Jub wrote:Yes, but I do not have a responsibility to provide a wheelchair ramp, elevator, or stair lift and would not be held responsible if a person with mobility issues tried to climb my front steps and fell. Stairs are not a physical hazard to the vast majority of people that will visit my home.
Obviously public spaces are designed to be accessible to all and thus laws are in place requiring things like ramps and elevators for the physically impaired, but even in these cases, somebody in an iron lung probably won't be able to access stores that meet the legal requirements. Should the law be changed to make sure that iron lung patients are able to have access equal to anybody else?
What is normally done here is to weigh the burden of making accommodations against the burden to the individuals who need the accommodations. That rule works perfectly well here.
See, adding wheelchair ramps costs money, but on a per-business basis it's not THAT expensive, and it simplifies life for millions of people who are now, or some day might be, in a wheelchair. By contrast, adding iron lung access is vastly more expensive, and the number of people in iron lungs who actually move about in society is miniscule. Therefore, we require public spaces (including private property routinely accessed by the public) to have wheelchair ramps... but not iron lung access.
The burden of, say, not making rape jokes and warning people before showing them a depiction or description of rape is
very small. Compared to all sorts of other burdens normal people accept without complaint it is
nothing.
And the burden on the tens of millions of rape victims in the US, or the probable million or more rape victims in Canada, of allowing the rape jokes to go on and not issue the warnings, is quite substantial.
So it is reasonable to expect people to make reasonable accomodations so as to NOT needlessly traumatize rape victims.
Injuries are an accepted risk of physical fitness training and sport. Even using gym equipment in an entirely correct and safe manner, I a healthy if out of shape individual risk injury by going to the gym. Now usually, I'll go in, work out, and come out a bit sore. If I went in with some lingering physical issue my risk of injury goes up dramatically, the same exercise that might have only caused me discomfort before could now aggravate my lingering injury. This is analogous to a person with pre-existing mental scars suffering mental trauma due to a subject coming up that would, at worst, cause mild mental discomfort to a healthy person.
Except that people with lingering mental scars don't get to decide NOT to participate in education, work, or other parts of public life. It's not optional.
If society had an expectation that everyone would perform physical exercise and labor, it would be reasonable of us to make some accommodations for those who have old injuries that affect their capacity to withstand such exercise and labor. Otherwise, it is unjust to require people to suffer needlessly when we could easily prevent that suffering.
Society DOES have an expectation that everyone will perform certain kinds of mental exercise and labor... the same argument applies.
If the university allows it to happen on their property and could reasonably have prevented it by performing their duty of care, then they share some liability, I'd say.
Please quote the law stating this as a legal requirement and provide examples of case law showing how this law has been interpreted and that the level of responsibility is as extreme as you have claimed it to be. Otherwise, I'm going to require a retraction.
...The case law arguing that universities have some reasonable degree of obligation to ensure a safe and functional environment is pretty well established. They may not be individually responsible for every crime or offense which occurs on their grounds, but they do still have
some responsibilities.
"Negligence" is a real thing, Jub; I'm not making it up. There are things you are reasonably obliged to do in order to ensure that others don't come to harm. And your right to control your property, your business, or your school do not relieve you of those obligations.
My college had 24/7 security but the other campuses only have security on call and others have no private security at all. Are you saying that there should be a legal requirement for 24/7 security on all campuses where students have housing?
It depends on the level of the threat. This is why I keep saying
reasonable precautions. If my campus is in a very secure and remote location and crime is virtually unheard of, private security may be unnecessary. If my campus is in the heart of a busy populated area and crime is relatively common, private security may be constantly necessary.
The precautions and protections we are obliged to put in place to prevent suffering are determined by:
1) The likelihood and frequency of the suffering
2) The difficulty of preventing it (whether it presents an undue burden)
3) The severity of the suffering.
This isn't a hard thing to understand...
Mental suffering is different from physical suffering in that physical suffering can be easily seen and we generally understand how to provide for the needs of those in a wheelchair due to cerebral palsy, or with diabetes, or with a broken leg. We don't know with any certainty how to deal with somebody who's suffered mental trauma, suffers due to being born with a mental condition, or even just the extremely mentally fatigued.
