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A common slogan in the social justice community is that intent is not fucking magic. Usually, people say that when someone does something oppressive, someone else calls them out on it, and the first person says “well, I didn’t mean to.” Intent is not fucking magic! If you hurt people, then they’re hurt, regardless of why!
…Except that intent kind of is fucking magic.
For instance, let’s say someone refers to me with female pronouns. Regardless, I’m misgendered, and I get that twinge of oh fuck oh fuck wrong pronoun. (It feels like being stabbed in the gut with an icicle.) But it is different if the context is:
- My boyfriend, who knew me as “she” for a year and previously had pronouns in read-only memory;
- A friend who is trying but still sees me as a girl;
- A random person on the Internet who assumes I’m female because I talk about gender;
- Someone who hates me and is deliberately misgendering me as a sign of disrespect.
The primary difference in these situations is intent. The difference in intent between “fuck, I’m used to your old pronouns” and “okay, but you’re a girl REALLY” and “I didn’t know” and “I want to hurt you.” It is reasonable for me to get more upset at someone wanting to hurt me than I am at someone making a mistake.
And you know what? If it’s an ambiguous situation, and it’s possible that they misgendered me to insult me and possible they misgendered me because they thought I was a chick, I would really appreciate it if they would clear the matter up. This is not just about their culpability, although that matters. It’s about my ability to assess how safe that person is and how much I should trust them. If you think intent shouldn’t matter, you are making it more difficult for oppressed people to distinguish people who will hurt them from people who won’t. That is the exact opposite of social justice.
Of course, I think most of the time “intent is not fucking magic!” is used when someone does a shitty thing over and over again and says “I didn’t mean to!” as if that makes it better. But you know what? If you make a sexist joke, and someone explains why that’s bad, and you make another sexist joke and then defend it with “I didn’t mean to be sexist!”, your intent was not good. If you mean well, you will act the way a well-meaning person acts.
How do well-meaning people act?
1) Apology. A real one.
2) Try to understand why the people believe that that thing was wrong.
3) Take steps to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.
3a) If you disagree that a thing was wrong, take reasonable steps to avoid doing that thing in front of people who are bothered by it.
3b) Or admit that, in fact, you DO intend to make sexist jokes and upset feminists, which at least has the virtue of being honest.
Thing of Things 
To say “it doesn’t matter if you tried, it only matters that you failed” (which is essentially what Intent Isn’t Magic means) is so ableist. I can’t believe how few people are willing to call this out.
I find it deeply concerning that some guy can say all the right words in the right order and thus get lauded as a feminist hero, while a well-meaning person who’s maybe socially anxious, less verbally skilled, and/or less educated and consequently uses the wrong language sometimes gets branded a dangerous misogynist. That’s not *just* ableist and classist; as you point out, that’s a horrendously inaccurate way to judge who is safe to be around and who isn’t. The most manipulative abusers always do come across as charming and are highly capable of rearranging their language to appeal to their audience. That doesn’t make them safer than some person who’s doing their best but is not so great with words;it means they possess a certain mental skill, and it may mean they’re better at manipulating situations to their advantage.
“Intent isn’t magic” makes it irrelevant whether something is a skill or a choice, which inevitably means people who happen to possess certain mental skills are given more status and more praise within SJ communities.
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The way I usually think of it is: intent isn’t magic, but it’s not irrelevant either. It doesn’t change how the other person felt, but it does matter for determining the appropriate response.
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Except… in some instances, it can change how the other person felt. To pick Ozy’s own example, they feel a lot different when their boyfriend calls them by the wrong pronoun than when a random person on the Internet says the exact same thing. The main difference is what Ozy knows or guesses about the speaker’s intent.
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What about a third part of 3, where there are no ‘reasonable steps’ available?
3c) Disagree that a thing was wrong and conclude that because any harm was unintentional and that avoiding doing that thing is too onerous, that the onus on avoiding future harm should, in this case, fall on those potentially being harmed?
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If intent *is* magic, and the offense comes less from ‘not having your gender recognized by society’ and more from the cause of the non-recognition, why be offended at all?
I was under the impression non-recognition in itself is hurtful similarly to how triggering a rape survivor is hurtful: You can have perfectly reasonable intentions – such as a serious discussion of rape – but merely reminding someone of such a horrible experience is enough to make someone feel like shit. In this case the intentions were more or less irrelevant.
If the intention is the leading issue, then I’m lead to believe that this whole social justice thing isn’t about “not hurting people’s feelings”, and is instead about signalling social status to previously disenfranchised groups. That is, things like racial slurs or incorrect pronouns or pictures of prophets aren’t bad because they’re inherently hurtful experiences, but because society has decided that doing these things signals lower status to groups who don’t deserve it.
