Towards a philosophy of safety

You have identified the key issue: what does "safety" mean? Can it be misused? Yes. So we know it means _something_. Does it have a meaningful opposite? 'Danger?' Means imminent threat. Does 'safety' mean 'no imminent threat?' What does imminent mean? NOW. So what is a threat when it's not physical? If you offend my feelings, as I have done to so many by merely challenging bad thinking, then does that mean you 'threaten' me? Should I treat that the same as violence? No. Now invert the argument. That is why 'safety' leads to acts of aggression. I spotted that in OP's language patterns and wanted to coax it out, so people could see the totalitarian thinking behind a supposedly mild mannered hacker.

This is why trigger warning idiots consider any novelty a fight or flight worthy risk. And the fact that a thread can be labeled 'philosophy' without commanding any actual, technical, philosophic conversation, is demonstrative of what happens when we let sentiment bullies dominate our discourse.

Helen Keller turned out to be flat-out wrong on this one, as a cursory examination of life expectancy statistics and especially infant mortality statistics over the last century shows.

Yeah, but I still want to have circuit breakers and safe drinking water in my home, and she was probably happy to have the same.

Civilization is all about mitigating most natural risks. Few people would like to die from cold and hunger when an extra strong winter comes, or constantly fear a sudden ambush by the tribe next door.

I don't think that's the right answer. I think that people simply don't engage with the academic discipline at all. My wife is a professor in the humanities and she sees this all the time with engineering students. They'll make big bold claims about the field that are wrong and can be addressed by reading almost anything but they refuse to even take that step.

Safety is a trash concept and I don't even need to be Wittgenstein to prove it.

What is absolute safety? You must answer with a synthetic concept. That's pure fail. It becomes a judgment, not a definition. But you want to play a cute game and invoke pedophiles even though your argument is just another judgment and therefore does not define absolutely.

See, you can work with code and be completely illogical.

You had me until the "groomer" version of "think of the children."

Concern over safety (especially of the children) is a political weapon. A ridiculously overused one. I think that's part of why people react the way they do.

I am not a libertarian, but in recent decades safety has been the excuse for the erosion of our civil liberties in the US, so I can understand why their feathers would be ruffled by this.

I am not so sure safety is a thing we should value or work towards in general. I'd claim something like "well-being" on an individual and a group level would be more important. But safety and well-being are both still vague abstract generalities, so not terribly useful yet. We need stronger definitions or frameworks for those concepts and we need to talk about them as applied in specific instances.