I take a very firm line on insults. I think that insults are a form of social punishment, and therefore you should only insult people if the trait is (a) actually harmful and (b) something that might change in response to punishment.
So, for instance, I basically don’t think there’s a good reason to non-jokingly call someone ugly. There is nothing wrong with having a face that doesn’t fit someone else’s standards of aesthetics– prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked ‘human’– and most ugly people can’t do a hell of a lot about their appearance anyway. Don’t call people “obsessive”, because obsessiveness shouldn’t be punished; obsessive people are the reason you don’t have to light a candle when it gets dark out. And don’t mock people for having cancer, because while having cancer is bad, mockery will not make people have less cancer.
I’m not a big fan of the concept of “ableist language”. In my experience, what happens is that if you tell people “don’t say ‘stupid’, say ‘foolish'”, they will switch from calling people “stupid” if they can’t do math to calling people “foolish” if they can’t do math, and at no point will it occur to them that maybe having dyscalculia can’t be fixed by insulting people. The problem here is not ableist language. The problem here is ableist beliefs and values.
And it’s absurd to put “moron” in the same category as “retard.” “Moron” has a history of being used as a psychiatric diagnosis, but is not currently associated with intellectual disability. The Google Image Search for “moron” mostly gives you pseudo-clever insults and a man with a lot of tattoos, while the Google Image Search for “retard” gives you this charming picture:
Nevertheless: I don’t think you should use mental health diagnoses as insults. The worst case, of course, is when you genuinely mean to imply that the person has a mental health diagnosis. As a general rule, when someone has a diagnosable mental illness, it is a sign that we as a society have said “this person’s problems cannot be fixed by the ordinary process of social rewards and punishments”. Therefore, it is basically always insulting people when insulting people won’t do any good, which is wrong.
However, most attempts to use diagnoses as insults aren’t meaning to imply people have diagnoses at all; they’re just playing off inaccurate and harmful stereotypes.
Let’s consider the joke “The Republican Party is very diverse this year– there’s two Hispanics, a black man, a woman, and an intellectually disabled man.” Clearly the author does not intend to actually suggest Trump has an intellectual disability; if they did, it wouldn’t be funny. The joke is a humorous exaggeration; but what is it a humorous exaggeration of?
Is the author suggesting that Trump has subclinical versions of traits intellectually disabled people also have? Are they implying that Trump is sometimes nonverbal, or has difficulties with self-care activities, or performs poorly on Raven’s Progressive Matrices, or has difficulty understanding articles unless they’re written in plain language? No. None of these are stereotypes associated with Trump, and his IQ is no doubt (like all presidential candidates) above average.
No, what they mean to suggest is that Trump is ignorant, that he is irrational, that he ignores evidence that’s right in front of his nose, and that he is often wrong. None of these things are necessarily true of intellectually disabled people. There are plenty of intellectually disabled people who cultivate their intellectual capabilities as best they can and who are informed about some topics while readily admitting when they don’t know enough to have a real opinion. Personally, I think it’s a tremendous dick move to insult intellectually disabled people by comparing their rationality to that of Trump.
Moving from the realm of humor: consider the phrase “psychotic killer”. Obviously, if one means to suggest that the killer actually had symptoms of psychosis, that is one thing. But a lot of people describe, say, Ted Bundy as a psychotic killer, even though he isn’t actually psychotic.
When these people use the word “psychotic”, they don’t mean to say that the person experiences delusions and hallucinations; they mean to say that the person is a Monster. Equating psychosis and being a Monster is tremendously harmful to psychotic people. While schizophrenics are at somewhat elevated risk of committing violence, so are other groups, such as young poor men, and yet no one has banned young poor men from purchasing guns or advocated for their preemptive long-term imprisonment. A substantial amount of the stigma against psychosis is exactly the fear that psychotic people will hurt you– a fear that, for the vast majority of psychotic people, isn’t true. And this is a particularly awful stereotype to perpetuate when you are referring to the actions of people WHO DON’T EVEN HAVE ANY PSYCHOTIC SYMPTOMS AND ARE THEREFORE CLEARLY AN EXAMPLE OF NON-PSYCHOTIC PEOPLE BEING VIOLENT.
In conclusion: it is okay to insult people. Do not insult people about harmless traits or traits that aren’t responsive to social punishment or in ways that perpetuate inaccurate stereotypes. Thank you.
Thing of Things 
“Personally, I think it’s a tremendous dick move to insult intellectually disabled people by comparing their rationality to that of Trump.”
The worst part is, this has probably also been used as an ableist joke.
