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The Etiquette of Equality

2023; Wiley; Volume: 51; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/papa.12230

1088-4963

Benjamin Eidelson,

Legal and Constitutional Studies

Imagine a classroom discussion of Lawrence v. Texas, the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark decision holding sodomy laws unconstitutional.1 One student argues that the Court's ruling was correct because a state may not base its criminal laws on bare moral disapproval. Another student picks up on Justice Scalia's dissenting opinion and responds that, if that principle were sound, polygamy and bestiality would also be immune from punishment.2 A third student chimes in to observe that those comparisons are offensive, even harmful, and urges or intimates that the second should apologize. What should happen next? One natural thought is that it depends on whether the offense that the third student took (or supposed others would take) is justified. That is evidently what Justice Scalia himself thought: faced with an openly gay student's similar request for an apology, Scalia rebuked the questioner for failing to grasp the reductio argument that he had actually made.3 Insofar as Scalia had “compared” same-sex intercourse and bestiality, after all, he claimed only that bans on these practices are alike by the lights of the principle that the Court invoked to invalidate sodomy laws. As Scalia correctly observed, that claim really has nothing to do with whether same-sex intercourse is morally tantamount to bestiality at all. Yet I suspect many will share my instinct that this point of logic is not all that matters, from a moral point of view, in the kind of encounter that I have described. For if many people confronted with Scalia's analogical argument will foreseeably take its expression as implying a moral equivalence between same-sex intercourse and bestiality—or, more simply, as an anti-gay insult—that fact alone seems to bear on whether, or at least how, one should voice the argument. And insofar as Scalia or the second student in our imagined dialogue predictably caused gay audience members to think they were being insulted (even, in a sense, mistakenly), and did so without good reason, taking offense at that behavior—under that revised description—could well be warranted after all. In a sense, the listener's interpretation, which starts off foreseeable but mistaken, seems to bounce off of the speaker and return to the listener vindicated in the end.4 This line of thought might suggest that the second student did act wrongly and should indeed apologize. But that is not a comfortable result either. Treating the student's mere invocation of the analogical argument as an insult will tend to ratify the misunderstanding of what they actually said, to discourage the expression of other ideas that could also be misunderstood, and to raise the overall “symbolic temperature” within the community.5 Indeed, a general practice of validating reactions such as the third student's here could well result in gay students facing more, rather than fewer, comments that they rightly take as offensive—at least in a belief- or evidence-relative sense of rightness—and thus leave them only worse off. So, again, what should the characters in this story do? I am tempted to say that, if you think the answer is obvious, one of us is missing something important. Of course, my real topic is not this vignette, but the formidable genre of moral and political disputes of which it is a characteristic if stylized example.6 Roughly speaking, that genre involves claims (1) in the normative register of respect and offense that are (2) linked to membership in a presently or historically subordinated social group and (3) occasioned by symbolic or expressive items or acts (flags, monuments, mascots, pronouns, analogies, tweets, “tropes,” and the like). Any descriptive account of our public discourse respecting matters of social equality today would have to give these claims a prominent place. In part because they are now so politicized, however, they can be exceptionally difficult to parse and evaluate on their own terms. In fact, it can be difficult to say anything at all about them without seeming to enlist on one or another side of a sharp conflict whose battle lines are already set.7 And yet I do not see how we could make sense of this important domain, or navigate conscientiously within it, without engaging both sympathetically and critically with efforts to recognize and redress claims of identity-related offense or dignitary harm. The premise of this essay is that we might find it easier to do that if we reframe the problems of identity-related offense in a somewhat broader perspective. Viewed abstractly, these cases pose a more general set of issues relating to the formulation, operation, and enforcement of conventions for communicating attitudes of respect and disrespect for other people. As several philosophers have recognized, such conventions form the substance of codes of etiquette, manners, or politeness; in social life writ large, we negotiate them constantly and rely upon them to meet a variety of essentially communicative obligations to one another. What is at work in encounters such as the classroom discussion that I just sketched, I will suggest here, is a communicative apparatus of the same fundamental kind—an “etiquette of equality” that specifies what the public expression of certain broadly egalitarian attitudes, in particular, shall be taken to require and forbid. Understanding the problem in those terms clarifies the valuable functions that the norms at issue may serve and makes it easy to see why, even though these norms may be quite arbitrary in content, they have real moral weight.8 At the same time, this account casts in sharp relief the costs to which the same normative system can give rise, including by the lights of what seem its worthiest aims. By demanding ever-greater investments in the communicative