‘Discrimination Preferred’: How Ordinary Verbal Bigotry Harms

ABSTRACT

A widespread thesis in contemporary philosophy of language is that certain speech constitutes, rather than merely causes, harm. McGowan develops a prescriptive account of harm constitution, according to which harm-constituting speech enacts norms that prescribe harm. Ordinary verbal bigotry, she claims, is harmful in this sense. We submit that the norms enacted by ordinary racist (or otherwise bigoted) utterances are not prescriptive. In our view, ordinary verbal bigotry enacts ‘non-neutrally’ permissive norms rendering harmful behaviours locally permitted—and indeed preferred over non-harmful options. We conclude by arguing that, although ordinary verbal bigotry enacts non-prescriptive norms, it can still constitute harm.

KEYWORDS:

• harm constitution
• prescriptivity
• permissibility
• non-neutral permissives
• hate speech

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This claim plays a pivotal role in McGowan’s model. See McGowan [2017: 42]: ‘To say that speech constitutes harm [ . . . ] is to say that it brings the harm in question about via the enacting of a norm (or norms) that prescribes the harm in question. (Clearly, the norms in question are prescriptive [ . . . ])’, and [2019: 23]: ‘To say that speech constitutes harm is to say that it causes harm via the enacting of a norm prescribing that harm’.

2 On McGowan’s account, for speech to constitute harm, it must enact norms prescribing harm and those norms must be followed [McGowan 2022: 132n4]. Thus, whether WW’s utterance constitutes harm depends not only on whether it enacts harmful prescriptions, but also on whether those prescriptions are adhered to. For the sake of simplicity, we leave this causal layer of McGowan’s definition of harm constitution aside.

3 A terminological note to avoid confusion. In McGowan’s parlance, ‘norm’ and ‘permissibility fact’ are synonymous. To say that speech enacts norms is to say that it enacts permissibility facts [McGowan 2022: 132]. McGowan [2018: 186] adopts a broad notion of permissibility, which ‘also include[s] prohibitions (and thus what is impermissible) as well as what is required (that is, what it is impermissible to refrain from doing)’. Permissibility, in her sense, is neutral between ‘proper permissibility’ and ‘prescriptivity’. In her view, speech routinely enacts (broad) permissibility facts, but it can only constitute harm when it enacts prescriptive norms. When it comes to harm constitution, McGowan restricts the domain of permissibility-fact-enacting speech to prescriptive-norm-enacting speech. We argue below that such restriction is implausible, and indeed unnecessary for her parity argument.

4 See Kaufmann [2012: 58–64] for an investigation of you should-orders.

5 This tendency is acknowledged, among others, by Bulygin [2015: 324].

6 Atienza & Manero [1998: 106] put forth a version of this claim: ‘If Parliament then issues a norm saying that “It is permitted for women to go topless on the beach”, that would be pragmatically equivalent to the issuing of a prohibitive norm addressed to the local authorities [ . . . ] in the sense that “It is prohibited to hinder, prohibit and/or sanction going topless”’.

7 See Simpson [2022: 163–5] on ‘gentle bullying’ in conversation.

8 See Maitra [2012] and Langton [2018] on the role of silence on the part of bystanders.

9 On hate speech functioning as propaganda, see Langton [2018].