Toward an expressive account of disrespect

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I develop an expressive account of disrespect according to which an action becomes disrespectful in virtue of making an explicitly or implicitly demeaning statement about its target’s moral standing. On my reading, we act disrespectfully whenever we (in word or deed) spread the falsehood that some people can be treated worse than they in fact can be given the correct account of what we owe to each other. After elaborating on the content that renders an action disrespectful and explaining how disrespectful actions come to acquire their distinctive content in the first place, I go on to defend my account against rival approaches and stress its usefulness in detecting a previously disregarded moral phenomenon, namely, the risk of causing moral confusion. I do so by arguing that, given our nature as social cognisers, disrespectful actions are particularly well-suited to pollute our beliefs about what we owe to each other and what is owed to us.

KEYWORDS:

• Disrespect
• discrimination
• expressive action
• recognition
• moral confusion

Acknowledgement

I thank Stephen Darwall, Tamara Jugov, Kristina Lepold, Deborah Mühlebach and Chris Neuhäuser for their immensely helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I am also grateful for the opportunity to present this paper at colloquia at FU Berlin, LMU Munich, Zurich University and at the XXIV. German Congress of Philosophy at HU Berlin – thanks to all participants for their constructive feedback. Special thanks to Aline Dammel for her help with the final manuscript.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Since all the cases I discuss in this paper are cases of moral disrespect, I will drop the qualifier ‘moral’ from now on.

2 Notice that while these three conceptions are compatible with each other, they can also come apart and neither of them implies the other. A person A, who believes that another person B has diminished moral standing, can go on to express this belief both by publicly stating it and by acting upon it. But it is also possible that A refrains from expressing her belief and from acting upon it if, for instance, she is afraid of potential social sanctions or retribution. Similarly, A can say something about B which people from a different community take as a clear sign that A believes B to have diminished moral standing even though A herself does not subscribe to this belief at all and does not realise that her words can be construed to express this. Finally, A can treat B in a way that would only be permissible if B had diminished moral standing purely by mistake and without endorsing the belief that B deserves such treatment.

3 For reasons of brevity, I will not, in this paper, address the important question whether other beings, too, have moral standing.

4 The only element of Hellman’s account I disagree with is what has been called the ‘hierarchy requirement’ (cf. Lippert-Rasmussen 2014, 138). According to Hellman, ‘one needs a degree of power or status to demean another’ (Hellman 2008, 35). Hellman adds this requirement because for her, demeaning (or in my terms: disrespectful) action is morally problematic because it puts its targets’ down (cf. Hellman 2008, 35). Hellman does not spell out explicitly how she understands this; but the fact that she insists on the hierarchy requirement suggest that she believes that by putting another person down, we change the normative landscape so that people can legitimately treat her worse, since such an exercise of normative power usually requires some sort of authority or status. In my opinion, disrespectful action is morally problematic for a different reason (which I am going to elaborate on in section 4), therefore I do not need the hierarchy requirement. As this requirement has been criticised extensively (cf. Lippert-Rasmussen 2014, 138), I consider it a positive feature of my account that it can do without it.

5 I admit that coming up with a theory of expressive action within a paper that tries to advocate for a specific conception of disrespect is somewhat ambitious (as an anonymous reviewer rightly pointed out to me). But I consider it a real shortcoming of Hellman’s and Shin’s otherwise very convincing works on disrespect that they fail to give us useful pointers on how to establish whether an action has the requisite expressive content and therefore really is disrespectful. The following remarks on expressive action are meant to help us make some progress on this issue, but I am well aware that for a fully-fledged theory of expressive action more would need to be said.

6 A critic might interject here that the difference between explicitly and implicitly disrespectful actions is not one of kind, but only of degree, because we need to interpret explicit statements, too, in order to make sense of them. I agree, but I want to add that this interpretation will often come much more easily given that the agents tell us explicitly how we should understand what they are doing. So even if the difference in question is only one of degree, it is significant enough to merit to be taken into account in our theorising (and I thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out to me).

7 Admittedly, this comparison is somewhat off as my conception of disrespect as I present it in this paper pertains to actions and not to artefacts (I thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out). But I believe that we can broaden my conception so as to include artefacts as well. Doing so requires more space than I have here, but the general idea would the following: an artefact A is disrespectful towards B if A states or conventionally signals that B has less moral standing than B in fact has (such as the Nuremberg or the anti-miscegenation laws did) or if the best explanation for why A has been created includes the assumption that its creators believed B to have less moral standing than B in fact has (as in the case of, for instance, racially segregated public facilities in the US).

8 The point of this example is to show how disrespectfulness can come in degrees, depending on what aspect of a person’s moral standing are called into question. If a critic contends that a person’s property rights are more important than her freedom to choose her romantic partner, this speaks against this particular example, but not against the more general point. Conceiving of degrees of disrespectfulness in this way presupposes that moral standing comes in degrees such that denying a person one of its constitutive elements is not tantamount to denying her all of it. While not all accounts of moral standing allow for this kind of graduation, I contend that the correct account will. For an account that does, see Jaworska 2007.

9 This shows that on an expressive conception of disrespect like mine which is based on the correct account of moral standing (and not on what people take to be the correct account), there can be cases where a person A explicitly belittles the presumed moral standing of another person B without being disrespectful because, as it turns out, A’s underlying assumption about B’s moral standing was correct. Some readers might consider this implication counterintuitive, but this is a bullet I am willing to bite given what I want my expressive account of disrespect to accomplish, i.e. track those actions which are likely to cause moral confusion (I will say more about this in section 5). I thank an anonymous reviewer for making me aware of this implication.

10 That my account is objective in the way described obliges me to accept that our current assessments of what is or is not disrespectful might be just as false as the ones made by people in the early seventeenth century or at any other point in time. Assuming otherwise would imply that we have some sort of inner sense that makes us infallible with regard to this issue. Unfortunately, I can see no reason why we should assume this.