dimensions of respect, the etiquette of equality threatens to divert us from, or even impede, the ambition of constructing a social order in which all are actually treated as equals. With these ends in view, I begin in Sections II and III by sketching the moral functions of conventions of etiquette or politeness in general and of the etiquette of equality in particular. In Sections IV through VI, I then proceed to unpack three problematic, interconnected features of this distinctive etiquette regime: (1) the costly and potentially self-defeating overdetermination of relevant signals; (2) a recursive tendency toward inflation in respect's demands; and (3) a related set of incentives for testing, and then affirming, a group's status through the assertion and remediation of offense. Taken together, I suggest, these add up to a powerful indictment of the etiquette of equality as practiced today—but one fully consistent with recognizing the value of its aspirations and even the genuine normative force of its demands. I then conclude in Section VII by reflecting on the dilemma with which this indictment leaves us. In short, there may often be a powerful moral case for each of us as individuals to act in ways that our community's operative respect norms demand, even if we believe both that the norms themselves are in need of reform and that our collective observance of them harmfully fuels and entrenches them. The reason is that, for the most part, our individual choices simply have too little effect on what the norms will be in the future to outweigh the immediate effects that those same choices have in light of what the norms already are. I doubt that this predicament has any fully satisfactory solution. But I think it counsels an ambivalence about the etiquette of equality that neither its enthusiasts nor its critics have tended to cultivate or express, and I think there is some reason to hope that expressing and thereby normalizing such ambivalence might itself go some way toward reconciling our conflicting obligations in this domain. Let me start with a claim that I hope will be uncontroversial: people have an important interest in others' recognition of their status as equal members of the communities that structure their lives. The full satisfaction of this interest, moreover, requires not only that others in fact hold certain attitudes, but that a person be made aware of others' regard as well.9 That second, public or communicative dimension of the interest in recognition will prove especially important here, so we should pause at the outset to take stock of its grounds and weight. Two principal bases for the value of knowing of others' respect suggest themselves. First, the epistemic pillars of a person's self-respect could well erode without reason to believe that others consider them respect-worthy as well.10 Second, and in any event, the assurance of others' respect is often essential if a person is to enjoy genuine opportunities to share in the benefits of social cooperation. The litany of indignities and anxieties recounted in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” makes both of these points vivid. Black people in the Jim Crow South, King explained, were “forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’” engendered by others' withholding of the usual signs of respect.11 Meanwhile, the same lack of assurance about their standing in the eyes of others consigned them to “living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next,” be it a denial of a needed service, a public humiliation, or outright violence.12 The conditions that King described were extreme, of course, but the underlying concerns here apply more generally. If a community is to support its members' self-respect and warrant them in incurring the vulnerabilities inherent in social intercourse, it will have to make mutual respect a salient element of the publicly recognized common ground.13 But how can that collective, communicative obligation be discharged? Ideally, we would want some coordinated social practice that makes the signaling of mutual regard routine, manageable, and predictable. Such a practice should afford ample occasions for communicating the relevant assurances about our own attitudes—so that, in Jeremy Waldron's phrase, each of us is “visibly impressed by signs of one another's commitment” to respecting our dignity.14 But at the same time, a suitable practice should allow us to express these attitudes en passant, without constantly derailing the purposive activities that bring us into contact with one another in the first place. What we would want, in other words, is a “recognized social currency that symbolically operates as thoughtfulness but simultaneously alleviates its strains.”15 As several philosophers have observed, “etiquette,” in the sense of conventional rules of politeness or courtesy, is the social practice that best answers to this description.16 I hasten to add that not everything that goes by that name is squarely relevant here.17 But many etiquette norms (and by many estimations, the most important ones) are concerned precisely with the routinized expression of attitudes toward other people. We have norms about the appropriate manner and occasions for expressing gratitude and deference, about what to say in case of an interruption or collision, about how to issue commands and make requests, about greetings, even about where we direct our gaze—and, of course, about much more besides.18 As Sarah Buss observes, the combined effect of all of these norms is to ensure that there are “many occasions on which there is something rather particular people must be sure to do in order to be polite to one another.”19 And in placing these demands on us, the norms thus give us many opportunities for, “in effect, saying ‘I respect you,’ ‘I acknowledge your dignity,’”20 through the simple act of complying. As long as certain behaviors are generally understood as appropriate when it comes to persons owed respect, after