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“I basically don’t think there’s a good reason to non-jokingly call someone ugly.”
Is this under discussion? I don’t think I know anybody who would dispute that statement, but maybe I don’t know the right (aka wrong) people. (Here I’m ignoring the cases where one wants to hurt someone elses feelings because they don’t like them).
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In our current society, this is probably true, but I wish it weren’t that way. I wished we could describe people as ugly (conventionally ugly, not inherently ugly) and fat without that being a grave insult. I wish we as a society would stop ascribing so much importance to beauty, to the point where saying someone lacked it was a neutral descriptor. The “everyone is beautiful” stuff grates on me for exactly that reason.
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Does any insult pass your test? I don’t think anybody ever changes their behaviour as a result of insults. I think the main implication of the rules you’re proposing here is simply to never insult anybody ever.
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I think insults do cause behavior change– I mean, I certainly stopped doing things when I was repeatedly insulted for them. But if you think they don’t, no, you shouldn’t hurt people for no reason.
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I find that quite surprising. Without wanting to pry into what was doubtless a traumatic experience for you, would you really say that those people did you a favour by insulting you?
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Reblogged this on Valprehension and commented:
I was literally just going to write a post on almost exactly the topic. I still might, but int he meantime, please read Ozy’s take on insulting people for things they can’t possibly be expected to change, and/or insulting people by comparing them to people with mental illnesses/disabilities.
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How about Narcissistic Personality Disorder? That seems to fit the criteria you’ve mentioned.
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I think you misunderstand what most people use insults for. Insults aren’t (usually) used to make people change behaviour in a positive way, they’re used to hurt people based on something that you think is important to them and will make them feel bad.
When people give suggestions about e.g. not using retard and using something else instead, it’s because they understand that when you insult someone you want to hurt that person, and they’re suggesting that you try to use an insult that doesn’t hurt ‘innocent bystanders’/ unrelated people too.
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I guess there should be a more general advice: “Don’t hurt other people when they’re not (a) doing something harmful and (b) can change their behavior because of being hurt”. Which I’d agree with three caveats.
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Problem is, our definition of “doing something harmful” is extremely flexible. For instance, Ozy presumably thinks Donald Trump is doing something harmful, or they wouldn’t feel free to insult him. But Trump is not directly harming anyone, or no more so than any other outspoken public figure. (Is speech even “harm”? You’d have a hard time finding consensus on that question alone.)
Is Kanye West doing something harmful? The answer is going to depend on whether you see him as giving voice to a justified critique of white racism, or heedlessly hurting the feelings of white people who have not done anything personally wrong to him. It’s turtles all the way down.
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While this is true, I still think we’d come out ahead if we stopped people from hurting other people for no reason.
And of course speech can be harmful. That’s literally the whole point of this post.
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No, I understand that, I think it’s morally wrong and they shouldn’t do it.
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“Don’t hurt people” is a nice moral proposition, I suppose, but most people carve out exceptions for one reason or another. It’s one of those plans that doesn’t often survive contact with the enemy.
If you’re arguing for “don’t hurt people” deontology in an absolute sense, I think that’s a controversial and rare enough opinion that your argument is weakened by taking it for granted rather than defending it explicitly. If not, then your argument against certain kinds of insult fails to cover cases where one is trying to damage a human being- cases which, in practice, account for the vast majority of insults.
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Don’t hurt people unless you have a good reason (such as punishing them for doing a hurtful action).
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But what if I want to hurt someone for a good reason overall (that is, I think the universe as a whole will be better), but not in a way that is good for that person specifically? What if I believe I can morally leave somebody worse off than I found them?
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Most insults are submitted as evidence to support the thesis that the insultee is dumber than the insulter. Call it the Because You Are Stupid theory of insults.
You like [wrong sports team]….BYAS
You support [wrong political party]…BYAS
You fail at grokking our 2 gender system…BYAS
You are poor…BYAS
You are intolerant towards [popular minority]…BYAS
You are unlikely to reproduce…BYAS
Do you think this is true? If it is true, would you prefer that the chaff be stripped away and folks just call one another stupid directly?
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“But a lot of people describe, say, Ted Bundy as a psychotic killer, even though he isn’t actually psychotic.”
I assume what’s actually going on in this example is that many people don’t really understand that psychotic and psychopathic are different things. Is Ted Bundy not a diagnosed sociopath?
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http://dilbert.com/strip/1992-09-29
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This is awesome and thoughtful. Thanks.
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>Don’t call people “obsessive”, because obsessiveness shouldn’t be punished; obsessive people are the reason you don’t have to light a candle when it gets dark out.
