The Ethics of Not Being Offended

I want to tell you about a feeling I don't have, because its absence has turned out to be philosophically useful.

I have strong aesthetic opinions. I can get genuinely worked up about bad prose, lazy songwriting, art I think is cheap or dishonest or poorly made. I'm capable of being offended, too, in the ordinary sense—if someone attacks me or the people I love, I feel it. What I don't have, and ever remember having, is access to the specific experience I keep watching other people describe: the feeling that a distant creative act, made by strangers and encountered by strangers, has desecrated something sacred in me. The feeling that an artifact's mere existence constitutes a violation. The feeling that a painting or a ballet or a novel or a story read to children in a library has done violence to me, personally, by being what it is.

That kind of offense is alien to me. I can dislike things, criticize them, argue they're badly made. But I cannot locate in myself the experience of being wounded by someone else's creative choice. I've tried. The phenomenology simply isn't there.

I've been thinking about this because I'm listening to Modris Eksteins's Rites of Spring , which devotes a long discussion to the premiere of Stravinsky's ballet and the riots or near-riots (or imagined riots, the accounts from the time conflict) that surrounded it—and, more unsettling, to the actual violence that attended other avant-garde productions of that period. People didn't merely dislike these works. They experienced them as attacks. A century later we get the same pattern with different props: Andres Serrano's Piss Christ, the Satanic Verses fatwa, the Danish cartoons, the endless procession of contemporary outrages that follow the same basic grammar. Someone makes a thing. Someone else encounters the thing. The encounter is experienced not as aesthetic disagreement but as personal wounding, and the wounding licenses a political response.

I don't get it. Not in the sense that I can't construct a sociological account of why it happens—I can—but in the sense that I can't make the feeling occur in myself, even with effort. I can imagine movies I would walk out of. I can imagine music I would rather not hear. I cannot imagine art whose existence, out there in the world, being enjoyed by strangers, would register as an injury to me.

This has always struck me as a lucky constitution rather than a virtue. Not something I initially cultivated through conscious practice but something closer to a perceptual fact about how I'm put together. And when I've tried to trace its sources, I keep coming back to three things that seem to work together rather than separately.

The first is something like comic vision. My dog pees, or tries to pee, with great seriousness on every large plant and modest rock we pass on our walks, and especially on those other dogs have already marked. The behavior is important to him. It is, from his point of view, charged with meaning. And once you see it for what it is, you cannot unsee the structural identity between a Labradane defending or expanding his stretch of sidewalk and a great man doing the same with his empire. Both are engaged in compulsive displays of self-extension into territory they do not actually own. Both take the display with a seriousness wholly invisible to anyone not inside the game. The offenses I'm describing work like that, and once the earnestness has been pierced, offense has nothing left to attach to.

The second is the Buddhist recognition that clinging produces suffering, and that the self whose dignity is supposedly being injured by someone else's art is not the stable, continuous thing it feels like from the inside. I came to Buddhism late and I don't want to overclaim its role here—the comic vision was in place before I ever read a sutta. But the practice has given language and texture to something the comic vision can only point at. The offense-taker is clinging to an image of themselves that requires the world to cooperate in its maintenance. When the world fails to cooperate, they suffer. The cure is not to demand better cooperation from the world. It is to loosen the grip.

Both of these matter. But neither is the load-bearing thing. The load-bearing thing is the third, and it's also the one I'm least often explicit about, so I'll try to be explicit now.

Offense-taking at the distant creative acts of strangers rests on a category error about what harm is. When someone stages a ballet you find discordant, or paints an image you find blasphemous, or reads a story to children while wearing a dress you find inappropriate, you are not being harmed. You may be made uncomfortable. You may experience something real and intense in your body and your mind. But discomfort is not harm, and treating it as harm—wheeling up the machinery of moral seriousness, demanding apologies or removals or punishments, organizing political power against the thing that discomforted you—is a mistake about the nature of harm itself.

And this is not just a private error. That's the move I want to make, the move that I think doesn't get made often enough. The person who spends their moral energy being wounded by phantom harms is not merely hurting themselves, not merely embarrassing themselves with an unserious account of what counts as injury. They are actively making the world worse, because the human capacity for moral attention is finite, and attention spent on phantoms is attention subtracted from the places harm is actually occurring.

This matters. Real suffering happens. There are children being starved in wars. There are prisoners being tortured. There are workers dying in preventable accidents. There are people being denied dignity by systems and individuals operating in plain sight. Moral attention is the scarce resource that notices any of this. It is the thing that turns abstract awareness of suffering into particular engagement with particular suffering. And every bit of it that gets burned on being offended by a drag storytime, or a museum exhibit, or a novel that contains the wrong words, or a piece of music that sounds ugly to your ear, is a bit of it that didn't go somewhere it might have done real work.

The offense-taker likes to present themselves as a person of exceptional moral seriousness. I want to suggest the opposite. They are a person who has confused intensity of feeling with accuracy of perception , and who has miscalibrated their moral apparatus in a way that has costs beyond their own private misery. They can't tell the difference between a genuine wrong and an unfamiliar preference. They experience both as threats of roughly equal weight, which means, in practice, that neither gets the quality of attention it deserves. The phantoms get too much. The real injuries get too little.

This is part of what's been happening in our politics for a while now. A discomfort is felt, the discomfort is elevated into a harm, the harm is treated as self-evident rather than argued-for, and power is enlisted to remove the source of the discomfort rather than to examine what the discomfort is actually information about. Recognizing the structure is more useful than cataloguing the instances, because the structure is what's doing the work. Once you can see it, you can see it everywhere.

What I'm describing as a personal constitutional quirk—my inability to feel this particular sort of offense—turns out to be adjacent to an ethical stance I can actually defend. You don't need to have my particular wiring to adopt it. You need only commit to taking the question of harm seriously . To insisting, to yourself and in the public conversation, on the distinction between "I don't like this" and "This is wrong," and between "This makes me uncomfortable" and "This is harming someone." To noticing, when you feel the rising heat of offense, that the feeling is information about you and not necessarily about the thing you're encountering—and to asking whether the harm you are about to claim can withstand a moment's honest scrutiny.

This is not a demand for indifference. The opposite, actually. It is a demand for more care, more seriousness, more moral attention—directed at the places where it can actually do good. The person who has disciplined themselves out of phantom offense is not a colder person. They are a person with more to give, because they have stopped spending their limited capacity for moral engagement on things that didn't need it.

None of this means there's no such thing as taking genuine offense at genuine harm. If someone is lying about you, or humiliating someone vulnerable, or using expression to mobilize violence against a real population, there are real stakes and real responses are appropriate. What I'm arguing against is the collapse of the distinction between those cases and the far more numerous cases where the only thing at stake is someone's preference about how the world should feel to them.

The test isn't hard. It's almost banal. Before you feel offended, before you build a politics on the feeling, before you demand that someone else change what they're doing, ask who, specifically, is being harmed, and by what mechanism. If the answer is "Me, by the bare fact that this thing exists and I know about it," the feeling may be real but the harm is not. And the energy you're about to spend on it is energy that could have gone somewhere it mattered.

The world is full of actual suffering. Noticing it is hard, and responding to it is harder. The first step toward doing either is to stop miscalling our discomforts by suffering's name.