Where we do understand what is to be done, and we can reasonably do it, it should be done. We should not stand around complaining about the terrible burden of having to spend five seconds uttering a warning, or of refraining from making certain kinds of jokes, or things like that.
Universities don't do a good job of dealing with students with depression and in fact, inflict mental fatigue to the point where people are turning to a pharmacopeia of drugs just to cope and get a leg up. Are you suggesting that university should be made less competitive to lessen the mental impact on students who know that the top 10% of a class often go on to earn far more than the median graduate?
I think reasonable measures should be taken, because negligence is a thing and by definition no one should be negligent or willfully bring about harm and suffering to others. This is an ethical issue as much as a legal one, though.
Because, you see, the competitiveness of university and the difficulty of university courses DOES touch directly upon the function of a university. And trying to make the classes easier will impede the functionality of the university.
The issuing of warnings that "this lesson might cause distress to rape victims or people with histories of childhood abuse, if you need a different environment or means of learning this information, that is okay" DOES NOT directly impede the functionality of the university.
Which is why I keep using the word 'reasonable.'
You've failed to define the term in any meaningful fashion and I'm going to require that you do rigorously because without such a definition the term is useless.
"Reasonable" is a common legal term and anyone with any sense or ability to carry on discussions of public policy should understand what is meant by it.
See here for an illustration of what is meant:
http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictiona ... reasonable
The exact nature of what is and is not 'reasonable' depends on detailed decisions that should be made by qualified professionals (i.e. not me). I may be qualified to debate the issue
with other amateurs on subjects where I and my fellow amateur have roughly equal knowledge... but that doesn't mean I am a lawyer, a psychiatrist, or an expert in university finances.
The exact nature of what it is 'reasonable' to do depends on specifics.
When it comes to depression, there are relatively few precautions a large institution can make to ensure that depressed people come to no further harm. Aside from making support and counseling available, there's not a lot they can do.
That's bullshit, and if you'd ever dealt with depression you'd know that. Are you sure you're qualified to speak on this subject?
Okay, I accept that I am wrong.
In which case, I
ALSO accept that universities are in fact under more obligation to reduce harm to the depressed, insofar as this is compatible with their mission of providing a functional learning environment to everyone involved.
The more they can realistically do without undue burden, the more they SHOULD do.
When it comes to things like rape trauma... the university knows, statistically, that a large percentage of its students have been raped in the past. And another percentage will be raped during their time at the university, unless steps are taken. Rape is not that hard a crime to prevent, and triggering other people's rape trauma is not that hard to avoid doing, on average. Therefore, the university should take reasonable steps to prevent rapes on campus. And to avoid common things that might trigger horror for rape victims, knowing that statistically speaking they probably have hundreds or thousands of rape victims on campus.
Ignoring that many of those studies have been disputed and that some have had, what I and the law would consider, an overly broad definition of what counts as sexual assault are we sure that a 'large' percentage of people have suffered in this fashion?
There are numerous, multiple, converging lines of evidence indicating that the percentage of women (in the US) who have been raped is in the double digits. There is NO convincing or compelling reason why such a massive number of women should methodically misrepresent whether or not they have been raped, to the point where the numbers in those surveys would end up being double or triple the true numbers.
Nor, for instance, is there a reason why 6% or more of American
men should identify themselves as rapists by effectively confessing to rape in an anonymous survey... if they have not in fact committed rape. And if 6% of American men say they have done it, common sense suggests that:
-Some men have committed rapes against multiple women, and
-Some men aren't dumb enough to confess.
This in turn suggests that whatever the percentage of American women who have been raped is, it's probably considerably more than 6%... which kicks it up into 'double digits,' like I said before.
I'm not disputing that most, if not all campuses, will have some number of rapes and/or sexual assaults over a small a span as a semester, but I'm not sure that these numbers are as far above the national average for places of the same population density and wealth/power disparity between residents.
Since
I did not say any such thing, I am not concerned about whether or not you are "sure" of this. I don't even know why you brought it up.
All I said is that a "double digit" percentage of women on campus (probably a double digit percentage of
people on campus) have been raped or will be raped during their time on campus. This is not a trivial minority; we are not talking about throwing the whole university out of gear to accomodate one or two people here.
