Third, it turns to the limits on when taking offence is justified, addressing jokes, unintentional affronts, disagreement over what counts as offensive, and what we should think of offence that is taken online. (shrink)

I argue that fitting resentment tracks unacceptable ‘ecological’ imbalances in relative social strength between victims and perpetrators that arise from violations of legitimate moral expectations. It does not respond purely, or even primarily, to offenders’ attitudes, and its proper targets need not be fully developed moral agents. It characteristically involves a wish for the restoration of social equilibrium rather than a demand for moral recognition or good will. To illuminate these contentions, I focus on cases that I believe demonstrate a (...) corollary thesis, namely, that strength, broadly construed, is a necessary condition of resentment-worthiness. I argue that weakness can make resentment unfitting in two ways. First, weakness may prevent a wrongdoer from shifting the balance of social power. Second, a weak wrongdoer may do social damage but be so lowly that resentment, which would represent him as excessively strong, would be inapt. Finally, I consider how accepting the ecological view might affect our theorizing about moral responsibility and the ethics of blame. (shrink)

In 1963 Roderick Chisholm proposed a category of acts called “offences” to capture what he called acts of “permissive ill-doing.” Chisholm’s proposal has proven to be controversial. Here I propose that some progress can be made in validating acts of offence by focusing upon moral dilemmas. Given the problems which have been alleged to beset moral dilemmas, this may initially seem like a puzzling strategy. However, I will call attention to a type of moral dilemma unlike what is standardly discussed (...) in the literature and attempt to show that those who acknowledge that such dilemmas are possible are likewise obliged to acknowledge that acts of offence are possible. My suggestion, then, is that, since the former are plausible to acknowledge, so are the latter. (shrink)

Most philosophers of criminal law agree that between criminal offences and defences there is a significant, substantial difference. It is a difference, however, that has proved hard to pin down. In recent work, Duff and others have suggested that it mirrors the distinction between criminal answerability and liability to criminal punishment. Offence definitions, says Duff, are—and ought to be—those action-types ‘for which a defendant can properly be called to answer in a criminal court, on pain of conviction and condemnation if (...) she cannot offer an exculpatory answer’; and defences are ‘exculpatory answers’ that ‘block the transition from responsibility to liability’. I criticise this answerability-based account of the offence/defence divide. It is descriptively false, I claim, as well as normatively unappealing. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Since at least as far back as the infamous Derek Bentley case of the 1950s in which an unarmed 19-year-old was convicted and executed for murder based on his alleged uttering of the words _let him have it_ to his gun-wielding accomplice, the issue of incitement has been positioned firmly as an object of interest for forensic linguists. An example of a language crime—i.e. an unlawful speech act (as reported by Shuy in Language crimes: The use and abuse of language (...) evidence in the courtroom, Wiley Blackwell, Hoboken, 1993) the features of incitement—formalized as _intentionally encouraging or assisting others to commit an offence_ in the law of England & Wales under section 44 of the Serious Crime Act 2007 (https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2007/27/contents)—have been widely debated by linguists and legal scholars alike. This paper draws on two webinars hosted by The Hunting Office in August 2020, which were subsequently leaked by the Hunt Saboteurs Association. Featuring senior figures from the hunting community addressing a nationwide audience of hunt masters, the webinars led to a police investigation and subsequent prosecution and conviction of one of the main speakers, Mark Hankinson, for _encouraging or assisting others to commit an offence under the Hunting Act 2004_. In this paper I explore what, linguistically, is meant by _encouraging or assisting_. Through corpus-assisted pragmatic and discourse analyses I interrogate the webinars to address the question of how precisely Hankinson implied his encouragement of illegal hunting with dogs. The phenomena of collocation and semantic prosody are crucial for understanding how such meanings came to be attached to the contributions Hankinson makes to the webinars. Moreover the paper will examine the contributions of other speakers and demonstrate that the same incriminating linguistic patterns in Hankinson’s talk are also evident in that of those who were not prosecuted. (shrink)