Like many mental-illness-y words, “obsessive” means “has this trait to the point where it’s a problem”.
You could argue that socially punishing people for obsessing over certain things is a bad idea – but then, “you pay too much attention to this thing” is clearly unwieldy, and yet empirically this is a thing that happens. What do you think we should call it
>Clearly the author does not intend to actually suggest Trump has an intellectual disability; if they did, it wouldn’t be funny. The joke is a humorous exaggeration; but what is it a humorous exaggeration of?
The idea that “intellectually disabled” is PC-speak for “stupid”. (Or maybe simply the idea that Trump has, or presents as having, a low IQ; which I suppose you could stretch into “Trump has subclinical versions of traits intellectually disabled people also have”.)
>But a lot of people describe, say, Ted Bundy as a psychotic killer, even though he isn’t actually psychotic.
“Psychotic” is often used, colloquially, to mean psychopathic or sociopathic. I’ve never encountered anyone who assumes that, say, antipsychotics cure is-a-serial-killer-ism; although I suppose it’s possible some exist, and they’re caused by this slightly confusing term.
This struck me as strikingly uncharitable, by which I mean no less charitable than normal, but below the extremely elevated standards I’ve come to expect of your writing, Ozy.
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I totally agree that, for example, mocking people for having cancer is not helpful (in addition to being completely heartless)… but I think you’re missing an essential purpose of insults. They’re often not meant to change the behavior of the target; they’re meant to change the behavior and attitudes of the audience. When someone points out that Donald Trump is behaving like a moron, they’re not hoping for Donald Trump to notice them, realize they’re right, and repent. They may, however, hope for others – potential voters of DT – to realize that he’s a moron (or at least hesitate to express support for someone widely considered a moron) and not vote for him. As Paul Krugman wrote a few days ago, “if people consistently make logically incoherent, ignorant arguments, the duty of a commentator is to say just that.”
The same thing applies to more private circumstances as well. Calling someone an evil lying bastard is unlikely to change that person’s behavior. It might, however, be a useful warning for others who considered doing business or starting a friendship with that person. Of course, it’s only useful if it’s true, so these kinds of statements must be used very responsibly, but they can be quite valuable.
On a side note, while I can see the potential collateral damage with “psychotic”, I never understood exactly how it’s supposed to work with “retarded”. Are intellectually disabled people actually offended if some random person calls some other random person a retard?
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Yes. (And the preferred term is “intellectually disabled”, or “ID” for short– “retarded” is often used as an insult, which makes people not want to identify with it.)
I mean, I don’t like it when “gay” is used as an insult; why would it be okay for me to use a word that means “intellectually disabled” as an insult?
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“Yes” – okay, thanks, point taken.
“I mean, I don’t like it when “gay” is used as an insult; why would it be okay for me to use a word that means “intellectually disabled” as an insult?”
Because being gay is not inherently bad (it’s only a problem when someone decides to make it a problem), whereas being intellectually disabled is bad in itself – as the term says, “dis”-“abled”, not possessing abilities that most people have, Note that I’m not saying intellectually disabled people are bad people – they’re people who have been dealt a shitty hand, and who have to live with it. But I wouldn’t want someone with significant intellectual disabilities – or someone who effectively behaves that way, for whatever reason – in a position of power, just like I wouldn’t want a quadriplegic firefighter, a deaf orchestra conductor or an aphasic news anchor, so I’m okay with calling Donald Trump a retard, or a fool, or anything along these lines. If that makes me ableist, I’ll wear the badge.
Of course, you argued that DT doesn’t actually show the signs of being ID, and strictly speaking you’re right. But we’re talking about candidates for one of the most demanding offices in the world, where, realistically, being a genius is barely enough to do a good job. That raises the bar a lot. If a candidate merely has an IQ a little above the average of the population (as GWB probably did), he’s as far below the standards as an ID person is below the average population.
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According to Wikipedia, Simonton (2006) estimated that GWB had an IQ of 138.5, so he was still more than 2 standard deviations above average in intelligence. I suspect Trump is pretty smart as well, given how successful he’s made himself (and of course there’s this).
I think US presidential nominees are sufficiently selected for high IQ that the more important thing to be worried about is whether they are rational / knowledgeable / not wrong etc. This is the point I think Ozy was making: in general, diagnoses as insults fail to single out the actually bad qualities of a person (i.e. the qualities that are likely to lead to them causing harm to others). If there was a Presidential nominee who clearly had an IQ far below the usual amount for a President, I don’t think there would be anything wrong with pointing that out and saying it might be a problem. But that is not the main problem with Trump, and we should avoid associating people with IDs any more than necessary with people who are actually harmful to others in the same way Trump might be as President.