That last proposal might explain a bit – for example why so many groups want to hop onto the ‘offensive terms’ train. I don’t think a white person has *ever* felt triggered by the word ‘cracker’ – it’s just a roundabout way of asserting higher status (as in, if you can create arbitrary signals of low status and then force their disappearance, you’ve signalled higher status).
But yeah – I don’t suppose you speak for all transpeople, so maybe the fact that not everyone agrees with you here is evidence to the contrary.
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I care about what gender other people see me as. That isn’t the same thing as what pronouns they call me– I know a lot of people who accidentally call me “she” but have also credibly signaled that they consider my gender to be Not Boy or Girl, and conversely a lot of people who get my pronouns right but still have me classified in their mental “boy” or “girl” categories. I am fine with the former group and uncomfortable around the latter group although I admit they have done nothing morally wrong.
And about why deliberate misgendering is worse than accidental misgendering: consider a person who steps on your foot. Your foot is hurt the same amount whether it was an accident and they say “sorry” or they were deliberately mashing your foot because they hate you. Nevertheless, you are liable to be way more upset about the second person, to consider the second person more dangerous to be around, etc. The disrespect compounds an already hurtful experience.
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Does it matter if someone gives every indication that they believe your self-identification is true, but clearly can’t get themself to alieve it?
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I think PDV brings up a good point. A person who is desperately trying to address you the way you want to be addressed, in direct defiance of his own mental limitations, is surely more admirable (and probably safer to be around) than someone who is merely paying lip service to your pronoun choices.
That said, we’re now getting into a kind of Turing Test territory: is there any difference between someone who perfectly emulates the proper mental states at all times, and someone who actually has these states; and if so, how would you tell ?
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@Bugmaster: Human brains are not necessarily rational, especially when it comes to vague feelings of discomfort.
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I think that a lot of the time people who say “intent isn’t magic” are doing so in response to people who are jumping from “I made a mistake rather than deliberately intending to hurt you” to “and therefore you are being unreasonable to be hurt and should stop whining about the fact that I did this hurtful thing”.
I agree that intent does make a difference in terms of how severe and lasting the hurt is, but the moment that someone assumes that their lack of intent to hurt me means they can’t have hurt me really, that pretty much automatically shifts them into, if not malicious, then at least willfully careless of my wellbeing.
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I didn’t mean to hurt you, I just didn’t care enough to think for 60 seconds about how what I did would affect you. If I had taken those 60 seconds I surely would have realized that it would hurt you. But I didn’t bother. Also, even though I now realize that there are some important things I failed to consider, I have no plans to set aside time to think through any other things that might come up in my interactions with you. I guess I’ll just learn about those things when I mess up and hurt you more. But I don’t intend to hurt you!
or
My intentions are good! I just want what is best for you, and I am convinced that I know what is best for you, so I will do it to you regardless of your protests or your suffering. It hurts you now, but in the long run it will be better for you.
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I think that those would not actually fall into the category “people with good intentions.” They would fall into the category “people who have bad intentions and are deceiving themselves about it.” I mean, if you genuinely want not to hurt someone, you will make reasonable efforts not to hurt them; if you don’t make those efforts, you don’t actually want not to hurt them, by revealed preference. And “I intend to disrespect your autonomy” is not actually a good intention no matter what it’s dressed up in.
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“reasonable steps”, “reasonable efforts” – Of course we should expect people to do reasonable things to avoid harming others. However, this just puts off answering, or even setting out how to answer, the question of what are the reasonable things someone ought to do.
What is it that makes it reasonable to expect everyone to, for example, educate themselves on gender identity issues and train themselves to meet a certain standard of conduct? What is it that makes it reasonable to expect everyone to limit their humour to that which is most broadly non-offensive?
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desipis: “What is it that makes it reasonable…”
In the abstract, I have a clear answer: *decision theory*. But it’s a long way to get all those meta-levels down.
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I think it might be useful to keep in mind the possibility of someone having neutral, or no particular, intentions, here. That’s what the given example looks like to me – the given person isn’t actually thinking about the person they’ve hurt at all, they’re just trying to find the least inconvenient thing for themselves, and it doesn’t really matter to them whether that helps or harms or is neutral to the other person. And that’s what ‘I didn’t mean to’ usually means, I think – it’s not a claim that the person had good intentions, it’s just a claim that they didn’t have bad ones.
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Desipep – it is difficult to precisely define what is and is not reasonable, but there are things that clearly are and are not reasonable, in much the same way as you can’t say 5’8 is exactly the point where people stop being short and begin being tall, but you can say that a 6’4 person is clearly tall and a 4’9 person is clearly short.