With a focus on the Common Law jurisdiction of England and Wales and the Civil Law jurisdiction of Vietnam, this article provides an analytical framework to address the uncertain jurisprudence of minor offence processes. The article’s approach is to seek an account of crime and criminal process that is most suitable for practice and most compatible with the broad notion of ‘criminal charge’ under international human rights instruments. It is argued that minor offences should be considered forms of less serious (...) crimes that are subject to short periods of imprisonment or non-custodial punishments and dealt with by summary procedures. The fragmentation of minor offences demands an approach to procedural pragmatism and procedural proportionality; that is, the procedure for each type of offence should be proportionate to the severity of punishment and fair as a whole. (shrink)

The possibility of supererogation--doing more than one feels morally obliged to do--is denied by many thinkers.

Since the #MeToo movement, many discussions arose on the role of consent in defining rape, among academics, legal practitioners, non-governmental organisations, and at the European Union level. This debate is particularly relevant in France, where rape is a sexual act committed by violence, coercion, threat, or surprise, with no mention of consent in the Criminal Code. By conducting a meta-analysis of the discourse of the French legal literature on this topic in four criminal law reviews and ten textbooks, this study (...) offers a new perspective to this debate. Based on this analysis, the definition of rape and the role of consent is barely discussed by the literature, partly due to an equivalence drawn between the constitutive elements of the offence and the absence of consent of the victim. Yet, the relevance of consent is highly criticised, mainly by a few male academics, using primarily arguments of authority instead of a critical approach to the topic. In general, the French legal literature on the role of consent in defining rape supports rape myths and gender stereotypes. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Joel Feinberg’s Offense to Others is the most comprehensive contemporary work on the significance of offense in a liberal legal system. Feinberg argues that being offended can impair a person’s liberty, much like a nuisance, and that it is therefore legitimate in principle to regulate conduct because of its offensiveness. In this article, I discuss some overlooked considerations that give us reason to resist Feinberg’s conclusion, even while granting this premise. My key claim is that the regulation of (...) offense can inadvertently increase the incidence of offense, by nurturing offense-taking sensibilities. In the course of defending this claim and spelling out its implications, I explain why concerns about the inadvertent nurturing of offense are now more pressing, given the identity–political character of contemporary offense-based social conflicts, and I discuss why a reluctance to legally regulate offensive conduct need not be insensitive to the identity–political issues that animate those conflicts. (shrink)

This paper analyses the republican notion of non-domination from the viewpoint of individual dignity. It determines the aspect of individual dignity that republicans are concerned with and scrutinises how it is safeguarded by non-domination. I argue that the notion of non-domination as it is formulated by Pettit contains a number of ambiguities that need to be addressed. I discuss these ambiguities and argue for specific solutions that place great importance on a person’s moral beliefs and his status as a moral (...) being amongst others. Furthermore, I argue that the impunity interpretation is to be favoured over the immunity interpretation of non-domination. I show that whilst these solutions accord well with many important republican tenets, they have other implications that contradict known republican positions. In particular, I show there is both room and a need for retributivism within republicanism. (shrink)

This paper criticizes the assumption, omnipresent in contemporary philosophy of religion, that a perfectly good and loving God would wish to confer on finite persons free will. An alternative mode of Divine-human relationship is introduced and shown to be as conducive to the realization of value as one involving free will. Certain implications of this result are then revealed, to wit, that the theist's free will defence against the problem of evil is unsuccessful, and what is more, that free will, (...) if it exists, provides positive support for atheism. (shrink)

The second volume in Joel Feinberg's series The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law, Offense to Others focuses on the "offense principle," which maintains that preventing shock, disgust, or revulsion is always a morally relevant reason for legal prohibitions. Feinberg clarifies the concept of an "offended mental state" and further contrasts the concept of offense with harm. He also considers the law of nuisance as a model for statutes creating "morals offenses," showing its inadequacy as a model (...) for understanding "profound offenses," and discusses such issues as obscene words and social policy, pornography and the Constitution, and the differences between minor and profound offenses. (shrink)

