On Being Judgmental

Here’s a minor puzzle. One the one hand, people make judgments all the time—making judgments, we can say, is part of what it means to be human. On the other hand, (some) people think that being judgmental is a bad thing; “You’re being judgmental” or “You’re judging me” is an accusation of sorts. How do we resolve this tension? To state the obvious, we can resolve it neither by claiming that being judgmental is always okay nor that it is never okay, because, clearly, sometimes it is okay and sometimes it is not. We need to resolve the tension in some other way.

But first some ground clearing is necessary.

What are some examples of making judgments? Here are some: “The view from here is astounding.” “This painting is vibrant.” “Wolves are majestic animals.” “He is a compassionate doctor.” “She is a strict teacher.” “He is a petty man.” “She is an odious person.” Because accusations of being judgmental tend to be retorts to judgments made about human beings, I will confine the rest of the discussion to them; let’s call them “human judgments,” by which I mean judgments made about human beings (usually made by human beings, though the God of the Jews and the Muslims provides a paramount example to the contrary). The last four examples in this paragraph are examples of such judgments.

Human judgments can be moral: “You are cruel”; “he is generous”; “she is a decent person”; “I am selfish.” They can be psychological (though these can mix with the moral): “He is such an anxious person”; “she’s a hot mess”; “John is very timid”; “I’m a claustrophobe”; “you’re always happy!” They can be practical (though these can mix with the moral and the psychological): “Martha is easy going”; “I love how spontaneous you are”; “Theresa is always happy to help.” They can be aesthetic (these can mix with sexual judgments and ones about health): “He’s a very attractive man”; “she’s gorgeous”; “he’s fat”; “I’m very skinny.”

Human judgments can be global or local, meaning that they can be about a person overall or about something the person does at a specific time or on a specific occasion. For example, “Elena is mean spirited” and “Paolo is hot” are global judgments; they concern Elena and Paolo as persons. But “Elena is being petty” and “Paolo is looking hot today” are local if Elena is not a petty person and Paolo is usually mediocre looking. Note that global and local judgments cut across all the above types.

Before continuing, I want to note and set aside one point, which is that contrary to what all the examples given so far might falsely imply, making judgments need not be direct or through speech. One can indirectly make a judgment by looking at the bottle of wine that is on the table in a friend’s house and then asking the friend, “How much of that are you drinking every day?” And one can non-verbally make a judgment, as with a sneer, a look, a grunt, a sigh. One can make a judgment by not looking at someone. And to all these ways of making judgments, the other can respond by saying, “Do not judge me,” “You’re being judgmental,” or “Stop judging me!”

My interest is in all the above types, especially the moral, psychological, and aesthetic, in both their local and global forms. The main reason is that accusations of being judgmental are not confined to any one type of the above. To explain: suppose that X judges Y to be A (whatever A is). For Y (or someone else) to turn and meaningfully accuse X of being judgmental, X’s original judgment could have been global or local, and it could have been of any of the above types (moral, aesthetic, psychological, and so on). Whether X judges Y to be petty, fat, a hot mess, or difficult, Y can come back and accuse X of being judgmental. The accusation of being judgmental can be about just any type of judgment.

(In what follows, X refers to the person making the initial judgment, and Y is the person retorting with something like, “Don’t judge” or “You’re being judgmental.” Of course, others can retort in the same ways on behalf of Y, but I will set this aside to keep the discussion manageable.)

But there are exceptions. Typically, accusations of being judgmental do not occur when the original judgments are positive. We do not usually retort to X saying, “Stop being so judgy” after X has declared (in earnest) that Y is beautiful, sweet, easy going, or compassionate. Typically, accusations of being judgmental occur when the judgment is negative.

I will then restrict my discussion to negative judgments.

I will also restrict it to true negative judgments, because what is interesting about the accusation that one is being judgmental is found not in those cases when the judgment is false but when the judgment is true (this is not to deny that retorting, “You’re being judgmental” can be perfectly apt in cases of false negative judgments). That is, the interesting question is not, “Given that X’s judgment of Y is false, how can the accusation that X is being judgmental be meaningful or true?” but, “Given that X’s judgment of Y is true, how can the accusation that X is being judgmental be meaningful or true?” We want to know what it means to accuse X of being judgmental in those cases when X’s judgments are true, because we want to see how one can both issue a true negative judgment yet still commit the specific type of wrong of being judgmental.

(I will not dignify with a response the objection that there are no true negative judgments on the grounds that truth is subjective or relative, except to say that since people can be—and many are—petty, a hot mess, anxious, mean, cruel, and so on, then to judge them to be so when they are so is to issue true negative judgments.)

Making judgments is a necessary part of human life. Without making judgments, parents cannot raise their kids, employers cannot promote or demote employees, friends cannot ameliorate their friendships, lovers cannot become better (as lovers), and moralists cannot be critical of morally deficient individuals (and societies). Not only do human beings rely on making judgments to get on with the business of life, but they need to make judgments to flourish—more often than not we need to know how to proceed, how to shape and continue with our lives, and critical judgments help us with that. It is the way we live and improve.

Moreover, we cannot rely only on our own judgments of ourselves; we need others to make judgments about us because we have limited knowledge of ourselves and because we have the tendency to think of ourselves as better than we actually are. So we need a critical eye on ourselves, and sometimes others are in a better position than we are to provide it (even if they can do so from less than noble motives and even if their judgments can be erroneous).

If we want to be better human beings, we then need others to judge us. We need their critical eye.

But in all this judging (and I am still confining the discussion to true negative judgments), there are those cases in which one is also being judgmental. That is, there are cases in which X judges Y to be clingy and X is not being judgmental in so judging Y, and there are cases in which X judges Y to be clingy in which X is being judgmental in so judging Y. So in which types of cases of making judgments can one also be judgmental? In which types of cases can making judgments be morally off in that specific way that “being judgmental” tries to capture and express?

One can be accused of being judgmental for various reasons. Consider the possible reasons for why Y accuses X of being judgmental after X has accused Y of being, say, weak. (1) Y might simply not want to be criticized, so Y’s retort is to stop X in X’s tracks or even to attempt to level the moral playing field with X (by in turn accusing X of having failed, specifically, of having been judgmental). (2) Y could be objecting to X’s manner of making the judgment, such that in judging Y, X is very abrupt or blunt, or lacking in sympathy, empathy, or compassion. (3) Y could be telling X that it is not X’s place to judge Y: that X is not Y’s friend, parent, psychiatrist, doctor, or that, more generally, X lacks the moral ground to make such a judgment. (4) Y can be telling X that instead of judging Y, X should have been doing something else, such as showing sympathy or empathy. (5) Y can be telling X that X’s motives in judging Y are not proper: that X is out to demean Y, to tell Y that Y is contemptuous, and so on. (6) Y can be telling X that X’s judgment of Y blames Y for who Y is or for what Y has done, for having reached that point in Y’s life when Y is being weak, whereas X is wrong to blame Y. And (7) Y can be telling X that X is wrong to think that Y could have acted non-weakly. (Of course, Y could be saying one or more of these.)

I will emphasize the last three, focusing more on (6) and (7) than on (5).

(5) states that making judgments can come from good and bad attitudes (a good or bad “place”), and when the attitudes are bad, the judger can be rightly accused of being judgmental. This is especially the case, I think, when the attitudes take the one being judged to be contemptuous or deserving of scorn. This nicely explains the rejection of the judgment. So when X says to an overweight Y, “You’re eating too much,” that judgment, if coming from X’s attitude that overweight people are low or contemptuous, is rejection-able—it can merit the response, “Stop judging me.”

To be clear, not all such responses are actually merited. Consider the following case. Brant and Grant are colleagues. Grant is a despicable person who always reports his colleagues to human resources. He’s a busy-body who derives tremendous pleasure from seeing his colleagues get called into HR. Once, Grant reports Tom to HR for having taken home a stapler even though Tom returned it the next day (he used it at home for work purposes) and even though Grant knew this. Upon realizing what Grant has done, Brant says to him, “You’re a scumbag.” Grant responds, “Don’t judge me.”

In this case, Grant’s retort is not merited, because even though Brant regards Grant with contempt, the contempt is deserved. So while it is understandable why Grant would retort in the way that he does, his retort is not justified.

