37.1459, FYI: STAL Seminar: APRIL 20, 14:30 CEST: Robin Jeshion, "What Is Wrong with Slurs?"

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LINGUIST List: Vol-37-1459. Wed Apr 15 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.1459, FYI: STAL Seminar: APRIL 20, 14:30 CEST: Robin Jeshion, "What Is Wrong with Slurs?"

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Date: 15-Apr-2026
From: Dan Zeman [danczeman at gmail.com]
Subject: Reminder: STAL Seminar: APRIL 20, 14:30 CEST: Robin Jeshion, "What Is Wrong with Slurs?"


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 sixth 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 Summer Time (CEST), 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 stalnetwork at gmail.com 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.

Linguistic Field(s): Philosophy of Language
                     Pragmatics
                     Semantics




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