We encounter offense through various media: an intended facetious remark, a protester’s photographic image of an aborted fetus, an epithet, a stereotypical joke of a minority racial group. People say things that cause offense all of the time. And causing offense can have serious consequences, both personal and professional; the offending party is subject to termination, suspension, or social isolation and public opprobrium. Since the stakes are so high we should have a better understanding of the mechanisms (...) of offense involved in these media and how they work. In this dissertation I focus on two mechanisms for communicating offense—i.e. racial and ethnic slurs and racial humor. First, I lay out a few distinctions concerning the particular kind of offense being targeted, objective versus subjective offense, and when state involvement might be appropriate for penalizing offensive behavior. Next, I discuss racial slurs and the conditions of their offensiveness. I offer a non-content based view of slurs’ offense, which contradicts the consensus view held by most philosophers of language and linguists working on this issue. Also, I look more closely at a purportedly non-offensive use of slurring language, so-called linguistic appropriation, and determine that appropriated uses are permissible in certain settings only under certain conditions. And finally, I propose a tri-partite analysis of racial jokes that provides conditions for when they are merely racial, racially insensitive, or racist. (shrink)

The second volume in Joel Feinberg's series The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law, Offense to Others focuses on the "offense principle," which maintains that preventing shock, disgust, or revulsion is always a morally relevant reason for legal prohibitions. Feinberg clarifies the concept of an "offended mental state" and further contrasts the concept of offense with harm. He also considers the law of nuisance as a model for statutes creating "morals offenses," showing its inadequacy as a model (...) for understanding "profound offenses," and discusses such issues as obscene words and social policy, pornography and the Constitution, and the differences between minor and profound offenses. (shrink)

This paper analyses the republican notion of non-domination from the viewpoint of individual dignity. It determines the aspect of individual dignity that republicans are concerned with and scrutinises how it is safeguarded by non-domination. I argue that the notion of non-domination as it is formulated by Pettit contains a number of ambiguities that need to be addressed. I discuss these ambiguities and argue for specific solutions that place great importance on a person’s moral beliefs and his status as a moral (...) being amongst others. Furthermore, I argue that the impunity interpretation is to be favoured over the immunity interpretation of non-domination. I show that whilst these solutions accord well with many important republican tenets, they have other implications that contradict known republican positions. In particular, I show there is both room and a need for retributivism within republicanism. (shrink)

One criticism of medical aid in dying (MAID) is the expressivist objection: MAID is morally wrong because it expresses judgments about disabilities or persons with disabilities, that are offensive, disrespectful, or discriminatory. The expressivist objection can be made at the level of individual patients, medical providers, or the state. The expressivist objection originated with selective abortion, and responses to it in that context typically claim either that selective abortion does not express specific judgments about disabilities, or that any judgments expressed (...) are not offensive. This response is inadequate: MAID often does express negative judgments about disabilities, which could reasonably be seen as offensive. But, does this offensiveness make MAID wrong? Drawing on Joel Feinberg’s account of offense, I argue that it is unlikely that the offensiveness of the judgments expressed by individuals who seek MAID or through the state’s legalization of MAID is enough to make it morally impermissible. (shrink)

According to the offense principle, the fact that wrongs are offensive makes them eligible for criminalization. Section “Introduction” unpacks this principle. Section “Offense and Offensiveness” discusses what it is for X to be offensive. Section “Offensiveness and Criminalization” argues that, whether we interpret offensiveness subjectively or objectively, the offense principle is not a sound principle. The fact that a wrong is objectively offensive does not bear on whether it should be criminalized. The fact that a wrong is (...) subjectively offensive is no reason to tackle it using the criminal law. Section “The Value of Offense” considers the conditions under which offense has value. It argues that, under some conditions, the fact that X is subjectively offensive counts against criminalizing X, while the fact that X is not subjectively offensive counts in favor of criminalization. Feinberg’s version of the offense principle—which holds that subjective offensiveness gives us reason to criminalize—is something close to the opposite of the truth. (shrink)