Killing means to end a life of, well, pretty much anything. Murder means to wrongfully end the life, but presumably only of another human being.

To discriminate means to ascertain a difference and act accordingly. So, for example, she has discriminating tastes in music. But it can also mean 1) to wrongly ascertain a difference and act accordingly. And it can also mean 2) to ascertain a difference and wrongfully act accordingly. What’s the difference between (1) and (2)? In the first case one believes that Hesperus and Phosphorus, a.k.a. the Morning Star and the Evening Star, are two different stars when in fact they’re not. In the second case one correctly sees that he’s a man and she’s a woman but hires him over her because he’s the man.

It’s to be noted that in neither case – the wrongful killing and the wrongful discriminating – does the wrongfulness wear itself on its sleeve. One could argue that it would not have been wrong to kill Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin or Pol Pot. Or that all other things being equal, it’s not wrong to hire on the basis of sex, or race, or what have you. So my point here is simply a linguistic one. To say X murdered Y, or discriminated (in this non-laudable sense) against her, is to subsume the culpability of his doing so.

And the same disambiguation is required for the term stereotyping. To stereotype is just to induce. Three-year-olds can’t be trusted to operate a motor vehicle safely. But it can also mean to induce wrongly. As with discrimination, wrongly in two possible senses. It could be that 1) the induction is mistaken. East Asians are not better at math than whites or blacks. Or it could be that, notwithstanding the induction is well-grounded, 2) it would nonetheless be wrong, all other things being equal, to appeal to race in making the next hire for the Math Department.

Once again, the issue, here at least, is not whether East Asians are or are not better at math. Nor is it if they are, whether it is or is not justified to allow that to figure in the hiring process. My point is simply a linguistic one. To say X has stereotyped Y, beyond the sense of simply performing a standard induction, is to subsume the culpability of his having done so, either because 1) the induction is faulty, or because 2) well-grounded or not, these kinds of inductions ought not to be allowed in hiring decisions.

But what about gaslighting? It’s a metaphor. And its metaphorical meaning is simply: to cause someone to doubt herself. Well, apparently not. In my first-year philosophy class I teach Descartes’ Meditations, the springboard of which is to cause one to doubt everything she had heretofore thought to be true. But I trust no one would accuse Descartes of gaslighting her. Or if I were trying to talk someone down from committing suicide, no one would accuse me of gaslighting him. So to gaslight must mean either 1) to cause someone to wrongly doubt herself, or 2) to wrongfully cause someone to doubt herself. In the first case I raise doubts in her mind that she really was raped, even though, as it happens, she was. In the second I’m trying to escape responsibility for the rape.

These are important distinctions, which are all too often overlooked. You say Jesus saves. I ask whether you find it suspicious that you wouldn’t believe that if you’d been born in China. I’m causing you to doubt yourself. But am I gaslighting you?Obviously not. But try 1) you rightly remember you were raped. But that’s not the way I remember it. Am I gaslighting you? I want to argue that I’m not. Whereas, 2) you rightly remember you were raped. As do I. But I try to convince you you’re misremembering. This time yes. But surely there’s a moral difference between (1) and (2). And that is that the raising of an alternative account – be it about slavery or residential schools or rape, or what have you – is not, in and of itself, gaslighting.

Consider the locution, “As you know perfectly well …” One seldom uses this phrase to cite a shared premise. It’s used as a straightforward accusation of gaslighting. We need to learn to call it out for what it is. It is itself an attempt to gaslight. It’s an attempt to gaslight what I do not know perfectly well. So it’s one of those woke neologisms – like settler colonialism, fragility, intersectionality, doubling down, and so on – that we’d do well to just dump from our vocabulary. It’s rhetoric, to be sure. But it’s not English.

Categories: Critical Thinking, Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask, Social and Political Philosophy, Why My Colleagues Are Idiots

Tags: Descartes' Meditations, discriminiation, gaslighting, induction, murder, stereotyping