You started off strong, but overreached. If I say to my spouse or child "You fucking stupid cunt, I've told you a thousand times to put the dishes away! You good for nothing piece of shit, you can't even get that right!" That's violence.
No it is not. Problems with drawing the line between what is acceptable and what is "violent" speech are caused precisely by the fact that this axiom is completely false. You cannot have free speech, and by extension speech at all, without causing what you percieve as "violence".
First of all, do not put equality sign between physical and being verbally abusive. The first one is something external that you have no control over, no matter how much you fight, the second you can just shrug off and continue with your life.
Problem with your example lies in the lack of context. On the more humorous side - maybe your wife is a cunt and your children are little bastards. If you percieve any kind of abusive expression, no matter of the context, as violence, then you're just done. There is no useful way that you can contribute to culture and society, because you cannot participate in discourse anymore.
On the more serious side - what about "psychological violence"? What about when your wife treats you like a slave and verbally abuses you on a daily basis? If your wife mistreats you, then just leave. Her words cannot stop you. What stops you is more likely the threat of being beaten, that she will make it impossible for you to see your kids and she will take your house. The violence is physical, economical and sociological, not verbal.
Going further - your comment disgusted me and I've felt that it violates some of the most important values I have in my life. Is this violence? Not at all, I will just shrug it off and continue to enjoy my day. I will get some downvotes and maybe be less frequent in visiting left-leaning websites. We lose the ability to talk to each other, but it's far from being violence. It's just stupidity on both sides.
Almost all situations of real interest and disagreement will be grey-area and call for a pragmatic vs. a dogmatic approach.
> First of all, do not put equality sign between physical and being verbally abusive.
I am not, in general -- let's try to confine ourselves to my specific example.
> The first one is something external that you have no control over, no matter how much you fight, the second you can just shrug off and continue with your life.
This is a dogmatic assertion that is not supported by the evidence. If I were feeling less charitable, I could counter that of course you could do something about physical violence -- you just had to train harder, have better weapons, or build a coalition. People are emotionally abused. Stating that in some cases, some people can transcend that abuse is ... not really relevant. It's interesting, and should be studied so that perhaps we can confer immunity to more people.
> Problem with your example lies in the lack of context. On the more humorous side - maybe your wife is a cunt and your children are little bastards.
As soon as you admit context you admit that abusive speech could be an act of violence, as well as true speech. As you say, yourself, context matters. This is why dogmatic approaches to this issue are doomed to fail.
> If you percieve any kind of abusive expression, no matter of the context, as violence, ...
Let's just stick to my example. To disprove "speech cannot be violence", I only have to find one example of speech that is violence. I don't have believe or prove that all (abusive) speech is violence.
> then you're just done. There is no useful way that you can contribute to culture and society, because you cannot participate in discourse anymore.
This is nonsense. It's smacks of litany rather than logic. A person can be a productive member of society in many ways, yet hold beliefs that disturb you.
> Going further - your comment disgusted me and I've felt that it violates some of the most important values I have in my life.
I can't know, but your words suggest that you are looking to be disgusted. We all like to be self-righteous at times, but I doubt we are as far apart as you believe.
I have deep knowledge of computer science, artificial intelligence, biology, and emotional abuse. All of these areas teach that nature has no respect for our ontologies.
We may try to draw a hard line between violence and speech, but we mislead ourselves. Almost all of the cases worth debating occur at the fuzzy edges of these concepts.
Failure to realize this may result in the sense of having a crystalline framework, but ultimately it misleads.
Violence is an act of communication and as such always bound to the context it happens in. If someone accidentally punches you during a sports match it may look violent, but you very likely won't feel violated, because you could assume the intent to hurt is not given. If someone delivers the same punch on purpose in front of your peers, you will feel extremely violated.
Two punches, equal in their physical qualities and physical pain, one much more violent than the other. What hurts more or does more lasting damage depends on the context. There are people who have been hit as a child and have no problem with it. There are people who have never been hit physically but verbally abused who will have to deal with this their whole life.
To think violence is only violence when it is physical certainly has not much to do with how people exert force onto each other in daily life. Of course this doesn't mean that every communicative act that challenges your world view, critisises your actions, highlights you mistakes etc. automatically constitutes a violent act, although you certainly might feel bad afterwards. This is why the dictionary definition of violence has "intent" in it. If someone tells you your whole life was a lie they might not intend to hurt you with their words, even if you are devastated. If someone tells you, your hair looks shitty, they do.
