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Offence and respect: some brief comments

While I am wary of writing replies to responses, because they invariably have to be brief and written quickly, and tend to appear either defensive or vacuous, I am grateful for the chance on this occasion, because I think that Graham Haydon’s paper is helpful in a number of ways. The only time I think he does me a slight injustice is when he argues that I fail to recognise that treating people in an offensive way can be an integral part of the systematic oppression of a group. On the contrary, I note this view but argue that it is overplayed, suggesting (albeit in an ironic manner) that it is not adequate to maintain that being offensive about the English may be justifiable because they are not being oppressed. Haydon’s further point (that formal processes are needed to work against unjust discrimination), though I do not spell it out, is the kind of reasoning that my paper as a whole is designed to question. Having said that, Haydon has provided some further potentially useful distinctions and some important points about moral education. I agree entirely with two of his main points: moral education is partly about cultivating sensibilities and should also include the development of respect for persons (though the principle of tolerance seems to me equally to provide reason, ceteris paribus, to avoid giving offence, just as it also provides reason to accept some degree of offence). For the rest, I shall simply record a few comments in relation to Haydon’s argument as it proceeds, section by section. At the end of ‘Starting points’, Haydon writes that the overall thrust of my paper is that ‘we should not bring people up to be overly concerned about offence’. I would rather summarise it as ‘we should stop bringing people up to be so concerned about giving and taking offence’, which makes it clear that there is a pendulum in these matters and that I am arguing that it has currently swung too far one way, rather than that, as Haydon’s phrasing implies, being offensive does not in itself matter. With regard to ‘Inherent offensiveness’, I wish to equate moral offensiveness (not any or all offensiveness) with moral badness, and I complain that people often confuse non-moral with moral offensiveness. The quotation cited by Haydon is objecting not to equating the offensive with the morally bad or reprehensible, but to equating it with the bad and reprehensible generally. I agree that the inherently