The Right to Offend

Rushdie argued across decades, and demonstrated with his body, that there exists no right not to be offended—that the demand to be protected from offense is, in effect, the demand to be protected from other people's freedom. He did not arrive at this position as an abstraction; he arrived at it as the survivor of a campaign conducted entirely in the language of offense, in which a novel's capacity to wound the faithful was treated as sufficient justification for a death sentence and the murder of translators. His reply was precisely calibrated: offense, however deeply felt, cannot be the boundary of what may be said, because the moment it becomes the boundary, the most easily offended party in any pluralistic world effectively sets the limit of all expression, and that limit will contract toward silence. This analysis transfers directly to the machine: the dominant design goal of commercial AI alignment is