Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

Contemporary work on slurring terms has focused on accounting for their distinctive semantic, pragmatic, and sociolinguistic properties. Taking linguistic data as paramount, philosophers have explored the projective behavior of slurs under negation and modals; explored how slurs embed in attitude attributions; and explored the variable offense profile of slurs when used, mentioned, explicitly quoted, and used in free indirect discourse.  The theorizing has borne fruit in identifying various mechanisms by which this linguistic data may be explained. But almost all theorizing (including my own previous work) has neglected to probe much further about how slurs function as tools of subordination and how their use is a threat to human dignity.  In this paper, I take two related steps toward furthering this goal.

First, I argue that slurs have certain specific statuses that transcends how they give rise to this linguistic data about projection, attitude reports, offense profiles in use, mention, quotation. Slurs are symbols. They are symbols not only in the untendentious sense in which all words quawords are symbols. They are in additionsymbols in the way in which flags are symbols of the countries they represent and pink hats are symbols of women’s rights and resistance to Trump’s political agendas that threatens them. I shall argue that there are multitude of typesof symbols that are candidates to model how slurs function as symbols, and that what unites all these distinct varieties of symbolization as models of slurs-as-symbols is that they all also function as tools of dehumanization.

Second, I argue that because slurs are symbols that possess the basic function of being tools of dehumanization, they constitute a special kind of threat to human dignity. Here I follow some excellent recent work done on humiliation, degradation, and dehumanization, as well as work done on the distinctive wrong in torture, both of which have been inspired by Margalit’s ‘negative approach’ to respect in The Decent Society. According to Margalit, humans are distinctive creatures insofar as they are capable of feeling pain and of experiencing genuine suffering as a result of ‘merely’ symbolically violent acts. Kuch [2011] and Susman have extended this point. Kuch argues convincingly that violence meant to humiliate victims always has a symbolic element. Susman [2005] argues in a similar vein that what is distinctively wrong with torture is not the pain itself, but rather its being used as a tool to humiliate by forcing the victim to, effectively, collude with the torturer, and do so against her will: to torture, the torturer ensures that the victim experiences her own agency as undermined, as ‘owned’ by the torturer. This perversion of the ordinary relationship of one’s experience of one’s own agency is inevitably meta-representational and thus symbolic. From these two paradigms, I aim to show that one way weapon uses of slurs undermine human dignity is by their functioning to symbolize to the community slurs’ targets as lesser human by forcing targets to perceive and experience themselvesas lesser humans.