THE ETHICS OF INSULTS
A Thesis
Presented to
The Faculty of Graduate Studies
of
The University of Guelph
by
JUSTIN CARTER
In partial fulfilment of requirements
for the degree of
Master of Arts
June, 2011
©Justin Carter, 2011 Library and Archives Bibliotheque et 1*1 Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de I'edition
395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington OttawaONK1A0N4 OttawaONK1A0N4 Canada Canada
Your file Votre rStirence ISBN: 978-0-494-82803-8 Our file Notre r6f6rence ISBN: 978-0-494-82803-8
NOTICE: AVIS:
The author has granted a non L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive exclusive license allowing Library and permettant a la Bibliotheque et Archives Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public communicate to the public by par telecommunication ou par I'lntemet, preter, telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des theses partout dans le loan, distribute and sell theses monde, a des fins commerciaies ou autres, sur worldwide, for commercial or non support microforme, papier, electronique et/ou commercial purposes, in microform, autres formats. paper, electronic and/or any other formats.
The author retains copyright L'auteur conserve la propriete du droit d'auteur ownership and moral rights in this et des droits moraux qui protege cette these. Ni thesis. Neither the thesis nor la these ni des extraits substantiels de celle-ci substantial extracts from it may be ne doivent etre imprimes ou autrement printed or otherwise reproduced reproduits sans son autorisation. without the author's permission.
In compliance with the Canadian Conformement a la loi canadienne sur la Privacy Act some supporting forms protection de la vie privee, quelques may have been removed from this formulaires secondaires ont ete enleves de thesis. cette these.
While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires aient inclus dans in the document page count, their la pagination, il n'y aura aucun contenu removal does not represent any loss manquant. of content from the thesis.
1+1 Canada ABSTRACT
THE ETHICS OF INSULTS
Justin Carter Advisor: University of Guelph, 2011 Professor Jean Harvey
Insults are used in all cultures and yet they suffer from a lack of critical investigation. This thesis develops some general concepts with which to organize and explain various different types of insults by distinguishing between conventional, unconventional, sanctioned, and unsanctioned insults. Some types of insults can be used in argumentative settings where the goal is to dismiss claims which do not deserve respect. There are situations in which it is morally acceptable to use these types of insults.
While insults may often cause harm, there are also uses for insults which may bring about goods. One such good is the occasional ability of insults to be an effective means of dismissing oppressive claims and defending the oppressed. Some situations in which oppressive claims are made against a person or group may warrant the use of dismissive arguments, including insults. TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 1: An Explanation of Insults 1 Introduction 1 Sanctioned Insults 3 Unsanctioned Insults 10 Conventional and Unconventional Insults 15 Non-Verbal Insults 22 Feeling vs. Being Insulted 25 Relationships and Insults 29 Conclusion 31
Chapter 2: Insults as Arguments 32 Introduction 32 The Harm of Insults 32 Insults as Fallacies 34 The Context of an Argument 35 The Context of an Argument: Background 38 The Context of an Argument: Audience 41 Background and Audience: An Example 44 Audience Assumptions and Arguments 48 Audience Assumptions and Insults 51 Insults as Arguments 53 Respect for Claims 56 Critique vs. Dismissal 58
Chapter 3: Jerome Neu and Thomas Conley 62 Introduction 62 Jerome Neu: Where is the Philosophy? 63 Jerome Neu: Individualism 66 Jerome Neu and Thomas Conley on the "Shakespeare Insult Kit" 69 Thomas Conley's Rhetoric of Insult: Situation is Everything 71 Thomas Conley: Identification 75 Thomas Conley: Malign and Benign Insults 77
Chapter 4: Moral Arguments for the Use of Insults 80 Introduction 80 The Good of Insults 80
l Competing Moral Commitments 84 Insults and Oppression 86 When Insults Should be Used 90 Insults and Respect 98 Extra Obligations to Use Insults 104 Conclusion 109
REFERENCES 111
11 Chapter 1: An Explanation of Insults
Introduction
A woman at a social function notices the presence of a gentleman who had committed a grave indiscretion against her on the previous day. He notices her from across the room, walks up to her and bows politely as the rules of etiquette demand. The woman gives him nothing but a blank stare of refusal and walks away. The crowd of invitees to the party notice this exchange and they are utterly shocked by what they have seen as the gentleman flushes with embarrassment at the extreme insult he has deservedly received. Not only has the woman insulted him directly through use of the "cut direct", she has also made it clear to all others present at the event that he warrants such a stunning rebuke, though the reason may be unknown. The cut direct sends a message to all others present at the event that some grave moral wrong has been committed by this individual. Others may distance themselves from the gentleman and his damaged reputation, or gossip to acquaintances about the event at a later time. The insult exerts social force on a complex network of relationships that extends from the two people directly involved. That social force comes from the common understanding of what the cut direct means and the rules that govern its use in society.