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“On a side note, while I can see the potential collateral damage with “psychotic”, I never understood exactly how it’s supposed to work with “retarded”. Are mentally retarded people actually offended if some random person calls some other random person a retard?”
I suspect a big one here is relatives and close friends, rather than the aforementioned disabled person. If you use ‘retard’ as a derogatory slur around someone with a child or sibling who has down’s syndrome, they’re likely to take it one-step-removed personally.
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Uh, why on earth would that be any different than with psychotic people?
If psychotic people care about their diagnosis being used as an insult why on earth wouldn’t intellectually disabled people? Who are people with feelings, who are capable of understanding things.
It is not just family members of disabled people who have feelings about disability.
You do not need to have an IQ over 70 to be hurt and offended by “person like you” being used as a common insult. Having a word that means ‘person like you’ be treated as if it’s obviously insulting and terrible is hurtful.
And not just to your family, WTH?
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I think you’re assuming semantic content that’s often not there. Humans are pretty good at using the same word to denote different concepts depending on the context. (Contronyms are even words that are their own antonyms). Just because words like “retard” “psychotic” “schizophrenic” ‘intellectually disabled” have diagnostic meaning does not mean they don’t have other contextual meanings that are at most tenuously related to the former.
I’ve used words like “retard” as insults among a group of friends to mean “irrational”, “momentarily boneheaded”, etc… Sometimes it’s even a contentless insult, as in, it’s meant to be interpreted as an insult but isn’t really an admonition for any specific behaviour at all. And if you were to infer it’s contextual meaning from how the word was used – instead of assuming a particular meaning and then judging the morality of our behaviour – it’d be clear that we were never referring to ID people. And I know this, because I’m the one who used the word and I know what meanings I intended to convey.
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You’re an asshole.
See, you can’t be upset about that, because I’m the one who used the word and I know that I intended to convey the meaning of “a charming person with fascinating ideas about how language works.”
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You not ‘referring’ to Id people, but you are using a word which has the meaning ‘people with ID’ as an insult, because obviously being like them is insulting, and people should feel degraded to be compared to them.
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Collateral damage is probably an important thing to consider. Who are you actually hurting here?
You might insult donald trump by saying he’s ID. But Donald Trump likely doesn’t give a shit, and the people you’ve actually hurt are the ID people who are hurt by the idea that they are so awful that being like them is an insult, and also probably the comparison to donald trump, because he’s not ID, he’s actually actively evil.
And I’m actually a bit hurt by the mocking inclusion of disability in a diversity thing, and it’s so frustrating that that’s the only time I ever see it included.
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Derogatory senses of words crowd out others–once one sense comes to be seen as derogatory, the word itself comes to be seen as derogatory. Hence people using diagnoses as insults results in people having to come up with a new term for the diagnosis every couple of generations. Whatever you might think about the morality of using diagnosis as insults, you have to agree that this is an annoying situation.
It’s not the argument with the most moral force, I know, but I figured somebody should bring up this point 🙂
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It seems to me that many instances of “ableist insults” – certainly everything in the category of “you’re retarded”, and I think many things in the category of “that’s insane” too – are really shorthand for something along the lines of “The quality of your contributions are at most in line with the best an intellectually disabled/insane person could do. Don’t waste my time with something on this level.”. I think that is manifestly fixable behaviour (by putting in more intellectual effort, or shutting up if one is not willing or able to) and might plausibly respond to social pressure.
In that case, though, the issue reverts right back to whether one thinks that shielding those who are actually intellectually disabled from true but tactless reminders of the limits of their abilities or providing efficient and colourful ways of communicating just how bad one finds someone’s contributions is more important.
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Um. I’m insane. I assume you find my contribution to this discussion of a perfectly reasonable quality, because you are bothering to comment on it. I have intellectually disabled friends; they are also perfectly capable of making good contributions to a discussion. Maybe the problem here is your assessment of the limits of our abilities, and not your tact.
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I get the impression that we are using different definitions of “insane” (and it might well be that yours actually is officially sanctioned – I have until now assumed that “insane” means something like “fundamentally incapable of sanity” where sanity is whatever, say, the LW sequences refer to when they talk about “raising the sanity waterline”), so please let me focus on “retarded” for now.