Compare the above case with this: Cat and Matt work together. Cat dislikes Matt. She thinks he is contemptible because he is often disheveled and does not shower every day. So even though Matt should work on his hygiene, he does not deserve to be viewed with contempt. One day, Cat passes him in the coffee room and she says to him, “Dude. You stink!” Matt retorts, “Don’t judge me!” In this case his retort is justified: he can sense Cat’s underlying contemptuous attitude and he shoots back with that response.

While true in some cases, the resort to underlying attitudes of contempt or some such similar attitude does not explain other cases—those in which the attitude is not contemptuous yet the retort of “You’re being judgmental” is understandable and might be merited. This is where (6) and (7) come in.

(6) claims that the judgment is rejected as being judgmental because it is deemed to be laying culpable blame on the judged person; it accuses the judged person of having failed in some respect and in such a way that had the person made better choices in the past, he or she would not have failed in the present. So when someone rejects the judgment, they are in effect saying that the judgment is based on lack of proper knowledge of the situation of the judged person. So, for example, when X judges Y to be eating too much, Y’s retort of “Stop judging me,” is short for, “You don’t know why I am overweight. If you knew my history, you would not have said what you did.”

Now consider (7), which states that in the present Y could have acted otherwise than Y did: if X judges Y to be eating too much, X is saying that, now, Y did not need to be eating too much. If X judges Y to be weak, X is saying that now Y could be displaying strength instead. (7) differs from (6) in that it does not dip into Y’s past to support the judgment, whereas (6) does. Moreover, in (6), X need not be saying anything about what Y could be doing now, only that what Y is doing now is explained by Y’s past failures.

In both types of cases, Y relies on X’s not having sufficient information to accuse X of being judgmental. In (6), Y says to X that X does not know what has occurred in Y’s life to justify making the judgment that X made. In (7), Y says to X that X does not know what is going on in Y’s mind now to justify making the judgment that X made. (In both types of cases, Y might also be saying to X, as an implication of X’s lack of sufficient information, “If you were in my shoes you might have done the same, so don’t judge me.”)

The point about insufficient information explains what goes on in many cases in which the judged person responds the way that he or she does. Halting X by saying “Do not judge” seems to mean, “You’re not in my shoes so you don’t know what I know, so cease and desist.” But if this is correct, there is a crucial question to ask: Is Y saying that the judgment itself is erroneous or is Y saying that X should not have made it? If the latter, how would that make sense in light of the fact that the judgment is true?

In some cases, it is the former. But the interesting ones are the latter, because these are the ones in which X is being judgmental despite that the judgment is true. Y can be understood as saying that X should not have issued the judgment, even if it is a true judgment, because it is issued in a spirit of judging without sufficient information or knowledge. That is, Y is accusing X of not merely stating a fact, but of doing so in an epistemically irresponsible way, by not relying on enough information, whether the information pertains to the past or to the present.

Consider two cases in which X says to Y, “You’re so petty!” In both cases, what X says is true. In one case, X just describes what he thinks Y is, with no additional assumptions made about why Y is petty. But in the other case, X says it with the intention to communicate something more, namely, the message that Y’s being petty is Y’s fault, and that Y could have acted in a non-petty way either because Y could have made different choices in the past that would have changed Y’s action in the present (this is point [6]), or that Y could have now, in the present, chosen a different course of action (this is point [7]). It is in these types of cases in which the retort, “Don’t judge me” makes most sense, because it is here that Y rejects X’s judgment on the basis of its not being well-established.

We should not confuse two claims with each other. It is one thing for Y to be culpable for Y’s actions or character. This is not at issue. But it is another thing—and this is at issue—for X to convey X’s belief in this culpability. It is the true-judgment-wrapped-in-blaming that Y rejects. Y says, in effect, “Had you known my story (reasons, excuses, explanations) or had access to my mind, you would not have judged me in the way that you did.”

Note that in these rejections, there could also be a component of accusing X of lacking empathy or compassion. But in the types of cases I just explained, the rejection is not primarily based on X’s lack of empathy. It is based mostly on lack of access to sufficient information on which X should have based X’s judgment. In these types of cases (as opposed to that in type [2] above), when there is an accusation of lack of empathy or compassion, it is because Y wishes to say that had X bothered to know more, X would have been empathetic or compassionate.

The above says nothing about whether Y’s retort in the above cases is justified. It is tempting to think that it is justified because, we want to say, surely it is plausible that we should not be making judgments before knowing all the facts. But this is not true. (As a reminder, the judgments being made are true ones.) We rarely make judgments on the basis of full information (that might not be possible), so the issue is making judgments on the basis of relevant information. And here, things get tricky, because on the one hand we do want to give the people who are being judged some leeway in deciding what is relevant information, but, on the other hand, people often don’t like to be criticized, and they can suffer from cutting themselves too much slack when it comes getting themselves off the culpability hook (people can go in the opposite direction and be too hard on themselves). There is no principled way to decide this question, and it is best left to a case-by-case discussion. But the point is that there could be cases that fit the following conditions: (a) X judges Y negatively and truly; (b) Y shoots back that X is being judgmental; and this is because (c) X lacks sufficient or relevant information to be judging Y; (d) Y is right that X lacks sufficient or relevant information to make the judgment; (e) yet X is justified in making it, and (f) Y’s accusing X of being judgmental is not justified (keep in mind that there can be cases in which both [e] and the opposite of [f] are true).

Consider the following case to illustrate the point. Sarah meets one of her boyfriend’s friends, Josh, for the first time on a camping trip with a bunch of other friends. Over the course of a long weekend, she has a chance to observe Josh interacting with others, and she comes to the conclusion that he is so competitive when playing games that he gets angry and spoils things for everyone. On the last day of the trip, he throws a hissy fit about some game or other, at which point she says to him, “You’re very mean-spirited. Relax. This is just a game.” He retorts, “I’ve been noticing the way you look at me, judging me with your eyes. Please stop that. You barely know me.” Suppose that Josh, had he put in some effort, could have controlled his behavior on the trip (he has done it before on a few occasions). Given all this, Sarah’s opinion of Josh, though formed over a period of only three days, is true (sometimes, you can know people very quickly—it’s not that hard, believe me). Josh is also right that Sarah barely knows him. Yet he is wrong to accuse her of being judgmental. She might have been unwise in voicing her opinion of Josh, but this is a different wrong than being judgmental.

Making judgments is perfectly human, necessary, and good, but sometimes the judger is met by the response that he is being judgmental. I have attempted in this post to make sense of some of the reasons that people have when they respond in that way. I do not intend the explanations of the reasons to be an empirical explanation of what goes on in the minds of the Y’s of the world, though in some cases I’m sure it is. Instead, I intend the explanations to be three ways (among others) of making sense of the rejections of judgement-making—they are reconstructions, so to speak, of the reasons that can motivate the rejections. Moreover, I have argued that not every time someone accuses a judger of being judgmental, the accusation is justified. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it is not.

Immoral Feelings

Blog 15 – Immoral Feelings

Feelings and emotions can be suspect from a moral point of view. Anger, jealousy, envy, sadness, and every other emotion can have blinding effects on the person who has them: they can blind us to others, to not giving them a fair hearing, to not weigh their needs and claims appropriately. There is also a long tradition in philosophy of suspecting feelings. Immanuel Kant, for example, was wary of emotions as a proper guide to what ought to be done. Even Aristotle, whose virtue ethics is considered to be a moral theory that does not shun emotions, puts them in a proper perspective. To Aristotle, the very idea of a virtue is that it is a state of character that, among other things, disposes us to correctly feel things: in the right way, at the right time, for the right reason, towards the right object, and so on.

            To many people, this might sound strange. After all, we cannot control our feelings, which seem to just happen to us. People often shrug their shoulders and say, “Well, this is just how I feel,” as if nothing can be done about it. Here, however, we have to be careful; we should distinguish between being able to change feelings on the spot, in the very short term, or by an immediate act of will, on the one hand, and between being able to change them in the long term, on the other. More importantly, we should distinguish between changing feelings and emotions (whether short or long term), on the one hand, and evaluating them, on the other. After all, even if it is true that “This is just how I feel,” it can also be true that how I feel in a particular situation is incorrect, inapt, irrational, or unjustified. For example, feeling rage at a minor mishap is not apt, and neither is feeling little or no anger at the slaughter of one’s family. Feeling jealousy is petty if prompted merely by the sight of someone else conversing with your spouse, while not feeling any jealousy at the prospect of losing your spouse to someone else indicates loss of love. Most emotions can be apt or inapt, justified or unjustified, rational or irrational, depending on the occasion, and it is up to us, as rational beings (or as ones who aspire to be rational) to evaluate them.