all, we can express respect for someone simply by visibly including them within the class of beings to whom we evidently take those standard-issue obligations to run. We are thus relieved of the practical burdens and game-theoretic conjectures that successfully communicating appropriate attitudes to a host of other people, each perhaps with their own beliefs about how respectful people tend to behave, could otherwise demand of us. At the same time, threading these practices through our interactions can serve to inculcate the very attitudes that we are being enjoined to express, as well as the more general sensitivity to the perceptions and interests of others that underwrites the injunction to publicly express them.21 The price of enjoying these opportunities for signaling respect through politeness, of course, is that we will also signal something when we fail to use them. In particular, omitting some standard respect-communicating performance, and especially seeming to do so purposely, will naturally bear the opposite meaning—not because the forgone behavior is beneficial in itself, but because of the valued message that is being withheld, and thereby inverted. This is why refusing to address Black people with standard honorifics, such as “the respected title ‘Mrs.,’” was one of the routinized forms of insult that King described.22 Or for a more pedestrian example, consider someone who wears bright, colorful clothes to a typical American funeral.23 Why is that disrespectful of the bereaved family? The core of the answer is simply that a prevailing convention makes wearing dark clothes at a funeral a means of expressing sadness or showing respect for those mourning the death. That convention allows people to express fitting attitudes, and in so doing, it inevitably creates opportunities (if one can call them that) for communicating opposite signals, through nonconformity, as well.24 We can now turn squarely to the thesis that ordinary etiquette, understood along the lines that I have just sketched, offers a valuable paradigm for understanding the problems of identity-related offense with which I began. The gist of that comparison will now be clear: in both contexts, we are concerned with the attitudes toward others that a person's behavior shows by the lights of some set of semiotic conventions, and with the moral implications that those meanings then have in light of (among other things) the interest in one another's recognition that I highlighted a moment ago. But in order to build out a more nuanced account of how the conventions of interest here function, it will help to start by considering the paradigm case of slur words specifically. If there is a distinctive etiquette of equality, after all, using a slur for a subordinated group would seem the quintessential violation of it—much as employing certain vulgarities would represent a paradigmatic violation of etiquette generally. And because I find Geoff Nunberg's recent account of the pragmatics of slurs particularly illuminating, I will use it to cast light on a wider class of identity-related affronts that appear to work in a similar way.25 Nunberg's view, in short, is that there is no difference in semantic content between slur words and their neutral counterparts (e.g., between “redskin” and “Indian”)—just as there is no such difference between “ain't” and “isn't,” or between “pulchritude” and “beauty.”26 Rather, the important differences within each of these pairs lie in the sorts of features that a dictionary would mark with labels alongside a definition: tags such as offensive, formal, slang, archaic, and the like. These bits of “lexical metadata” capture sociolinguistic facts—facts about who uses the words at issue, or the discourses to which they belong, not about what the words themselves mean.27 The special effect of any given person's using a slur is then achieved through a kind of “‘affiliatory’ speech act”: the speaker signals or declares, through their use of one term rather than another, membership in or solidarity with the community whose word of choice it already is.28 Thus, as Nunberg sums up his view, “racists don't use slurs because they're derogative; slurs are derogative because they're the words that racists use.”29 This analysis directly and convincingly explains the mechanism of offense in one familiar class of cases. Suppose, for instance, that I describe Obergefell v. Hodges to students as the case in which the Supreme Court recognized a right to “homosexual marriage.” Many of them would be troubled by that characterization today, even though their predecessors would have taken the same phrase as essentially a neutral descriptor not long ago. Why is that? Well, the words “gay” and “homosexual” may be effectively synonymous, but “homosexual” was the default word within a particular time-bound linguistic community, and my pointed choice to deviate from the default word in my linguistic community (“gay”) in favor of that alternative would signal a desire to evoke or associate myself with the prevailing attitudes of that past community, rather than those of my own, toward the subject at issue.30 In other words, my word choice would trigger what Nunberg calls a “ventriloquistic implicature.”31 Students would thus take offense at my word choice because they would take it as a statement or indication that I view gay people with the once-standard disdain.32 And their evidence might well warrant that inference on their part, even though drawing the same inference from the same utterance at some earlier time would have been unreasonable.33 This is a good start, but the key to mapping the etiquette of equality is recognizing that we can generalize the same fundamental analysis well beyond matters of word choice. Much as an actual dictionary might now tag “homosexual” with archaic or offensive, I want to suggest, we all walk around with a kind of mental lexicon that attaches similar metadata tags, not only to words, but to myriad other abstract items as well. Consider