Connotations of "privilege"

[jack]

What are the connotations of the traditional English word "privilege"? I think I would say:

1. It's unfair that someone has X when other people don't.
2. A minority of people have X
3. By default, but not necessarily, X is something that people have that they shouldn't be entitled to

You might quibble with the details, but I think that's roughly what people would expect, even though, as with just about every other word in the history of language, it's used in varying ways.

How do they match up to the related-but-different modern usage of male privilege, white privilege, etc?

I think (1) is the big one, and why the term was coined at all, that it refers to things that men get from society by default and women don't and that that IS unfair, and the word was chosen to emphasise that.

However, I think a lot of the confusion is because (2) and (3) don't really apply. "privilege" is naturally used equally much for groups which are a minority (rich privilege), about equal numbers (male privilege), or a majority (non-disabled privilege). And it's used much more often for things that other people want to be able to do (eg. the privilege of walking down the street without expecting catcalls) rather than things they wish no-one could do (eg. the "privilege" of being able to catcall people walking down the street).

So, it may be the case, that the name correctly captures the aspect of "unfair", but by bad luck also sounds like it means "you shouldn't have that", when most people using it probably actually mean "everyone should have that". As Moses says, he's not jealous of other people being prophets -- he wishes everyone could be prophets, he just happens to be lucky that he's achieved it first when many other people haven't.

I'm not saying we should avoid the word[1], but if I have a moment of negative reaction I think it's useful to recognise why we do. Since if I understand why I feel like I'm being blamed or threatened, even if that's not the intention, it may be easier to separate those feelings. And hence actually listen to what's being said, rather than reacting with a general blanket of resistance and negativity.

Footnote [1]

At least, without a positive suggestion for another term which would suggest "unfair" equally well, but with more accurate connotations for "everyone should have it". I doubt it, but is there word that might be better but equally understandable?

As always with discussions about this sort of topic, I find it very very difficult to say that "people who are drawing attention to an injustice don't have an obligation to keep trying until they find language that the person with the problem is comfortable with" while also saying "but it needn't be completely and utterly verboten in every conceivable OTHER circumstance to discuss which terminology is most actually useful at being understood".

(And even if it's the best term we have, I don't think it's necessary to pretend that the unintended connotations never cause problems, even amongst people familiar with the terminology.)

Comments

[forestofglory]

Honestly, I don't really think that the negative reaction so many people have to the idea of privilege as used by social justice types is about the word used.

[liv]

I agree: look at what happened when Scalzi wrote a big long post about replacing the word "privilege" with the metaphor of "playing through life on a low difficulty setting"; he got about a thousand comments of people making the exact same arguments that they always make about privilege, so he didn't really get anywhere at all!

[liv]

Although, I do agree that it would sometimes help to have separate words for advantages which some people unfairly lack, as distinct from advantages that nobody should have at all but some unfairly get.

[jack]

Hm. If you think so, I'm inclined to think I may have been much too hasty. But "low difficulty setting" ALSO has a big negative stigma amongst the main most-privileged social groups, would a fair test be to use a description that didn't?

[jack]

One datum for my theory is, do people who are heavily familiar with social justice jargon, object to being described as having privilege[1]? My theory is that they do, because even though everyone says it's not supposed to, being described as privileged sounds like a criticism.

[1] Assuming that there's some person who's worse of than them in at least some ways.

[rmc28]

Most of the people I see using it are also self-describing their own privilege, so I think they obviously don't "mind" being described as having privilege.

I certainly don't mind being described as having white, cis, rich, Oxbridge graduate privilege (and the rest, that's what comes to mind first). Doesn't mean I don't also get some sexism, but I'm in a much better position to weather the sexism than most.

[naath]

I don't object to being described as having privilege; and whilst being told that one is wrong is never fun I don't find that being told I'm wrong because I have failed to account for my privilege is less fun than being told I'm wrong because of some other reason.

[jack]

I don't know. Obviously lots of people will react negatively anyway. But it seems to me that even people who are quite heavily involved in the social justice often have a negative reaction to people pointing out their privilege, more so than the actual content of the observation necessitates, even if they've learned to suppress it.

Although I'm not sure if that impression is true, ideally I'd actually check it.

ETA: Although if Liv agrees, maybe you're right.

[liv]

Oh, don't discount your theory just because I agree with the objection to it! forestofglory is more knowledgeable about this stuff than I am, and I don't really like the social justice concept of privilege anyway. I think it's the idea I object to, not the word, but it's possible that the choice of term biased me against it.

[pseudomonas]

I do think the concept is useful, but I'm pretty sure I remember being confused by it having a word-I-thought-I-knew-the-meaning-of when I first met it. Once you get past that, it's just a word having one more shade of meaning (though yeah, some people are awfully odd about "new" meanings of words, and these may intersect unhelpfully with the people who have problems with the idea for other reasons).

[jack]

Hm. It definitely seems more people than I expected had no problem with it, so maybe I'm seeing a problem where it isn't there.

But it also seems like even when people think they can handle it, if people have a word that means either "X" or "Y with negative connotations", the negative connotations often leak in even when they think they're talking about X...?

[pseudomonas]

Well, you still (occasionally) find people claiming that they don't like the fact that the word "gay" also has the meaning of "homosexual". One has to ask oneself exactly what their objection *really* is.

[ptc24]

I don't think it's necessary to pretend that the unintended connotations never cause problems - if you remove the "the", I think that's a good maxim, indeed, lots of people seem to be keen to prevent problems caused by unintended connontations.

