This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
I have adapted this rough definition of “slur” from Jeshion (2013, 232). Hom (2010, 165), Anderson and Lepore (2013a, 25), and Bianchi (2014, 12) provide a similar gloss. Anderson and Lepore (2013b) distinguish acts of slurring from slurring words. The former, which may include offensive jokes, need not constitutively involve the use of conventional slurring words, such as “dago” and “kike.” I will restrict my discussion here to conventional slurs and bracket questions about other slurring acts.
One alleged difference is that slurs have neutral counterparts, whereas particularistic pejoratives do not (see, e.g., Hay 2013, 456). A neutral counterpart of a slur s is a non-evaluative term that refers to s’ target group, e.g., “Italian” is a neutral counterpart to “wop” (Hornsby 2001). However, Ashwell (2016) argues that having a possible neutral counterpart is not a necessary condition on a word’s being a slur.
Camp (2013, 338) claims that slurs function to distance speakers from targets.
Bell (2013) argues that responding to people who manifest certain vices with contempt is a good way to protest their failure to meet standards one cares about and to thereby maintain one’s own integrity. My argument here does not depend on the success of Bell’s. If she is right, contempt is one form of protest, yet protest need not be contemptuous (see, e.g., Hill 1979). While some theorists hold that slurs are conventional vehicles for expressing contempt (see, e.g., Richard 2008), a number of theorists deny this (see, e.g., Anderson and Lepore 2013a and Camp 2013). In any event, my aim here is not to motivate having a certain reactive attitude such as contempt but rather to defend the practice of slurring certain groups.
Bernard Boxill suggests that to protest the violation of one’s rights is not necessarily to argue that one has the rights in question, and that often “people protest when the time for argument and persuasion is past” (Boxill 1976, 63).
Smiley (2010) attributes to Tuomela (1989) the view that crowds and mobs may be collectively responsible for harm and destruction, despite the fact that members may not intend to perform group actions, as long as some of the members directly contribute to harm and others either facilitate these contributions or fail to prevent them.
We can also imagine antinatalists using “breeder” as a slur for anyone who reproduces, rather than heterosexuals specifically.
Here I am following the convention, suggested by Padden and Humphries (1990), of using “Deaf” to refer to a cultural group consisting of people who use a sign language and feel a shared sense of solidarity, and using "deaf" to refer to individuals who have the audiological condition of being unable to hear yet do not necessarily consider themselves members of a Deaf community.
McIntosh (2000) articulates a number of privileges afforded to people on the basis of their perceived whiteness.
I take it one can ridicule someone on the basis of membership in a white supremacist group without also disparaging them on the basis of membership in an innocent vulnerable group (e.g., being unemployed or living below the poverty line).
However, we can imagine beings that ought to be vulnerable because of the kind of beings they are (cf. May 2005). Suppose a “race” of parasitic alien invaders show up to Earth. Arguably, the use of slurs intended to make this group vulnerable need not be objectionable.
This is not to suggest that the use of slurs is wrong only to the extent that targets are offended. As I noted above, the use of a slur may be impermissible because of its role in cultivating an objectionable identity, and utterances of a slur may do this independently of whether anyone finds them insulting.
Cf. hooks (1995, 13) on the dangers of expressing rage as a member of a marginalized group: “We learned when we were very little that black people could die from feeling rage and expressing it to the wrong white folks. …Rage was reserved for life at home—for one another.”
I will leave it open whether people whose hearing is typical and are not vulnerable in other ways are morally permissible ostensible targets of the ORAL slur.
References
Anderson, L., & Lepore, E. (2013a). Slurring words. Nous, 47(1), 25–48.
Anderson, L., & Lepore, E. (2013b). What did you call me? Slurs as prohibited words. AnalyticPhilosophy, 54, 350–363.
Aristotle (1999). Nicomachean ethics, 2nd ed. (trans: Irwin, T.). Indianapolis: Hackett.
Ashwell, L. (2016). Gendered slurs. Social Theory and Practice, 42(2), 228–239.
Barry, B. (2001). Culture and equality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Beauvoir, S. (1984). The second sex, translated by H. M. Pashley. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Bell, M. (2013). Hard feelings: the moral psychology of contempt. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bianchi, C. (2014). Slurs and appropriation: an echoic account. Journal of Pragmatics, 66, 35–44.
Blum, L. (2002). “I’m not racist, but…”: the moral quandary of race. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Blume, S. (2010). The artificial ear: cochlear implants and the culture of deafness. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Bolinger, R. J. (2015). The pragmatics of slurs. Nous. doi:10.1111/nous.12090
Boxill, B. (1976). Self-respect and protest. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 6, 58–69.
Brontsema, R. (2004). A queer revolution: reconceptualizing the debate over linguistic reclamation. Colorado Research in Linguistics, 17, 1–17.
Camp, E. (2013). Slurring perspectives. Analytic Philosophy, 54, 330–349.
Card, C. (1995). Lesbian choices. New York: Columbia University Press.