again the allegedly offensive reductio argument for the constitutionality of sodomy laws with which I began. If “comparing” same-sex intercourse to bestiality—in the very thin sense of asserting that the two are alike by the lights of some principle—is offensive, it seems to be so in much the same way that using the word “homosexual” now is. At least in the minds of many, that is, the speech act of drawing this “comparison” is itself an item in the relevant sociolinguistic lexicon (where, in effect, it is marked as homophobic). If slurs are the words that racists use, we might say, then offensive comparisons are the comparisons that homophobes make. In fact, some universities and advocacy groups now distribute manuals or glossaries that make this “lexicon” metaphor quite literal, systematically mapping utterances to the insulting content they are apt to convey.34 These documents can be understood as modern etiquette guides, differing more in focus than in nature from those once published by Judith Martin or Emily Post. They simultaneously describe and prescribe the metadata associated with particular act-types, with a view to facilitating the predictable communication of respectful attitudes and the avoidance of offense within a particular domain. What bounds and distinguishes the etiquette of equality, at least as I intend the concept, is thus mainly the set of attitudes whose expression it governs (or, put differently, the particular metadata fields that it encodes).35 Admittedly, just how to characterize or itemize the attitudes that belong under this shared umbrella is not obvious, and the bounds of the “etiquette of equality” will not be well-specified without such an account. (Even my choice to foreground “equality” as the unifying theme undoubtedly reflects a certain point of view.) Racism and anti-racism would be natural paradigms of the relevant sort of attitudes, for example, except that these notions lack agreed referents.36 Still, the general outlines of the relevant domain are clear enough to make the concept a useful one, and I will take the following sketch as a starting point. First, there are derogative attitudes and stereotypes associated with particular subordinated social groups, and the etiquette of equality specifies how to avoid expressing or affirming those attitudes or ideas.37 Second, much as acting politely not only can avert offense but also can convey affirmative acknowledgment, the etiquette of equality specifies how to affirmatively signal one's disavowal of the same disrespectful contents (and, perhaps, of the unjust conditions with which they are linked).38 It makes sense that we would have a distinct set of conventions geared to these purposes. Most importantly, against a backdrop of stigma and pejorative stereotyping, it would be unrealistic to rely on the universal baseline etiquette of “please” and “thank you” alone to meet the communicative obligations sketched in Section II. When people have particular cause for concern about their status, more targeted evidence of respect will presumably be needed to provide the same quantum of assurance.39 So, for example, etiquette-like norms that designate particular terms as respectful create valuable occasions for demonstrating respect for members of the named groups (and, fittingly, for doing so when their group membership is conversationally salient). When some type of expression is already often linked to an objectionable attitude, moreover, etiquette-like norms that effectively codify this connection can discourage the relevant behavior and relieve members of subordinated groups of some of the fraught ambiguity that they otherwise face when it occurs. And while both of these explanations posit a function (congruent with the functions of etiquette writ large) served by identity-tailored etiquette norms, such norms are also apt to develop as byproducts of efforts to improve our thought and talk in other respects. The basic reason for favoring “enslaved person” over “slave” might be that simple nouns predispose us to essentialist thinking, for instance, but one effect of efforts to revise our practices accordingly has been to render the use of “slave” problematic on account of its changed sociolinguistic metadata, too.40 This portrait of the etiquette of equality casts it, like etiquette generally, in a broadly favorable light. A dedicated system for conspicuously registering one's respect for members of socially subordinated groups, and avoiding signaling otherwise, seems a natural adaptation to a social context in which such respect cannot be taken for granted. And once we frame the issue that way, it seems clear that those who chafe at so-called “woke” norms on the ground that they are capricious or unjustified—who object, say, that there is nothing intrinsically disrespectful about referring to “the blacks,” or asking where a person of apparent Asian ancestry is from, and so forth—are often just missing the point. There is nothing intrinsically objectionable about wearing bright colors to a funeral either, but you still shouldn't do it. If an etiquette geared specifically to communicating respect for members of subordinated groups represents a logical extension of etiquette in general, it cannot be criticized simply for functioning as other codes of etiquette do. Even if one doubts the value of having these norms, moreover, that is no more a moral license for flouting them, without regard for harmful and eminently predictable consequences of doing so, in this context than in any other.41 And yet it seems clear that the ongoing elaboration of this etiquette and the mounting attention paid to it are also shaping our practices for communicating respect, and the broader communicative climate we inhabit, in ways that can be problematic—or, at least, that carry significant costs alongside their benefits. Those costs are likely to be exacerbated if those of us implicated in different ways in these processes lack a clear sense of what is happening. Given the