            Moreover, evaluating emotions and feelings is important. It is important for its own sake—to know whether our emotions are reflecting a fair or proper attitude towards others and ourselves—but also for the sake of long term change. If we want to be good people, we need to feel the proper emotions at the right times, towards the right people, for the right reasons, for the right time, and so on, as Aristotle says. And we need to feel emotions properly because emotions are not mere sensations. They are complex states that contain attitudes, beliefs, and reactions, all of which are subject to ethical criteria. For example, if I feel angry for days on end at a minor slight, my anger towards the person who slighted me would involve beliefs and attitudes: the belief that what he did to me was awful, and that I should stay angry at him, for example, and the anger would involve a negative or hostile stance (attitude) towards him. But if what he did does not merit such a reaction on my part, then feeling that kind of anger would be clearly unfair to him (and it would eat at my soul).

            So evaluating our emotions is an important moral task.

            Thus, unlike ideal (or theoretical) virtuous people, whose virtue and wisdom are complete and whose emotions are therefore rightly directed by them, the rest of us have to deal with emotions and feelings that often spring on us, demanding our attention. Moreover, many people not only have to evaluate their emotions, but they also have to evaluate the wrong emotions, emotions that come at the wrong times, for the wrong reasons, towards the wrong people, and for the wrong periods of time. More often than not, we also know, or at least suspect, that we are feeling the wrong emotion. We often have to say to ourselves, “Cool it. You are making a big deal out of nothing” or, at least, “Am I right to be feeling this?” That is, we often have to subject what we feel to the scrutiny of our reason. So even if, unlike a virtuous person, we sometimes cannot help but feel an emotion, we still need to ask ourselves whether what we are feeling is apt, and, if not, negotiate with ourselves to temper or eradicate what we are feeling.

            My subject for this post is an off-shoot of the above theme, and it derives from the fact that in some types of situations there is a misguided distinction made between the impact of what someone says and the intentions behind what they said. This is a distinction—the intention of words vs. their impact—that seems to be gaining currency. We see people getting outraged at things that other people say, despite the fact that in some cases the speakers said what they did with clean intentions. Moreover, the distinction is such that, if morally mishandled, it can easily block our ability to question our feelings and thus be fair to others and decent to ourselves.

            Consider the following four examples to best bring out the distinction and its moral challenges.

            (1) The first example is real, extracted from an article by Eric Hoover in The Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Make Yourself Uncomfortable” (August 16, 2019, A12-A15) about ACCEPT (Admissions Community Cultivating Acceptance & Peace Today), a new group about diversifying and making sure that admissions are equitable. In September 2016, at a conference for the National Association for College Admission Counseling, Phil Trout, the association’s departing president, referred in his opening remarks to the killing of Tyre King, an African-American teenager who had been shot by a white police officer a few days earlier in Columbus, Ohio, the same city where the conference was taking place. Trout said that the killing of King is a tragedy that “challenges us once again to remember that all lives matter.” Trout, it seems, did not know that “all lives matter” is an expression that some people use to oppose Black Lives Matter; he seems to have used it intending to “express sympathy and solidarity.” In the outrage that followed, many made the comment that despite his intentions, people were upset merely by the impact of Trout’s words.

            According to the Chronicle article, “on any given day, you might see a discussion [on the Facebook page of ACCEPT] of ‘intent vs. impact.’ OK, maybe that white person didn’t mean to offend, but his remarks did, in fact, offend a person of color. What should he do? Acknowledge his privilege and apologize. He also should acknowledge the impact of his remarks instead of describing his intentions” (A14).

            (2) The second example is fictional (but based on a real event). Suppose that we are listening to Daria, a speaker giving a talk about her experiences as a Latina young woman upon arrival to Chicago and matriculating in high school. She describes an incident in which five of her female white class mates surround her one afternoon outside school and call her a “trashy bitch” and then chant, in unison, until they hound her away, “Spic! Spic! Spic!” This word is a slur, and hearing it is no doubt jolting. On hearing Daria, we feel with her, we come close to understanding what she might have felt on that afternoon, and how that word would have cut deep into her psyche. And this feeling of ours might transform into anger at the people who put her through this experience.

            Now imagine another speaker, Jessica, a white woman, giving a talk about Daria’s experiences in the United States. She recounts the same incident and quotes the same words as Daria did. Moreover, Jessica’s intentions in doing so are clear: they are not to mock Daria, to belittle her experiences, or to call her a “snowflake,” but to inform the audience of how experiences of racism have shaped the lives many Americans. Still, upon hearing the word “Spic,” some people in the audience get angry, and they get angry not at the young women who used it to taunt Daria on that one afternoon, but at Jessica because she mentioned that word.

            Granted this is how some people actually felt, should they have felt that way? More generally, what should our reaction to hearing Jessica quoting the S-word be? Would anger at her be rational or merited?

            (3) The third example is again fictional (and based in a real event). James is a white man who teaches a Contemporary American Literature course at his college. On one particular day, he is reading a passage from an American-Asian writer, in which the narrator describes an incident in which he was called a “Chink” by other characters in the novel. After quoting this passage, James goes on to explain to his class how the word “Chink” has been used in the United States as a slur against Asians and Asian-Americans (the Chinese, specifically, though slur words have a way of glossing over differences between ethnic and cultural groups!). After class, some of his students go up to him to tell him that they were upset by his use of the word, at which point James tries to explain to them that he was not using it, but mentioning it to explain to the class its bad meaning and its use by the author in the passage he had read to convey a complex experience. This explanation, however, does not help, and those who are angry with James claim that even though James’s intentions were not to offend or hurt, the impact of his words nevertheless did and that this needs to be acknowledged.

            Is anger at James merited or justified?

            (4) Finally, a personal example. The word “manyak” in Arabic (or in some Arabic dialects) has a bad history: it refers to a guy who likes to “take it up the ass” and who is, more often than not, effeminate. It is the closest word in Arabic to the English “fag” or “faggot.” I have a few good (straight) friends in Beirut who use this word with me and I with them. That is, we often pepper our conversations with each other using this word. When we use it, we use it to mean something like, “Dude.” Yes, the word has been used in the past and continues to be used as a slur. But it has come to acquire a more neutral meaning, and that’s not how we use it with each other. (The word “marico” in Spanish is also like this: it can be used as a slur, but it can also mean something like “Dude.”) When my friends use this word with me, when they address me that using this word, I am not upset at their use of it.

            Now, imagine me walking down a street in Beirut one day and someone, a stranger, calls me “manyak” because he believes that I am gay. He does not need to call me that in a hostile or threatening way, and I might not feel any danger upon hearing him (he might be a 15-year old kid who hurls the word at me mockingly and then runs away). My reaction to this is to correctly perceive it as an insult, as a slur, as demeaning—as whatever way we typically feel when people hurl slurs at us. It offends and angers me, and rightly so.

            Have I over-reacted to the stranger’s use of the word against me? Have I under-reacted to its use by my friends? (Note that to use “over-react” and “under-react” is to ask the above-mentioned “should” question, because it is to ask whether my reactions were merited or unmerited, apt or inapt.)

            Before answering these questions, note that there is an important difference between the types of intentions in examples (1) and (4), on the one hand, and in examples (2) and (3) on the other. In (2) and (3), Daria, Jessica, and James all intended the same meaning of the slur words. They also all had the same intention in using the slur words: they intended to use them in an anti-racist way, to illustrate the evils of racism. In example (4), the kid who calls me “manyak” intended a different meaning than my friends intended; while they intended “dude,” he intended “fag.” Moreover, he intended to use the word in a demeaning way. In example (1), Trout did not intend the meaning of the expression “all lives matter” to be “contrary to what Black Lives Matter believes, all lives matter,” but to mean something like, “I am appalled by the killing of Tyre King whose life matters as everyone else’s does.” And Trout also intended to use his words to condemn the way that black people are treated.

