This week we ask: Is there value in taking offence? Indeed, should we cultivate a readiness to take offence in ourselves and others?
This week we welcome Dr Emily McTernan, co-host of this podcast, into the guest seat. Emily is talking about her new book, On Taking Offence. In it, she argues that taking offence is an important and often valuable response to affronts against our social standing, and that it deserves to be taken more seriously by scholars than it has been (and perhaps less seriously than it might be seen by some sections of society).
Mentioned in this episode:
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
offence, norms, offended, interactions, anger, affront, part, thought, concern, act, small, person, emotion, treat, standing, ucl, book, interesting, joke, online
SPEAKERS
Emily McTernan, Alan Renwick
Alan Renwick 00:05
Hello. This is UCL Uncovering Politics. And this week we ask: Is there value in taking offence? Indeed, should we cultivate a readiness to take offence in ourselves and others?
Hello. My name is Alan Renwick and welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics, the podcast of the School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at University College London.
And we have a special episode today for three reasons.
One is that it's the first episode of the new academic year here at UCL. Over the summer, we've been beavering away doing lots of fresh research, and we're looking forward to bringing lots of it to you over the coming weeks and months.
Another reason it's special episode is that we're recording this in our brand new studio. Up till now, we have recorded the podcast online. But now, for the first time, I'm sitting here in the same space as this week's guests surrounded by lots of fancy equipment.
But the most important reason that today is a special episode is that that guest is my fellow UCL Uncovering Politics host, Emily McTernan. Having heard her ask the questions many times, now we have a chance to explore some of her own research.
Emily, it's great to have you on the podcast as a guest this time. And before we get going into your research, we should just reflect on a moment on the joy that is our new studio. It's been quite some time coming but feels great.
Emily McTernan 01:33
It's wonderful to be in person, to actually be on the other side of the table rather than just two boxes on a screen. And I'm delighted to be the first person to get to be interviewed by you in this space.
Alan Renwick 01:43
It should be fun. Let's see how it goes. So yes, let's get down to business.
Dr Emily McTernan is not only co-host of this episode, but also Associate Professor in Political Theory in the UCL Department of Political Science. She has published in many of the leading journals in the field, including Philosophy and Public Affairs and the Journal of Political Philosophy.
And her new book, On Taking Offence, was published by Oxford University Press over the summer. In it, she argues that taking offence is an important and often valuable response to affront against our social standing, and that it deserves to be taken more seriously by scholars than it has been.
Now listeners with particularly long memories may recall that we discussed one chapter of the book in an episode way back in January 2022. But now we have a chance to explore the arguments in much more depth.
So Emily, let's go for it. And so as I said the book is a defence of taking offence. Why did you think that such a defence is needed?
Emily McTernan 02:48
I think two reasons. One is how it's seen in public. And one is to do with what it might tell us within philosophy.
So in public I think there are two big mistakes in the way that we're thinking about the culture of taking offence, what happens when people take offence.
So one is that offence is often seen as an expression of hurt feelings, of victimhood, that it's somehow a matter of vulnerability or over sensitivity. And I think that's a mischaracterisation. So in the book, I argue that offence is actually instead an act of resistance to an affront to your social standing. And I think it's a valuable one at times, and I'm sure we'll talk about that.
And the other mistake in popular thinking about offence is that it's seen as catastrophic in some way, right? So we have all of these articles and books that have been concerned about the idea that people, particularly young people, are taking offence all the time these days, that we have a 'generation snowflake', that there's a kind of chilling effect on the rest of us, that the rest of us are feeling there are things we can't say, places we can't go in conversation. And I think, again, that's a mistake. I don't think there's anything new or special or funny about taking offence these days. We've always taken offence. And I think it's a perfectly ordinary, if potent, part of social interactions.
And so against the unpopularity of offence, I want to defend it as a morally and socially valuable part of our interactions, at least sometimes. Sometimes it's the opposite. Sometimes it can be morally very problematic. But sometimes it can do good things. And then the other – so that's the kind of public facing reasons. So I thought this was interesting to try and engage with the public debate on it a bit more.
But the other is some philosophical motivations. So there are two.
So one is simply that philosophers have not spent very long thinking about offence. The central book on taking offence is written by Joel Feinberg, but in it he doesn't really tell us much about offence. What he actually talks about is a whole cluster of dislike states from annoyance to disgust to anger to offence that might be caused by people and their various behaviours. But I really think offence is an interesting distinct emotion.
So part of the project of the book is to try and pull out why it is distinctive and interesting. And it should be familiar to us. I think we feel it for all sorts of different [reasons]. Things can trigger our offence. We all differ on this, but you might be offended when someone queue jumps in front of you, when someone spills your drink in the bar without apologising, when someone makes innuendos in your workplace.