Indeed, the list of rape victims at a given university is, I suspect, at least as long as the list of people with severe physical disabilities, so I see no reason the university shouldn't be working about as hard to accomodate the rape victims as it does the disabled people. Or at least, working hard enough that the relative degrees of effort are consistent.
Even so, I do agree that simple things like writing a detailed syllabus that highlights things known to have an above average mental impact and giving warnings before those lessons come up are a good thing. I would argue that they shouldn't be mandated without further study into what terms require such warnings and a detailed framework outlining what constitutes culpable mental harm due to negligence.
In which case, surely you would
support people who call for qualified professionals in social work, mental health, law, and university finance to try and construct such things?
Rather than constantly protesting and impeding and devil's advocating whenever anyone tries to say that doing such a thing is a good idea, right?
You're a basically sensible person; I assume your answer is 'yes' to what I just asked.
If the issue was something that affected you personally (say, you become incredibly super-depressed whenever you see the color orange), then yes, you have a responsibility to contact others about the accomodations you need.
On the other hand, if the issue was something that affects many people (say, you become incredibly super-depressed whenever your boss makes rape jokes, because bad teenage memories)... your boss has an obligation to stop doing the thing that he should know hurts other people. Because it's not just hurting you, it's hurting a lot of people. Statistically speaking, if he keeps it up for any length of time he IS hurting people.
It's like, if I go out into the woods I'm not obliged to shout "hey, hunters, don't fire guns randomly into bushes, you might hit me!" The hunters are reasonably expected to know that, and to NOT fire guns randomly into bushes, because even if they don't hit me, or if I'm somehow bulletproof... sooner or later that action will result in serious harm.
Frankly, I disagree, at least from a legal standpoint. Nobody aside from me is responsible for my mental state, it is entirely up to me to manage that be that with drugs, counseling, lifestyle changes and what have you. A boss making comments that cause me mental harm might or might not be an asshole, but either way he's not responsible for my mental state or my depression.
Why? Why is mental health
unique in being the sole responsibility of the sufferer, with no one else having any obligations to take common sense measures to protect others?
I'm responsible for not engaging in behavior likely to cause traffic accidents. For not engaging in behavior likely to spread disease. For not spreading malicious rumors about others that might harm their lives or careers. For not engaging in reckless use of machinery or weapons around them. For not lying to them and defrauding them of time or money. There are all sorts of ways in which I am responsible for the simple concept of
not harming others.
When any reasonable person can easily understand how an action might cause harm, and they know harm is a likely result of the action, people are obliged to
not commit that action.
This is true in business, in sports, in driving cars, in all sorts of areas.
Why should mental health be any different?
Balrog wrote:Dragon Angel wrote:Simon_Jester wrote:Specifically, the argument being that people who don't have to deal with Problem X should not lecture those who do have Problem X on how it's "not such a big deal" and they should, literally or metaphorically, "walk it off."
Right?
Exactly, and where even if a person does have Problem X they do not get to dictate the terms under which other sufferers of Problem X react to it.
People are free to react to whatever they want however they like. You could be traumatized by a picture of a water bucket and end up spending days in your room rocking yourself back and forth. Other people are free to ridicule you for this response, they might suggest you receive help for this overreaction, but you are free to spend as long as you want in that state. The issue becomes when you want your hypersensitive reactions to be consequence-free (in art class you have to draw a picture of a water bucket but you get to skip that day and won't be graded on it) or for others to be affected by it (because water buckets traumatize you, all water buckets are banned from campus property).
Thing is, what if it's 5% of all humans who are driven into this state of catatonia by the sight of a water bucket? At what point does it behoove the rest of us to
put away the damn water buckets, or throw a tarp over them or something?
It's like, oh, peanut allergies. One person in a thousand or so has an allergy to peanuts so intense that they can literally swell up and die if they consume peanuts. Some, so intense that just being in the same building with peanuts, or eating food processed with equipment that was used to process peanuts, will cause swelling up and dying.
The
minimum reasonable response in light of this is to put signs on the door of your restaurants saying "danger: we serve peanuts here, we cannot protect you from peanuts." And to publish information saying that your candy bars or granola contain peanuts. So that people are not, unwittingly and innocently, caused to eat peanuts that kill them.