complexity of the phenomena and the staggering variety of cases, I disavow any pretension to comprehensiveness here. But over the next three sections, I will turn to tracing three such processes that seem particularly important and to drawing out some of the challenges characteristic of each. Many of our ordinary etiquette conventions—such as the rituals of saying “please” and “thank you”—are notable for their simplicity and very broad uptake. Because these conventions are so widely embraced (even if inconsistently observed), they effectively lack what Nunberg calls a provenance: a social group whose members, recognizing a common stake in having a shared linguistic device for some purpose, coin or converge on a convention that they are then taken to “own.”42 That is part of the reason that the observance of these norms generally cannot communicate anything beyond the bare acknowledgment (“I respect you”) that Buss persuasively depicts as the special province of politeness.43 To act as our most familiar politeness conventions prescribe is usually to brand oneself as, at most, one of “the polite.” The etiquette of equality is plainly different in this regard. To state the obvious, the people most invested in lacing their expression with special acknowledgment of the standing of members of subordinated groups are not an otherwise-random collection of speakers. And the usages and norms on which they converge are thus inevitably colored by that recognizable cultural and political provenance. Indeed, this seems central to how those practices serve their communicative functions. Just as racial slurs derogate by pointedly invoking the linguistic conventions of racists, many of the newly favored linguistic practices seem to show respect in a parallel (but opposite) way: by pointedly invoking the conventions prevailing among progressive anti-racists who have invested these usages with their own attitudes toward the subjects at issue.44 If “the import of [slurs] is always mediated by the interests and self-conception of the specific communities that coin and own them,” as Nunberg forcefully argues,45 then we should expect the same to be true of what we might call “anti-slurs”—words or word forms, such as the capitalized “Black,” that serve largely to give those with egalitarian views their own distinctive vocabulary for speaking about the same subjects. Unlike classic gestures of politeness, therefore, making use of these new etiquette conventions communicates a meaningful social affiliation with—perhaps membership in, perhaps deference to—a distinct discursive community. But in light of the fuzziness and flux of the social phenomena that characterize this domain, it seems inevitable that different people will often have different understandings of just who “owns” the convention, of what attitudes those people characteristically have, or of which of their attitudes are sufficiently germane to any given one of “their” symbols as to contribute to the meaning of a person's choice to deploy it. As a result, different people will necessarily also have different understandings of the meaning with which the relevant affiliatory speech act (the “anti-slur”) invests a speaker's own expression. Indeed, even one person, recognizing that all of the considerations just mentioned involve matters of degree, will reasonably take such an act of ventriloquism to impart multiple resonances of variable strengths. The consequence of all this is that the meaning of the relevant act-type, in the sense of the attitudes a person is reasonably taken to express by performing it, will often be overdetermined.46 By way of analogy, consider wearing a flag pin in the United States—a symbolic act whose meaning is overdetermined, I think, in much the same way.47 At one level, wearing the pin is naturally taken simply to express one's identification with, pride in, or commitment to the United States. That is the strand of meaning that most closely resembles the semantic content of a word—the “official” meaning of the behavior by the operative convention's own lights. Yet it is a plain social fact that those who use that particular device to express that content today tend also to hold a particular, politically conservative conception of what patriotism demands. For me to wear the pin could thus furnish evidence about my views on any number of issues—that I favor the mandatory pledge of allegiance in schools, that I disapprove of the athletes who have taken to kneeling during the pledge, and so on. An observer who thinks that I know this, moreover, may take my choice not only as evidence of these other views but as an effort on my part to signal them. So, if I do not want to evoke or endorse these additional resonances, that gives me a substantial reason for eschewing the flag pin—even if I feel a great deal of patriotism and would prefer, all else equal, to express it in this customary way. Moreover, that reason against wearing the pin has force even if patriotism, rightly conceived, does not actually entail any of these conservative ideological commitments, even if my audience does not think that it does, and even if many who wear flag pins sincerely intend by that action to express patriotism as such and nothing more. Perhaps most importantly, this metadata-based reason for eschewing the pin retains its force even if my doing so might itself read to some—in light of their own understandings of the relevant metadata—as evincing a lack of patriotism on my part. In that unhappy event, I will find myself in an expressive double-bind, and I will simply have to weigh the relative costs, in the context at hand, of the different ways of being misunderstood. Many of the practices prescribed by the etiquette of equality are overdetermined, thanks to their salient but messy provenances, in the same sense. Although they may reasonably be viewed and held out by some as thin and undemanding signals of respect—as ways of acknowledging the equal standing of members of subordinated groups, of av