The Study of Racialism

In another thread, site-member sjames (perhaps inadvertently) conflated two issues: whether mere speech can justify physcal attack and whether mere speech per se can be morally reprehensible. This thread addresses the former.

Specifically, when can mere speech morally justify physical assault, even to the point of causing injury or death to the speaker?

FWIW, my own sense of morality is that this happens only when the words being spoken are a (1) clear and (2) believable threat of (3) immediate physical violence. E.g.: the words, "Give your money or I will pull the trigger and blow your brains out."

It has just been suggested to me that if a man makes a lewd remark to a woman, it is morally acceptable for her to retaliate by slapping him (presumably, with an open hand, rather than with a brick or crowbar).

No, imo, "mere" speech does not "justify" physical violence; but, I'm not clear on your definition of "mere." Words are actions. If someone insults your wife, there is usually a communally acceptable level of response. A slap might be acceptable; but shooting the person dead "might" not. It would be a response inappropriate to the offense.

The courts, however, recognize that certain words in certain contexts can incite violence or disturb the peace.

As for your example, whether there was actual clarity, believability and an immediate threat of violence would be left to a jury to decide. They would also determine whether your level of response was appropriate. Without being there, I can not say a-priori how a person felt at the time.

Is your point that responding to anything other than an immediate threat with violence is immoral?

To answer the question, I'd say "it depends."

There is a large gray area here due to the emotional impact of words that may not be physically threatening but experienced as psychologically threatening. Are certain psychological reactions okay but others are not? For example, if I slap the 20th construction worker who has called me a name that day, but not the 1-19th, is that as wrong as slapping all 20? What if I endured verbal abuse from the construction worker for 10 years and ignored it until one day I just knocked him out? What if I ignored the behavior of one construction worker for years but slapped another one on his first offense? Does that matter? Is it just wrong to ever respond with violence to a verbal assault because we are expected to have control over our emotions and ensure that we identify and deal with any psychological issues that might one day bring forth violent behavior?

It matters what type of assault takes place, though any assault not committed in the act of self-defense is subject to prosecution, correct? So if I slap a guy because he calls me a name and I open up a gash in his face with my ring or break his jaw, I can go to jail. If he is standing at the top of a flight of stairs when I hit him and he falls down and dies, horrible accident though it may have been, I probably would go to jail for manslaughter. Terence Howard's father went to prison for a similar reason (I believe a White man insulted his wife and they started fighting over it).

There are some who would say that violence is never morally acceptable, that it is simply wrong to kill even the most deserving criminal or attacker.

I sincerely hope that one day a drug that is able to suppress or eliminate violent tendencies is discovered, making it possible to live in a society free from violence.

Wrong thread. The last time you conflated these two issues, I gave you the benefit of the doubt that you did it accidentally. But now you are very obviously conflating the two issues deliberately. Please consider yourself warned for violating The Rules paragraph 3.5. If you do it again your posting privilege will be suspended for one week.

Yes. Precisely so. That is my morality. (Warfare, of course, is a category sui generis.)


But your examples all pivot around a person losing self-control and physically attacking someone who does not threaten. In one example (the 20th construction worker) the victim of your violence was not even the trigger.

I fully understand that some people cannot control themselves. They commit violence against others because they feel "psychologically threatened" as you put it or, as you suggest, because they reach a breaking point from prior insults. I understand. I sympathize. I truly feel sorry for such people.

But, in my mind, self-control of our emotions is precisely what distinguishes us from animals. It is the sole purpose behind the initiation rituals that our species used to lift ourselves to consciousness--rituals designed to weed out and exile or kill those who could not control their impulses. Even today's bowlderized sanitized oh-so-mild coming-of-age initiation rituals retain this ancient feature. Are you Catholic? Did you receive the Sacrament of Confirmation? Did you flinch?

People who cannot control their own violent impulses are tragic and sad, but in my mind (and in the minds of tribal leaders going back for hundreds of millennia) such people are not fully human and must not be tolerated in our midst.

Ok, but I did give you the courtesy of responding to your original question, which I find to be biased. There is no such thing as "mere" speech. All words, as we all know, are used in context.