The easiest way to define it is that it is a reasonable effort to avoid harming others when the harm you would do without the effort is clearly greater than the effort required to avoid the harm.
‘Calling people by the correct pronouns’, allowing that you may slip up on occasion, is definitely a thing where the potential harm caused by dysphoria or outing is greater than the effort required to remember the pronouns, except in the case of some people with disabilities, who find remembering such things extremely difficult. People like Ozy, sensibly, accept that in this case the effort is greater and therefore don’t blame said people.
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Loki – Firstly, your “easiest way” is a simple application of utiltarianism. While it does provide an easy framework with which to make a determination, I’m not sure it that the requisite obligation to self-sacrifice for the greater good fits most peoples understanding of reasonable. It might be noble, but I don’t think it matches reasonable.
For example, if you accept the marginal utility of money and a general obligation to self-sacrifice for the greater good, everyone ought to give away all their money to people poorer than them. So have you done the “reasonable” thing and given away all your worldly possessions? I doubt you have, because I don’t think your argument accurately or completely captures all aspects of what is considered reasonable.
If there isn’t an obligation to give away material goods for the greater good to be considered reasonable (and therefore someone of good intent), why should there be an obligation to give away cognitive resources and your own thought processes? Surely, if there’s something we should have the freedom to be selfish about it it’s the way we choose to think and communicate about things? I tend to think there’s a moral cost to attempting to control the way others think or communicate that goes beyond the mere mental effort required to make the desired change.
Secondly, it’s anything but straight forward to objectively estimate the costs or harm of things in the realm of psychology. I think its important to acknowledge the “privilege” that people who are (formally or informally) educated in gender issues and how that can frame perspective on the ease of changing thoughts and behaviours.
What might seem to be a trivial task of switching words to match gender theory to some, may seem to be a significant and deeply uncomfortable task of mentally restructing a lifetime of experience and culture to others. To the latter, it may seem less effort for people to change the way they respond to words they hear rather than for other people to change the words they speak. I’m not sure there’s an easy way to determine which perspective is ‘right’.
I think you’re correct to frame the issue as one of balancing the interests of both (or multiple) parties. However, objectively measuring the moral costs or psychological burdens of change is not going to be an easy thing to do.
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“Surely, if there’s something we should have the freedom to be selfish about it it’s the way we choose to think and communicate about things?”
Sure! But then you no longer get to claim that you don’t intend to hurt people. You can say “I intend to hurt you because I think that the cost to me is too high to avoid hurting you”, but you are clearly still intending to hurt people. Similarly, in the EA case, I do, in fact, intend to fail to prevent several thousand actuarial deaths, that is a totally fair assessment of my actions, and it would be ridiculous for me to claim otherwise.
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I don’t think there is intent to cause hurt though. I don’t even think it’s fair to describe it as indifference to hurt. It’s simply prioritising the hurt in a way that is lower than other factors. Saying that someone intends to cause hurt implies that they see the hurt as a good thing rather as simply the lessor of evils. It also implies that it’s an outcome they are actively seeking out, rather than one which they see as an unfortunate side effect.
Take the defintion of racism that you posted about a few days ago. By labelling someone who fits within the “Racism-2B” defintion as a “racist” you could be hurting them (emotionally, to their reputation, etc) as others may interpret your label as the “Racism-1A” definition. Is it fair to say that by using the term “racist” according to the “Racism-2B” defintion you intend to hurt people?
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I think it is bad to label individuals as racist because it is tautological (to a first approximation, everyone is racist) and causes misunderstandings. I try to minimize emotional harm to others when I say that something they did is racist; if I knew something would cause someone emotional harm but felt it was important enough to criticize anyway, then I do think it would be disingenuous of me to say I didn’t intend to cause them harm. It wasn’t my primary intention, but it was a consequence of my actions a reasonable person would foresee.
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@ozymandias:
I don’t like using the word “reasonable”, because I don’t know what that means.
For example (trigger warning: misgendering), if I am walking down the street and see a random person who looks vaguely female to me, I am going to believe that this person is female, and address “her” as such (should I need to address the person at all, that is). I believe that this choice is probabilistically justified, given the evidence and the extremely low prior probability of the person being non-binary, FtM transgender, etc. If I stopped and thought about it for 60 seconds, then… I’d still do the same thing. Is that a “reasonable” thing to do ?
If so, then IMO it would be unreasonable of that person to treat me as a hostile enemy unit, merely because my probability calculation didn’t turn out the way they liked. But if not, then… I’m not sure where we go from there.