The reason I am arguing this is that the discussion of the insults in question always seems to carry an assumption that the one who calls somebody or their acts “retarded” must do this with not only an (accurate or inaccurate) insulting image of the actual recipient, but also with a manifestly inaccurate (and denigrating and harmful) image of intellectually disabled people in mind. This is at odds with my intuition of what is going on; to perhaps illustrate, (my proposed expansion of) the hypothetical statement that “X is retarded” and your response to it seem to me to be isomorphic to something like:
[X just insisted vocally that the government spending $360 million on 317 million people means it might give every one of them $1 million and then some at the same cost.] “X is bad at math. X’s contributions are at most in line with something a person who is bad at math can do. X should stop wasting everyone’s time.” – “I have friends who are bad at math; they are also perfectly capable of performing simple division. Maybe the problem here is your assessment of the limits of abilities of people who are bad at math.”
If you think that this example is different in nature, perhaps the difference is somewhere along the lines of thinking of “retarded” as denoting a binary flag and therefore having a concrete set of people as an extension, so that any general assumption about “the retarded” that is worse (by any metric) than the best element of the set (by the same metric) is painting the best element in a worse light than they deserve, versus thinking of “retarded” as denoting a continuous measure of intellectual inability, so that you can say “A is more retarded than B” or vice versa of any two people and the “retarded” in “you’re retarded” always denotes “sufficiently retarded for the purpose of the insult” (analogously to how the “you’re bad at math” above abbreviates “you’re so bad at math that you can’t do basic division”).
I suspect that among the people who defend the use of “you’re retarded”, many will be thinking of the latter, and pointing out the distinction would make it clearer what the argument is about… and I realise that my own wording above (“the best an intellectually disabled person could do”) sounds so much like the “binary flag” interpretation that even someone who uses the former but considers the latter possible would consider it evidence that the interlocutor is also using the former. (I think it quite possible that this is a mistake also made a lot by other people who internally use the latter definition.)
(The defense of “you’re retarded[the latter sense]” would still fall apart if it turned out that degree of intellectual disability is not actually a strong correlate of propensity to make bad contributions to a discussion like the ones that typically invite the insult.)
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@eightbitsperpixel
(1) That’s retarded.
(2) That’s gay.
(3) Lol, what a fag.
(4) He’s such a little bitch.
(5) You’re an idiot.
(6) She’s bad at math.
One of those is not like the others.
[Note: comment edited by Ozy to change eightbitperpixel’s username, per his request]
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@Nita:
I assume you want to say that (6) is the different one, but I don’t see what the unique quality that sets it apart is – I was going to guess “it has never been used as a ‘professional’ diagnosis of anything”, but then this is also the case with (4), and (2) and (3) are only similar to something a medic would actually have testified to someone being in court to the extent that (6) is similar to “…has dyscalculia”. As I see it, all of (1), (5) and (6) suggest a likely at least partially immutable quality of the insulted that is strongly anticorrelated with their ability to understand and make an intellectually challenging contribution to a discussion – the possible difference being that “bad at math” is usually seen as more mutable than “clinically retarded”, but then I reckon that (4) (=”acting in a way traditionally associated with being female”+”disagreeable”?) is also seen in the same way.
To understand where you are coming from, though, if we assume that (1)-(5) do cluster together, say as set A, and (6) alone belongs in set B, which set do you reckon each of the following belong into?
(7) You have dyscalculia.
(8) You’re bad at math. There is no way you will ever get better at math.
(9) You fucking suck at math.
(10) You have the cognitive abilities of a 3 year old.
(11) You are incapable of abstract thinking.
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@ eightbitsperpixel
Whoa, I guess you do perceive these differently. Here’s my classification:
(7) B
(8) B
(9) A
(10) A
(11) neither
All sentences from set A contain a word or phrase from the cultural cache of insults. This is usually due to a deliberate choice to strike an offensive or crude tone.
Belonging to a group the name of which ends up in the cultural cache of insults is rather unpleasant — anyone can use it to hit you with an insult you can’t “refute”, and when it’s used used against a “normal” person, the implication is that being like you is something to be ashamed of.
Although being bad at math is not a good thing, it’s not usually used as an insult. In fact, it’s considered rather normal — try telling someone you like mathematics, and they’re likely to declare “oh, I’m so bad at math, haha!” — and this is so common that people who are bad at math are unlikely to become marginalized any time soon.
Sentences from set B can be someone’s honest opinion, stated with no regard for the subjects feelings, but without reaching for [words that are commonly used as] insults.
Sentence (11) is something no one would have a reason to say, as someone incapable of abstract thinking would be unable to comprehend it, but at the same time it’s too bland to be an effective verbal attack against someone who is capable of abstract thinking.
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(Note: (10) is in A because you wouldn’t use the phrase “cognitive abilities” if you were, in fact, talking to someone with the cognitive abilities of a 3 year old.)
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