11 Anderson and Pildes, too, believe that actions can express statements without their agents’ intending them to. This becomes apparent when they distinguish between ‘expressing something’ and ‘communicating something’: ‘To communicate a mental state requires that one express it with the intent that others recognize that state by recognizing that very communicative intention. One can express a mental state without intending to communicate it’ (Anderson and Pildes 2000, 1508).

12 To further illustrate this idea, consider our understanding of money. Roughly speaking, we understand money to be the medium of exchange people accept to engage in transactions for goods and services on the market. What people end up accepting as medium of exchange varies from country to country – bits of paper, pieces of metal, seashells, Bitcoin, etc. – and is thus relative, but the property in virtue of which bits of paper, pieces of metal, seashells, Bitcoin, etc. are money – i.e., that they are accepted as a medium of exchange – is not.

13 Not everybody will accept that we should tie the expressive content of an action to society’s common ground in such a way. Richard Ekins, for instance, agrees that the social meaning of an action (which is Ekins’ term for what I have called expressive content) is determined by its explanation, but for him it is the agent’s explanation that counts and not the one most people who witness it would reasonably come up with. To Ekins, it seems ‘clearly unreasonable’ (Ekins 2012, 24) that on an account like Anderson’s and Pildes' or Shin’s (or for that matter mine) a person can end up unintentionally disrespecting another if she does not realise how her actions will be interpreted in a social context she is not familiar with. But whether any account of disrespect is unreasonable or not depends on what we want to do with it. My aim is to establish an understanding of disrespect that helps us track a distinct moral problem, namely that of potentially causing moral confusion, and whether an action runs this risk or not depends not on its agent’s intentions but on how it will likely be understood. Given my objective, tying the expressive content of an action to society’s common ground is therefore not unreasonable, but necessary.

14 Some authors reject the idea of moral testimony, that is, of basing our moral beliefs upon what other people tell us about morality (cf. Hills 2013). In what follows, I do not make any assumptions about the rationality of accepting moral testimony, which is the most contested issue in the debate about this kind of testimony. I only assume that we do in fact rely on moral testimony (at least in part) when we build our individual moral belief systems.

15 For a compelling description of how social oppression can nevertheless lead to epistemic advantages, see José Medina’s account of epistemic heroes (Medina 2012, chapter 5).

16 This point is made persuasively by the literature on epistemic injustice; see, for instance, Fricker 2007, chapter 7 or Dotson 2014.

17 I assume here that some states of affairs – for instance, having knowledge or being able to act morally – are intrinsically good and therefore make the lives of those people who partake in them go better, even if these people do not experience them as pleasurable or cannot use them to bring about other, more tangible advantages. Put differently, I implicitly rely on an (at least in part) objective theory of wellbeing. It is beyond the scope of this paper to defend such an approach to wellbeing here, therefore it is all the more important to make this implicit assumption transparent. I thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.

18 Obviously, there can be cases in which the subjects of moral confusion are complicit in their false beliefs, for instance by actively ignoring evidence of their targets’ equal moral standing (for accounts of how we actively bring about our own ignorance, see Mills 2007 or Pohlhaus 2012). But even when the subjects of moral confusion are responsible for their false moral beliefs, their lives are nevertheless negatively affected by this ignorance.

19 A critic might wonder why I even bother addressing an extensional worry given that my approach is ameliorative. If, as I said in the introduction, my primary aim is not to systematise our conceptual intuitions, why try to make room for this particular one? My reasons for this are twofold. The first is dialectical: I claim that my conception of disrespect is superior to its rivals because it does not face the objections they do; therefore I have to show that my conception can do what the mental state conception cannot, which includes making sense of the disrespectful tinge many instances of indirect discrimination have. But, second and more in line with an ameliorative approach, I think it adds to the philosophical usefulness of any conception of disrespect if it allows us to classify discriminatory actions, both indirect and direct ones, as disrespectful because we need all the philosophical tools we can get to criticise discrimination.

20 In fact, with regard to Hellman’s expressive account of demeaning action and to the theory of wrongful discrimination she bases on it other worries have been raised. For instance, Lippert-Rasmussen sustains that Hellman cannot make good on her claim that her expressive account of demeaning action is grounded in the ‘bedrock principle of equal moral worth of persons’, but that she has to rely on some more contentious moral principle in order to make sense of the cases she discusses (Lippert-Rasmussen 2014, 135). In addition, he worries that, in contrast to what Hellman asserts, we cannot explain the wrong of discrimination solely by reducing it to instances of demeaning action (cf. Lippert-Rasmussen 2014, 137). He is also puzzled by the fact that Hellman’s account does not allow for the ‘wrongful discrimination of nonpersons’ (Lippert-Rasmussen 2014, 137) and by her ‘hierarchy requirement’ (Lippert-Rasmussen 2014, 138), according to which only people with social status and power can demean others. All of these worries pertain to Hellman’s specific version of an expressive conception, either because they refer to the hierarchy requirement other versions of an expressive conception (such as, for instance, mine) do without or because they focus on Hellman’s particular understanding of moral standing or on how she conceives of the relation between demeaning action and discrimination. Therefore, I do not need to address any of these worries here to defend my own version of an expressive conception. A different worry which pertains to any expressive conception of disrespect (mine included) has been presented by Thomsen when he wonders ‘why it should be wrong, in and of itself, to express a false belief’ (2017). Luckily, I have already addressed this in detail in section 4, where I discuss the risk of causing moral confusion.

21 This worry is the driving force behind Ekins’ critique of Anderson’s and Pildes’ account of expressive action, cf. (Ekins 2012) and footnote 15 in this article.