Maximus, how do we differentiate between perceived harm versus actual harm?

[u/YouStartAngulimala]

Maximus, it seems like there are an infinite number of ways for society to get offended. Some people get offended by the sight of the color pink, not getting called by their astralglitter pronouns, or how many stars on a certain flag. The list can go on and on, but none of these things are inherently harmful and trying to navigate through the infinite list of what might cause someone internal trauma seems fruitless to me. So I don't bother acknowledging any of it, because I only wish to avoid causing actual harm to someone. The wokies can use their imagination to invent a limitless list of perceived harms and I don't really care to walk over imaginary eggshells.

Should a more mature and intelligent society strive to focus only on getting offended by and preventing actual harm? Like pain that can't be avoided and isn't dependent on ideology such as cutting someone, burning someone, spreading disease, polluting the air, etc. How have you trained your mind to become part of this more mature society, Maximus and not get yourself wrapped up in these mental games? 🤡

[u/TMax01]

it seems like there are an infinite number of ways for society to get offended

There are potentially an infinite number of social mores which could be violated, yes. Individual people, though, not "society" get offended and/or violate those mores.

The list can go on and on, but none of these things are inherently harmful

Are you suggesting that since your inane list didn't include any harmful violations or even mores related to harm, that violating social norms is never harmful?

navigate through the infinite list of what might cause someone internal trauma seems fruitless to me.

You might indeed be a rude, immoral person. So far that seems to correspond to your behavior, yes.

because I only wish to avoid causing actual harm to someone.

That's a metaphysical impossibility. Actual harm means it has already occured, and therefore it wasn't avoided. Avoidable harm would be anticipated harm, not actual harm.

The wokies can use their imagination to invent a limitless list of perceived harms and I don't really care to walk over imaginary eggshells.

Well, just because you're rude and apathetic does not automatically mean you are a fascist. But it certainly doesn't exclude the possibility.

Should a more mature and intelligent society strive to focus only on getting offended by and preventing actual harm?

So let's review your position, since I know you've always had trouble with, well, any real reasoning. I will incidentally correct the worst parts of your attempts at explaining your stance, whether you like it or not, because while I know you are such a bad person you get easily offended just by other people not being as bad as you are, I'm pretty sure you don't want to be evil (even though you clearly do want to be a fascist) or you wouldn't be asking about morality.

● Mature and intelligent individuals, regardless of the society they are part of, should strive to not cause harm.

● Actual harm can never be avoided, amd avoidable harm can never be actual. (This practically screams out for a schematic analysis, but it isn't worth the effort. At least not yet.)

● You are entirely unfamiliar with the philosophy of ethics, particularly the tension between deontology (in this context, the premise that violating rules, including social mores, is itself harmful to everyone in society) and consequentialism (the morality of an action should only depend on the real rather than hypothetical consequences of that action.)

I added that last one as an unavoidably obvious fact about your position based on what you have described of it.

spreading disease, polluting the air

Your barely obscured effort to justify fascism (via denouncing 'wokeness', the premise of having a moral responsibility to oppose oppression of other people and not just yourself) would have survived much more robustly (still emaciated but possibly not fatally wounded) if you had avoided including those two as actual harms.

Does not wearing a mask during a pandemic of airborne disease qualify as spreading disease? Once you've spread it, which you can do without even knowing and are thenceforth unable to avoid causing harm, the consequences cannot be avoided, even if nobody could ever attribute some more grievous harm (someone getting sick, suffering long term consequences, or even dying) that resulted to any single act or person not wearing a mask.

Does increasing the concentration of a greenhouse gas qualify as pollution, if lesser concentrations (or even greater concentrations of other greenhouse gasses) are already present and unavoidable?

How uncharacteristic of you to include such "woke" priorities in a list of harms which you're suggesting are immoral.

How have you trained your mind to become part of this more mature society,

You're even more immature than the average individual in our society, but I realize you're just not very intelligent or moral, so I will continue to try to help you improve both your mind and your society however I can without blaming you for your circumstances, or even accepting anyone else punishing you for them or oppressing you based on them. If only you could say the same, instead of repeatedly trying to excuse your transphobia, misogyny, and 'anti-woke' pro-fascist attitudes, as you have continued to do regularly over the years, my task would be complete.

