What Is Wrong with Slurs?

Robin Jeshion (University of Southern California)

The Slurring Terms Across Languages (STAL) network (https://sites.google.com/view/stalnetwork/home), an international and interdisciplinary network whose primary aim is to promote work on slurs, pejoratives, expressives and evaluative terms from less studied languages, invites you to the seventh talk of the 2025-2026 academic year. The invited speaker is Robin Jeshion (University of Southern California), who will give a talk entitled "What Is Wrong with Slurs?" (see the abstract below). The event will take place online on Monday, APRIL 20, 14:30-16:00 Central European Time (CET), and is part of the of STAL network seminar series (program here: https://sites.google.com/view/stalnetwork/seminar). If you want to participate, please write to [email protected] for the Zoom link.

All welcome!

ABSTRACT:

Many forms of verbal discourse are dangerous and cause harm, yet slurs are repeatedly distinguished for special moral censure, so much so that in many liberal democracies, their use is not legally protected. What is wrong with using them? In this paper, I aim to illuminate why slurs are rightly singled out for special, deeper social censure. Such acts do typically perform wrongs and cause numerous harms: they negatively stereotypes, reductively de-individualize, create and perpetuate social hierarchies and social exclusion, and undermine the target group’s reputation, as many researchers have shown. Nevertheless, I believe none of these captures the distinctive moral wrong in slurring speech acts. To illuminate their moral dimension, I take inspiration from moral-psychological work on degradation, humiliation, and dehumanization, as well as work on the distinctive wrong in interrogational torture. Sussman, Luban, and Kramer have argued that what is distinctively wrong with interrogational torture is not the extreme pain itself – though of course it is wrong for that. What makes torture distinctively wrong is it being used as a tool to humiliate by forcing the victim via their affective experience to, effectively, collude with the torturer, and do so against their will. To torture, the torturer ensures that the victim experiences their own agency as undermined, as ‘owned’ by the torturer. Building on these ideas, I argue that a prime source of the perniciousness in weapon uses of slurs that distinguishes them from other harmful types of speech parallels a deep wrong inherent to torture: the perversion and undermining of the slur’s target’s agency by forcing them to perceive and experience themselves as lesser humans. Weapon uses of slurs in the conditions of most vulnerability are best seen as micro-linguistic acts of torture. I close this paper by addressing the moral dimension of slur-mentions. I argue that there is a foundational moral wrong in slur-mentions, one that is parasitic on the moral wrong in using slurs. Slurs, the words themselves, function as representations of the perversion and undermining of their target group’s agency, akin to the way photographic representations of torture (and lynching and rape) function. In non-legal or non-education contexts, they can be abused, with the representations serving as additional symbolic humiliations and affronts to the human dignity of the target groups.