Recently there has been a growing sympathy for those hurt by offence. There seems to be a real need to take the offended seriously, to the extent that institutional efforts are underway to mitigate the effects of offence (for instance bill C-16 in Canada).
I find this incredibly weird; in fact, being part of what I consider a great liberal tradition, I’m offended that people would want to protect others from being offended! The question of what to do with people like me is a good prelude to the reductio ad absurdum that I have sketched out below. I propose that it is never possible to protect people from offence. Here I will outline my reasoning as to why this is the case. First of all, I presume that:
Let us imagine that we want to protect victims of offence using legislation. This legislation will have to adhere to the above mentioned principles. If this legislation is to be any good it also needs to be free of paradoxes. But there is at least one paradoxical situation innate in trying to implement such legislation. The paradox is as follows. Consider a possible victim of offence named Charlie. Charlie is offended when people try to protect him. Charlie is capable of being offended by such actions under principle 2) and it is our duty to take seriously his offence under principle 1). How do we protect Charlie from being offended? One could propose to refrain from protecting Charlie, but this refusal to protect him stems from a desire to not offend. In fact, by refraining from protecting Charlie we are protecting him from being offended. Thus, we will offend Charlie and fail to protect him. Our only other option is to protect Charlie, but this also leads to Charlie being offended. A contradiction. Any legislation that aims to protect the offended needs to either resolve the above paradox or find fault with either of the two proposed principles. I'm convinced that such a resolution of the paradox does not exists and consequently that the proposed legislation would not be worth considering.
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