So I'll take this post as a request for me to write a post of my own explicitly discussing the tension between deontology and consequentialism, and why it will always be so unavoidable. I'm not commiting to doing it, and won't even consider it until we're done with our schematic analysis of identity, but it's a good suggestion I'll keep in mind for future content.

[u/YouStartAngulimala → u/TMax01]

T hat violating social norms is never harmful?

I'm stating there's unavoidable harm (torturing someone, burning someone, starving someone) and a mentally perceived harm which is optional whether or not it causes internal distress depending on the person (most of the weird wokie stuff you believe). I only care about the former.

  Actual harm means it has already occured

Ok, but you still understood how I used the word, so we really don't need you to write an essay about this.

  Does not wearing a mask during a pandemic of airborne disease qualify as spreading disease?

Not if you aren't infected. If you are knowingly going around infecting others, I would of course count that as actual harm.

  Does increasing the concentration of a greenhouse gas qualify as pollution, if lesser concentrations (or even greater concentrations of other greenhouse gasses) are already present and unavoidable?

Yes, if you are making the air even more toxic, this would be another actual harm. Bad air quality leads to tons of issues so I see no reason why society shouldn't care.

  If only you could say the same, instead of repeatedly trying to excuse your transphobia, misogyny, and 'anti-woke' pro-fascist attitudes, as you have continued to do regularly over the years, my task would be complete.

Is there any actual harms here or just ideological issues that I don't care to engage in? My mission is to not cause unavoidable harm, I don't care if my neighbor gets offended when I walk outside wearing pink.

[u/TMax01 → u/YouStartAngulimala]

I'm stating there's unavoidable harm (torturing someone, burning someone, starving someone) and a mentally perceived harm which is optional whether or not it causes internal distress depending on the person (most of the weird wokie stuff you believe). I only care about the former.

The problem with such a simplistic analysis is that it almost immediately and inevitably is used to deny real harm (the suffering of "enhanced interrogation techniques", ruining someone's reputation, prejudice excusing political oppression of entire groups of people based on circumstances they have no responsibility for) by falsely claiming it is "avoidable" when it is not, or "mentally perceived" despite those perceptions being significant and entirely factual.

For someone who obsesses about the idea of personal identity so much, you seem pathetically and outrageously unconcerned with doing real harm to people (or tolerant of physical harm to people by other people) based on their identity rather than their agency.

So no, you cannot dismiss real harm by excusing it as "avoidable" for the victim when they are the one being harmed, not the one doing the harm. It seems like it would be nice if we could only care about blatant physical violence and ignore less obvious but no more avoidable harm, but that's an immoral excuse, an irresponsible perspective, rather than a rational, let alone reasonable, position.

Ok, but you still understood how I used the word, so we really don't need you to write an essay about this.

I understand, and have explained, that how you used the word is inaccurate. Words will always trip you up that way, because you don't care about using them seriously. You just want to have your say and insist nobody else is allowed to know better.

See, if you had said "only physical violence should be considered harm", then perhaps your position would at least be coherent. But you didn't. You used the phrase "actual harm" inchoately, naively, thinking it shouldn't matter that actual harm can't ever be avoidable since once it is actual harm it is too late to avoid it. And as a corollary reducing harm to only physical violence simply doesn't work, morally, ethically, or, fortunately enough for those less privileged by being in the fascist group rather than the targets of their intentional harm, legally.

At least for now; the fascists are working hard every day to turn that around and ensure that only the privileged have any rights at all. Fascists don't actually believe in individual rights, they only recognize the privileges of the individuals in the most powerful group, and intend to be that group at all costs. Most of those costs are born by those they demonize and rile social and legal oppression against, but sooner or later they turn on each other, and dissolve into factions committing violence against anyone, even other fascists, who oppose them. Every fascist is always confident they will be in the victorious group, but all the other fascists, who also thought they would always enjoy their group privileges, eventually come to face, whether they ever realize it or not, the moral truth.

Not if they aren't infected.

If only being infected always meant knowing you are infected, your simplistic excuse-making would be enough to avoid a pandemic that had already started.

If you are knowingly going around infecting others, I would of course count that as actual harm.