Such a scene may seem strange these days. The "cut direct" is certainly still used, but the conventional understanding of its meaning and the rules regarding its use have been softened. In a moment of anger following an argument I might "cut" a colleague, only to apologize and reconcile an hour or two later. The cut may not carry the same sense of severity that it once held. If I use another type of insult, the situation may be
1 quite different and yet the insult might still be intended to state that "I am cutting all ties with you". Insults exist in all cultures and each language has a vast lexicon of abusive terms and gestures that can be used against others and serve to insult them.
Insults are not limited to words; the cut direct shows how a complete lack of speech or recognition can function as an insult. Various gestures, actions or omissions of action can just as readily be interpreted as insulting and they may be used intentionally by others in order to insult. It may also be the case that a slip of the tongue, an ill-placed comment or a foolish action can insult unintentionally. Collections of such insults have been compiled in books and journals. A cursory glance through Maledicta: The
InternationalJournal of Verbal Aggression, for instance, reveals abusive and insulting words and phrases in dozens of different languages from various different historical periods. These insults range from the conventional insults that are commonly used in a language or culture to new and genuinely creative speech acts directed at particular people in response to specific background events.
It is curious that such a widely used form of expression has received so little critical attention. It may seem as though nothing positive can be said about insults and that nothing productive might come from studying them. Perhaps insults are morally unacceptable in all cases and if they are used, then an apology must surely be due to the victim. Jerome Neu, in Sticks and Stones: The Philosophy of Insults, suggests exactly this position in the final chapter of his book, which deals with forgiveness1. Though Neu's treatment of forgiveness at the end of his book is general and does not explicitly state that all insults require forgiveness, he strongly suggests a necessary connection between an insult being given and some kind of forgiveness being due. The only exception cases
2 Neu explicitly admits are those where the insult is unintentional and does not betray some malicious intent or opinion. To assume that almost all insults are morally unacceptable or call for apology from the insulter and some sort of forgiveness from the insulted goes too far. Insults are extremely diverse and if we hope to understand them we should draw some basic distinctions between types of insults that will allow us to appreciate their richness and understand some of their more subtle features.
Sanctioned Insults
During the 2006 midterm elections, comedian Stephen Colbert was invited to be the featured entertainer at a White House Correspondents' Association Dinner. Colbert performed a satirical speech repeatedly lampooning and insulting President Bush, a man sitting a mere two seats away from the podium. Much of the speech is addressed directly to President Bush and contains such brilliant examples of satire as:
Now, I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32 percent approval rating. But guys like us; we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in "reality". And reality has a well-known liberal bias ... Sir, pay no attention to the people who say the glass is half empty, because 32 percent means it's two-thirds empty. There's still some liquid in that glass, is my point. But I wouldn't drink it. The last third is usually backwash.2
For the duration of the performance President Bush sat, watched, laughed at some of the jokes, and shook Colbert's hand at the conclusion of the speech. This is a prime example of a "roast", a kind of comedy performance in which a comedian is expected to use insults and put-downs against a famous target. In this case the insults and vituperation were sanctioned by the audience and the target of the roast. In a roast, insults are an expected part of the performance and both the audience members and the person being roasted are expected to either politely accept the insults or enjoy them for
3 their creativity and comedic value. In a different context the insults could easily be understood as aiming to offend or harm the target, but in sanctioned situations we generally do not understand them in this way. The insults may still result in hurt feelings for the person being insulted, but they do not have the right to respond or express outrage over having been insulted. The social situation is such that they must accept the proceedings and they may lose face if they react negatively (at least in public).
If I am the subject of a roast and I express that I took offence, it may be an indication that I take myself too seriously. Not feeling insulted during a roast does not require the peculiar character trait of being impervious to insult but simply the recognition that these particular insults should be taken with a degree of levity. They are not meant seriously.
Sanctioned insults are those that a particular cultural group identifies as being non-offensive and acceptable when used in certain contexts, such as roasts. It is acceptable to enjoy the use of insults in this context because no one is really being harmed or offended and all the participants, including the person being insulted, consent to the activity and know what to expect. If the same insults are used outside the context in which the sanctioned insults normally occur, they may not be acceptable and the reaction to them by the insulted party and any audience present may be very different.
Sanctioned insults abound in our culture. People pay to see insult comics such as
Don Rickles and Lisa Lampanelli hurl abuse at them from the stage. At such an event you may be able to sit and watch as other audience members are insulted, but there is always the danger that the comedian will turn their attention to you. In such a case you should enjoy being part of the act since this is exactly what you have paid for and should
4 expect. Even in cases where the comedians are not specifically insult comics, it is generally expected that the comedian may justifiably insult a member of the audience who engages in "heckling" by yelling at the comedian, or engaging in some other form of disruptive behaviour during the act.