            In general, words and intentions can cross paths in at least two ways: the intention to imbue words with a certain meaning, and the intention to use the words in a certain way, given their meaning. The first type of intention is rarely up to individual people, because the meanings of words and expressions is largely public. I cannot say “Nothing travels than the speed of light” to mean “I will love you forever” (unless it occurs in, say, a poem and the context of the poem clarifies that light and speed are being used as metaphors or similes in connection to love). This is why my friends can intend words like “manyak” and “marico” to mean “dude” only if such a meaning is public, in some form of social circulation. If no such meaning were present, and only the slur-meaning were prevalent, their use of it that way would be problematic, and their intentions to the contrary cannot so easily override its public meaning. (This is why we often tell our students in art critiques that, despite their intentions, some symbols and words can go beyond them and be taken up by their public meaning.) We can think of public meanings as a group of cats, and individual intentions as people trying to herd them and keep them in line. It might happen, but not likely.

            This is also why I wrote above that the intention to use certain words or expressions depends on their meaning. For James to intend to use “chink” in an anti-racist way, he has to rely on its public meaning as a slur. Ditto for Jessica, Daria, and the kid in Beirut. We cannot use words in a certain way unless we rely on their public meanings. Otherwise, our attempts can go seriously awry. If we go back to the Trout example, his explanation for using “all lives matter” in a non-insulting way sounds sincere precisely because this expression does mean what he intended it to mean, even though there is now a rival, insulting, meaning of it.

            Because the intention to mean something with a word or an expression is hostage to the word or expression’s public meaning, leaving little room for individual intentions in changing the meaning to suit the individual’s purposes, and because the impact vs. intention distinction depends on the pre-existence of public meanings, what follows is only about the intention in use.

            So, to return to our questions: What explains the difference in our reactions to Daria and Jessica in the second example and to James in the third example? What explains my different reactions to being called “manyak”? Should there be a difference in the reactions? The basic answer is that what explains and justifies the difference in the reactions is the attribution of a different intention to each party. This, in turn, explains why the impact of words cannot—more accurately: should not—be shorn of their intended usage. Put differently, the intention behind a word or an expression should dictate, at least to a large extent, how we react to the use of that word or expression. Thus, given the “clean” intentions of all the speakers in the above examples (except for the kid who uses the slur against me), the anger is not justified at all.

            Might one, however, be able to argue that it is? How? One argument is that slurs are ugly words with ugly histories, and that one can be easily jolted upon hearing them, regardless of the intentions, which would explain and justify people’s being upset. Slurs are hateful words based on group belonging that have been used to demean, to insult, or to put someone in their (lower) place, all on the basis of their group belonging. So that, one can argue, regardless of the intentions, these words are impactful.

            But this is not convincing. One reason that it is not convincing is that it would apply to anyone who uses these words, no matter to which race, gender, sexual orientation, or ethnic group they belong. Yet this does not jive with the facts, and the facts are that the anger is always directed at out-group people who use these words, especially if the people are white. Put differently, it seems that people’s reactions cut a lot of slack to members of in-groups who use the slurs in a non-demeaning way, but no slack, or barely any, to members of out-groups who also use these words in a non-demeaning way. So the ugliness of the words’ meanings does not explain the differences in reactions to who utters these words.

            The above argument also glosses over the distinction between intention-in-meaning and intention-in-use, which I already explained. It does so because it attempts to explain the negative reactions to slur words only by relying on their meanings, thus setting aside how they are used or intended to be used. I will return to this shortly.

            This leaves us with one explanation for the difference in reactions: That when members of in-groups use the words in a non-insulting way, it is acceptable, but when members of out-groups use it in a non-insulting way, it is not acceptable.

            This, however, is not a reason, let alone a good one. It is mere assertion (and one that smacks of a bad –ism of sorts: of anti-white racism, of anti-straight phobia, of anti-male sexism, etc., if such things exist). For it to go beyond mere assertion, it needs to give a reason why a slur word in the mouth of a white person who is using it with clean or anti-bigoted intentions is still somehow morally wrong. I cannot think of a single reason why it would be. And this reason, were it to exist, would have to grapple with the distinction between intention-in-meaning and intention-in-use. Without showing how even with a good intention-in-use the out-group speaker is wrong to use the word, the reason won’t go anywhere. So, questions such as the following need to be answered: Why would Jessica, who was not only informing us of the racism that Daria had been through, but also condemning it, and who was turning our attention to Daria’s experiences to show us how awful they were, be wrong to use the word as she does?

            One might argue that we can always find an adequate substitute, such as “the S-word” or “the N-word” or the “C-word.” If we can do so with no loss of meaning, why not do so? It would spare everyone a lot of strife.

            As a tactical or pragmatic argument, it is convincing. After all, if I know or highly suspect that my use of a particular word, no matter how well-intended, will offend and offend deeply, I should avoid using it. But this argument is not a good moral argument. After all, for the suggested word to be a good substitute, we need to have a reason first as to why a substitute is needed, and it is this reason that I think still needs to be supplied. Moreover, such substitutes might fail to adequately convey the horrors of what one is trying to convey. If I am quoting a passage from an anti-Arab racist, using “camel-effer” instead of “camel-fucker” to convey the hatred would not be as powerful. Absent a good reason to avoid the word, I should recount the words in an unvarnished way (as a colleague has plausibly suggested to me). I have no moral reason to step away from using certain words simply because they might offend, when the offense is premised on not taking my intentions-in-use into account and thus smacks of over-sensitivity.

            So it seems that there is no such thing as a justified or merited impact of words without a proper knowledge and evaluation of a speaker’s intentions. We need to know what a speaker intended with their words to know whether to be upset or joyed by their words. And if we are already upset by their words—if we cannot help but feel upset—we need to know their intentions in order to evaluate what we are feeling. Given that the intentions of a speaker can change the valence of a word from being negative to being positive, we cannot—it would be irrational and unjustified to—feel a certain way for or against the speaker simply upon hearing that word; we need to know how and why she used it. Only then will our feelings be apt or inapt depending on the case. To be sure, we can feel whatever we want as long as we are careful to not transform this feeling into a moral case against (or, less commonly, for) the speaker. If we are to do so, we need to take into account the speaker’s intentions-in-use.

            Therefore, those who rely only on the impact of the words and refuse to take into account the speakers’ intentions in using these words are making a moral mistake: simply put, they are being unfair to the speaker. In refusing to take into account a speaker’s intentions, and in embracing anger or rage at the speaker’s words, they are basically saying to the speaker the following: “Even though, ethically speaking, your intentions should inform how we feel about your words, we are nonetheless not going to consider them in how we feel. We are going to be angry regardless of your intentions.” This is an injustice to the speaker in two ways. First, it overrides what the speaker intended to say, treating her as a non-conversant or a non-communicator—in a sense it objectifies the speaker, reducing her mind to a mere string of words with their own meaning. Second, in doing so it makes an exception of the speaker precisely by suspending, in her case, the social and moral convention of interpreting speakers’ words in light of their intentions—it singles out the speaker for unfair treatment by refusing to apply to her the usual social and moral interactive conventions.

            But there is another ethically troubling aspect to the way impact vs. intention distinction is used, and it is one that rebounds on those who disregard the speaker’s intentions. Simply put, those who refuse to take a speaker’s intentions into account willfully deceive themselves into hearing what they want to hear. So, instead of giving themselves credit for being good inter-actors with another person, they override the intentions and hear what they want to hear. This means that they deprive themselves, willingly, of hearing a potential truth, of being open-minded, and of engaging with what they hear. These are all epistemic defects, and they are defects in the hearers themselves.

            The impact vs. intention distinction has to be handled carefully if we are to be fair to others and to ourselves. Specifically, we cannot claim that the impact of words is justified regardless of what the speaker intended in using these words. Ideally, the intentions of a speaker explain how the words have impacted the hearers via their intentions: the speaker’s intentions were racist, so the impact was hurtful. But more importantly, they justify the impact via the intentions: because Jessica’s intentions in using the slur word was not racist, I should not be upset by it (even if I happen to feel upset by it). Such evaluations of emotions allow us to be fair to others and to be better human beings.

Academia and the World's Ills

This post is about five words that I find more and more commonly used in daily communications on academic campuses—certainly in my institution, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where I have been teaching for longer than I care to remember. These are words that, I conjecture, reflect a kind of mentality (that I explain at the end) and that I find worrisome, for reasons that I will also explain.