We're not really talking here about things that 'trigger trauma' for only one person. We're talking about things that trigger trauma for millions of people throughout America. There are tens of millions of rape victims in America. Do they all have to constantly go around ALL THE TIME asking us not to talk crudely or insensitively about rape in front of them? Should we ask them all to wear signs around their necks saying "I was raped, please be considerate?"
How is that LESS of a burden overall than just, you know, being considerate?
Alyrium, Simon, and others will have to elaborate here because I don't know the process, but I'm sure that does not happen nearly as often in practical matters as you would think. From what I gathered in their typing, at the least.
It doesn't have to be commonplace to have a toxic affect on the environment.
How, then, is that NOT an argument that applies equally well to the very provocations and offenses that are being protested?
If we can get a toxic academic atmosphere from a spray of isolated instances of someone
asking a university to do something extreme like ban a literary classic for containing racism, or ban 'violate' from its law curriculum, or expel a student for a rape accusation that evidence doesn't support...
Why can't we get a toxic atmosphere from a spray of isolated incidences involving people having their mental illnesses blown up by traumas or public humiliations, or by racist or sexist acts on campus, or the like?
Why is it important to remove one sort of toxin but not the other?
The problem arises with defining what is and isn't a microaggression. It's asking people to police their thoughts and actions on the vague pretext that someone might be offended, not for something explicit like using a racial slur or even being rude like asking to touch someone's hair, but otherwise innocuous statements which people make out of genuine belief rather than deep-seated need to oppress others.
The level to which people are
actually being asked to do this is pretty minor. It's not worse than any number of other 'politeness' rules people in civilized societies routinely follow anyway.
There are a lot of things that can get a professor censured, which are pretty harmless by the standard of 'objectivity' most anti-outrage types are applying here. Dropping your pants and mooning the lecture hall is "objectively" harmless, right? No one was injured. People should be able to take that butt-waving in stride.
But no one would say that the student body is somehow out of line for protesting if their professor habitually moons his students.
Balrog wrote:Simon_Jester wrote:Some of the flipouts in question are triggered by descriptions of damaging rapes being inflicted by animals with (by human standards) grotesque anatomy. Or things like parasitic wasps that paralyze other insects and lay eggs inside them, which hatch and eat the victim alive from the inside out.
Those are NOT normal things which appear in everyday society. Being unusually disturbed by such things is not a sign that one is 'unable to function.'
There is a
world of difference between "wow, that's rather disturbing that ducks rape each other, I wonder what I will have for lunch today" and "OMG I have been emotionally scared to have learned that! Why did you teach me that!? How dare you!" It's not even the case that these people are being forced to watch ducks rape each other, the simple transmission of this knowledge is apparently so debilitating as to demand conformity to their hypersensitivity.
Alyrium,
who brought this up in the first place, says otherwise.
His entire point is that he says to students "yes, to understand how sexual selection works in animals, you need to know that (for example) ducks commit rape a lot, and how this affects evolution in ducks.
You need to know this. However, you do not need to learn this information
in a public venue, in the presence of large numbers of your peers; if this subject is likely to disturb you, you may read it in your own pace in private where you can stop reading and call your therapist at any time."
I see no practical difference between this and, oh, a physical trainer who, mindful of one of his athletes having an injury or a minor disability, adjusts their exercise regimen so they don't tear or break anything.
Surely we wouldn't complain that the trainer was "coddling" athletes who have knee injuries just because he doesn't exercise them hard enough to re-injure the knee, and wants to make sure they heal as smoothly and efficiently as possible. We wouldn't say the trainer should expect his athletes to "toughen up" and "fight through the pain" of their knee injuries. Because that's not how recovery from a knee injury works.
Balrog wrote:the atom wrote:Your survey was specifically talking about statements that are offensive to minority groups.
And...?
...
You realize that's because it includes
everyone with a college education, including the people in the older generations who don't subscribe to government censorship, correct?
...
Because television is broadcasted on public airwaves which anyone, including small children, can watch or listen, and it is a legitimate concern that small children should not be exposed to certain ideas because they are still developing mentally and emotionally; the same shouldn't be said for someone of legal age to smoke or get married. Note that on pay-for services like HBO or satellite radio they have no compunction about censoring violent media or coarse language.
Here's the problem, which you seem to have missed.