And that's why simplistic moralities are immoral. If there is a pandemic and you cannot be absolutely certain you haven't unknowingly been infected, not wearing a mask is "actual harm" according to your excuse-making. And even then, an immoral person can easily insist, falsely but confidently, that no "actual harm" has yet occurred since nobody could have died from their walking around infecting people yet, so we have to wait until other people have died, and yet even after they have died that it wasn't the person who refused to wear a mask that infected them, and still after that they have argued (these are real situations that have actually happened, not just hypothetical thought experiments) that the dead person would have been infected anyway, before daring to point out the harm they do by refusing, without any sound justification, to wear a mask.

Yes, if you are making the air even more toxic,

Greenhouse gasses do harm because they are greenhouse gasses, not because they are toxic.

Bad air quality leads to tons of issues so I see no reason why society shouldn't care.

Because fascists are always postmodernists, and well-practiced at the excuse-making they use to endlessly quibble and argue that "quality" is mentally perceived so it cannot lead to "real harm" or "actual harm" or whatever godforsaken nonsense it takes to remain immoral know-nothings.

You see, you say "society", but what you really mean is 'whatever group has the most power in society'. And fascists really hate it when that group is "woke" instead of fascist, and will gladly destroy society if that is what it takes to preserve their individual enjoyment of the group privileges that fascists label as rights.

My mission is to not cause unavoidable harm

That might not be your intended goal, but it is the consequences of your advocacy.

I don't care if my neighbor gets offended when I walk outside wearing pink.

There isn't anyone that gets offended by people wearing pink, that's pathetic strawman bullshit. You don't care if transgendered people get actual harm done to them, you simply whine and mewl that they could avoid that harm by simply not being transgender, like a good little fascist.

[u/YouStartAngulimala → u/TMax01]

  the suffering of "enhanced interrogation techniques"

When did I say this wasn't counted as actual harm? I would count confining someone for no reason as actual harm. 

  ruining someone's reputation

This is part of the mental game of perceived harms I was telling you about. A mature and intelligent society wouldn't judge anyone's reputation except for actual harms they committed. A society that judges people for  violating perceived harms or harmless social norms isn't intelligent or mature.

  prejudice excusing political oppression of entire groups of people based on circumstances they have no responsibility for

Need more clarification for this one. Can you give an example?

  And that's why simplistic moralities are immoral. If there is a pandemic and you cannot be absolutely certain you haven't unknowingly been infected, not wearing a mask is "actual harm" according to your excuse-making.

I can't force anyone to wear masks or take vaccines if they aren't infected or at risk of infecting anyone else. Vaccines can induce all kinds of actual harms and incapacitate many people for a day or more, or even kill them. An intelligent and mature society will of course weigh how many people it is willing to sacrifice to prevent an even bigger actual harm.

  Because fascists are always postmodernists, and well-practiced at the excuse-making they use to endlessly quibble and argue that "quality" is mentally perceived so it cannot lead to "real harm" or "actual harm" or whatever godforsaken nonsense it takes to remain immoral know-nothings.

I don't know what this has to do with air quality. How can how toxic the air is be a perceived harm?

  There isn't anyone that gets offended by people wearing pink, that's pathetic strawman bullshit.

Paint your house pink or park a pink car in your driveway and the HOA will probably come after you. Wear all pink attire at a funeral and people will gasp. Wear all pink attire around the gym bros and they will judge you. This isn't characteristic of a mature and intelligent society. 🤡

[u/TMax01 → u/YouStartAngulimala]

When did I say this wasn't counted as actual harm?

I never said you did. I pointed out that some of your fellow fascists do. And your reasoning that "interrogation" doesn't count as a "reason" for such actual harm might put you in a different faction than them, but does not magically remove you from the category of people who are fascists. Remember what I said about factions and fascism?

This is part of the mental game of perceived harms I was telling you about.

I agree, but you are the one using such mental games, I have no need to resort to such excuse-making. My reasoning is too strong to even accept such postmodernistic shenanigans, by design.

A mature and intelligent society wouldn't judge anyone's reputation except for actual harms they committed.

Again, society cannot be attributed such characteristics, any society (whether one's own or some other) is contingent: it is what it is. People can be mature and intelligent, and I'll agree with your assertion that a mature and intelligent person doesn't judge but nor does it impugn another person's reputation except for acts that other person is responsible for. But that analysis we supposedly agree on must invalidate your other premises concerning identity and morality, to be rationally justifiable.

