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38No Harm, Still Foul: On the Effect-Independent Wrongness of SlurringJournal of the American Philosophical Association 9 (3): 471-489. 2023.Intuitively, a speaker who uses slurs to refer to people is doing something morally objectionable even if no one is measurably affected by their speech. Perhaps they are only talking to themselves, or they are speaking with bigots who are already as vicious as they can be. This paper distinguishes between slurring as an expressive act and slurring as the act of causing a psychological effect. It then develops an expression-focused ethical account in order to explain the intuition that slurring i…Read more
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119I Wrote this Paper for the Lulz: the Ethics of Internet TrollingEthical Theory and Moral Practice 23 (5): 931-945. 2020.Over the last decade, research on derogatory communication has focused on ordinary speech contexts and the use of conventional pejoratives, like slurs. However, the use of social media has given rise to a new type of derogatory behavior that theorists have yet to address: internet trolling. Trolls make online utterances aiming to frustrate and offend other internet users. Their ultimate goal is amusement derived from observing a good faith interlocutor engage with their provocative posts. The ba…Read more
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80Pejorative LanguageInternet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2014.Pejorative Language Some words can hurt. Slurs, insults, and swears can be highly offensive and derogatory. Some theorists hold that the derogatory capacity of a pejorative word or phrase is best explained by the content it expresses. In opposition to content theories, deflationism denies that there is any specifically derogatory content expressed by pejoratives. As … Continue reading Pejorative Language →.
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236Do Racists Speak Truly? On the Truth‐Conditional Content of SlursThought: A Journal of Philosophy 4 (1): 28-37. 2015.Slurs denigrate individuals qua members of certain groups, such as race or sexual orientation. Most theorists hold that each slur has a neutral counterpart, i.e., a term that references the slur's target group without denigrating them. According to a widely accepted view, which I call ‘Neutral Counterpart Theory’, the truth-conditional content of a slur is identical to the truth-conditional content of its neutral counterpart. My aim is to challenge this view. I argue that the view fails with res…Read more
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59Derogation without words: On the power of non-verbal pejorativesPhilosophical Psychology 30 (6): 784-808. 2017.While a large body of literature on pejorative language has emerged recently, derogatory communication is a broader phenomenon that need not constitutively involve the use of words. This paper delineates the class of non-verbal pejoratives and sketches an account of the derogatory power of a subset of NVPs, namely those whose effectiveness crucially relies on iconicity. Along the way, I point out some ways in which iconic NVPs differ from wholly arbitrary NVPs and ritualized threat signals in th…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Language |
Applied Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Language |
Applied Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Value Theory |