You are conflating a desire to censor
anti-minority speech with a desire to censor
all speech. To oversimplify a bit for the sake of explaining:
Suppose you have proven (for example) that very few seventy year old men think racial slurs should be censored. Does this prove that seventy year old men
respect freedom of speech? No, it does not.
It might be that twenty year old men want to censor seventy year olds talking about "damn kikes," while the seventy year old men want to censor
the twenty year olds who are complaining about their anti-Semitic speech.
It may well be that twenty year old women want to censor the seventy year old women who berate the media for "acceptance of the gay lifestyle" while seventy year old women
want to censor that acceptance.
So you keep claiming things along the lines of "older people are less likely to support censorship." Except that's not what the survey you cite proves. That survey proves that older people care less about censoring speech that specifically offends or harms minorities. That doesn't mean they care less about censorship.
And since, quite frankly, the historical trend over the past sixty years has been that we censor LESS and not MORE, I suspect that support for censorship is not increasing anywhere near as fast as you think. Or at all, really. The biggest difference is that we as a society have reached a point where we actively try to suppress intolerance, rather than trying to suppress those who protest intolerance.
Dragon Angel wrote:It's interesting how things like these are overexaggerated. Yes, there are certain groups of activists who take these too far to the point of outright bullying, but the people who take the very concept of trigger warnings' and microaggressions' existences to mean "these subjects will be outright banned from the curriculum" is just as much, if not higher. Two extremes, really, and people would be advised to try not falling into them.
It's the extremes which drive the narrative and have the power to influence public policy though, and in the end many moderates help give legitimacy to their voices. Not every Republican is a member of the Tea Party, and in polling they tend to be a small minority, but they are a loud and active minority. It was because of them that many of the more moderated politicians were "primaried" so their extremist candidates could get on the ballot, wherein the rest of the more moderate Republicans voted for them for one reason or another and thereby contributed to the problem.
Except that the bullying activists on the left have far less influence.
We don't have dozens of university presidents being forced to resign because someone protests the microaggressions they tolerate on campus. We DO have dozens of Republican politicians being driven out of office because someone protests their willingness to vote against a tax cut. One of these situations is not like the other.
So honestly, the protests of the microaggressions don't strike me as a significant threat. They raise a sensible point, and while some of them may go too far, there is far
MORE going-too-far on the side which opposes them.
Very few people are actually threatened by 'censorship of speech offensive to minorities.' Very many people are threatened by a cultural climate permissive of sexual assault, harassment, casual racism, and cruelty towards the mentally ill.
It isn't the intent of these to ban subjects from ever being taught or give students "easy" ways to avoid keeping up with their classes. Their intent has been to a. maximize learning in educational environments by giving proper warning to prepare for content that could possibly produce intense anxiety,
Except some of the demands are exactly for the ability to avoid being taught this subject matter, which deprives them of an education and (unless the teacher can creatively find an alternative) allows them to skip work their peers still have to do.
The existence of a handful of people who "demand" this is largely irrelevant and frankly I don't see what the fuss is about. Wake me up when they have as much success advancing their agenda as the young-earth creationists.
It's "internet tough guy"-ism taken to real life to expect people to casually deal with negativity in their professional learning environments--where they may have already dealt with this same sort of negativity throughout their entire lives on a constant, never-ending basis--without a single complaint. This is literally the definition of privilege.
But it's not about dealing with negativity, not in the sense of having a professor that (for example) is openly racist, uses racial epitaphs when referring to minority students and gives them lower grades on purpose compared to his Aryan brothers and sisters. It's reading
Heart of Darkness in a class on colonialism and being offended that you had to read about a minority group being oppressed and now you have to run to your safe space to put back together the pieces of your broken emotional state. It's participating in a class about great American plays of the 20th century and not having to examine
A Streetcar Named Desire because of implied rape,
Fiddler on the Roof for depictions of anti-Semitism, or
A Raisin in the Sun for depictions of racism, which not only denies the person the chance to exam great works of art that speak to human experiences but reduces that same great material and defines it in terms of vulgarity.
I see a profound lack of evidence that this prospect is a realistic threat to anyone. We might as well discuss the threat of being invaded by the Moon Men or some such.
The only "threat" I see is that
professors might be expected to mention that
Heart of Darkness contains profoundly brutal colonialism, or that
A Raisin in the Sun depicts racism. How exactly is that a threat, anyway?
