Other people were clearly hurt by it though and I don't believe I'm in a position where I should tell other people what they should or shouldn't feel.
If they are mentally unwell, it doesn't make their suffering any less real does it? I admit I am biased as someone with a mental illness, I wouldn't want someone to disregard my opinion based on knowledge of my illness.
As for dishonest people, I suppose I like to believe I can believe other Googlers, especially when there are so many of them in this case who were upset by this.
> If they are mentally unwell, it doesn't make their suffering any less real does it? I admit I am biased as someone with a mental illness, I wouldn't want someone to disregard my opinion based on knowledge of my illness.
I meant only to reference the variations in tendency towards certain mental behaviors (such as accurately assessing reality, or taking responsibility for emotional responses) that exist among people. I gave an example of the "mentally unwell" to illustrate that this spectrum exist, but all parts of the spectrum are worth considering.
As an aside, and to hopefully show I'm not brushing with too wide a brush here: people with mental disorders are, sometimes, actually far better (at, say, having an accurate view of events) than people who don't have disorders, because they have [in the course of learning to cope with their issues, have also] learned to understand and correct for flaws that we all have.
I did not mean to suggest that people with mental disorders should automatically have their opinion/experience/claims discounted!
We should evaluate each situation individually. But there are clearly cases where a person's claim of "being hurt" should not be allowed to influence certain decisions, or policy, regardless of their overall mental/emotional functioning.
This touches on another problem area of ambiguity/clarity in my statement. We should question the reasonableness of the claim of being hurt - by which I not only mean "Were they really hurt?", but also "Is it reasonable for them to have been hurt?"
I can choose to be deeply hurt and offended by almost anything. We must strike a balance between respecting peoples feelings, and not allowing manipulators to exploit that respect to unreasonably coerce our behavior.
If you take 'respect for people's feelings' to an absurd extreme, we could create a world in which I could have you jailed for posing the questions you pose above. 'They hurt me.'
The fact that some demonstrably ideologically intolerant people successfully pressured Google to fire someone for expressing reasonable opinions based on evidence - this suggests to me that our society has already crossed certain thresholds in the balance between "respect for claims of being hurt" and other societal values - such as the allowance of independent thought.