And then the last piece of kind of motivation, I guess, again, within the academic literature, would be that there's been a long running and increasingly popular, a long running complaint about an increasingly popular framework within political philosophy. So increasingly in political philosophy, there's a turn away from the distributive, which thinks justice is all about the stuff that we have, towards the relational egalitarian. So you think it's all about treating each other as equals – that our big concern should be things like oppression, domination, marginalisation, and not whether we all have equal stuff. That stuff matters, but it doesn't matter in and of itself. What matters is how we stand in relations to others.
So within that framework, a lasting challenge to it has been this thought that it's dreadfully vague when it comes to talking about what it actually is to live as equals and what it's really like to live as not equals. So that it will say, abstractly defined, 'avoid things like oppression, domination, marginalisation', but not very many details on exactly what that would involve. And then on the positive side, what we're going to be like when we live as social equals, the thought is, well, it'll be things like we're going to shake hands, we're going to look each other in the eye, we're going to all use the same titles, we're not going to have doctors and misters, it's all going to be the same. And those are quite unsatisfactory, and even relational egalitarians admit that.
So the book is a tiny part of the project of trying to flesh it out a bit. So one thing that the book is essentially concerned with, in the middle of the book, is to start thinking a bit more seriously about what it is to have social standing and how we go about negotiating our social standing with each other. And so one of the parts of that negotiation, the book argues, is by taking offence. That's one way we can stand up for our standing when it's slighted and it's a helpful way of thinking through some of the conflicts that we face in contemporary society over things like norms of flirtation, or over things like microaggressions or cultural appropriation – offence is one part of the story about how we're going to negotiate these things together.
Alan Renwick 06:17
Great start. As true scholars, we should of course, before we proceed any further define our terms. So what does it mean to take offence?
Emily McTernan 06:38
Great. So on my account of offence, it's a reaction in emotional response to an affront to our social standing as we conceive of it – the social standing that we take ourselves to be due. How we expect to be treated; how we think other people should be towards us and with us.
When we take offence, we perceive or judge that there is this affront, and then we feel a moment of estrangement from the person who has offended us. And it may only be a moment. It might be just a small pause in your interactions together. It can sometimes be much grander. So if someone says something a tiny bit offensive, maybe I just feel this small moments of rupture. If someone says something so egregious to me – or about me or mine – that I never want to see them again, that rupture might be very lasting.
And finally, the kind of third part of the story is that we'll have a behavioural tendency – an inclination towards acts of withdrawal. So that doesn't mean we always withdraw. But it means we will fairly often withdraw. So what might those look like? Well, they might be that I'll never talk to that person again. But I think much more often, it's something like I'll raise an eyebrow, I'll leave an awkward pause, I pointedly won't laugh at your joke that's offensive.
So that sort of what taking offence is: it's an emotional response to an affront to your standing.
Alan Renwick 08:20
It's quite interesting that you focus there very much on offence as a small-scale emotion. And you talk about this quite a lot in the book. Why does it matter that it's this small-scale emotion?
Emily McTernan 08:32
So I think one concern of the book was just to really clearly distinguish it from public shaming. So there's this emotional reaction we have together when someone says something that offends your sensibilities about how you ought to be treated that just isn't the same as the concern we have about mass pylons online and public shaming. So I really wanted to draw our attention to these details.
And the other reason is because... The reason really is partly to do with what I think we should be thinking about social standing. So I'm seeing offence as an emotion that's to do with negotiating your social standing. And I'm seeing social standing... Of course, sometimes your social standing has to do with your legal status, whether you have a vote, sometimes your social standing is coming from your economic status, but sometimes it's coming from something distinctively social. And that is precisely the everyday patterning of our interactions together that are going to express things like racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, small details of the way we interact with each other, of what patterns those everyday inequalities.
And so I wanted to bring our attention to offence, a small part of the negotiation, of that small and ordinary stuff – very important stuff – but small and everyday stuff that's making up unjust social relations. And so I really want to draw attention to the fact that offence when I'm defending it as socially valuable, I really am defending it over the small things, the very thing that critic doesn't like. The point of pointing out that it is in itself a small thing, that it isn't this catastrophic public shaming reaction.
Alan Renwick 09:59
And can one be offended by an affront against someone else's social standing?
Emily McTernan 10:04
So the answer is sometimes.
So I want to be really careful about this. So I think one thing that I want to distinguish carefully here is that I don't think it's apt to take offence at a slight aimed at some unrelated other. Now there's a lot of kind of philosopher carefulness there. So maybe I'll just unpack that a little bit.
So Hume has this – David Hume, a very famous philosopher – has this wonderful example of someone feeling proud about a beautiful fish in the sea. And his point is: why would you feel proud about the fish, right? It's got nothing to do with you. Let's suppose you're not to marine biologist who is responsible for saving them. You're just an ordinary person.
And a similar thought – so that's going on in pride – and a similar thought is going on with offence, right? If it's an affront to someone standing, where that has nothing to do with your own standing. It's just inapt to take offence, just the same as it's inapt to take pride of the fish in the sea.
Now does that mean it's only if it's directly about me that I'm going to take offence? No. And we're all familiar with that, right? If a male colleague says something offensive about women, but he's targeting another woman in the department, I may be offended, even though it wasn't about me directly.