Carnaghi, A., Maass, A., & Fasoli, F. (2011). Enhancing masculinity by slandering homosexuals: the role of homophobic epithets in heterosexual gender identity. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37(12), 1655–1665.
Christiansen, J. B., & Leigh, I. W. (2004). Children with cochlear implants: changing parent and deaf community perspectives. Archives of Otolaryngology: Head and Neck Surgery, 130(5), 673–677.
Croom, A. (2015). Slurs, stereotypes, and in-equality: a critical review of “how epithets and stereotypes are racially unequal”. Language Sciences, 52, 139–154.
Ellinas, A. A. (2013). The rise of golden dawn: the new face of the far right in Greece. South European Society and Politics, 18(4), 543–565.
Embrick, D. G., & Henricks, K. (2013). Discursive colorlines at work: how epithets and stereotypes are racially unequal. Symbolic Interaction, 36(2), 197–215.
Ferber, A. L. (1998). Constructing whiteness: the intersections of race and gender in US white supremacist discourse. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 21(1), 48–63.
Glickman, N. S. (1996). The development of culturally deaf identities. In N. S. Glickman & M. A. Harvey (Eds.), Culturally affirmative psychotherapy with deaf persons (pp. 115–153). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Grushkin, D. (2003). The dilemma of the hard of hearing within the U.S. deaf community. In L. Monaghan, C. Schmaling, K. Nakamura, & G. H. Turner (Eds.), Many ways to be deaf: international variation in deaf communities (pp. 114–140). Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press.
Harvey, J. (1999). Civilized oppression. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Hay, R. (2013). Hybrid expressivism and the analogy between pejoratives and moral language. European Journal of Philosophy, 21(3), 450–474.
Heyes, C. (2012). Identity politics. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2014/entries/identity-politis.
Hill, T. (1979). Symbolic protest and calculated silence. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 9(1), 83–102.
Holcomb, T. K. (2013). Introduction to American deaf culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hom, C. (2008). The semantics of racial epithets. Journal of Philosophy, 105(8), 416–440.
Hom, C. (2010). Pejoratives. Philosophy Compass, 5(2), 164–185.
Hooks, B. (1995). Killing rage: ending racism. New York: Henry Holt and Co..
Hornsby, J. (2001). Meaning and uselessness: how to think about derogatory words. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 25, 128–141.
Jay, T. (2009). Do offensive words harm people? Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 15(2), 81–101.
Jeshion, R. (2013). Expressivism and the offensiveness of slurs. Philosophical Perspectives, 27(1), 237–259.
Killmister, S. (2012). Why group membership matters: a critical typology. Ethnicities, 12(3), 251–269.
Killmister, S. (2014). Resolving the dilemma of group membership. In G. Balder, M. Bessone, & F. Zuolo (Eds.), How groups matter (pp. 89–108). New York: Routledge.
Kymlicka, W. (1995). Multicultural citizenship: a liberal theory of minority rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lampert, M. D., & Ervin-Tripp, S. M. (1998). Exploring paradigms: the study of gender and sense of humor near the end of the 20th century. In W. Ruch (Ed.), The sense of humor: exploration of a personality characteristic (pp. 231–270). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Lane, H. (2005). Ethnicity, ethics, and the deaf-word. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 10(3), 291–310.
May, R. (2005). Bad words: remarks on mark Richard’s ‘epithets and attitudes’. USC workshop in the linguistics/philosophy interface: syntax and semantics with attitude. Santa Cruz: University of California.
McIntosh, P. (2000). White privilege and male privilege: a personal account of coming to see correspondences through work in women’s studies. In A. Minas (Ed.), Gender basics: feminist perspectives on women and men (2nd ed., pp. 30–38). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Nunberg, G. (forthcoming). The social life of slurs. In D. Fogal, D. Harris, & M. Moss (Eds.), New work on speech acts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Padden, C., & Humphries, T. (1990). Deaf in America: voices from a culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Padden, C., & Markowicz, H. (1997). Learning to be deaf: conflicts between hearing and deaf cultures. In M. Cole, Y. Engstron, & O. A. Vasquez (Eds.), Mind, culture, and activity: seminal papers from the laboratory of comparative human cognition (pp. 418–431). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Queen, R. (2007). Sociolinguistic horizons: language and sexuality. Language and LinguisticCompass, 1(4), 314–330.
Richard, M. (2008). When truth gives out. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Ritchie, K. (2015). The metaphysics of social groups. Philosophy Compass, 10(5), 310–321.
Saka, P. (2007). How to think about meaning. Berlin: Springer.
Smiley, M. (2010). Collective responsibility. In E. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/collective-responsibility
Thoutenhoofd, E. D. (2000). Philosophy’s real-world consequences for deaf people: thoughts on iconicity, sign language and being deaf. Human Studies, 23, 261–279.
Tuomela (1989). Actions by collectives. Philosophical Perspectives, 3, 471–496.
Waldron, J. (2012). The harm in hate speech. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Young, I. M. (1990). Justice and the politics of difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
DiFranco, R. Appropriate Slurs. Acta Anal 32, 371–384 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-016-0313-0
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-016-0313-0