Note: whether you feel hurt or not plays no role in the definition of the word violence.
"behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something."
Notice that word "physical". Liberals have tried to define the word to be associated with words or 'hate speech' in an attempt to shut down speech they don't want to hear. It doesn't mean they're correct.
If you want to clarify your thinking, you should consider these key questions:
1) Why is violence bad? What is it we're trying to prevent when we seek to prevent violence?
2) Are there instances of speech, which in specific contexts can, cause the same negative outcomes that we try to prevent when we seek to prevent violence?
3) Is it really true that physical violence is inescapable, while abusive speech only causes harm if the listener lets it?
Let go of left/right talking points, shallow pattern-matching, and groupism, and deeply consider these questions.
Well, I'm sure a nuanced argument about the boundaries between concepts can be settled by the first Google result.
I'll take your Google result and throw you this Oxford English Dictionary result, which admits a more nuanced interpretation: https://www.oed.com/oed2/00277885
That definition is the same as the one I gave. It talks specifically of "physical" violence, at least as the main definition.
When I was growing up, we always had this phrase: "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." It was usually the response to a kid complaining of being verbally teased at school, in the sense that he needed to ignore it - don't bother the teacher / parents about it unless the bullies start using their fists to hurt you.
The left has tried to redefine violence over the years in order to create the idea of "hate speech" which they want punished the same as violence.
A more interesting example would be giving an order to fire rubber bullets into a peaceable crowd. In the same sense that someone has committed murder if they hire a hitman, we could say that the speech act of giving the order, is a violent act.
Your example of a stream of abusive language, is not the equivalent of that. If someone is punished for such an act, they are not being punished for committing a violent offence.
I do wish people would stop trying to shift the definition of 'violence'. I don't want to have to make a habit of saying 'physical violence' just to close the door on it.
The difference between your view and the view you are commenting on is (as so often) whether we look at the act or the outcome. And honestly, given the dictionary definition of violence both are valid perspectives.
Cambridge Dictionary says: violence – extremely forceful actions that are intended to hurt people or are likely to cause damage.
Nowhere does it say these actions have to be carried out with the body (and if we are pedantic here, yelling into a room can be very physical as well as you are literally moving air with your breath).
Violence is a matter of communication. If your girlfriend accidentally turns around and hits you in the face with full force, it hurts, but that doesn't mean it was violent behaviour. If she however hits you on purpose with bad intent, it can be weak as hell and still constitute violent behaviour.
This means violence is not purely physical, but also an act of demonstrating/communicating power over the other. And as an act of communication there is more to it than it's pure physical components.
> If your girlfriend accidentally turns around and hits you in the face with full force, it hurts, but that doesn't mean it was violent behaviour. If she however hits you on purpose with bad intent, it can be weak as hell and still constitute violent behaviour.
Disagree. That is a violent act, but one without violent intent.
Boxing is a violent sport, but isn't criminal.
> This means violence is not purely physical, but also an act of demonstrating/communicating power over the other. And as an act of communication there is more to it than it's pure physical components.
I don't think the word 'communication' is helpful here. I think what you're getting at is intent.
> Disagree. That is a violent act, but one without violent intent.
intent is in the dictionary definition of the term violence, which is my point. How do you know it is intent? It is beeing communicated (be it verbal, nonverbal or otherwise).
Defining acts like these as communication has a long tradition in system theory, which among other things is used in therapy of families and relationships, so this is not really a creative act on my side.
That people at times use actions (including violent ones) to communicate is nothing new, everybody who has a child knows this.
In conversations like this, it's unhelpful to defer to your favourite dictionary. For one, I can point to another dictionary whose definition of 'violence' makes no mention of intent. [0] (Originally I'd thought to use the Oxford dictionary for this example, but I'd missed that their definition, like Cambridge's, does mention intent specifically :-P )
More than that though, I'm able to have my own take on the meaning of a word.
Philosophers have no use for dictionaries when exploring the meaning of 'free will', for instance. For someone already fluent in English, the dictionary contributes nothing.
> How do you know it is intent?
Ah, I wasn't clear. I don't think violence is a matter of intent, but I think 'intent' may be a better word for what you were referring to as 'communication', unless I misunderstood your point.
I can see that it makes some sense to view violence as 'communication', in the same way evolution is steered by 'communication' between species, but I don't see that this perspective is bringing much to the table in this context.