And so one thought in the book is that we can take offence when someone says something that pertains to our standing, even if it's not a direct insult to us – something that, you know, if it's part of our group, then you can see how it would also be an affront to my own standing, because it's affront of me and mine.
Same thing happens in pride, of course, right? We can feel proud in our children's achievements, not because they're our achievements, but because the child is close enough to us that it somehow reflects on us or we take it to. But I do want to resist the idea that you should be taking offence on behalf of unrelated others. I think that is not an apt thing to feel.
Alan Renwick 11:40
So if I'm also in the room where the man says something offensive towards the woman, can I feel offended?
Emily McTernan 11:47
So it's an interesting case. So I think there's a conceptual... The part I talked about is the kind of conceptual mistake. So like the fish in the sea pride, it's a conceptual mistake to think it's about you.
But I also think it can be a moral mistake. So the worry I have about the colleague who weighs in and says: Oh, well, I'm offended now, because you've said this about women in front of me. And the way I put it in the book is you're making it about yourself, right? So it ought to be focused on the target of the affront, the woman. And instead, the man is saying something like, or you're saying something like: I am a fine, upstanding person, and you must take account of that, and so you've offended me by saying something like that in front of me.
So it's a kind of moral mistake because it's distracting from what's happened here. So it would be better maybe to feel indignant or angry or one of the other emotions but offence, I think, has a tendency to be something like making it about yourself, which is inapt in these sorts of cases, morally and conceptually, I think.
Sorry, one tiny, tiny extra part. The slight complication here is that sometimes these are fronts to standing at sort of targeting your group identity. So thinking women are lesser, thinking gay people aren't, you know, as proper as straight people, something like this. But the other way in which offences is in the mix with our social norms is it's also to do with our general norms of courtesy and politeness and what we don't say around here.
So, in fact, in the case of the colleagues in the room, there is a sense in which you have been affronted. So if we have a very strong social norm in academia that we're all good liberals, right, and this means there are lots of things we do and don't say and do and don't think, and someone transgresses that in front of you, that is a kind of affront to you, because you understand academics to be these kind of fine, upstanding people and someone's violated that norm in front of you. Yes, that's an apt source of offence – we take offence when norms are violated of that kind.
So the story is a little complicated, I realise. But the kind of the headline news is the sort of social justice warrior type and often taking inapt offence. But it can be more complicated.
Alan Renwick 13:39
They're inept offensive – inappropriate offence.
Emily McTernan 13:41
So inappropriate is both conceptually inappropriate and morally inappropriate. The case of the two colleagues in the room is tricky partly because there are these two levels of norms going on. So I think what might be happening is drawing on the general social norm about not saying these kinds of things around here. And that's all of our jobs to keep sustaining and endorsing. And so it's seen as an affront to all of us when that's transgressed against.
Alan Renwick 13:49
So the social justice warrior isn't allowed to think on this scheme that I'm an oppressed person. This other person is also oppressed in a different way. The affront against that other person is an affront against oppressed people, and therefore I can feel offended.
Emily McTernan 14:22
Some might... I mean, that's interesting. There might be cases of affronts to particular groups that generalise in a certain respect and so could cause that kind of offence.
I think the only hesitation I have is that I actually think that often is where we start to make moral mistakes, where we weigh on other people's behalf. I think even if you're a member of a differently oppressed group, it's quite easy to mischaracterise what's going on, what that group is actually demanding or asking for. And so I think there's good reason to be wary of that morally.
Alan Renwick 14:51
And why does this distinction matter? So you talk in the book about how the person who's not in the affected group can feel indignant.
Emily McTernan 14:59
Hm.
Alan Renwick 15:00
And you're suggesting that there's quite an important distinction to be made between feeling indignant and feeling offended. And I guess you're implying in what you've just said that if you're offended, then that implies further action or further emotional response that is not available to the person who's merely indignant.
Emily McTernan 15:20
I guess that would be – something like that would be the line. Yes.
So I think the thought is something like... I mean, one place this comes up particularly in the book is thinking about the alternative of anger, because you might think indignation as a species of anger. And one thought in the book is just the offence is a very particular kind of emotional reaction. So it's this action of withdrawal. It's about the social wrong, the fact that you've been socially slighted.
And anger is quite different, and so too would be indignation. So it might mean much more emotion of engagement. So not about withdrawal, of about lashing out or pushing back. Something much more engaging with the other and not a kind of removal from the other.
And the other is, I think, often as a third party, you're acting – it's not really about the social misstep as much as the moral misstep in these cases. So you feel indignant because women ought not to be treated like that. It's not because your social standing is threatened. So I think a different response is more fitting for the case that we're in. So anger is more appropriate because what you're actually picking up on is a moral flaw in what's happened, and not engaged in the social dynamic of trying to negotiate you're standing against an affront.