I wish to be clear that even though almost all my colleagues use these words all the time, what I have to say here is not meant to accuse any of them of willful miscommunication or bad communication. At most, the accusation can be of thoughtlessly following the crowd (which is, actually, no small accusation in a setting supposed to be all about critical thinking). Another thing to make clear is that I am by no means advocating the banning of such terminology—on principled grounds, certainly not; think instead of what I am doing as a prompt to get us to reflect more on the words that we use and why we use them.

Some of the expressions that I find troublesome are already well-discussed and I will not repeat them here. I refer to: “safe spaces,” “trigger warnings,” “social justice,” “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” “micro-aggressions,” and “implicit bias.” Some of them (“safe spaces”) clearly do not belong on college campuses. Others (“trigger warnings” and “social justice”) are not clear. Others (“diversity, equity, and inclusion” and “micro-aggressions”) are ill-defined or not defined at all (I think, sometimes knowingly and even intentionally), and they often involve double-faced-ness (officially: “We want to include all voices and experiences”; unofficially: “Perhaps not so much members of a certain group”). Others (“implicit bias”) are not actionable (suppose I am on a search committee and I cogently argue against a candidate who happens to be gay; is this my implicit bias against gays kicking in or am I arguing from good motives? And if I have good reasons for why I reject the candidate, does it matter whether I act from implicit bias or from non-implicit bias?)

The expressions I’m after are not all as hefty, but they are indicative of the changing climate on campuses.

Here they are:

(1) “Reach out”: as in, “I’ll reach out to Richard to set up a meeting.” In the not-so-distant past, we used to use “email” and “contact,” as in: “I’ll email Richard about the meeting,” and “I will contact him and see what he says.”

Well, what’s wrong with “reach out”? Other than being technically incorrect, it connotes helplessness, need, lifting someone out of a ditch, or something along these lines. At first, I thought I was just imagining this connotation, or that it was one born out of my non-abilities as a non-native English speaker. But no, I was not imagining it; here’s the Oxford English Dictionary (on-line): “reach out [mainly North American]: seek to establish communication, with the aim of offering assistance or cooperation: his style was to reach out all the time, especially to members of his own party; anyone in need of assistance should reach out to the authorities as soon as possible.”

So there you have it. Unless by definition all our jobs in a college are miserable (which they are not), we now use an expression connoting need and assistance to communicate with each other on a university campus. This nicely belongs in the same group as “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings.”

(2) “Share”: as in, “I’ll share this email with you” and “Can you please share this document with us?” We used to use “forward” and “email,” as in: “I’ll forward this email to you” and “Can you please email us this document?”

Well, what’s wrong with “share”? Just one thing, really: it connotes a world in which children hold hands and skip together in a field of flowers. It connotes children’s activities in kindergarten (as in: “Children, children! Please share your crayons with each other!”). It connotes breaking bread together (as in: “Let’s share a meal together soon.”)

So there you have it. Like “reach out,” “share” dips into the mentality of “Let’s all be nice to each other” which is, don’t get me wrong, a great mentality for certain contexts. But when used in a university, it symbolizes a certain way of thinking that has come to prevail (see below).

(3) “Empathy”: as in, “We need to hire an administrator who is empathetic” or “I want a department chair who shows empathy.” Now, when people use this word, do they really mean what it means?

To state the obvious, “empathy” is a specific word in the English language (duh!), and this usually means that, no matter how close it is to other words in meaning, it has its own unique one. The word to which it is closest is probably “sympathy,” but “empathy” and “sympathy” mean different things; specifically, “empathy” has a component that is missing from “sympathy,” which is sharing the emotions of the person for whom you have empathy. To empathize with someone who is feeling sad is to also feel their sadness, whereas to be sympathetic towards someone who is sad is to understand and feel some compassion for them sadness.

Now, sharing someone’s emotion by also feeling it is a feat that is very hard to pull off, and, believe me, there are some emotions and feelings that you do not want to share. But regardless of these difficulties, which of the two—sympathy and empathy—do we want our colleagues to have (especially if they are administrators)? If I have to choose one, then I choose sympathy. Why? Because, as others have pointed out, empathy is a dangerous emotion, and one of its dangers is that it can block the critical distance often necessary when dealing with a situation. A dean, say, who empathizes with a crying teacher in her office is a dean who will (at that moment at least) not be able to critically assess the teacher’s complaint. Sympathy allows for a general understanding of the situation—of where the teacher is “coming from”—but also of what needs to be done.

So why this insistence on empathy when we have a perfectly more adequate alternative?

A part of me wants to say that we are just using this word as a catch-all term for “being good.” But if so, why not just say that? Why not say, “We want someone who is decent [good, understanding, etc.]”? My hunch is that this is not the reason for the insistence on empathy. My hunch is that we are using it because it dips into that very same mentality that “reach out” and “share” dip into. I’ll get to this mentality in a bit.

(4) “Non-judgmental”: right up there with “empathy” is the insistence that we be non-judgmental. I’m never sure what this exactly means (I’m actually writing a post on it to explore it), but it seems to reflect the attitude that when we communicate with each other we suspend a certain kind of criticality and that we understand where the other person is “coming from.” It seems to call for an empathetic attitude, actually.

But the problem is that we are judgmental all the time: it is part of our fabric as human beings that we judge: we engage in artistic and aesthetic judgments (“Nature is beautiful”; “Richter is one of the best painters of the 20^th century”); moral judgments (“slavery is a moral abomination”); practical judgments (“Taking the train is better than driving”); scientific judgments (“Darwin’s theory of evolution was revolutionary”); and various other types of judgments.

There is another problem with the desire to be non-judgmental, which is its sheer hypocrisy (or, to be nicer, its sheer arbitrariness). For there is never a problem making judgments in academia when it comes to certain things, things that range from the expected (e.g., tenure and promotion decisions, hiring decisions) to more politically charged questions (e.g., which values an institution espouses). However, since it is unclear what it means to be non-judgmental and in which areas, I will stop here.

(5) “Labor”: as in, “I will not do any more labor in this department” or “Once again, a woman of color has to put in labor and chair this committee.” We used to use just plain old “work,” but now we use “labor,” which conjures images of tilling the soil in sweat and heat under a boiling sun (often in fear of being caught by immigration), or images of standing in a factory line assembling things as they speedily come down a belt, or images of cleaning homes while the mistress of the house stands over your shoulder telling you that you missed a spot.

But now, full-time, tenure-track, and tenured colleagues, who have probably one of the cushiest, most comfortable jobs in the world, use the word “labor” to refer to grading papers, or running a department (though I admit that petty squabbles among academics can be its own circle of hell), or making a schedule, or attending meetings. I’m sorry, but this is not labor.

I willingly concede that part-time faculty who have to go from one college to another teaching five or six classes a semester, just to make ends meet, with little to no time for their own research, do labor. This would be labor in academia if there ever was one. But sitting in the comfort of one’s own home, with NPR in the background, and, say, grading papers, is not labor. And using this word to refer to academic work cheapens the actual labor that many others have to do, some just to barely survive.

The use of the above words betokens a certain mentality that has come to prevail in academia, stemming, I conjecture, from the idea that we live in a deeply bad world, a world that is unjust, that is racist and sexist and homophobic and transphobic and ageist and anti-disabled. (Of course, I am not claiming that every time someone uses, say, “reach out,” this is what they are thinking, but that the common use of such words is explained, at least partly, by this mentality.) It is a world so bad that its badness seeps into (floods?) the workplace. The world’s unjust structures also carry over to the work place, so that just as in the real world people labor, in academia we, too, labor. Just as in the real world we need to empathize with one another, so too in academia we need to empathize with each other. Just as in the real world we have to reach out to one another, so in academia also. The academy mirrors the outside world: whatever happens out there happens in here, so whatever moral and ethical relationships we decide are fit for the outside world, they are also fit for the academy. (Not all such relationships, however, are fit for the academy: humor, which does a lot to alleviate life’s suffering, is best conducted judiciously and cautiously in the halls of academia.)

But if my diagnosis is (at least partly) correct, this mentality is unnecessary. The world is a bad place, yes (for human beings and, lest we forget, even more so for non-human animals), and I am the first in line to say this (I consider myself a philosophical pessimist). We work, however, in a college setting. We are here to educate and research, to teach and learn. We are not running a hospice. And although there used to be a time when many colleges were themselves structured by injustices, that time is not now. Today, colleges are places of general equality and fairness (even equality- and fairness-obsessed).