I've been thinking about the connotations, and given my interests, I've boiled it down to a couple of (strawman?) moral philosophies. Let me call them Individual Hard Prioritarianism (IHP) and Groupwise Hard Prioritarianism (GHP). Prioritarianism is a real term, it's sort of like utilitarianism, except you give higher weight to the utility of people who have less of it. I can think of at least two ways of justifying this. Firstly, it's sort of a bit like the way sympathy works, secondly, from a Rawls/Harsanyi you-don't-know-who-you-are original position, it's easy to imagine somewhat risk averse contractors being in favour of it.

Hard Prioritisation is my name for an idealised version of Rawls' maxmin principle; pick the policy whereby the worst-off person under than policy is best off. GHP would be where you divide people into groups and then do maxmin on average welfare in groups. I haven't read A Theory Of Justice, my reading around suggests that Rawls adopts some form of GHP for economic distributive justice, but tends to use different things for different purposes.

Contrast with Soft Prioritarianism (again, my term, I think this is just "prioritarianism". You could justify this as people being sympathetic but not crazy-ass sympathetic, as original-position-contractors being risk averse but not pathologically risk averse, you could say "deep down I'm a utilitarian, but because of diminishing returns, I act as a soft prioritarian with regards to observable goods".

(Then there are forms of strict Equality of Outcome which require levelling down.)

If we take such views as being all-encompassing, then GHP appears to give members of oppressed groups the moral right to do more or less as they please (so long as they derive some net benefit from it) towards counterpart members of non-oppressed groups (so long as they don't drag the previously non-oppressed group down lower than oppressed group, which is hard when one individual is interacting with another). Needless to say this can be rather alarming. See also the oppression olympics, large amounts of wrangling about which groups exist and how to represent spectrum conditions, intersectional identities, requirements on people to wear identities on their sleeves, requiring people to know which groups they are a part of, etc. IHP I think has pathologies of its own, but it seems less pressing to discuss them here. Arguably, IHP in practise would collapse into some version of Soft Prioritarianism - you don't know what's going on in the rest of people's lives. Also, I find it hard to concoct justifications for GHP. People complain that utilitarianism violates the "separateness of persons" but various group-based theories seem to do so much worse IMO.

With Soft Prioritarianism, well, a lot of it seems like common sense. You give worse-off people a second hearing but maybe not a third, you tolerate some tactless remarks from them and tolerate being picked up on your own lack of tact, but if they push their luck too much, you reserve the right to walk away.

The trouble with Soft Prioritarianism is the question: how soft?

There are also issue-by-issue views where things that aren't relevant right now aren't relevant right now. This works quite well with a sympathy-based model. However, given that everything is correlated with everything else, there's always the problem of people bringing up tenuously-relevant issues.

The other issue is that there's a different notion, also called "privilege", which is an epistemic issue. This definition seems to be the one I see in posts which strike me as being more sensible and mature. Basically it says that more powerful groups have more capabilities to put their point of view across, so people from more powerful groups often have a poor idea of what things are like for people from less powerful groups - much more so than vice versa. However, you need to be careful of a bait-and-switch here. If Alice says to Bob, "you shouldn't react angrily to the term 'privilege' like that, here's an essay that explains why", and Bob reads it and says, "that's actually quite sensible and mature, thankyou Alice, I feel a lot calmer now", and then Bob goes and reads bits of the blogosphere that use 'privilege' in the other sense, then I think Bob might justifiably feel a bit cheated by this.

The trouble with this epistemic issue is, if you say, "why don't we just fall back onto established social norms for our conversation", then there's the worry that those norms will disproportionately reflect the interests of more powerful groups. Hence the need to be explicit.

This has become a rather long essay; anyway, 'privilege' does end up being an ambiguous word, with some connotations threatening, and some non-threatening. However, if you say "we shouldn't worry about the connotations at all", that's implicitly suggesting that the threatening versions of 'privilege' are the ones that are in use.

[mathcathy]

I said that I was "privileged" to work on UC ... I didn't mean that I had something good that was unfairly mine. I meant that being able to contribute to such a high profile project was an honour.

I'm not sure you've got the definitions right here, or where you got them from - I doubt that the dictionary would agree that there is an unfairness or negative connotation to the word. To me it has purely a positive spin for the person in receipt of the privilege, there isn't a negative for everyone else. In fact, in most cases, the people without the privilege probably don't even care.

I think privilege carries responsibility, you see. It isn't just a thing you get unfairly, it's an earnt thing, either before the bestowing of the privilege or after or because of.

[redbird]

From your viewpoint, being able to work on a useful and high-profile project is an honor, and you may well have earned it. (I put it that way because I don't even know what this UC is, nor how participants were selected.) But it's an honor that will likely also lead to other desirable things, rather than being an honor that you get one of, and then the next time they pick someone else so that more people can get a chance. It's not unreasonable that experience working on one good project makes you more likely to be selected for another, because you can learn useful things (as well as meeting people who might be more likely to select you than an equally qualified stranger).

And sometimes the next good thing isn't something where there are obviously related skills or qualifications. For example, NASA used to select only test pilots as astronauts (which sounds plausible but is largely arbitrary and PR-related; jockeys who could pass an eye test might have been a better choice). There were definitely people who cared that, because they hadn't been chosen as Air Force test pilots, they didn't have the chance to be astronauts.

In turn, neither test pilot nor astronaut require or teach skills that are particularly relevant to government, but at one time two out of 100 U.S. senators were former astronauts. One piece of the unfairness here is that this is one more factor that gave white men an advantage in elections relative to women and non-whites.