Alan Renwick 16:33
So we've talked about this a bit already, but I should give you the opportunity properly to explain what actually is the value in taking offence. So you're arguing not merely that there is this thing that is philosophically interesting, but also that it can be valuable to take offence. Why is that?
Emily McTernan 16:50
Great. So we've touched on this, as you say, already a little bit.
And so lots of small things. I'm talking about things like microaggressions, unwarranted intrusions, inappropriate jokes, small acts of disrespect, interrupting people, and so on and so forth.
So the thought in the book is that offence is an emotion that negotiates and sometimes renegotiates the pattern of behaviour and the underpinning of social norms that are what structures the relations of inequality in our society, the pervasive hierarchies that we experience in our society. And so the thought is... So part of the book is trying to make good on the thought that this pattern of small interactions is important in the way I'm claiming it is, that it is collectively a way in which injustice is perpetuated and reproduced.
Now, those small things on their own might not seem to matter very much as a one off. But collectively that's how we're constantly re-realising the relations of inequality between us. It sort of makes it spread across life in a certain way when they're not about the law and not about the economic situation. Obviously, the lines here are going to be blurred. So that's the kind of background picture of what's going on in hierarchy and what's going on with these everyday patterns.
And then the thought with offence – why is offence valuable? Well, here's this pattern that systematically treats people unequally. And the place I want to say that offence is valuable is when it's standing up for your standing as a social equal, trying to renegotiate the terms in which people like you are being treated. So when someone takes offence because you haven't used their title, where you have used the white man's title, or doctor, that's a way it's a small act of resistance against that pattern.
But I think it's quite an important and valuable act of resistance. Because when you take offence, you're saying: don't treat me like that. So you're giving people a signal: that's not the right kind of thing to do. And you're also giving everyone else a signal: this isn't the right kind of thing to do. It's not the kind of thing that's okay around here.
And the thought is it's actually quite costly to offend other people. Most of us most of the time don't want to do it. And we don't like making these kinds of social missteps as it were. So I think taking offence is this nice little piece of interaction that can push back against certain kinds of unequal treatment or patterns.
And they're quite hard to get out in other ways. So I think offence is only one of the social emotions used to negotiate these. But I think it's quite an important one because it is the feeling we have when there are these transgressions against our perceived standing, so you can see why it's relevant here. But I think taking offence is important here because it's playing a role in negotiating these background patterns of the norms. It's a way we can say the norms need to change around here.
And we see it... The reason we're seeing it, perhaps, in places that people are finding it uncomfortable is precisely because a lot of our norms are in flux right now, in terms of how we should be treating each other as equals or not equals. And so you would expect then to see offence popping up in places people don't like it, because some people are going with the old norms – and they're offended when someone is offended at you following the old norms – and then there are the new norms, and there are people who are offended when you don't follow the new norms. And it's going to be very complicated, it's going to be quite a lot of offence as we go about this renegotiation.
So I think it's quite helpful if we reconceptualise it not as an act of vulnerability and victimhood, but as what you would expect to see when the norms are in flux in negotiation because it is an act of negotiating these norms. And that's what makes it valuable.
Alan Renwick 20:02
So does that mean offence is sometimes a better response than anger because we are in this kind of delicate renegotiation process and maybe anger is just too strong. Is that fair?
Emily McTernan 20:15
Yeah. Or will be perceived as too strong.
So I think anger is apt at these injustices, because while they look small in the one-on-one case, of course, collectively, there's nothing small about being someone who repeatedly experiences microaggressions in your workplace. But as a one off it's always going to seem – or it's often going to seem – to the outsider as an overreaction to feel angry. Offence is just an apt-seeming reaction, I think, directly to that act and its transgression of how you want to be treated. And so it's going to seem more in line with what's happening here, and so perhaps easier to have put into our social negotiation. So yes, I think that's part of it.
And the other reason, of course, is that until these norms are established and we all widely agree, lots of people are going to contest, say, that there's anything morally wrong about saying or doing these sorts of things. But they might much more easily see that some people are seeing it as socially wrong to do that. And it might be after we all accept that it's socially wrong to do those kinds of things, we often then also accept it's morally wrong.
And anger is a response to moral violations and transgressions, I think particularly. And so, and it looks particularly suitable there. I mean of course we get angry at things like our computer not working, but where anger seems valuable and important and we think it's okay is often when it's a moral violation, that we're seeing someone has hurt someone else. And I think it takes longer for us to accept that these things hurt, than that these things are not okay anymore around here. That's the first bit so we can get to the second bit, the moral bit.
Alan Renwick 21:37
It's curious. I'm trying to work out whether the dividing line between when anger is appropriate, or the most apt response, and when offence is the most apt response, is a philosophical one or an empirical one. So is it a question of which will have the better overall effect in promoting acceptance of egalitarian norms? Or is there something more philosophical underpinning that allows us to draw that line somewhere?
Emily McTernan 22:09
So I think that there are some philosophical lines to draw here and there's also an empirical set of claims that we might make.