I mean, it's like saying that golf is somehow undermined by the fact that the golfer yells "Fore!" before hitting the ball so that people know there's about to be a golf ball flying through the air.
Crown wrote:Simon_Jester wrote:Amusingly, in that case, the male student accused of rape, the one who was the target of the mattress performance (the one that Mattress Girl wanted to leave the university) himself sued the university because he felt like he was being 'abused' and 'slandered' by the fact that this girl kept walking around campus carrying a mattress and calling him a rapist.
That sounds exactly like the very profile of someone who you'd expect the "anti-outrage" crowd to say is 'oversensitive' and needs to 'toughen up' and 'walk it off.'
Failed at he first hurdle. That's impressive.
Since you have chosen not to substantiate this claim, I am going to ignore it.
Simon_Jester wrote:She wasn't suing anyone over anything, she was carrying heavy objects and saying nasty things about somebody (which may have been true, or not, I don't know and it hardly even matters for our discussion).
By contrast, HE was suing the university for harassment because someone else threatened to carry heavy things around and say mean things about him and demand that he be expelled. Not because the university actually said it would expel him, certainly not because it DID expel him. Because someone was carrying mattresses around campus.
You understand that my objection to the notion of trigger warnings for things like the word 'violate' and safe spaces doesn't mean I would advocate spray painting the word violate all over a school campus just to illicit a response?
Um... you really have done an amazingly good job of NOT making that clear.
If you're going to talk constantly about how mentioning "this movie contains depictions of a racist beating and if you have trouble coping with that, talk to the TA about some other way to get your grade" somehow undermines a necessary form of 'mental toughness...'
And if you're going to repeatedly scoff at someone whose argument is literally "look, minorities put up with real harassment and you are not well qualified to tell them they just need to 'toughen up...'
No, you are NOT giving people reason to "understand that your objection" to people having to pay attention to this issue and show basic human empathy has limits you deem "reasonable." You're doing a very good job of giving the impression that you basically just can't stand the idea of anyone being required to care or pay attention to how their actions, speech, or curriculum might affect the more vulnerable members of their audience.
This is why there are like three or four people who've gotten the same impression in the same thread.
Simon_Jester wrote:It's only a problem worth remembering and caring about when a woman is publicly lugging mattresses around as a way of protesting the continued presence of a man she claims abused and raped her, and when insults directed against this man are scrawled on bathroom walls.
No, it's a problem when someone
exonerated of any wrong doing faces continued abuse from some whack job who can't accept that the world doesn't agree with them, so they have to make someone else's life hell.
Is it an equally serious problem when a man stalks a woman because he can't accept that she isn't interested in him? Do you bring that up on a regular basis in discussions of behaviors you perceive as harmful?
Do you store specific high-profile instances of such behavior in your brain so you can refer back to them years later?
If you do, I'm surprised.
If you don't, then there's a double standard here.
Basically, men being targeted by slander campaigns and harassment is a problem,
even when they are not directly confronted, when it's a woman who believes she has been objectively harmed... But women being targeted by slander campaigns and harassment is less of a problem. For that matter, women being physically intimidated and threatened isn't a problem. Or at least, it's not a big enough problem that you need to remember to think about it while debating.
...
Beyond this, what I'm getting at here is that if we ARE asking minorities to 'toughen up' and accept the level of sensitivity toward minorities that was common in, oh, 1980 or 1990... Frankly, we're asking a lot of women and gays and racial minorities and abuse victims to accept
precisely the threat of "facing continued abuse from some whack job who can't accept that the world doesn't agree with them, so they have to make someone else's life hell."
We're asking women to quit their job for fear their boss will coerce them into a sexual relationship. We're asking minorities to move off campus for fear of being attacked by racist students. We're asking abuse victims to be unable to complete their education because they fail a class due to repeatedly reliving the abuse trauma and refusing to treat them because they should "toughen up."
Because that is
exactly what used to happen. Legally, and the authorities would do little or nothing about it.
If you don't have a problem with asking that of women who feel trapped in an abusive relationship that they believe has become sexually exploitative... why do you have a problem with asking that of the men these women feel
trapped and exploited them in the first place?
Why is
sauce for the goose not sauce for the gander here?