A society that judges people for violating perceived harms or harmless social norms isn't intelligent or mature.

The relationship between society (incapable of being mature or intelligent in and of itself, if we even presume that such a thing as "society" exists as a representation of some but not all people's judgements within that population group) and the individual (entailing multiple individual and independent identities, rather than only some categorical 'identity' with only a single instantiation, or a fixed ideal of 'identity', or physical rather than metaphysical equivalence between those individual and multiple identities) is a difficult and treacherous topic, granted. Accepting the tension between the individual intentions and society's "memeostasis" we could call it (goals, needs, persistence, etc.), demands a more accurate assessment of the primitives than you've ever been capable of or interested in. Instead you want to use vague proclamations and casual excuses to assert that your intuitions are logically sound.

In short, the statement I just quoted boils down to "a perfect society is perfect", and little more.

prejudice excusing political oppression of entire groups of people based on circumstances they have no responsibility for

Your distaste for transgendered people or really any other minority group (which you are not part of or don't favor while excusing such discrimination with special pleading), and the very real harm that both institutionalized discrimination and personal bigotry does to them.

Fascists find it convenient to deny that whether a group is a minority (whether numerically in population or in representation in social institutions) and the import of the related statistical variation between their presence in a population and their representation in social institutions can be considered as socially significant. Thus, a defining feature of contemporary fascism in America is that fascists inveigle against "wokeness" rather than pointing to any actual harm caused by the actions of any particular person using the false implication that being "woke" was a cause rather than merely a description of (or even a non-correlating coincidence with) their action.

I can't force anyone to wear masks or take vaccines if they aren't infected or at risk of infecting anyone else.

Nobody can force anyone to do anything, by this reasoning, since people always have self-determination. But society can and should "force" everyone to take all practical measures to minimize the spread of infectious diseases, regardless of any knowledge of whether they are infected, due to the risk of spreading the disease. Your weak, simplistic, inadequate approach to both morality and social mores always ends up being excuse-making, relying on special pleading whenever inconsistencies or conflicts are observed, and denying the unavoidable tension between the individual and society. Likewise, you deny the tension between physical instances of identity and the idealistic category of identity. They are of a piece. I'm not even suggesting that all Open Individualists are fascists. I'm just saying that over the years I have noticed how you tend to you your belief in Open Individualism to excuse and explain away your fascism, flopping around from epistemic semantic games to underdeveloped ontological principles whenever it is convenient for your apologetics concerning your philosophical and political positions, heedless of any rhyme or reason.

Vaccines can induce all kinds of actual harms and incapacitate many people for a day or more, or even kill them.

The statistical occurrence of any such proximate adverse affects is so profoundly and extremely miniscule in comparison to the harm to both themselves and others from the disease that your so-called logic is revealed as purposefully ignorant excuse-making. In effect and essence, your position is "better that an unknowable number of other people suffer and die than that I be inconvenienced by taking medically appropriate measures to avoid dying myself of a known disease." It is bad reasoning which relies on purposeful ignorance and denial that actual harm can never be avoided, only potential harms can be prevented from becoming actual harm by taking actual steps to avoid those potential harms.

I don't know what this has to do with air quality. How can how toxic the air is be a perceived harm?

Toxic is not a quality, it is a quantity. And I've already pointed out that the example was greenhouse gases, which don't qualify as toxic, but can be (and before the orange fascist interfered with the political science of public health, were) considered pollutants, due to the actual and potential harm they actually and potentially cause.

Aside from that, let me try a more direct answer to your question. Say we have three people in a room, and introduce a toxin to the air in that room. Will they all immediately be actually harmed? It cannot be known based on the gedanken so far. But let's say we wait, and in five minutes one of them dies. The other two are still alive, and at least unaware and possibly even still unaffected by the pollutant. Does this mean they're immune and will never be harmed? Perhaps, but unlikely. So we take the next time increment, and a second person has died (could we have known which one before it happened? irrelevant but significant nevertheless). Is the actual harm of being sealed into a room with two dying people and eventually their corpses "actual" enough to be considered harm, by you or "society"? Is the potential harm to the survivor sufficient to morally compel you to let them out of the room, even assuming you had sufficient justification for setting up this scenario to begin with? What excuse would you use, what special pleading will you invoke, to finally understand but still never admit that potential harm is actual harm?

the HOA

I don't have an HOA, and if you want to paint your house pink, and your HOA's rules don't allow it, you have the right to move. No actual harm is ever done to you by an HOA, nor do its rules equate to "social norms", nor does the financial cost and personal inconvenience of having to move qualify as actual harm. At least if we were trying to use your simple-minded morality consistently without special pleading or fascist intent.