So the philosophical lines would be things to say something about the distinctive kinds of acts that come with feeling those emotions, and which look like they're going to be the right ones to feel in this kind of case, morally speaking. And I think there is some distinction here. So I think offence at the act is often going to seem proportionate in a way that anger at the act, when it's small, is not. The anger is very often at the pattern.
But importantly in the book, I actually, I don't, I try not to spend too long arguing about precisely which emotion we should feel because of course our emotional lives are much more messy than that. So we may well feel both. It's not the case that we only feel one emotion at a time, that would be very strange moral life, right. And when we're very familiar with the idea you might feel different emotions. And so I don't really see it – you might be both angry and offended. That seems completely apt, right? That does seem to sometimes be how we feel. So I don't really want to see them as so much in direct competition.
But I guess what I wanted to draw our attention to is the fact that it's not all and only anger, that our emotional lives are indeed more rich than that. And one other piece of the picture of how we respond to injustice is we're looking at these small details of our interactions and we're often offended. We may then on reflection become angry, but I wanted to see the value of the initial offence reaction too. And I think it is valuable. And it's an immediate pushback. I think sometimes it takes time with these small injustices – we reflect on them, and we become angry. But I think we're often immediately offended. And I wanted to say, well, that's also valuable, because it's this immediate act of pushback against the act. It's very easy to signal it. It's quite a low-cost signal.
So getting angry at someone is quite a high cost as a signal. But so it's quite dangerous to be angry at someone, right: they might have a reaction to you; it might well be taken to others to be an overreaction. I think it's a lot less dangerous to take offence actually. I think because it's often these small gestures, it's sometimes going to be quite subtle often, it's going to be hard for the other person to protest about the fact that you've taken offence. I mean it does happen, particularly more dramatic manifestations of offence, but a lot of the time when we signal offence it would be quite hard for the other party to do much about it. Hey, you didn't love my joke, right? It's not going to go as well, whereas the anger is much more of a direct conversation between the two parties, and so it can be much more costly, I think.
Alan Renwick 23:49
And when we're thinking about your response to the critics of 'generation snowflake', I'm just wondering if it would be fair to say that your response to them is essentially to hive off part of what they don't like and defend that and say, 'offence taking, we ought to defend' while you're kind of agreeing with them about quite a lot of the social justice warrior-dom that goes on out there. Is that that fair?
Emily McTernan 25:06
I have some concerns about public shaming, I have some concerns about mass public shaming, and I have some concerns about how the dynamics of offence translate online. And in all of those respects, I guess I have some sympathy for the position that's being pushed.
Where I don't have sympathy is the worry about what's going on in our classrooms, in our universities, in the interactions between ordinary citizens. I think we shouldn't be worried about offence taking in these cases. In fact, we should expect it and we should sometimes welcome it. So that's why... I do think it's an important part to clawback because you do see a lot of criticisms of things like 'the woke generation'. And we're often not talking only – or we're certainly not talking even mainly – I think what we're seeing that is not online, it's in person. And it's that I want to really defend, these kinds of dynamics. I think it's important to disentangle them and to see what they're doing because I think I do really worry about this narrative of victimhood and vulnerability.
Alan Renwick 26:01
I did one point when I was reading the book have a thought that if one allows oneself to be offended by someone, is that kind of allowing them power over one. And that if one rather decides to float above and not be offended, then somehow one is denying them that power. Is that Is that a reasonable thought?
Emily McTernan 26:01
It almost, it reminds me very much of the feminists discussing anger, where they say: we can see how women's anger is, we make it so that it can't really be read, it doesn't get uptake. People don't read it as anger. They see the woman has been hysterical. And I sometimes think, perhaps uncharitably, that the critics of offence are seeking to do a similar thing that was done to women's anger when they say it's an emotional vulnerability, it's a victimhood, because it's distracting from the fact that what it is, is it an act of resistance to a social hierarchy, an act of insubordination. No, I don't want to be treated like that. And of course, if we start seeing it as hurt feelings, as victimhood, it's a similar kind of move as the one that was pulled when we said: well, women aren't angry, they're hysterical, we don't take their claim seriously. And what it is is a claim: a claim not to be treated like that.
So that's very interesting. So I think one thing that I try and do in the book is make clear that I think a real weakness of some ways that we think about social standing in political philosophy is we treat it as this very static thing. There are these groups, they're ordered in a certain way, and that's the end of the story.
And I really want to encourage a view where, of course, we come into our interactions with different standing, set by things like our group identity, but we are in a process of negotiation. It's a dynamic negotiation between us about who is the one who's setting the terms in our interaction, who is the one who has power, what they have power over. And so I really wanted to bring that kind of dynamic interaction to the fore.
And the reason that's relevant to your question about whether we should just sort of rise above offence and not let the other person have power over us, is actually by offending us what they've done is a small move in that interaction. They've said: you are lesser than you think you are. And you are saying: no. You're resisting it. You're asserting it in a way that can be quite subtle and can be very effective.
