Slurs, Offensiveness and Prohibitionism

RAMIRO CASO; NICOLÁS LO GUERCIO

Conferencia; IV Conference of the Brazilian Society for Analytic Philosophy; 2016

Brazilian Society for Analytic Philosophy

Slurs, offensiveness and prohibitionismIn recent years, many philosophers of language have turn their attention to expressive words. Slurs raise particularly interestingquestions. What makes them offensive? Why are some slurs more offensive than others? How should we explain the phenomenon of linguistic appropriation? Are there any non-offensive (non-appropriated) uses of slurs? Anderson and Lepore (2011, 2013) argue in favor of a view they call Prohibitionism. According to them, roughly speaking, slur words are prohibited words, that is, words with ?relevant edicts surrounding their prohibition? (2011, p. 2). Allegedly, this view has the advantage of properly satisfying several explanatory demands. First, it provides an answer to the question of what it is that makes slur-words offensive, viz. slurs are offensive because their use means the violation of the prohibition. Second, it accounts for the fact that slurs are non-displaceable, that is, occurrences of slurs in the scope of several operators (conditionals, negation, belief-ascriptions, indirect reports and maybe others) are nonetheless offensive, while the derogatory attitude must typically be ascribed to the speaker. Anderson and Lepore maintain that even the mere mention of a slur is offensive, as in ??Nigger? means nigger? or ??Nigger? is a derogatory word?. Prohibitionism is supposed to account for these facts. Finally, the view claims to possess a good story about two related facts concerning the use of slurs: on the one hand, slurs possess different degrees of derogatory force, even between co-extensive words (?Nigger? is worse than ?coon?); on the other hand, the view is supposed to explain the phenomenon of linguistic appropriation, that is, the existence of non-offensive uses of a given slur by members of the targeted group.In this critical presentation I will examine Anderson and Lepore?s reasons in favor of Prohibitionism and I will argue that they are, at the very least, fragile. First of all, I?ll show that not all slurs are prohibited. Argentina?s collection of slurs provides several examples. The argentinian ?facho?, that targets people with right wing, intolerant or racist beliefs, or ?gorila? used by ?peronists? to derogate people with ?anti-peronists? political views, are far from being prohibited. Moreover, one could easily imagine a racist society in which a word ?S? is not prohibited at all and yet it is a slur, that is, a word used to derogate members of a certain group just because of them being part of that group (for a real life example, think of words like ?judenschein?[jewpig] or ?judenscheisse? [jewshit] in Nazi Germany). Second, I will that Prohibitionism cannot account for those uses of slurs that are non-displaceable. Finally, I?ll claim that Prohibitionism has not provided a good story neither regarding why there are different degrees of intensity in slurs nor concerning the phenomenon of linguistic appropriation. In the first case, it seems that if slurs are all prohibited they should be equally offensive, for it is hard tomake sense of the idea of there being different ?degrees of prohibition? for each slur. Finally, Anderson and Lepore?s story w.r.t linguistic appropriation is that sometimes, due to historical facts that need not concern the philosopher, prohibitions take into account some ?escape clause?, e.g. for members of the targeted group. These considerations, however, do not really explain the phenomenon: it is only said that appropriated uses are not offensive because they are not prohibited. We already knew that some uses are offensive and some uses are not. Now we are told that that is due to the fact that some uses are prohibited and some uses are not. But that doesn?t really helps us understand the phenomenon unless a story is provided regarding what is a prohibition and why some uses are prohibited while others are not.