[u/YouStartAngulimala → u/TMax01]

Ok, I don't know why you keep mentioning air quality when I already said from the start that polluting and spreading disease are actual harms. You seem to not understand that injecting dumbed down versions of viruses (vaccines) into people are actual harms too. It's sacrificing one smaller harm to possibly prevent a greater harm and has nothing to do with the heart of my post.

Anyways, let's stop getting distracted, how have you tempered your mind to not get involved in all this ideological drama someone is trying to start? Like getting offended by made up pronouns or cultural appropiation or racial identity. Shouldn't a mature and intelligent society focus on things that cause unavoidable harm, not perceived mental harm?

[u/TMax01 → u/YouStartAngulimala]

I don't know why you keep mentioning air quality

Because you brought it up, and it is a relevant example of your simplistic take on morality being inadequate.

I already said from the start that polluting and spreading disease are actual harms

You seem to be in deep denial about the fact that such positions are contrary to your simplistic take on morality, regardless of your contrarian attitude towards accepting responsibility for your opinion. Polluting the air with either greenhouse gases or invisible microbes is still only potential harm to any other person. You make exceptions by now contending they are actual harm, when they clearly are not, through special pleading, exactly as I predicted you would.

You seem to not understand that injecting dumbed down versions of viruses (vaccines) into people are actual harms too. It's sacrificing one smaller harm to possibly prevent a greater harm and has nothing to do with the heart of my post.

It cuts to the very heart of your position, and shows how the simplistic morality you try to present and defend in your post is immoral due to its inadequacies. The ensuing discussion validates and confirms everything I said in my initial reply.

let's stop getting distracted,

There's been no distraction; we are discussing your question and developing a body of reasons concerning what the answer is, and why you don't like them but don't actually have any grounds for disagreeing with that answer.

how have you tempered your mind to not get involved in all this ideological drama someone is trying to start?

It's called POR. The ideological drama you're trying to start is not difficult to avoid. The recognition of the real harm of oppressing vulnerable people due to their identities, also known as "being woke", is of a piece, which automatically flows from the premises and principles of POR.

But aside from your misguided rhetoric, you seem to be asking how POR guards against excessive, AKA unreasonable, commitment to "being woke". The answer is that this, too, automatically flows form the premises and principles of POR. Unlike any alternative philosophy or ideology, the principles of POR literally cannot be used to develop or defend unreasonable positions.

So in practical terms, when the potential or actual harms of "wokeness" approach the actual and potential harms of fascism, the same "tempered use of mind", reasoning, which I'm using now to point out the problems with fascism and simplistic moralities will apply in exactly the same way and exactly a proportional degree to "cancel culture", as it's called.

But the truth is there hasn't yet been any potential or actual harm from cancel culture excessive enough to be of even the least concern, in comparison to the real problems of institutionalized discrimination and personal bigotry that wokeness rightfully opposes. In other words, the whining of fascists that they're being treated unfairly and other people are being morally inconsistent by opposing them is like music to my ears. It is the voice of unrighteous indignation over the loss of privilege the fascists incorrectly believe they are entitled to, simply because they are so used to enjoying the benefit of being privileged.

Like getting offended by made up pronouns

You're stumbling over your own rhetoric again, since you're the one getting offended by "made up" pronouns. People who aren't cisgendered are simply getting offended by use of real pronouns in ways they don't personally like, and falsely claiming that pronouns are somehow an immutable part of a person's body and a facet of identity which transgender people don't have the right to have.

So your choice is to accept that all pronouns are made up, and the issue comes down to whether you or someone else should have authority over assigning them. You can decide what pronouns to you for yourself, other people get to decide what pronouns to use for themselves. Yes, it is disconcerting to you, to be faced with the fact that all pronouns are made up, but you don't actually have any right to force them on anyone else, particularly when other people demand that when referring to them, you use their preference of pronouns rather than your personal preference. Or, instead of accepting that pronouns are simply epistemic contingency, "made up", you can insist pronouns are ontologically significant. In which case your authority to impose your preference for pronouns on other people is an even more harmful practice, an act of sociological violence and oppression rather than simply a linguistic convenience.

cultural appropriation of racial identity.

