Derek Christian Haderlie

I present a variety of ways that being deputized to speak on someone’s behalf can produce interesting kinds of illocutionary harm. In particular, I show that being deputized to speak for others can lead to important kinds of inability to speak for oneself (in ways not easily remediated). I then argue that this harm is exacerbated in the case of being deputized to speak on God’s behalf. From an Abrahamic religious perspective, there is a very real threat that so long as the matter about which one speaks is of interest to God, one will not have the ability to guarantee that one fails to thereby speak on God’s behalf. With these results in hand, I draw a modest upshot for the divine hiddenness debate. Certain patterns of divine manifestation which would produce non-resistant non-believers are bound up in interesting ways with divine deputizations. Thus, we have a readily recognizable human good at stake in such manifestations: the ability to speak merely for ourselves.