: Re: To what extent should we fear giving offense? Recently we have seen multiple questions on various aspects of political correctness. They have sparked some measure of disagreement, which is what

@Speyer920

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Trying to not offend in general, as a goal in and of itself, is automatically a losing proposition. Posed as an optimization problem, it resolves to saying nothing and reaching no one.

You cannot please everyone. Every choice attracts some potential readers and alienates others. This is normal.

There cannot be a universal list of permissible victim groups. The borders of said groups are always drawn by the attacker, who is at will to assign any and all "naughty" labels to predetermined targets.

You should excel at your craft and perfect your vision. This means if you set out to write a book promoting concept P, you should ensure that it indeed promotes P, as an obligation to your craft and vision. This has nothing to do with "political correctness".

There's only one group of people you need to avoid offending -- your audience. And the audience is retroactively defined as "the people who like the book". You respect the audience by refining your craft and vision. Throwing out a plot point because you realized it's bad is a normal part of writing. Sometimes the realization is prompted by reader feedback, other times you notice it yourself. Only laziness is objectively bad.

Suppose you're writing a fictionalized biography of a living person in collaboration with the subject. Sometimes, the subject would tell you, "No, this isn't something I'd say. And that isn't something I'd do." What do you do?

Well, at least you have one authoritative source in that scenario. Now imagine you're writing a book about a community, and each community member has different ideas on how everyone should and should not act in your book. Who do you listen to?

For a book in general, especially for a fiction book, the audience (in the artistic sense) isn't something that can be measured beforehand. Often, it's the writer who notices a pattern or a thought and crystallizes it into words for other people to find and express themselves with. It's that pattern and those people who you need to be faithful to, not the perpetually offended "influencers" who, what with all the things to be offended about, have no time to read.

Avoiding or inviting controversy are marketing strategies. It follows from Weierstrass's theorem that for every book, there's an optimal amount of controversy it has to generate to maximize the chance of landing a movie deal. But it's not a moral consideration.

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