On intent, and how (and why) I think it matters

I think intent matters. I think the reasons why we do something are relevant in assessing how we should be judged on what we do. I think some of the factors that are important in determining intent (and these do not limit any other factors that may arise in a particular context) are—
(a) what the person thought they were doing:
(b) what they were trying to achieve:
(c) whether they were acting in good faith:
(d) what they actually knew about the situation they were in:
(e) what they could be reasonably expected to have known about the situation they were in.

I think intent matters because I dislike the idea that someone is just as culpable for being accidentally offensive as they would have been if the offense had been malicious and intentional. That doesn't sit comfortably with how I think about morality: surely hurting people on purpose is worthy of more blame than doing so accidentally?

Most of the discussions I have seen about intent have been in the context of someone being offensive and then saying that they didn't mean to be, as a kind of excuse for the harm they have caused. For better or for worse, it usually comes along with an apology. On the side of whoever has been harmed, someone (quite rightly) points out that the fact that the harm wasn't purposefully caused doesn't mean that it didn't happen or wasn't real.

Where I break with both sides is that I just don't find a lot of the claims of complete innocence very credible.

An example of something that I do think was done innocently—and it's kind of a ridiculous example, but I think I can use it to make the particular points I want, so I'm going to run with it:

A few weeks ago I went to the birthday party of a good friend. There I met a friend of hers, who was a very good costumer. We got to talking about corsets (as you do), and she said to me that corsets were better than bras for large breasts, because they give better support and take less pressure off the spine.

I wasn't offended by this, but it did sting a little and it is one of the things I carried away from the evening. It fits in with a whole lot of stuff I have going on about body image and the curse of shopping and what expectations my professional career will place on how I look and dress.

The first point I want to make with that example is that I can't infer any sort of purposeful or reckless attempt to upset me or poke at wounds from that conversation.

The second is one about words having meanings and meanings being contextual: if I had been in the midst of a conversation with that same person about body image and the curse of shopping and what expectations my professional career will place on how I look and dress, and she had said the same thing, I would have been much more upset and I would not have found a claim that she meant to do no harm particularly convicing. This is because I work in a fairly conservative office and suggesting that I wear corsets would clearly not be a reasonable response to me talking about how difficult I find buying work clothes.

I think it is fair to expect that people who are debating things in good faith will pay attention to the conversation they are having, and take contextual clues from that conversation (rather than from how they talk to other people in their lives). I think it is reasonable to expect that people will turn their minds, even if only briefly, to thinking about what the likely sore spots are for whoever they're talking to and then (if they are determined to continue the discussion in good faith) not say things that are likely to poke those sore spots.

There is, of course, a limit to what a person can be reasonably expected to know about a particular thing (either a topic, or what the sore spots are of the person they're talking to).

But, for example, I think it can be taken as read that someone who identifies as leftish and who is bothering to engage in explicitly feminist discussion should be aware of basic dialogue about how women are (often) treated in discussions (hysterical! irrational! devoid of reason and unable to make coherent points! simply ignored!); and therefore if that person should choose to use argumentation techniques which rely on ad hominim attacks like "calm down, you're being irrational" they have absolutely no basis on which to claim that they are totally innocent and had no idea that their words could give offence when, inevitably, someone is offended.

This is what I mean when I say that I think intent is important, but that claims of a lack of intent should be critically examined.

I think part of my problem with the discussions about intent that I've read is that they almost invariably take place in a context where (at least initially) everybody is acting in good faith and nobody is trying to be malicious and hurtful. In that context it isn't so much that intent isn't important as that if everybody is claiming that they genuinely had no idea they were giving offence and there's no reason to doubt that, the conversation must of necessity move to what the person should have known.

And maybe "you ought to have known X and Y and Z; these concepts should have been familiar to you as a regular commenter on this forum/a member of Group B/a resident of this country/a citizen of the world" is a tougher sell than "your motivations are irrelevant", I don't know. Whatever else it is, communication is complicated.

stick it to the (wo)man

So, in brief lots and lots of words:

1. the Government explicitly wants to get more beneficiaries in work. Don't get me wrong: this is a laudable aim. Most people who subsist on state benefits would like to have more money, and most of them would like to get it through paid employment.
   
2. the Government wants to cut funding to education, including early childhood education. To some extent, I do sympathise with the view that early childhood education is basically daycare by another name. But whatever it's called, it's the place where a lot of kids go when their parents or guardians are at paid work, and where some kids go when their parents or guardians aren't at paid work.
   
3. cutting funding to early childhood education will have the direct result of increasing the amount of money parents and guardians pay in hand to the centres. This is because the cost of running the centre doesn't suddenly decrease just because their income from one source has fallen.
   
4. this will in turn decrease the marginal income of working parents and guardians. That is, the sum of "net income" minus "costs associated with working" will be a smaller figure.
   
5. costs associated with working aren't, of course, limited to childcare. Other costs include transport, work-appropriate attire, and any work equipment. And I think these costs are reasonable enough, just as I think that parents paying part of the cost of their small children's daycare needs is fair enough.
   
