Intent is not magical.

Saturday, February 25, 2012

Intent is not magical.

eateroftrees:

thefremen:

It doesn’t mean that any harm done is less harmful. It doesn’t provide an excuse for those who act as abusers without the express intent of causing harm. What one tries to do and what one does are often different things and to others what we are trying to do is completely irrelevant information.

Erm, that’s not quite true. What intent doesn’t do is magically insulate a person from harm (ie, its not magic). What intent does do is means we don’t need to escalate here. (escalation usually meaning I’ll mentally file you under “People who will likely hurt me” in my head and attempt to cut you out of my life. Assuming you even were in it in the first place; ignoring you or blocking you is likely going to be the extent of escalation.)

Like, you can say horrible ableist shit accidentally. It’s not actually super hard, especially if you’re not thinking and have no idea how the oppression in question works. (Say, calling people “special snowflakes” is an obvious one that comes to mind)

See, what your intent does not do is keep that from hurting people. Like, if you were honestly unaware of the context or weren’t particularly thinking when you said it, your intent does more or less mean you’re not a terrible person, and that, oh hey, you can be like, “oops sorry” and we can move on.

If you actually intended to cause harm here, there’s not really any particular way we can recover from this. It’s not really an “oops sorry” and move on moment, ‘cause you knowingly and willfully hurt people.

There’s also an obvious gray area: your intent to not cause harm stops helping the moment you start denying and belittling said the harm. Because once you start being like “But I didn’t mean it that way it really means this!” or otherwise start being evasive your intent is no longer not to cause harm, it’s to revise history so you never caused harm in the first place and to shut up the people talking about their harm.

So like, intent does matter, it’s not completely irrelevant; it’s just not magic, and does not stop harmful acts from being harmful, and once you start acting like your intent is magic your intent isn’t good anymore.

I could provide some more dramatic examples if its needed, but yeah. Basically.

Great articulation, Emily!