Of course, individually we have to deal with life’s burdens, and our students come from poverty or from broken homes or from being subjected to all sorts of isms and phobias. Still, we should not confuse a college for something else. Indeed, let’s think of college as a refuge from the world, as a place where we can suspend those ethical relationships that are based in the togetherness-of-living-in-a-world-full-of-suffering-and-injustice and replace them with ethical relationships based in the ethos of education and research (and, of course, in the ethos of basic human decency, which includes sympathy and fairness, and, please, humor). After all, being professional at the workplace does not only include not making sexual jokes, but also not treating each other as perpetual victims and oppressors.

Some readers will recoil in disbelief and dismay at the suggestion that the college can be a refuge from the world’s ills. They do so because they think that the structures of institutions (and hence colleges) reflect these ills, and because the individuals who work at and attend these institutions carry the ills with them, like unwitting Trojan humans. I reject this view. Colleges are not perfect places, but they are also not reproductions of the world’s illnesses, neither structurally nor individually, and we can try, and have tried, to ensure that they are not such places. To insist that they are is to adopt the dimmest, worst view of our abilities as human agents.

I wish to repeat that my claim is not that every time someone uses the above terms the use is indicative of the user’s wayward beliefs or intentions. No. I do not know how and to what purpose each user uses these words. My claim is that the widespread use of these terms and others is indicative of a larger mentality that is prevalent now in academia, a mentality that could very well be at odds with free inquiry.

"LGBTQI+"?

There has been a steady increase in the number of letters being added to the name “LGBT”: it used to be “gay and lesbian,” then, somewhere along the line, it was decided that bisexuals—or some of them—are, after all, really bisexual (not just halfway-out-of-the-closet-homosexuals), so we added the “B.” Then the “T” for transgender people was added. Because the main reason for the additions was to reflect as accurately as possible the diversity of the queer community, there was a felt need to add more in order to include more: so we have “I” for “Intersex,” and “Q” for “queer” and/or for “questioning.”

            As a side note, depending on what we mean by “queer,” it could be that we might just as well use the “Q” and only the “Q,” in place of the longer acronym, which is a suggestion that Jonathan Rauch makes in “It’s Time to Drop the ‘LGBT’ from ‘LGBTQ’” (The Atlantic, January/February 2019). This is because if it means something like “anything that is not heteronormative” (whatever this means), then it would refer to all the identities we wish to refer to and future ones that we have not yet imagined, as long as they are not heteronormative: gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgender people, intersex people, and more. The problem with “Q” is that, despite its tidiness, efficiency, and the ease with which it rolls off the tongue, it does not properly reflect the diversity by referring to each group using its own initial—it fails to recognize each group. It also faces the problem of being too inclusive, depending on how many more identities it includes, which opens the door for perhaps some groups that are not very morally wholesome, even though they are sexual minorities or non-heteronormative.

            So we are left with the daunting possibility that the initials can keep expanding. Consider one such expanded version—LGBTQQIP2SAA, which stands for “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, pansexual, two spirit, asexual, and ally” (mentioned in Rauch’s article and in Jeffry J. Iovannone’s; https://medium.com/queer-history-for-the-people/a-brief-history-of-the-lgbtq-initialism-e89db1cf06e3). This is not only a mouthful, but one with the potential of becoming more of a mouthful given that it can be expanded with new identities, such as another “B” for “bigender” and “GQ” for “genderqueer.”

            Another variation is adding the “+” at the end to arrive at “LGBTQI+.” Although some might see the “+” as a sign of open-ended inclusion, it might as well be seen as a sign of desperation, in effect saying, “We can’t keep up, so we’ll just add the ‘+’ to include whichever identity comes up.” Using the “+,” however, is in effect the same as using only the “Q,” but one put in place after the realization that the addition of more letters had failed in the face of more and more incoming identities. And its problems are the same as those of using just “Q.”

            The problems that plague decisions as to which letters to include in the acronym can be seen as the result of a crucial yet unanswered question: Whom are we trying to group together under this acronym? Is it non-heterosexual sexual orientations? Is it non-cis genders? Is it people whose sex does not belong to the common sex binary? And to answer this question, a more important one is why we want to group together whomever we want to group. Is it because these groups share a common property? Or is it because it is politically advantageous to do so? I will discuss in this post some reasons for joining together these groups, and raise problems with each of them. The discussion, I think, is interesting and leads to fascinating issues.

            One puzzling thing common to all these suggested acronyms is the lumping together of sexual orientations with non-sexual orientations. Consider LGBTQQIP2SAA: the “L,” “G,” “B,” and “P” (and maybe the first “A,” depending on how we understand asexuality) refer to sexual orientations, while “T” and “2S” refer to gender, while “I” refers to sex, while others’ reference is ambiguous (both “Q’s,” the second “A,” and maybe the first “A,” again depending on how we understand asexuality). My concern is specifically with transgender and sexual orientation, and I will approach the acronym in general through these two aspects—sexual orientation and gender—of a person’s being.

            What are some proffered reasons for keeping them together? The website of the Cambridge University Students’ Campaign for LGBT+ (https://www.lgbt.cusu.cam.ac.uk/resources/trans/the-t-within-lgbt/) lists several reasons for why trans people and gay people should be placed together. Let’s briefly examine them. (Reasons [5] and higher on the following list are not from this website but mine.)

            (1) “[M]any trans people are gay, lesbian or bisexual and conversely many gay, lesbian or bisexual people are trans.” But this is not good enough, because by the same token, many trans people are straight, and many straight people are trans, yet this does not give us a reason to include straight people under the umbrella of LGBTQ. Moreover, given this reason, an acronym made up only of initials that refer to sexual orientation identities can still include transgender people who are oriented to members of the same gender or sex. (I am assuming for now that transmen and transwomen are, respectively, men and women in the sense needed for them to be gay and lesbian, given that the concepts of gay and lesbian refer not only to the target of the sexual attraction, but to the sex or gender of the person with the attraction; to wit, a lesbian is a woman who is attracted to women, and a gay man is a man who is attracted to men. However, please note that this is a controversial assumption because the issue is much more complicated owing to the differences between gender and sex, and to whether sexual orientation refers to a person’s sex, gender, or both. So, if sexual orientation refers to the sex of the person with the orientation—if a man is gay because his sex, not his gender, is male—then it’s unclear whether transmen who sexually desire other men are gay or have a different sexual orientation altogether. I shall return to this issue below.)

            (2) Historically speaking, trans people have always been part of the gay community and have played a crucial role in the gay rights movement. This, however, provides merely a historical reason, not a conceptual one. Granted that historically speaking trans people were part of the initial struggle, is there a non-historical reason that trans people and gay people should be grouped together? To see this point better, suppose that, historically speaking, vegans were part of the initial movement of LGBT rights (I am not claiming that this is actual history—I am imagining history to have been different to make a point). This would give us at most a historical reason to put together vegans and LGBT people under the same name, but it would not give us a conceptual reason.

            (3) Learning to accept one’s trans identity can be similar to learning to accept one’s gay identity, including the social pressures one is subjected to when one comes out. However, unless we have a more basic reason to assimilate gender to sexual orientation, this reason is not different from any other process of coming out, such as coming out as non-Zionist to one’s Zionist family and social group. Yet this gives us no reason to include non-Zionists under the LGBT umbrella.

            (4) “We’re stronger together.” But this reason gives us as much reason to include anyone who can make us stronger (the second “A” above for “allies”) or with whom we can both be strong together (e.g., vegans).

            What we need is a reason that combines both sexual orientation and gender using one or more criteria to which sexual orientation and gender are relevant, while reasonably excluding irrelevant features. (The rest of the reasons that I examine are not from the Cambridge website.) So, we might try:

            (5) We share a common history of oppression on the basis of sex or gender. This is a good start. After all, what seems to be common to all the groups joined together under the LGBT+ umbrella is some connection to sex or gender. But we have to be careful. Consider sex: it is an ambiguous concept in that it refers to various things, including gender (which is often used synonymously with “sex”) and sexual desire, the latter of which can include sexual orientation. But this only pushes the question one step back: Given that sex and sexual orientation are different things, why group them together under the auspices of “oppression”? Consider next gender: Given that sexual orientation and gender are very different things, why group them together under the auspices of “oppression”?

            In response, one might argue that the same social systems that oppress people on the basis of gender or sex also oppress them on the basis of sexual orientation, because such systems aim to control various factors related to sex and gender, such as sexual desire and activity, reproduction, and gender roles.

