When Language Loses Its Moral Weight

Commentary

A poster in a local coffee shop caught my eye. “Abuse,” it said, should not be confined to physical or sexual violence. Rather, it extends into various other areas, such as the technological, the financial, and the spiritual.

Of course, no one doubts that humans have ingenious ways of behaving badly across any domain of life one cares to name. A spouse who monitors the family finances with ungenerous rigidity, a colleague who uses technology to exclude others from decisions, and a partner who treats shared obligations with habitual carelessness may all behave badly. These are failures of judgment, character, or consideration.

Such behaviors may frustrate, disappoint, or even corrode trust. But they are not, without further qualification, forms of abuse, and to name them as such is to blur distinctions that moral clarity requires. When everything is called abuse, the word loses its moral gravity, and when that happens, those who suffer real abuse are not better served but quietly obscured.

Harm takes manifold forms, and a moral vocabulary requires that we make distinctions where we can. If the terms we use to identify injury are loosened from their moorings, our capacity for judgment is weakened. The result is not greater sensitivity to those who are truly abused, but a moral flattening in which all forms of discomfort appear equally urgent.

Nowhere is this verbal inflation more evident than in higher education. The modern university, once understood as a place where young people are initiated into a demanding intellectual inheritance, has increasingly adopted a therapeutic model along with its corresponding vocabulary. Students are no longer said to be challenged by uncongenial ideas; they are said to be harmed by them. What was once contested in argument is now experienced as “violence,” a desecration of the student’s emotional well-being. The language of injury has migrated into the domain of ordinary intellectual disagreement, and the university, which should know better, has largely promoted it.

The consequences for higher education are serious. To call words “violence” is not merely to intensify disapproval, but to collapse an essential distinction. Violence, properly understood, involves the coercive violation of a person. It constrains freedom in the most immediate and tangible way.

Speech, even when harsh, false, or misguided, belongs to a different order. It can wound, offend, and unsettle. But equating it with violence confuses categories that a free society has long labored to keep distinct, and which the university, of all institutions, ought to defend.

The confusion arises from a laudable desire to take suffering seriously, but it hardens into a habit of viewing all difficulty through the same moral lens. In a culture that rightly condemns harm, claims of injury carry moral authority, inviting attention and deference.

As this dynamic becomes more widely understood, the threshold for what counts as harm tends to be lower. What was once disagreement becomes aggression; what was once discomfort becomes trauma; what was once merely offensive is now recast as violence.

There is a certain strategic convenience in this. I do not like what Professor X has to say. Her arguments unsettle me, and her conclusions offend my convictions. But notice the rhetorical shift here; by claiming that her words constitute violence, I need not answer her claims. I need only report her to the authorities.

In brief, the claim of harm short-circuits the very process that liberal education exists to sustain: the patient, rigorous contest of ideas in which the better argument, not the more aggrieved party, is supposed to prevail. To name disagreement as injury is not to deepen moral seriousness but to evade it. It is to replace the hard work of intellectual refutation with the much simpler work of accusation.

The cost of such verbal inflation is twofold. First, it erodes our capacity to respond proportionately to genuine abuse. If all harms are treated as equivalent, none receives the seriousness it deserves. The victim of actual violence or real abuse finds their suffering rhetorically assimilated to far lesser grievances.

Second, it diminishes the individual. To interpret every difficulty as harm is, paradoxically, to treat the student not as a person capable of intellectual growth but as a patient requiring protection. Liberal learning has always insisted otherwise. We read challenging writers not because we endorse their conclusions, but because wrestling with a powerful and uncongenial mind is itself a form of intellectual formation.

In other words, the encounter with difficult or demanding ideas is not an obstacle to education, but the very formative work of education itself. Hence, what presents itself as compassion is, in effect, a failure of respect, a quiet declaration that students cannot be trusted to think for themselves.

This is not an argument for indifference to suffering. It is an argument for clarity. To preserve the moral force of our language, we must be willing to make distinctions—to say that some things are genuinely harmful, while others are merely difficult, uncomfortable, uncongenial, or offensive, without being injurious. Such distinctions are not acts of callousness. They are the conditions of justice. A culture that cannot distinguish between violence and disagreement will find its moral energies dissipated and its judgments uncertain.

The task is not to contract our moral concern but to discipline it by recovering a language of harm that is both humane and exacting, one that makes the distinctions our moral and intellectual life requires. Only then can we respond to genuine suffering with the gravity it deserves while preserving the space for intellectual encounter on which a free society depends. That space is not incidental to the university; it is its defining charge and its highest obligation.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.