Imagine a group of three popular middle-school girls standing by their lockers in the hallway. One of their unpopular classmates, Maggie, walks by and trips, spilling her books and papers everywhere—and the popular girls start pointing and laughing. Clearly this laughter is rude, perhaps even aggressive. When someone gets hurt, the humane response is to break from a playful mood into a serious mood, to make sure they’re OK. The popular girls’ laughter, then, reveals that they don’t take Maggie’s suffering seriously. They’re treating her pain as an object of play—a mere plaything. Note that
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