Sometimes, It Is Just Words: Norm-Setting as Negotiation

ABSTRACT

McGowan’s notion of norm ‘enactment’ is the linchpin of her practical project, designed to provide an objective standard that circumvents the need to assess actual subjective uptake of discriminatory norms proposed by racist utterances in public spaces. However, the essential role of uptake to potential norm-imposing utterances—and responses like dismissing, countermanding, and ignoring—cannot be waved away. Contributions to conversations, and even more so to other social interactions, do not exert the normative compulsion upon participants that McGowan’s theory needs. People’s words, even their ugly words, are not invariably norm ‘enactments’ that ‘constitute harm’—sometimes they are just words.

KEYWORDS:

• norm
• racism
• conversation
• speech
• score

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 People continually encounter suggestions, of varying reliability, as to what is normative (expected, correct, standard-meeting) by merely observing others’ responses to concrete situations, even fictional ones.

2 Yet elsewhere McGowan [2003: 179n41] appears to concede that hearer recognition, if only subconscious, must be pre-requisite to a conversational contribution having some actual norm-changing effect.

3 Similarly, parties often ignore external events that threaten to intrude upon a compelling exchange. Both sorts of overlookings are sometimes later referred back to, often for humorous effect.

4 See also Lewis [1979: 345]: conversationalists’ efforts ‘to steer certain components of the conversational score in certain directions. . . may be . . . in . . . conflict’.

5 The danger here is that swelling moral norms may prompt overzealous efforts to eradicate all speech that might seem to some to deserve a ‘racist’ label.

6 Compare how the addition of self-interested incentives can undercut moral motivation in a wide array of circumstances. See, e.g., Bowles and Polanía-Reyes [2012]; see also Atiq [2014].