Helen Daly

David Miguel Gray’s “Doxastic and Epistemic Sources of Offense for Slurring Terms,” published in this journal in 2025, proposes and defends a novel account of slurs. Here, I give an additional reason in favor of his account: it coheres well with recent philosophical theories of insults. This kind of fortuitous external consistency is a significant theoretical virtue. In this brief response paper, I will summarize Gray’s account of slurs and explain its natural fit with recent philosophical work on insults. After that central task is done, I will make two further observations: in section 3, about the relationship between epistemic and linguistic sources of offense, and in section 4, about a possibility for future research raised by Gray’s taxonomy of negatively valenced terms.

Tarana Burke’s #MeToo movement is about “healing and action. Everything else is a distraction” (Burke 2019). That is, Burke helps people develop local resources for survivors of sexual violence, and local strategies for the prevention of sexual violence: healing and action. This essay is focused on Burke’s “community healing circles.” These are small groups of people who meet to talk about the sexual violence they have suffered. Using her own theory of insults, Daly describes the damaging insult that results from sexual violence, and proposes an explanation of how Burke’s community healing circles help survivors to overcome that harm. She then briefly considers how similar practices could be used in other contexts. Her central contention is that sexual violence expresses a profound lack of respect, and that this tends to diminish survivors’ sense of self-worth. Sharing these experiences with similarly-situated people can help survivors recover their dignity. She proposes two mechanisms involved in this recovery: First, being treated with respect counters the tendency to believe that one does not deserve respect. Second, understanding your experiences can be easier when you see them reflected in another.

“It was her first weekend in the village, and she had been planning to observe the inhabitants in the time-honoured manner from behind the shadow of her curtains.” On the first page of A Few Green Leaves, Barbara Pym announces the significance of invisibility. This theme, specifically women’s invisibility, reverberates not only throughout this novel, but also in Pym’s other novels, and in Pym’s own biography. As we witness Pym’s women routinely underestimated and ignored, we might initially suppose she is lodging a protest against such disregard of women, particularly women past the first bloom of youth. But Pym’s position is more complicated: women’s invisibility is unjust and insulting, yes, but it is also the precondition of Pym’s marvelous work as an observer, from behind the shadow of her own curtains. She, no less than her characters, makes a virtue of necessity, exploiting invisibility to study others more closely than they know. In A Few Green Leaves, we find excellent examples of invisibility in the characters Emma Howick and Daphne Dagnall. Pym not only makes these women visible, but also shows us how to find the humor and dignity in their situations and how we might make the best of our own invisibility.

Some bemoan the incivility of our times, while others complain that people have grown too quick to take offense. There is widespread disagreement about what counts as an insult and when it is appropriate to feel insulted. Here I propose a definition and a preliminary taxonomy of insults. Namely, I define insults as expressions of a lack of due regard. And I categorize insults by whether they are intended or unintended, acts or omissions, and whether they cause offense or not. Unintended insults are of particular concern since greater understanding may help us to avoid them. And insults by omission warrant special consideration because they suggest an interesting extension of Grice’s theory of conversational implicature.

Imagine you find yourself in heaven after death, only to discover that the soul of your dearest love is suffering in hell. Would your bliss be marred by the suffering of your loved one? The “argument from love” challenges the traditional Christian conception of heaven and hell as places of perfect bliss and terrible suffering, respectively, on the grounds that no lover in heaven could be very happy if she were aware that her beloved was suffering in hell. Love requires concern for the well-being of one’s beloved, thus apparently rendering heavenly bliss impossible for those who love an unreformed sinner. Here I defend a traditional conception of heaven and hell against the perplexing mismatch between the blessed souls’ love for the damned and apparent indifference to their plight.

People often assume that everyone can be divided by sex/gender (that is, by physical and social characteristics having to do with maleness and femaleness) into two tidy categories: male and female. Careful thought, however, leads us to reject that simple ‘binary’ picture, since not all people fall precisely into one group or the other. But if we do not think of sex/gender in terms of those two categories, how else might we think of it? Here I consider four distinct models; each model correctly captures some features of sex/gender, and so each is appropriate in some contexts. But the first three models are inadequate when tough questions arise, like whether trans women should be admitted as students at a women’s college or when it is appropriate for intersex athletes to compete in women’s athletic events. (‘Trans’ refers to the wide range of people who have an atypical gender identity for someone of their birth-assigned sex, and ‘intersex’ refers to people whose bodies naturally develop with markedly different physical sex characteristics than are paradigmatic of either men or women.) Such questions of inclusion and exclusion matter enormously to the people whose lives are affected by them, but ordinary notions of sex/gender offer few answers. The fourth model I describe is especially designed to make those hard decisions easier by providing a process to clarify what matters.

Sex determines much about one's life, but what determines one's sex? The answer is complicated and incomplete: on close examination, ordinary notions of female and male are vague. In 2012, the International Olympic Committee further specified what they mean by woman in response to questions about who, exactly, is eligible to compete in women's Olympic events. I argue, first, that their stipulation is evidence that the use of vague terms is better described by semantic approaches to vagueness than by epistemic approaches. In addition, the IOC's 2012 stipulation was made with sensitivity to its practical consequences. Linguistic actions often have morally relevant consequences, and I contend that, other things equal, we should adopt theories about language that acknowledge the responsibility we bear for what we say. Taking vagueness to be an epistemic phenomenon precludes the sense of agency needed for moral responsibility; taking it to be semantic does not. Thus I advance two arguments for semantic approaches to vagueness, as against epistemic approaches: one descriptive and one normative.