We have decided some brain quirks are disorders (and get accommodations, as is compassionate), whilst others are flaws (and get slurs). But no one picks their hardware. You cannot earn a better prefrontal cortex or deserve a calmer amygdala. Nor does one get to pick the environment they are born in, which will inform their choices later in life. Even the capacity to “learn better” is a roll of the dice, some brains start the race with sprinting shoes, others with lead weights.
So when we call someone stupid, lazy or insane we are not describing a choice, but simply announcing which kinds of unlucky we’ve decided are worthy of scorn.
Yeah. I mostly agree with most of what you wrote. I feel like the over policing of language is not helping anyone. And I think it gives truly shitty people another excuse to shit on otherwise reasonable politics. The idea that we have to sanitize every insult is like trying to rid the world of all bacteria or something. It can work on a small scale but you will never complete the job and if you zoom out, what the hell did you help anyway?
I’d much rather focus on bigger concepts rather than rethinking every piece of language we use. Some of the language changes as of late, probably even most of them, have been good. We don’t need to continually obsess about it.