What is your responsibility to the feelings of others?

The other night, some older guys walked by me in a train station. They were talking about drinking beer. They looked like they’d been doing just that. One of them joked to the other that he was also “looking at pretty girls“.[1] His friend replied “there are none along that way“.

Lots of laughs. Super funny.

There were young ladies in that mass of people walking away from the train. What did they think? Were they amused? I doubt it.

It’s not really funny. It’s actually kind of stupid. It’s almost more a mantra. The guys are barely aware of what they’re saying. It was just standard banter between them. It was call and response, probably instinctual at this point. The ritual joke, with the ritual response.

It’s hopeless to prevent them from talking like that in private. I know, I know, the fact that they think this way is part of the problem, etc. etc.—but let’s be realistic. You’re not going to change them now. Society has done its damage.

But do they have a right to talk like that around others? They have the right to say a lot of things, but at what point do we consider it to be threatening? At what point does someone’s right to feel safe in a train station, or on their walk home, trump someone else’s right to express themselves in public?

The guys weren’t leering around. But how can you be sure? And does it matter? What if it had been dark out? Would the ladies have felt more threatened? Would they have taken a different way home? Do we adjust our societal rules to accommodate the most easily offended? To what degree should we care what they think? To what degree should we care about a someone’s right to make jokes in public?

It gets complicated because they’re saying things in public that are best understood in a context that is not available in public. If you knew the guys, you might know they’re harmless. Maybe they’re a gay couple and making ironic jokes. Maybe they’re mentally handicapped. Maybe they’re lacking empathy and only barely aware of the effect their words might have. Maybe they are predators and everyone really should have scattered.

And expressing an idea about “pretty girls” is one thing. What about expressing an unpopular opinion about a hot-button political issue? Wouldn’t hearing it make someone’s blood boil? What right does that blood-boiling person have to a peaceful ride home versus the other person’s right to discuss certain issues with a friend in public? In that case, I would be more on the side of freedom of expression because the safety of the person whose blood is boiling isn’t threatened, either explicitly or implicitly. Instead, it’s more their problem that they let the opinions of complete strangers affect them so strongly.

For me, it’s a bit less clear where the context is men making salacious comments in a twilit train station. But what if the comments were about a certain ethnic group? That can feel pretty threatening as well.

But context is paramount. If the context is a comedian on stage, then you shouldn’t be able to block them from saying whatever they feel like saying. Comedians should benefit from their context—that they’re paid to make people laugh. People laugh for different reasons, sometimes stupid and evil ones. That doesn’t make the comedian evil. The comedian doesn’t hold every opinion they express on stage. They are sometimes being very ironic, to make the point that the people who think something is funny in a non-ironic way are actually the ones who should be laughed at. It’s all very complicated.

This exact kind of thing is why people get into so much trouble on social media. They say things that would work just fine in a small group, a group that understands the context, but that don’t work in public, with no context. They fail to understand how what they’re writing will be interpreted by people who don’t know them.[2]

If no-one wants to hear it, then the hope is that people will automatically stop saying those things, stop making those stupid jokes. If people do want to hear, and we still disapprove, then we have to do the work of addressing the root cause rather than the symptom. Don’t take the shortcut of banning speech.