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The problem with this whole thing, both sides on this argument are trying to force all actions onto a moral topology. Good things should be extolled, bad things should be suppressed.

An oblivious asshole pushing through a crowd may have roughly the same effect as an aggressive guy pushing people around, but to handle it in the same way will be met with bewilderment. "I'm just trying to get to this song." As someone who has used my size many a time to protect friends in a crowd, I gotta see whos drunk that I just need to be a wall to, and whos looking for a fight.

The notion that racism and sexism are based on intent doesnt mean they dont exist in unintentional, structural forms, just that if you want to stop unintentional racism and sexism you can't do it in the same way as you go about fighting the klan.

I really like this piece, but think Wilson is wrong on this point, at least as I understand microaggression.

When you cross from real aggression to microaggression, it means that the the intent is the primary source of offense. Shoving to the front of a line is not a microagression. It is not all in your head and not just the intent.

If someone smiles at you and you think they are condescending, that is a microaggression. you may be right or you may be wrong, but the intent is what bothers you, not the smile.

I've heard the term both ways. The impression I get is that it's intended to cover a swath of things that harm somebody, either intentionally or unintentionally, but which individually don't seem significant.

It's possible for people to use that intentionally: to deliberately cause offense in a way that they know they can't be called out on. But that wouldn't be significant if it weren't part of a larger pattern where the effect is greater than the sum of the individual events.

Many of those are unintentional, though they might recognize the problem if called out on it. As an example: asking a woman to get coffee for a meeting. In itself, it might be that today you happened to choose a woman; tomorrow it might be a man. She cannot prove that it's sexism without establishing a pattern, which would be an enormous and absurd burden to put on her.

It's even possible that the boss genuinely did choose her at random, but it still echoes with past explicit misogyny and chauvinism in a way that harms her but she can't usefully fight back against it without seeming to blow things out of proportion.

I agree it is a tough problem, specifically because the intention or causality is uncertain. It isn't sensible or desirable to punish good healthy behavior simply because it can not be readily discerned from bad behavior.

What are we to do with your example of the "good boss" who randomly selects a women to have coffee? Never have coffee with women, or all employees because only doing so with men could also be taken as harmful behavior?

At some point, trying to police every behavior on a probabilistic basis has more collateral damage than it is worth. At some point the problem can no longer be productively addressed by punishing behaviors and we have to use other mechanisms for harm reduction.

Slight clarification that doesn't alter anything about your reply: in the "get coffee" scenario I meant it as "go fetch coffee for the meeting". That's a stereotyped role in which women were assumed to be mothers/caretakers to the office in addition to all of their other duties, but which men would think was their primary duty.

He could ask somebody to get coffee without intending to bring up a whole history of chauvinism that you weren't even aware of, but it's also kinda his fault for not thinking it through.

That's just to clarify what I said above, not really a reply to any of the points you bring up. You're right that in the end this is inherently fuzzy. But I do think it's useful for everybody to say "I'm going to do more than just the bare justifiable minimum, because there are real issues out there, deliberate and otherwise."

That's not an injunction; it couldn't be. But it's something to think about, and the people who say "I'm not going to think about it because it's not my problem" are almost certainly the problem.

That is an interesting take. The concert example is especially amusing to me: these people pushing through certainly are aggressive, intentionally so, because the whole point is to assert themselves into a position for better proximity to the entertainment at the expense of the people they're pushing through. If that isn't aggression, nothing is.

I feel like the very concept of 'aggression' is being watered down and diluted. In an intellectual sense I can see how it could be considered aggression, but my sense of that word implies some a much more significant amount of force and intent.

I think it's even more egregious how the word "violence" has been co-opted to mean "something I don't like."

Back in my day violence used to mean you caused people physical harm, now it means any sort of distress experienced by another person, for which they hold your responsible.

You don't think being shoved into equipment or other people, or having your feet trampled/legs kicked is aggressive? Because that's what these aggressive pushers do. It's aggressive, and not in the watered down sense.

You just completely switched from someone accidentally bumping to someone doing it on purpose, aggressively. There is no reason to “consider” this is a real example.

This is one of the dumbest parts of this critique. He's apparently got a different definition of "aggression" than H+L, which is fine, but he's begging the question and assuming his definition is right and theirs is wrong and therefore their argument is wrong. To be clear, his definition is roughly that words and deeds can be aggressive by themselves, separate from any human intent (he bizarrely calls 'intent' the 'emotions' which is a weird inversion). This idea that the meaning of words and deeds can be separated from the intent of their creator is at the core of post-modernism. And needless to say, this question is not settled. But critiques like this one that pretend to be substantial but are actually just semantic disputes are not very interesting.

I found that particular paragraph of the article a bit shallow and simplistic. There are reasons why law tend to focus on intent, and it is very difficult to build a moral model around acts if one remove intent. It also start to redefine words which carries intent, rather than using words that implies a lack of intent.

If I know a person was an oblivious asshole moving around in a concert, then I would not describe them as acting aggressive. I would describe them as acting inconsiderate. From a physiological/medical perspective, aggression is associated with fear, anger, stress, and dominance. Inconsideration is the lack of empathy, lack of understanding social norms and etiquette, and lack of higher thought processes. It is only if we remove intent that we can confuse the two concepts.

I thought it was a bad take because it involves repeated behavior that would have clear feedback and differs a lot from singularly bumping someone or even doing it regularly in disconnected social contexts. In general both author and Haidt seem to making overly expansive generalizations. Probably a better example is that misgendering unintentionally is very different from doing it intentionally but this piece seems to be trying to say that Haidt and the Author both think that it always has to be viewed as either a transgression or non-transgression rather than there being a continuum of giving the benefit of the doubt one way or the other. I'm personally more inclined to assume this is the Author's distortion on some level, but may be wrong.

You can be an asshole without being an aggressive asshole. Suppose the concert guy is about to shit is pants, he’s therefore very much in a hurry and communicating that non verbally by bumping into people but also trying to avoid confrontations because that would slow him down.

As to unintentional racism/sexism, it’s impossible to treat thousands of different groups equally with every action. The layout of entrances to a shopping mall is going to disadvantage some group because of where people live. Calling that racism or sexism devalues the meaning of the term into irrelevance. So no, there’s still actual racism and that’s what the term is referring to.

In the context of a crowded concert, people bumping into each other without malicious intent isn't aggression, it's part of the experience which people choose for themselves. Those that don't consent to such physical contact (like myself) hang out at the back of the venue away from the crowd push. For the people at the front of the crowd, getting jostled around is a desirable part of the experience which they opted-in for.

Alternately, defining harassment solely based on the perceptions of the receiver, as many organizations do, creates a comparable problem of subjectivity. Perhaps something like commonly-agreed "community standards" should be the guide.