Towards the end of Stephen Rohde's review of Robert Boyers' The Tyranny of Virtue, he considers the question of whether expressions such as "stand up for", "turn a blind eye to", and "take a walk in someone's shoes", constitute "ableist" language, and whether they should be considered offensive. In doing so, he quotes approvingly a disability rights advocate, who recommends that people not use such phrases, out of sensitivity to the disabled.
My initial response to this idea was skeptical, but it set me thinking about what the justification for my position was. After all, many terms we no longer consider acceptable were once used by people who had no conception that there was anything wrong with them, so why should I not be one of those people with regards to potentially ableist language? Also I think our default reaction to people claiming that something is hurtful to them should be to take them at their word, and examine our behaviour first rather than defensively dismissing their complaints, even if ultimately we conclude that we are not at fault.
So is there a case to be made that expressions such as those mentioned above are ableist and inappropriate to use? I believe in this case there is not, and that we can make a principled distinction between such language, and other language we deem genuinely inappropriate.
My immediate reaction was to draw this distinction based on the speaker's intention: if no harm or offence was intended, then the speaker did nothing wrong. While I think intention plays a large role in evaluating behaviour, it is clearly not the whole picture. For we can unintentionally do and say things that we nevertheless recognise as wrong, and we even often feel remorse over our unintentional behaviour.
Another thing to consider is whether an expression, even when not used to deliberately demean or insult someone, can still have this effect indirectly. Perhaps the most obvious examples of this are the many once-ubiquitous expressions that are now considered sexist, and have been replaced by gender-neutral alternatives. A title such as "chairman", for example, was never intended as an insult to women, but nevertheless the case could be made that its use has contributed to the perpetuation of prejudices and stereotypes that have entrenched men in certain leadership roles and excluded women. If this argument holds, it provides at least a potential reason for wanting to change the language.
I don't believe such a case can be made for the supposedly "ableist" expressions mentioned in the review. Not only have such terms never been used to intentionally diminish disabled people, but neither does their use result in any "negative externality" to society at large, as in the case of unintentionally sexist language. If I "stand up for" someone, I am not inadvertently perpetuating the idea that people who can stand are morally superior to those who can't. If I "turn a blind eye" to something, I do not thereby contribute to a culture of disrespect towards the blind. I would maintain that such expressions do not produce or encourage any of the potentially negative effects that could be alleged in the case of sexist language.
But if someone personally takes offence or experiences some other negative emotion in encountering such language, is this not itself an example of some kind of harm - a harm that we should avoid if we can? I believe it is not morally required to do so. If the person who uses such language does so without intending any offence, and if we can't point to any ways in which such language inculcates further discriminatory behaviour, either from the person using the language or from an audience acculturated to hearing it as part of normal conversation, then it should be regarded as acceptable. Our criterion of unacceptability cannot be simply the personal offence taken by individuals, absent any other discernible harm. To do so would be to uncouple the emotion of offense from its psychological and communicative role of alerting us to injustice, and so to completely lose its effectiveness as an aid to our collective moral development. Harm (actual or potential) should be a cause of offence; offence itself is not a harm.
This may sound very obvious when pointed out, but I think it is important to be clear about what distinguishes the different cases. Some people seem to think that any speech that causes offence is automatically wrong, while many people believe that whether or not speech causes offence is strictly irrelevant to its acceptability. Arguments framed in terms of offensiveness can therefore lead to entirely fruitless debate. The principle we should be considering is not whether the speech causes offence, but whether it causes any harm beyond simply offence.
I think the motivation behind the desire to curb these perceived examples of ableist speech stems from an "err on the side of caution" principle: if something could even potentially have negative effects on someone, the moral thing to do is to avoid it if possible. This might sound reasonable, but I believe it is not always the right solution, and I believe that one need not appeal to contested arguments about the overriding value of free speech in order to dispute it. For it ignores the fact that moral development is not only a matter of behaviour, but of emotion. And just as we can train ourselves to do the right thing, so we can train ourselves to feel the right thing. Offence is an emotion that can motivate us towards moral ends, but if it causes us to find fault with things without actually improving the world in any way, then it is no longer of any use. We can and should train it towards serving the goals we are actually striving for.
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