Ralph DiFranco

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 respect to slurs that encode truth-conditional content which does more than merely classify someone as a member of the target group, as well as slurs that denigrate by virtue of their iconicity

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 basis for condemning a pejorative utterance is often taken to be the harm it causes or a defective attitude in the speaker. However, trolling complicates this picture, since trolling utterances are by definition insincere and should be recognizable as such to other trolls. Further, these utterances seem morally questionable even when they cause little to no harm, and they often do not feature conventional pejoratives. I argue that while the potential for negative effects is relevant to ethical assessment, in general trolling is pro tanto wrong because the troll fails to accord others the proper respect that is their due. However, this characteristic wrong-making feature is sometimes overridden.

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 the animal kingdom, such as the wolf’s snarl, which do not threaten or demean targets by virtue of any kind of iconographic depiction. An iconic portrayal such as a racist caricature disparages its target by inviting recipients to entertain an unflattering image of the target. “Blackface” performers in the nineteenth-century, for example, promulgated an unflattering image of African-Americans by means of make-up, costumes, and vocal impersonations.

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 involves an effect-independent moral wrong. The core idea is that the act of expressing a morally defective attitude is itselfpro tantomorally objectionable. Unlike theories that focus only on problematic effects, this view is able to shift the moral burden of proof away from victims of slurring acts and onto speakers. It also offers moral guidance with respect to metalinguistic and pedagogical utterances of slurs.