6. but childcare is a really, really high cost for a lot of people. Not everyone is in a position to rely on other family members to take on childcare so that they can enter paid employment. Not everyone has family. Not everyone has family in the same city. Not everyone has family who are appropriate carers for small children.
   
7. and children are a social good. I mean, obviously they are also people -- and perhaps someday I will write about why I think people owe each other some care -- but they're an investment (trite, I know) into what this society will be able to support in 25 years.
   
8. so the idea that parents should bear sole responsibility for raising and providing for their children doesn't really work for me. I'm going to personally benefit from there being qualified doctors in 40 years, so I should bear some responsibility for making sure that there are children to get there.*
   
9. getting back to where I was going with this: it is contradictory to have an explicit policy to encourage people back into work and then create stumbling blocks that you know full well will make employment difficult in some cases and impossible in others.
   

*As an aside: if your policy, personal or political, ever relies on people not fucking in situations where it is likely that people will want to fuck, your policy is stupid.

For this reason, the statement that people should not have children they cannot afford, aside from being an utterly disgusting statement of privilege and assumption, is just so mind-bogglingly stupid it blows my mind. Children are a logical consequence of sex, and if it ever gets to a point where heterosexual sex, sans totally effective contraception, does not reliably, across the species, result in offspring -- we are so totally -- I'm trying to think of an adjective here...

there are a lot more skeletons in the great closet of humanity than you'd think

So I should know better than to read comment threads on Stuff.co.nz; they only make me angry. I read a few of the comments on today's article about Phil Goff's plan for tax should Labour win the next election, and honestly a few was enough.

Because every single one of these threads ends up in a cagefight about interest-free student loans and omg how totally unhelpful and useless history degrees are. And everybody talks very earnestly about how hard they work (and I have no reason to doubt that) and how it's unfair that they have to pay as much tax as they do and/or pay so much child support and/or don't receive enough child support (children: they cost money). But then! Interest-free student loans and history degrees rear their ugly head. Again.

Universities are, of course, meant to be bastions of learning, stalwart defenders of truth against all the forces that want to suppress it.

This is, of course, largely bullshit.

Universities are not about truth. They're not (in my humanities-driven experience) about questioning whether things are true at all. If they were, there wouldn't be 2 departments in one faculty, one of which teaches that people are ultimately rational and will act reliably in their own self-interest and one of which teaches how to get people to buy the things you make even when what you're producing is crappy. Independent thought isn't nearly as encouraged or as valued as everyone pretends.

And maybe that's okay.

And I digress.

Universities have always taught humanities subjects. For a very long time, history meant ancient history: Latin, Greek, the Roman empire. People went to university for much the reason they do now: to spend a few years becoming even more educated after finishing school. Sons of particular social strata went almost by default, unless they showed especial interest in another career or were especially dim. The rest of us didn't go at all.

For most of humanity, literacy didn't exist as there was no written language. I don't doubt that people learnt a lot of skills anyway.

For most of the time that there has been written language, most of humanity - almost all of humanity - has been illiterate. The real change in accessibility to written language, and therefore to information that wasn't known by anyone you knew in person, was the printing press (at least in Western Europe. My rest-of-the-world history is very shaky). Even so, it took the Enlightenment and a bunch of other shit happening before educating the poor became popular. Sometime after that, governments started legislating for free compulsory primary school education.

Most people still left school at ages we would now consider Far Too Young. They still went out and got jobs and were fully productive members of society. This is because, actually, for most jobs an education past 14 or so was kind of... useless. There are very few things you need to know calculus for. Or geometry, or Latin. People went into apprenticeships if they were going into a trade, or they got a job as a shop assistant or a clerk or anything else you can imagine. Society continued to flourish.

And it got richer, and suddenly levels of education that were barely imaginable a generation ago were open to most citizens of the wealthier nations. So people went to university, and they got history degrees.

And as degrees became less and less about proof that you came from the right sort of family, they became less and less of value on a CV. Because it has always been true that an Arts degree is not of a lot of practical value in day-to-day employment for most of the people who have them. ALWAYS.

Does this mean that the state should stop subsidising education in subjects it doesn't see as having practical value? Or, conversely, does that mean it should do a better job at subsiding skillsets it does see as having a lot of practical value (I'm thinking of the trades here)?

And does the lack of obvious correlation between the education you receive at university and the job you do now mean that your education has no value? I work in administration, and the critical analysis skills I learnt in Philosophy papers have proved to be very useful in my job, even though I can't explain how and Philosophy is, like, the go-to Department of Uselessness whenever people want to get their rant on (along with Art History).

Just--
1. If people have a right as such to an education, to what extent should a state fund it so that it is realistically accessible?
2. Does it depend on the content of that education? How do you know in advance what will be useful? Does it depend on who's making the judgement (at a societal level, or at an individual level)?
3. If the behaviours of a group of people will be predictable over time, should we be studying that in order to avoid the certain unwanted and predictable consequences of certain actions? (In other words: should we not be studying the mistakes of history?)

And a little more provocative--
4. Do people have a right as such to an education? What form does it take, and what is its scope?
5. What makes some forms of knowledge more useful than others? What's a working definition of "useful"? (Art is a social good.)

And finally--
7. History is written by the victors. What would happen if nobody read what they wrote?