Your personal opinion that about a person's humanity is interesting, but I would never take it upon myself to describe anyone as "not fully human." In fact, I find your words to be more violent than the ones originally in question.

sjames's posting privilege is hereby suspended until midnight, April 2, 2008. The member was warned twice to stick to the topic: once informally and once formally. The above post contains nothing about when is violence justified. Instead, it merely expresses opinions about another site member (the administrator in this case). It is a defiant response to a moderator's attempt to keep the thread on track and a clear violation of The Rules paragraph 4.7. Sjames was not suspended the last time that he tried to derail a thread (http://onedroprule.org/viewtopic.php?p=37041#37041) because he was a new member and allowed some leeway. He is no longer a novice and no more leeway will be allowed.

Mr Sweet suggested that

This is a modern interpretation although it is grounded in religion but most people do not believe this. This is the raison d'etre of AMerican society as I understand it where as long as your are the majority, you can do what you wish.
At what point does a word become a flashpoint for violence?
In Trinidad, amongst friends we called other as follows: "hey mr white man" or "hey mr black man" and some people with the new PC stuff look at it as offensive! It would obviously depend on my attitude and what I was attempting to convey!

Exactly - The loss of self-control due to unknown emotional triggers for any number of reasons is precisely what human societies have yet to invent a reliable method of rooting out and controlling. The question is whether some losses of self-control are acceptable, or none? This question becomes harder to answer any other way that "it depends" as a society grows, technology improves and time marches on.



I don't feel sorry for most of them. It is my hope that modern science can discover the triggers and eliminate them with chemical or psychological treatment. I am not comfortable with the alternative, which is to try and predict which genes or environmental circumstances will produce violent behavior and nip it in the bud, as it were, in ways that remove personal freedom in paternalistic or deterministic manner (i.e, aborting fetuses with a "criminal gene" for example, castrating).



I agree. But the ancients as well as we modern humans have yet to figure out how to make everyone behave or control themselves. I just think we don't understand our triggers well enough to do so.



Fully agree. I imagine there is a class of people for whom only the most pacifist would oppose killing outright, and perhaps another that is predatory enough to warrant removal of some kind (like sociopaths). But where the line shuold be drawn is far from clear, especially in a free society that grants freedom first.

The above claim was off-topic. I have split it to a new thread titled Can Americans in the majority do as they wish? Punjabtrini now has 24 hours to provide a source for this bizarre claim of fact. (In that new thread, NOT HERE.)

Frank raises an interesting question…By reading the responses here, I can truly understand where both Frank and Maya are coming from. I can think of one (perhaps very obvious) instance of mere speech “justifying” physical attack albeit in most cases(luckily) not resulting in permanent injury or death. However I wouldn’t quite classify my example as necessarily occurring within a “free society”; but instead within a “benevolent dictatorship” ( )…namely the parent-child dynamic.

I wonder how many people here (or people that you know) have received a swat on the backside or a slap across the face for being impudent or having a “fresh mouth”? Is this justified? Of course this would open up a totally new thread concerning corporal punishment, which isn’t the purpose here. However, IMHO, I’ll just say this: “backtalk” was not acceptable in my home as a child, nor would I tolerate it if I did have those hypothetical children……

Excellent point! I may have had that in the back of my mind when I thought of coming-of-age rituals and initiations. Such rituals both demonstrate the newly fledged adult's self-control and mark life's milestone after which parental force is no longer allowed.

Another closely related case is when a psychotic must be forcibly restrained in order to prevent danger to the individual or to others.

I remember when I was younger, a kid called the police on his father for spanking him and the cops where getting at the father. the dad told them they could take the kid and raise him themselves. pushed the kid out and closed the door.

My dad probably spanked me once or twice and it was on something really bad He knocked my brother down because he got really smart with my mother (in front of family)

My dad never allowed disrespect toward adults and never toward our mother. He'd debate with us. But backtalk toward mom was out of the question. Especially when boy get into those early teen years, we begin asserting our 'manhood'.

People say it teaches the children to be violent. But that isn't the case at all in our family.