            This is a promising response, but it requires further argument. This is especially true in light of previous feminist arguments in favor of separating sexual orientation oppression from gender oppression (e.g., Cheshire Calhoun’s 1994 essay, “Separating Lesbian Theory from Feminist Theory” [Ethics 104: 3, 558-581), and in favor of grouping together non-sexual with sexual oppression because, say, patriarchy’s reach is far and near-exhaustive (e.g., Karen Warren’s 1990 essay, “The Power and Promise of Ecological Feminism” [Environmental Ethics 12: 2, 125-146]). That is, there is no clear consensus one way or another about grouping these issues together. This might be extended to argue that oppression on the basis of binary genders is also different from oppression on the basis of transgender. For instance, there is no reason to believe that the oppression of ciswomen is the same as that of transwomen, and surely transmen face obstacles that cismen do not. My point is that we need better arguments to focus on and identify that precise system of oppression that oppresses on the basis of the sexual in such a way that it includes both sexual orientation and transgender identities. Vague references to patriarchal systems or to sexual minorities might be insufficient given that the mechanisms and bases of oppression can differ in ways that depend precisely on whether the target is sexual orientation or gender.

            (6) An interesting reason for grouping sexual orientation and gender together is anchored in the popular conception of sexual orientation. Some background is necessary before explaining this reason.

            Our current, popular conception of sexual orientation is what I would call “dualist” or (as the philosopher Kathleen Stock calls it), “reflexive” (“Sexual Orientation: What Is It?”; unpublished manuscript in which Stock defends the popular conception of sexual orientation, which she calls “the orthodox view”): it involves not only the sex (or gender) of the object or target of the attraction, but also the sex (or gender) of the person with the attraction. For instance, a lesbian is not only someone who is sexually attracted to women, but is someone who is herself is a woman (hence we often say that lesbians are attracted to other women, with “other” implying the womanhood of the person with the orientation). In general, homosexuals are attracted to members of the same sex, while heterosexuals are attracted to members of the opposite sex. The words “same” and “opposite” imply a reference to the sex (or gender) or the person with the orientation.

            This dualist conception of sexual orientation is different from a monist conception, one which emphasizes only the target of the attraction. (A monist conception could refer to only the person with the orientation, but that would be a mere possibility and utterly pointless.) An example of the monist conception was recently defended by the philosopher Robin Dembroff in “What Is Sexual Orientation?” (Philosophers’ Imprint 16 [3], 1-27), in which Dembroff conceives of sexual orientation only in terms of the sex and gender of the object of the sexual attraction. Dembroff’s conception, that is, has no reference to the sex (or gender) of the person with the orientation. (Dembroff’s view is one example of the monist conception because their view, which Dembroff calls “Bidimensional Dispositionalism,” considers the sex and/or gender as bases of the attraction, whereas monism could elect only one of these two as the basis.)

            On the dualist conception, straight men and lesbians have different sexual orientations, even though they have the same type of object of desire. On the monist conception, they would have the same sexual orientation. The current, popular or orthodox conception of sexual orientation is the dualist or reflexive one, not the monist conception.

            One thing to note about the dualist conception is that not only does it link the sex (or gender) of the person with the sexual orientation to the sex (or gender) of the target of the orientation, but it does so in a very strong way, by making the sex (or gender) of the person with the orientation primary. What does this mean? It means this: if someone’s sexual orientation changes, this does not change the sex (or gender) of the person. But if the person’s sex (or gender) changes, this does change the person’s sexual orientation. For instance, if Rafael used to be straight and, somehow, becomes gay, this would not change Rafael’s sex (or gender), not unless Rafael decides to take the additional step to make the change. But if Omar, who is, let’s say, straight, changes his sex (or gender), he also changes his sexual orientation, without needing to take any additional steps. Omar now becomes a homosexual woman whereas he was once a heterosexual man. It is in this way that the popular or dualist conception of sexual orientation strongly links a person’s object of attraction with their own sex or gender.

            The point is that this popular conception of sexual orientation, by forging a strong link between one’s sex (or gender) and sexual orientation, gives us a crucial reason to group together gender and sexual orientation.

            But despite its being a strong reason, it is not ultimately convincing. This is because the popular conception of sexual orientation makes essential reference to the person’s own sex (or gender) only as far as sexual orientation is concerned. This sounds trivial, but it actually is not. To explain: the popular conception refers to one’s sex (or gender) only to elucidate one’s sexual orientation. When we say that X is attracted to women, we need to know X’s sex (or gender) in order to know X’s sexual orientation. This means that the popular conception is not concerned with someone’s sex (or gender) as such, which means that it gives us no reason to group gender with sexual orientation just because that someone has a particular gender. Thus, if we are trying to group together identities on the basis of sexual orientations or on the basis of gender, it still makes little sense to group transgender people with LGB people using this conception of sexual orientation.

            (7) Another reason for keeping the “T” and the “LGB” together is the following. (I beg your patience because this will be a bit complicated.) I have been writing as if sex and gender are interchangeable for the purposes of sexual orientation. For instance, I have been writing that the popular conception refers to the sex (or gender) of the object of attraction and of the person with the orientation. But some believe that the popular conception refers primarily to the sex, not the gender, of the person with the sexual orientation and of the object of the orientation. (Kathleen Stock, in her essay, defends this claim though she does not explain why sexual orientation works this way—a difficult task by all means. Dembroff, in their essay [p.3], states that the popular conception is a “conceptual jumble” when it comes to a number of points, including lack of clarity as to whether sexual orientation is about sex or gender.) That is, a gay man is gay because his sex is male, and he is attracted to other men because they are sexually male, not merely because their gender is male. Of course, their gender is usually the epistemic entryway to one’s desire: Muhamad, as a gay man, is attracted to Owen (partly) because he perceives Owen to be a man, and he perceives Owen to be a man (partly) on the basis of Owen’s perceptible gender or gender presentation.

            In addition, as Stock explains in her essay, to claim that the concept of sexual orientation primarily refers to sex, not to gender, is to claim that in a large number of cases (and this is of course ultimately an empirical claim), what sustains Muhammad’s desire for other men is Muhammad’s belief and perception that they are male—that their sex and body is male. It is also to claim, as a corollary, that were Muhammad to discover that Owen is a transman, Muhammad’s sexual desire for Owen likely ceases or weakens, and that additional elements have to be present for his desire for Owen to continue. For example, his attraction to Owen on the basis of Owen’s physical looks is so strong that it sidelines his lack of attraction to him on the basis of his belief that Owen’s sex might not be male or typically male (though how far this strong attraction takes Muhammad is unclear: maybe to make out with Owen, but not to engage in sexual activity or certain forms of sexual activity).

            Is it plausible for the popular conception of sexual orientation to primarily refer to sex, not gender? One argument that it is plausible goes as follows: Sex, not gender, is primary in the concept of sexual orientation because the attraction—gay, straight, or other—to other people is sexual, and sexual attraction is strongly tied to the role that the person’s sexed-body and genitalia play in the attraction. Put differently, sexual attraction to others is sex-dependent in that it is tied to what we believe their bodies are like, including their sex organs. This does not mean that people are attracted to each other only after they have seen each naked or seen each other’s genitalia, or that people are attracted only to each other’s genitalia or that when they have sex they focus only on the genitalia. Instead, it means that the belief that the object of one’s sexual attraction is male, female, or a specific configuration of sex and genitalia typically animates and sustains the attraction for the other. It forms the background condition for desiring someone. The other’s body is seen as attractive in light of beliefs about their sex. For instance, imagine seeing a pair of hairless legs but in such a way that you cannot see the rest of the person’s body and are thus unable to form beliefs about their sex. Coming to know or to form beliefs about their sex will likely affect your sexual attraction to the legs: if you are straight and you come to know that they are the legs of someone of the same-sex, this will likely deflate your attraction to them. (I say “likely,” “primarily,” and so on because these are all generalizations and variations in human beings’ sexual attractions are well known.)