And so I think with that picture in mind, it's not the case that you're giving someone power. They've already threatened your standing and now you have to respond. You have to say, actually, it's fine to treat me like that, and signal to everyone around you that it's fine to treat me like that. Or you have to say: don't treat me like that.
And you can say that with a kind of rupture. You can say: don't treat me like that I'm very angry now. Or it turns out you can do it really subtly. You can make that person feel uncomfortable. You can make everyone else realise that wasn't quite okay but without actually putting yourself on the line in the way that a direct challenge does. And so that's why I'm not seeing it as this process of letting oneself behind.
I think the other thing I wanted to push back on that picture, because I think it's a common one, is sometimes people think, well, if you just rise above it, try not to notice it, it'll be fine. I think we are affected by these small things, even when we don't think we are. And so I think becoming conscious of them and resisting them isn't leaving us worse off than we were before.
Alan Renwick 29:17
Yeah. Let me put a couple of further possible kind of responses to your argument. And one final one coming from the view that offence taking sometimes goes too far. Of which I guess is that some people who are, you know, perfectly well meaning and want to get on with other people and don't want to offend them but they feel that sometimes they're walking on eggshells. That's the phrase that's often used. They feel that if they fail to use the most up to date lingo in relation to some particular group then they're going to cause offence and they're going to create a socially difficult situation. And that just makes them feel, makes them kind of withdraw from interaction with people where actually it might be better to have those interactions and have people understanding each other.
So there's a concern from some people that the development of the readiness to take offence creates this context that's just quite difficult for everyone and actually impedes that process of norm development.
Emily McTernan 30:24
So I think as with any disposition to certain emotions, you can have an excess as well as a deficiency. So we can take too much and we can take too little. So obviously we could get into a society where we do indeed take so much offence that it is very hard for us to move on together and shake these norms together.
But the picture I want to resist perhaps in what you've just sketched is I think one of the points of the book is simply to say we all offend others all the time. This is a very normal part of our interaction. So you know I make a slighting remark about my partner's cooking, I don't respond to my friends text in a timely fashion or with a sufficient concern, I queue jump because I just really want to get on the tube and I don't really want to wait for tourists to get on with their bag.
And so I guess one thing I want to say is just it's not terribly scary. We don't need to be walking on eggshells. We need to accept that we're all going to mess up.
And I think the interesting thing about the offence reaction is it very often leaves space for repair. So it's not a huge rupture. It's not the anger that requires some kind of restitution, some kind of forgiveness moment. It's just a negotiation of how we're going to treat one another. It just a small act going on here. And so you don't need to sort of walk around terrified that you're going to offend. You can accept that we're all going to offend, that we all try, that we're all in this process of negotiation together. And we shouldn't worry too, too much about that.
And insofar as our goal is to reshape our norms, we're not going to want to scapegoat at least too many people for saying the wrong things precisely because we do want relations to continue. We want to move to a better set of norms, not often casting people out into the wilderness. We're more often trying to be clear about what the terms are that we can successfully interact together.
Alan Renwick 32:09
And then the other critique is coming from the other side of this debate and would argue that actually this focus on offence is underplaying the seriousness of social inequalities and structural inequalities and the importance of being angry against these sometimes and taking serious big action against them.
Emily McTernan 32:31
Great. So again offence is never meant to be in conflict with anger in that sense. So, of course, anger at microaggressions is legitimate and is helpful and is a good thing. The argument is simply that we shouldn't stop at anger. There are a range of other emotions.
Is offence the wrong kind of emotion to take seriously in justice? Well, I think the fact that offence can sometimes be felt at things that don't really matter, or even – and often – felt by people who are defending their inflated position in the social hierarchy, doesn't mark it out as a sort of uniquely bad emotion to feel, a sort of inapt for injustice, precisely because anger is often felt by those who are at the top of the heap as well. And anger is often felt at things like the irritation that the mic in this room is not going to connect directly to my laptop.
And so the thought is just the fact that the emotion can sometimes be felt about not very serious things doesn't diminish its importance for dealing with injustice. And it's definitely not the case that we shouldn't feel anger, and nowhere in the book do I say we shouldn't feel anger, it's simply that we should also take seriously the loads of other emotions that we feel that are also part of the story of how we're going to negotiate and renegotiate these hierarchies together.
Alan Renwick 33:38
I think I've tried every counter argument that I could think of and you've responded wonderfully to everyone. So let's move on.
You devote a chapter of the book to humour. Why does humour get a whole chapter?
Emily McTernan 33:52
So humour is a particularly interesting, a kind of troubling, case. So the chapter in the book is motivated by a tension. And the tension is this: on the one hand, humour very often offends people. So if you look in the newspaper and, you know, think about when people have offended, it's often certain comedians who say certain kinds of things and everyone is hugely offended. But on the other hand, we often say things like: oh, it's only a joke, oh they were just joking, shouldn't take offence at things like that.