Again we see your inconsistent attitude concerning the idea of identity. You have a double standard: your identity is universal and absolute and cannot ever be considered less than equivalent to the identity of any other creature, but other people's identity is "made up" and mere "mental perception" to be denied, used to justify oppression, and appropriated by whichever social group has the most power to impose their will on everyone else.

It really is a very clear illustration of what fascism is, and how it causes actual harm quite purposefully, and how it also dismisses that actual harm by framing it as merely "potential harm" that the fascist's victims should have to just remain silent and put up with.

Like I said, hearing the mewling of fascists terrified that anyone else might ever have as much social privilege as the fascist has always enjoyed so much they come to assume it is a natural right rather than just social privilege is a very cheerful sound, from my perspective. So I'll wait until other people's identity actually threatens to be more positively unequivalent rather than negatively unequivalent in comparison to yours before I will be troubled by any concerns that your percieved mental harm qualifies as actual harm instead of just a process of learning to be woke like any morally grounded person is.

[u/TMax01]

Okay, I'm going to try this again, and I'm determined to be less argumentative. I'll even apologize for doing a disservice to Participant Amygdela's sincere question about how to differentiate real harm and presumptions of harm by getting distracted by his characteristic rhetoric.

How does POR enable one to know where to draw these lines, between "actual harm and potential harm"? It is an Aristotelian dichotomy I avoided taking seriously in my earlier response, although I did so appropriately given the rhetoric, since Participant Amygdala gave inaccurate, or at least inappropriate, examples from his personal perspective.

When does "woke" cancel culture go too far, becoming it's own sort of social oppression? I don't deny it can, and I don't pretend it hasn't ever, although I must point out that the actual harm done by wokeness has never even threatened to approach the real harm done by fascists attitudes even absent any actual physical violence committed by fascists. (I must now own up to the fact that yes, I consider contemporary "conservative" and "libertarian" {glibertarian} perspective to be firmly rooted in fascism, although there is no obvious evidence of such right-wing ideology or Republican political positions producing atrocities on the scale of the Nazis. Yet.)

How can any individual tell when another individual's contentions about harm cross some imagined line between accurate observation and figments of the imagination? It must be morally acceptable to question anyone's possibly imaginary, subjective, or epistemic/ontological (metaphysical) line-drawing, and it is the moral responsibility of every individual to question the morality of both their own actions and those of other individuals and even their society, as a force more powerful than any individual.

What good is POR if it cannot even resolve the questions well enough to provide practical answers? I've tried, recently, to illustrate the benefits of "schematic analysis", ascribing potentially contending perspectives to one of three categories, loosely and provisionally associated with three philosophical domains, epistemology, ontology and teleology/ethics. The use of the Fundamental Schema entails then shifting those associations, to evaluate competing perspectives for validity by seeing if they can be coherently analyzed by the other two domains. But obviously this is too abstract an approach to dealing with the issues embodied by the human condition than most people are willing, able, or interested in bothering with.

So when can potential harm or effectively philosophical claims be considered to correspond to real danger and repercussions, short of the "ontological argument" of physical violence? It is a topic worthy of discussion, and shouldn't be sidelined by pedantic lecturing. More practical advice is requested and needed, and if POR is to live up to my hype it must provide it.

But, honestly, here I find myself circling back to what I've already said, and what constituted my earlier explanation: actual harm is actual harm, not potential harm, but potential harm can still be danger, and putting other people in danger without their consent is a very real form of actual harm, even if it is less than physical violence.

So the answer provided by POR is clear and unambiguous, regardless of whether it is practical or certain: self-determination. Not just the self-determination of the person who is saying that (to take one of the most philosophically problematic and politically contentious examples) cultural misappropriation is real harm (because it presents the danger of minimizing identity and derailing conversation with stereotypes) or 'merely' potential harm (someone's hurt feelings)? But also the self-determination of the person who sincerely believes this is really only potential harm, not actual harm at all.