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I mean, yes, that is perfectly reasonable.
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People tend to rely on the word “reasonable” once the rules attempt to cover a sufficiently complex or broad enough scope such that its not feasible to express a full and comprehensive set of rules that can appropriately resolve all possibilities. It generally marks the limits where logic and rationality must start to rely on intuition and subjective opinions in order to produce a practical response.
That in itself is a reasonable thing to do, as long as it’s not abused by attempting to unilaterally define the contents of the reasonableness and elevate a subjective (and potentially biased) viewpoint to the level of objective assessment or pure rationality. Essentially, once the term “reasonable” is utilitised its an implicit acknowledgement of the potential validity of the opinions of others (within that scope); in a sense its a form of a micro moral relativism.
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“I didn’t mean to hurt you, I just didn’t care enough to think for 60 seconds about how what I did would affect you.”
Sure you don’t literally mean 60 seconds. It would be absurd to hold a conversation with gap lengths of one minute.
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Far too charitable. Everyone would agree that people who do that are either insincere or deeply clueless; there’d be no need to invoke the idea that intent literally doesn’t matter.
“Intent is not fucking magic” is a rhetorical cudgel, an attempt to win arguments by making your interlocutors out to be racist/sexist/etc., even when there are no reasonable grounds to think so. It can’t possibly have escaped your notice that social-justice arguments on the internet proceed along exactly those lines, almost all the time.
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I think this is a pretty huge strawman, which, if you go look at the original article, the message is *accidental harm is still harm* and saying “I didn’t mean it” will not always lessen the blow. Obviously intention will affect how we feel about the people involved and how we act going forward. But the article is clearly about those who say “I didn’t mean for this to hurt therefore I get to ignore your pain.”
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As others have mentioned, I don’t think you’re attacking the real reasons behind “intent isn’t magic”. I think the purpose of it is to address people who say things like “but I didn’t mean to hurt you, so you’re not allowed to yell at me”.
Even if you didn’t intend to hurt someone, you still hurt them. You still have to apologize and they’re allowed to be angry and sad.
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While I agree, I think there’s a great amount of difference between saying, a). “your unintentional comment made me angry and sad, please stop”, and b). “your deliberate attack on me made me angry and sad, and thus from now on you are my enemy whom I vow to destroy”. When people say “intent is not magic”, in my experience, they are saying that (a) and (b) are completely interchangeable, and therefore we might as well go with (b) every time.
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That’s funny, in my experience I see a metric-fuckton of people who say, “Golly I don’t mean any harm so that thing I did is okay.”
Like, for example all the cis folks who write ignorant shit about trans people — like I mean those who think they are going to support us by writing about some basically-gay-dude and calling them a trans woman. Like, sure they mean well but THEY ARE TOTALLY FUCKING LYING ABOUT US AND THEY DON’T CARE.
And fuck Hedwig and fuck Rayon and fuck the people who created them CUZ THOSE ARE LIES AND THEY HURT US.
(Sorry, I feel strong about this.)
And their intent ain’t magic. It’s really important that people get this.
And the first time I got to read real words by a real trans woman my eyes were opened cuz I finally got to see myself.
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Wait, isn’t Hedwig the owl from Harry Potter ? I liked that owl… Actually I like the Rayon polymer, too… *confused*
Anyway, I hear your frustration (even if I don’t fully understand it, as per above), but from my perspective, it sounds perilously close to saying, “anyone who says anything ignorant about trans people is my enemy for life”, because “intent is not magic”. Hence my comment above.
I mean, just for example, I can understand if you decided to treat me as an enemy for life, but I hope it’s for something more substantial than “fuck Bugmaster because he doesn’t know who or what Hedwig is”.
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This Hedwig , and Rayon from the Dallas Buyers Club. I have not seen Dallas Buyers Club. The main character in Hedwig is creative and talented, but instable and abusive. If you have no negative preconceptions towards trans people you can enjoy it as the tale of a cursed artist, but it is like La Cage Aux Folles for gays 40 years ago (probably worse I would guess).
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I never used the term “enemy for life.” That’s on you, and thus your conclusions are about your private-veronica, not me.
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A major problem is that SJWs do not call oppressors on their oppression in a spirit of trying to help you help us all get along, because we’re all in this together. Hence the “W.” We use expressions like “Calling you on your bullshit” rather than “politely pointing out something you might not have thought of, and then actually listening to your response without prejudice” because we’re describing an inherently aggressive act. What the SJWs in question are doing is picking fights. The object of their attention defends himself. I am shocked, shocked!
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Your comments have successfully annoyed me. Banned.
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