Suzanne Whitten

Reputational damage from others’ speech can profoundly shape what we can do in the world, influencing whether our words receive uptake, the opportunities available to us, and whether we can credibly contest the characterisations made of us. Yet debates about reputational rights typically frame reputation and free speech as competing individual interests, asking when reputational harm crosses a threshold sufficient to justify restricting speech. Drawing on adjacent literatures including hate speech, defamation, privacy, and epistemic injustice, such accounts also tend to treat reputation as effectively synonymous with social standing. This paper challenges both moves. First, drawing on Gloria Origgi’s social-interactionist account, I argue that reputation is conceptually distinct from standing and should be understood as the speech about us that circulates within our communities, which profoundly shapes standing without being identical to it. I then extend this view to defend a modified dignity-based conception of reputation (MDCR) that attends to both the external dimension of reputational damage (one’s standing among others) and the internal dimension (how individuals experience their perception of themselves). Reputational wrongs, on this view, are defined not by falsehood, disesteem, or identity-based hostility, but by the imposition of a social identity over which the individual has limited influence, constraining their capacity for self-authorship. Drawing on theories of relational autonomy, I then argue against the view that reputation and free speech are competing interests. Rather, they are co-constitutive relational goods, such that protecting either requires attending to the social and material conditions that sustain both.