I agree that ignoring psychological harms completely is arbitrary. Many people would prefer moderate physical pain to public humiliation and this seems pretty hard-wired in our psychology.
At the same time, in the current climate claims of psychological harm are clearly used strategically. People supposedly feel unsafe if a colleague has political views that they disagree with for example, which clearly is not some sort of universal fact of human psychology. Certain claims of emotional harm should be discounted not because they are necessarily false, but because indulging them leads to a bad equilibrium.
I think this is exactly the point I was trying to make here:
Naïve accounting of psychological harms (including unwillingness to ask individuals to change their psychology) causes affectively expensive ideologies [6] to propagate, which leads to supraoptimal restrictions on physical actions. This works thus (“Naïve Assignment Framework”):
Psychological harm H is the result of an external act A and the victim’s psychology Ψ
By supposition, Ψ cannot be blameworthy cause of H
Therefore, A is the sole morally blameworthy cause of H
As compared to a framework where we allowed Ψ to be a morally blameworthy cause of harms in at least some cases (as I argued above must be allowed), this framework for assigning moral blame will shift more blame onto people taking external actions. It is therefore supraoptimally restrictive of external actions, and suboptimally restrictive of affectively expensive ideologies. This causes those expensive ideologies to propagate more than they would under a better blame-assignment framework.[7]
More perversely, it incentivizes moral actors to adopt affectively expensive ideologies, since those ideologies are in effect subsidized by the Naïve Assignment Framework.
I agree that ignoring psychological harms completely is arbitrary. Many people would prefer moderate physical pain to public humiliation and this seems pretty hard-wired in our psychology.
At the same time, in the current climate claims of psychological harm are clearly used strategically. People supposedly feel unsafe if a colleague has political views that they disagree with for example, which clearly is not some sort of universal fact of human psychology. Certain claims of emotional harm should be discounted not because they are necessarily false, but because indulging them leads to a bad equilibrium.
I think this is exactly the point I was trying to make here: