Matters of (Reasonable) Opinion

Just because something is subjective doesn’t mean that you can’t be wrong about it.

Many things – even important things! – are subjective and hard to define within tight edges. Sometimes people exploit this fact in order to pull some rhetorical trickery. If you can’t define something too exactly, that leaves an opening for people to define it however they want, even to an absurd degree.

Let’s take an example – bullying. Bullying is bad, but what bullying is can be hard to exactly pin down. One of the reasons bullying can be hard to deal with in places like school is because sensitivity varies across individuals, intent is hard to directly observe, and many instances of it can devolve into “he said/she said” arguments with no clear objective result.

So if all that is true, doesn’t that mean that bullying is always whatever the victim says it is?

No, of course not.

Yes, bullying is subjective, but some things are clearly not bullying. If one student claims “She’s bullying me because she did her book report on a book I hate just so I’d have to listen to it,” then that student is over-defining bullying so loosely that it loses any influence as a term. That doesn’t mean bullying isn’t real, and it doesn’t even necessarily mean the student in question isn’t being bullied. But some things fall outside the range of reasonable subjective opinions.

So be wary about people pulling this trick. It’s an easy crack to slip through. Taking any negative but subjective topic and re-defining it so that it always conveniently wraps around the person speaking is an easy way to create a false moral high ground. Don’t fall for it – don’t be bullied.