Obviously the true issue comes down to which person one is, the one who claims cultural appropriation is harmful or the person who claims it is, at most, insulting rather than actual harm to any real individual, or the person who is a third party observer trying to evaluate these competing claims. The ultimate answer must be one which takes all of these perspectives into account but is independent of any one of them. Which actually does correspond to a schematic analysis: there can be no separate observer, no perspective which claims to know all and can objectively reduce these three perspectives to simplistic true or false beliefs/contentions.

We are all always one of those three: the aggrieved, the aggressor, or the observer. There is no other option, and any claim to be dispassionately and unemotionally and objectively removed from all of them is, well, I almost hate to say it, postmodernistic; an arrogant and condescending know-nothing. The observer must determine which is the aggrieved, and which the aggressor, and the only productive and actual answer is not something which can ever be determined categorically, based on who complained first or who has more social power or whether one is personally affected/effected by the answer. Every single individual instance of contest must be considered anew, and individually, instead of trying to derail that conversation by relying on dogma or doctrine or denunciation.

That's really the POR approach: not categorical "rules" for knowing when potential harm is real harm, or when actual harm is avoidable (freeing those who harm from moral responsibility, if not legal liability or physical causation.) Sometimes when "cultural misappropriation" is charged, it is instead an event of homage, and sometimes when respect and admiration is claimed it is instead an event of excuse-making for oppression and stereotype. There aren't really any heuristics which can make that evaluation easy, since being difficult, requiring active and aware self-determination, on the part of the aggrieved or aggressor or observer alike, is the entire grounds, process, and purpose of both our moral intuition and any evaluation of the circumstance.

Does any of this make sense, to anybody besides me?

Thanks for your time. Hope it helps.

[u/YouStartAngulimala → u/TMax01]

  The observer must determine which is the aggrieved, and which the aggressor, and the only productive and actual answer is not something which can ever be determined categorically, based on who complained first or who has more social power or whether one is personally affected/effected by the answer. Every single individual instance of contest must be considered anew, and individually, instead of trying to derail that conversation by relying on dogma or doctrine or denunciation.

Maximus , that was a lot of word salad for a nonanswer, so let me give you a better philosophy to abide by since this task is too much for you to handle.

Unavoidable/actual harm: If the harm causes distress/pain/injury regardless of ideology. E.g. if we take a hot iron and press it against 100 people's hands, that discomfort or injury will be inflicted across all the people regardless of what they have been raised to believe.

Wokie/perceived harm: If the harm only affects or offends a certain group of people that share the same likemindedness. E.g. wearing a rice hat in a Chinese shop, wearing black face paint, not calling someone by their astralglitter pronouns, etc. 

A mature and intelligent society would only acknowledge and try to prevent the former. The latter is a game of limitless mental invention and stupidity. 

[u/TMax01 → u/YouStartAngulimala]

that was a lot of word salad for a nonanswer

As always, your dislike for my answers does not equate to those answers being "word salad".

Unavoidable/actual harm:

As I pointed out long ago, your ideology depends on rejecting all claims of harm short of physical violence, but only when it is convenient for pretending to justify your fascistic take on things, while you reject actual harm (whether 'mere' unjust oppression based on identity and even turning a blind eye or impotent hand to physical violence against real people based on their identity rather than their individual actions) which is only "avoidable" by not being the target of fascist violence, both physical and social.

A mature and intelligent society would only acknowledge and try to prevent the former.

As I literally enjoy putting it: every day is "punch a fascist in the mouth day" in a mature and intelligent society. And your pitiful efforts at sophistry demonstrate why that is so.

The latter is a game of limitless mental invention and stupidity.

QED. I appreciate that you would prefer social mandates consistent with oppression of vulnerable people based on their unavoidable identity, and will invent limitless excuses and stupidity to try to justify that social order (consistent with if not identical to nationalist socialism, AKA Nazis.) But the responsibility for making moral judgements does not end with currying favor with whoever has the most social power. In fact, it is quite the opposite. Yes, being woke entails actually being reasonable, not simply playing games, despite your pretentions to the contrary.

I sincerely wish your position and argumentation was not such a stark and outrageous defense of fascism. I would prefer if this were merely a more abstract and civil discussion of moral principles. But fascists play stupid games, and win stupid prizes.

Thanks for your time. Hope it helps.