So the book is very interested in the role that jokes might be playing against the kind of unjust background. When we tell an offensive joke, what are we doing? Is it offensive? Is it the fact that it is a joke an excuse, or a reason to further condemn the person who's offended?
So that's the question: is it worse that it's a joke than if it had been a just a statement of the same content? The same sexist belief, say, or the same racist belief. Or is it less bad that it was a joke, because you didn't fully endorse those beliefs because it was only a joke. And so the chapter is really trying to get to grips with this.
And so I think comedy is particularly interesting, partly because – and I think on all three theories of humour of why things are funny – it's highly likely you'll offend when you tell a joke.
So one theory of humour is the kind of Freudian relief theory. So the view is something like, very roughly, that you feel humour with a release of a tension. So someone transgresses a taboo that we all have to abide by all the time in society, and the release of the tension, that's what causes it to be funny. Because we can see the taboo violation is highly likely to offend, so of course comedy offends.
On another theory of why we things are funny, humour is about feeling superior to others. So mocking to do humour very much looks like this. Of course that's going to offend.
And then the third theory of humour says it's about this incongruity – or at least the one I like – it's all about particularly the transgressions of norms, benign transgressions of norms. So what's funny is when you think things should go a certain way and then the comedian subverts it. So to pick the case of tickling, there's a norm against physical contact. It looks like an act of aggression. But of course, it's benign – it's just a tickle. And so that's where the funny comes in. And so again, if it's transgressing norms it's going to offend.
So there's something very interesting because comedy is somehow tightly tied to the risk of offending.
But on the other hand, I don't think that lets the comedian off the hook. So the other part of the chapter, having explored why comedy might so often offend, turns to whether indeed it is worse to make a racist joke than to say a racist thing.
And the thought is actually jokes might be particularly malign. So when someone makes a racist joke, they are shaping what we all take to be acceptable even more pervasively than the person who says the racist thing. So it's a slightly complicated argument here, but the thought is quite simple.
So a joke is a particularly demanding speech. So when I make a joke, you're expected as the audience to respond. I'm looking for the laugh. It's awkward not to laugh. And when a laugh happens, it's confirming to everyone in the space that that is funny, that that's fine, so what I just said is okay.
Actually, a statement doesn't always come with those demands. So it's a particularly strong piece of reinforcement of the thought that this racist piece of belief is okay as compared to someone just dropping it into a into a conversation. So obviously both can be wrong. But it might be that's even worse when it's a joke. So that's where I finally come down.
So yes, comedy is a very complex thing. I think we don't tend to talk that much about comedy. There is some philosophy on this, so we do sometimes think about it in political philosophy, but very seldom. I think it's actually quite, quite an important part of our social interactions. There is a lot of comedy and humour in our social interactions. It's interesting, perhaps, to think about the ways in which it can shape our social norms and the ways that we treat one another.
Alan Renwick 37:46
And we've been talking here mostly about interactions – interpersonal interactions – between individuals, I guess also in meetings, in maybe a theatre, in a comedy club or something like that. A lot of the concern that is expressed these days is about interactions that take place online and on social media. How does the framework that you develop for looking at offence transfer into the online world?
Emily McTernan 38:13
In the last chapter I take that on directly. So the tricky thing about saying very much about the online world is of course it has so many different forms. So in some places, the dynamics that I've been defending – in, as you point out, these very interpersonal, actually connected forms of our engagement with one another – in some places on the internet, that is, indeed, the same set of dynamics.
So Facebook's an interesting case, or Meta, or whatever they want to call it. But there's a nice study done on what happens if people take offence on social media in the case of Facebook. And it looks very similar to offline. So it's things like: you don't respond to their post, perhaps you block them, perhaps you just leave, you know, you leave it hanging as an interaction. So it's a quite small manifestations of offence. It's similar the online variant and what we see offline.
And that makes sense on my picture, precisely because it tends to be that on Facebook, we're talking to people we know. Maybe that's broad communities, but it's often friends, friends of friends, relatives. It's a kind of closed social community. It's a bit like offline life.
Where I start to get worried as things like Twitter. So why is that? The dynamics are going to be different on Twitter. It's largely interactions amongst strangers. So one of the things in the book about the analysis of offence... So I've talked over and over about how it's often subtle, it's often small, but it's still potent. How small it can be depends on how close we are. So if my partner offends me I don't have to do very much to show I'm offended. A raised eyebrow definitely is going to do. If Alan offends me, I might do something a bit bigger, right? That might have to be a small pause, an awkward moment between us, and then he's going to realise. If it's a stranger online, I'm going to have to do something quite dramatic to convey the same amount of withdrawal.
And so online you are going to see an exaggerated set of dynamics around offence. There's no way to just raise an eyebrow. And interestingly Facebook has a kind of eyebrow raising equivalent on the ways that we interact with each other's posts and the nuance that fashions. Not so much Twitter. So I think I am concerned about what happens amongst strangers between them online. And so I think that there might well be differences when we come to online.