            The focus on sex has an explanation likely based in evolution and the role that the sex organs play in procreation. Beliefs and perceptions about the sexual organs and sex of the other are likely crucial in the formation of desire because this would be nature’s way of getting us to copulate heterosexually. It would make little sense, evolutionarily speaking, for us to feel sexual desire regardless of our beliefs of the other’s sex because this would have led to less-than-efficient mating strategies. Again, this does not mean that every time a heterosexual couple desires to have sex they also desire to procreate, let alone that gay couples want to procreate whenever they desire to have sex. Sex to us is crucially a mental matter, and on the surface sexual desire has many goals (primarily sensual and non-sensual pleasure, but also status, conquest, etc.), but the historical formation of sexual desire likely has an evolutionary explanation, and this is what we need in order to explain the role that sex and sex organs play in desire, even when they deviate from heterosexual statistical norms, as they do in same-sex attraction or in cases of attraction to mixed-sex bodies.

            If, then, sexual orientation links the sex of the person who has the orientation to the sex of the object of attraction, it is possible that a new category of sexual orientation (or more than one category, actually) can arise for people whose sex does not conform to the two binaries, for people whose sexual attraction is for those whose sex does not conform to the binaries, or for people who are both. We can add letters as we see fit to the acronym. Here, however, we have to be careful. Consider Ahmad, who is sexually attracted to gender non-conforming individuals. This attraction, on its own, does not usher in a new sexual orientation (if, that is, we keep fixed the concept’s reference to sex and not widen it to include gender) because it does not tell us what Ahmad’s attraction is to, as far as the sex of the object of attraction is concerned: it does not tell us whether Ahmad is attracted to gender non-conforming individuals who are sexually male, female, or other. If Ahmad is attracted to male gender non-conforming individuals, then he would—or should—be classified as gay on the popular conception. If he is attracted to female gender non-conforming individuals, then he would—or should—be classified as heterosexual. (The “should” is important because if the popular conception of sexual orientation refers not only to the sex of the object of attraction, but also to the match between the sex and the corresponding socially accepted gender, Ahmad’s sexual orientation would be in limbo. What makes this issue even more complicated is that “gender” can refer to various things, from basic bodily appearance to comportment to mannerisms to clothes to other things.)

            Going back to adding new letters to the acronym: we can establish the existence of sexual orientations of and to people whose sex does not conform to the usual sex binaries. Because on the popular conception of sexual orientation the sex of the person with the orientation is either the same as or opposite to that of the object of the attraction, and because the sex of non-binary people is neither the same nor opposite to the binary sexes, we will have on our hands new sexual orientations, using the popular conception as our template. We can, then, by going beyond the sex binaries, add sexual orientations on the basis of the non-binary sex of the person with the new orientation or on the basis of the non-binary sex of the person who is the object of the attraction.

            (There might be, however, constraints that such orientations need to meet in order to count as genuine sexual orientations, whatever this means; for instance, that they are numerically large enough to matter, and that they are not variations on the other basic sexual orientations, though how to fix these constraints is a philosophical headache.)

            The point, however, of this discussion is to provide a reason to group transgender people with LGB people. Do we have this reason? We will have it only if we make the following assumption: that people whose sex does not fall into the sex binary are transgender people. It is this assumption that will take us from the new sexual orientations to transgender identities. But, obviously, this is a false assumption because of the crucial differences between sex and gender that allow people of the same sex to have different genders and that allow people of the same gender to have different sexes. Just because someone’s sex is not one of the two sexes does not mean that they will be transgender. So this reason, interesting, fascinating, and instructive as it is, fails.

            (8) One final reason for grouping together sexual orientation and transgender was suggested to me by my colleague and friend, Andy Yang (though he does not necessarily endorse it). It goes as follows: it makes sense to classify transgender people with LGB people because the former were or will at one point be gay or lesbian themselves. How so? Consider a cisman who becomes a woman: if he used to be straight, s/he will become a lesbian upon becoming a woman; if he used to be gay, s/he will become straight upon becoming a woman, but he was at some point gay. Either way, a trans person will have at some point in their life a gay sexual orientation.

            Interesting as this reason is, it faces some difficulties. First, trans people who consider themselves to be members of the LGBTQ+ community need not think of themselves as members of the community because of the above reason. They might think they are members because they are, simply, trans and trans people have always been considered as part of the LGBT community. Now, I admit that this difficulty smuggles in a constraint on what counts as a good reason for the grouping together of transgender and LGB groups, a constraint that I have not yet raised (but that’s because I hadn’t yet needed to), namely, that a good reason for the grouping should cohere with the reasons that the members of the groups themselves have for the grouping. I am, however, unsure of the importance of this constraint because, though it might be important for political cohesion, it is less important for conceptual reasons for the grouping.

            A second difficulty, and one connected to the first, is that the suggestion relies on sexual orientation as a description or property of who one is, whereas the letters in “LGBTQ+” might refer to more than that, to an explicitly adopted or accepted identity, such that one is not merely a homosexual but also gay, with all the cultural and political connotations that come with it. Indeed, given the politics behind the acronym, it is best understood as referring to political identities, not merely to one’s descriptive property of, say, having a same-sex orientation. If so, then what might matter to a trans person is their identity as trans, not their sexual orientation as such, and what matters to a lesbian is her lesbian identity, not merely her same-sex sexual orientation. (More on this below.)

            A third difficulty is that the reason’s convincingness rests on the dualist conception of sexual orientation. If we change this conception to a monist one, we pull the rug from under this reason. Since, however, I have been operating with the popular conception, this difficulty is not severe.

            A fourth difficulty with this reason is that it cherry picks what it wants from the popular conception of sexual orientation. On the one hand, it relies on the popular conception’s reflexivity or dualism to make its point. On the other, it neglects what might be a crucial aspect of the conception, which is its reference to sex, not to gender. (“Might” because this aspect of the conception is debatable.) On the popular view, and given the reference to sex, a straight man who becomes a woman need not become a lesbian because the concept of lesbian is sex-dependent, and much will depend on the transwoman’s body and how many female sex features it has. The point is that it is assuming very much to claim that trans people become lesbians or gay if they used to be straight (or straight if they used to be lesbian or gay). So this last reason should not bank on it.

            I have considered eight reasons for putting together sexual orientation and transgender groups, and I have come up mostly empty-handed. At the least, none of the reasons is straightforwardly convincing. This should not be a surprise, because, in general, sexual orientation and gender are very different kinds of thing. The first is primarily about one’s sexual energies and attractions, and the second is about, well, gender.

            It seems to me that the best reasons for the grouping will have to be political—that is, that being joined at the hip will allow these groups to attain political gains more efficiently, attain more political gains, or (inclusive “or”) attain more political gains more efficiently. But we have to remember that we are now in different times: in the west, gay people have attained their rights, and though they suffer from homophobia and other challenges every now and then and every here and there, their war is almost won. Not so for transgender people. Moreover, there has been some recent fractions among these groups, especially between gender critical feminists and some transgender thinkers and activists, which indicates that we need to get our political ducks in a row before we start speaking of attaining these goals together.

            Indeed, the need to get our political ducks in a row is more evident if we understand the acronym to refer to the political and cultural identities of being gay and trans, as opposed to sexual orientation and gender descriptive aspects of one’s being (e.g., a reference merely to one’s desires for members of the same sex, or merely to one’s feeling of belonging to a different gender). For in the former case, political and cultural identities imply political goals and postures not implied, or not implied so obviously, by a reference to a description of one’s being. Given that the acronym clearly refers to the political and cultural identities of being gay and trans, coming to an agreement to what the respective political and social goals are is a must.

            However, to my mind, political reasons for unity do not themselves have much cache unless they are grounded in something else, something that gives us a good reason to group these groups together but not those. That is, the political reasons themselves must be grounded in something that unifies LGBT groups with each other as opposed to unifying, say, trans people with other groups, if unity with these other groups is better for the hoped-for political and social gains. The closest we have to unify LGBT groups is that they are all sexual minorities, which might be a good enough reason to start with for political purposes, though I worry, as I argued early on in this post, about using the ambiguous concept of sex to justify this grouping.

            I have conducted this discussion on the basis of the popular or dualist conception of sexual orientation. On a monist conception, whether Dembroff’s Bidimensional Dispositionalism or another version of the monist conception, we do not have better reasons to join the two groups together. Monist conceptions focus solely on the sex (or gender) of the object of attraction, so there is no temptation to develop arguments that proceed from a conception of sexual orientation that relies also on the sex (or gender) of the person with the orientation.

            Thus, the acronym “LGBTQ” needs to be seriously re-thought. If we are to keep it intact or if we are to add more letters to it, we should make sure we have a good reason for doing either or both.