But what really worries me online, it's actually less the Twitter case – although I do talk about that in the last chapter – and more the move to regulate that we see from social media platforms. So my final appeal to the critics of the culture of taking offence is just to say: you guys ought to be much, much more concerned about institutions stepping in than you are about the actual offence. And of course, they often are concerned about that, but that's where I agree.
So the fact that the institution is going to regulate offence is often where it does look like a chilling effect. So if Facebook or Twitter or any of the other online platforms starts deleting content before we've even seen it if it's deemed offensive by the algorithm, that's going to be a problem because it's not going to let us contest and negotiate the norms. It's just going to vanish. And there is something slightly troubling to me about that.
Alan Renwick 41:02
Presumably there are limits to that. So grossly offensive material, presumably.
Emily McTernan 41:08
Yes.
Alan Renwick 41:09
There is going to be some regulation there. So again, there's some kind of boundary to be drawn.
Emily McTernan 41:32
Yes, exactly. Absolutely. So clearly hate speech is the easy case. Absolutely we should just delete that immediately. Anything that threatens or incites violence, delete. Anything that is grossly offensive, delete.
But there are I think questions about things like... The nice case from Facebook is the deletion of a post on a Me Too discussion where someone had written 'all men are scum'. And it was deleted, and she was blocked from Facebook for a period of time as a result.
Only you might think that you should be worried about these regulatory platforms making a decision about what kinds of political speech are going to be permitted, or what kind of expressions of political speech are going to be permitted, and sort of insisting on a just a very sort of neutral tone for all of these kinds of debates, because you might think more heated language is apt, and that that conveyed a certain kind of point that it's probably okay to put that on line. No one's directly threatened by that, really. And so I think that is a concern.
And I also think I'm concerned partly just because it's so undemocratic the way these are being done. So if these are going to be the fora in which we have these political discussions, it's a huge concern to me that it's the tech bros and their friends making these decisions for all of us about how our democratic debates ought to go, what things are on and off, or in and out of limits to say, whether they go beyond the law. Of course, hate speech is a whole different question. But when they move well beyond the law, and they’re doing other things, how many of those are happy for them to keep going?
Alan Renwick 43:15
But I think you're also arguing for a kind of laissez faire approach here in favour of it, or instead of, an approach that is subject to democratic control. So you're not suggesting there should be regulation that is subject to democratic control as well as regulation that is not subject to democratic control.
Emily McTernan 43:32
So I would be more comfortable with the regulation by democratic control because that would be another way of negotiating the norms. So offence isn't the only way to negotiate the norms. It's only one. And the book is explicit about that. There are many other routes. And one other would, indeed, to be to have a democratic debate about what is and isn't okay to post online.
Alan Renwick 43:49
I mean, I guess the reason I'm asking that question is I'm just wondering whether laissez faire works, whether we can kind of assume that people rubbing up against each other and responding and all of that happening will allow the norms to develop.
Emily McTernan 44:14
Yes, and there's lots of reasons to be worried online.
So one is the exaggeration of the effects between strangers that's going to lead to it being much harder to shape norms in kind of appropriate ways.
And one is, of course, if you have an algorithm that pushes controversial stuff, or only shows people things that are like the things that you already approve of. I mean there's huge problems with moving stuff on to the online context for these negotiations.
But I guess one of the central points that I still want to reiterate is how much of our lives has lived offline, how much of our negotiation is, in fact, in person between us, between us and our students or us and our employees or us and an employer, and not to [inaudible] on the tube and not to forget that stuff.
Alan Renwick 44:55
Wow, what a fantastic conversation. And what a wonderful book. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, and I'd recommend it very much to all of our listeners as well. Really enlightening and thought provoking and fascinating. So many, many thanks, Emily.
And we have been talking about the book On Taking Offence, written by Emily McTernan and published in June by Oxford University Press.
And we have lots more great research to discuss over the course of the term.
So I'm going to be hosting episodes on topics such as immigration policy, the role of historical research in political science, and the politics of lending by the IMF (the International Monetary Fund).
Emily, you're going to be hosting lots of fun things as well.
Emily McTernan 45:37
Yes, on fiscal transparency, about language as a kind of act and whether it takes a certain kind of uptake from the audience to be that – some deep philosophy questions there – and on climate change and injustice.
Alan Renwick 45:50
We are going to make fiscal transparency fun. We promise that, don't we?
Emily McTernan 45:53
Yes, absolutely.
Alan Renwick 45:56
Great. And next week, I'll be hosting an episode where we're looking at the dynamics of collective action with a particular focus on action by people living in informal housing in South Africa.
Remember to make sure you don't miss out on that or other future episodes of UCL Uncovering Politics, all you need to do is subscribe. You can do so on Apple, Google Podcasts or whatever podcast provider you use. And while you're there, we'd love it if you could take a moment of time to rate or review us too.
I'm Alan Renwick. This episode was produced by Alice Hart and Eleanor Kingwell-Banham. Our theme music is written and performed by John Mann. This has been UCL Uncovering Politics. Thank you for listening.