Comedians have developed a sort of group defence against heckling. In "The
Stand-Up Comedian's Response to the Heckler" Andrew Conway states that borrowing jokes is normally an unacceptable practice for comedians, but in the case of insults and jokes borrowed from other comedians to be used against hecklers, the practice is acceptable . The comedian may attack the intelligence of a heckler by stating "there's a guy who'll never get cancer of the brain"4 or impugning their appearance by claiming that
"you're the only case where the baby died and the afterbirth lived" . The purpose of such an insult is to embarrass or abuse the heckler until they choose to be quiet or leave the audience so that the act may continue. The heckler receiving the insult may feel hurt by what has been said, but is not considered a victim or due an apology from the comedian who is doing exactly what their job entails. While this permissibility applies in most cases, there are exceptions to this general trend.
Despite the fact that the general standards for sanctioned insults are different in a comedy show setting than they would be elsewhere, this does not imply that anything goes. Though not explicitly recorded, there are still rules that dictate what kind of insults are sanctioned and these rules maintain the acceptable practice of use for insults in comedy shows. Certain types of insults such as racial slurs would likely invite the protest of the audience and would be both unsanctioned and morally unacceptable. The comedian Michael Richards discovered such a limit while performing a stand-up routine
5 in 2006. In responding to a pair of black hecklers, Richards employed racial epithets and references to lynching. His response later elicited several public apologies from the comedian on national television and he has retired from stand-up comedy altogether, partly as a result of the incident. In this case the hecklers are morally justified in their outrage and the apology is required. The use of racial slurs may be one type of unacceptable insult that receives far more attention than other kinds. It is not clear that a sexist insult directed at a female heckler would have received the same kind of reaction and this may indicate the particular abhorrence of racial insults in some cultures.
With the exception of such extreme examples, insults against hecklers serve to protect the interests of the larger group by allowing the normal comedy act to continue.
So long as the rules governing the exchange are maintained by avoiding certain types of insults or certain subjects, the insults can be considered a sanctioned and sometimes a morally acceptable practice.
One interesting variety of sanctioned insult is a type of verbal duelling match called "The Dozens" which is practiced mainly by inner-city black youth in the United
States. William Labov described the Dozens in Language in the Inner City as a game where two adolescents engage in a ritualized exchange of insults in front of a group of peers who witness the exchange, judge the various insults through laughter and decide upon the ultimate victor in the contest6. A contestant who is losing badly by choosing poor rejoinders or simply failing to come up with a response may sanction other members of the audience to join in and gang up against the failing participant . The stock of acceptable insults is severely limited since the participants are not allowed to come up with novel insults8 but rather rely on a memorized set of insults, often in the form of
6 rhymed couplets. Youths who play the game may spend their time producing new insults and rhymes when the game is not being played, but the game itself is based on rote memorization of existing insults. The victor is generally the participant who has access to a larger stock of memorized insults and can produce more peer-accepted rejoinders than their opponent. The game comes off as a kind of stylized verbal duel with a call- and-response structure. Certain specific calls require certain equally specific responses.
The standard response to a player opening with the insult "Your momma drink pee?" is to reply with "Your father eat shit".9
These exchanges are understood as rituals by the competitors and this ritualistic element establishes a distance between the claims made in the insults and the reality of the situation. A documented exchange instigated by the insult "Your mother's a duck" does not result in violence between the participants because it is identified by the person to whom it is directed as a ritual insult signalling a challenge to play . The content itself is absurd. No human's mother is a duck. This absurdity allows a symbolic distance to form between the target of the insults and the reality of the situation such that the competitors are safe from actual offense. The entire game is highly stylized and this allows the participants to perform verbal acts that hold the danger of eliciting a physical confrontation if they are used outside of the game. It is this stylized dimension that allows these insults to be sanctioned, at least within the particular social groups in which they are constructed and used. The participants all understand what playing the dozens entails and they know which insults are parts of the game and which are not.
William Labov, a linguist who studied adolescents playing the dozens, notes that different groups in different areas have unique sets of insults which are involved in the
7 dozens and insults from one group are ineffective in other locations . This clarifies an important feature of sanctioned insults in general: the participants must know the rules that govern the use of a sanctioned insult within a given area and those rules must be observed. If I were to walk up to a random person on the street and say to them, "Your mother eats rat heads," the result may more likely be a contest of fists than a contest of wits, but someone familiar with the rules of the dozens within the right geographical area would understand it as an invitation to play the game.
It is equally probable that social sanction will be withdrawn if I use insults that are actually true in a game of the dozens. In one exchange recorded by Labov, a boy named Boot begins using insults involving true claims about the father of an opponent named David, but "Boot's insults do not draw much response from the others, and one can sense the group support ebbing for him"12. Once the rules that sanction the insult contest are transgressed, the group support disappears and Boot ends up looking malicious instead of witty.
From the examples above we may articulate the more general features of sanctioned insults. The sanctioning of an insult happens within specific situations and in specific places within some social group. The sanctions of the group in a game of the dozens extend no further than the area where the game is practiced. The sanctions of the comedy audience do not travel out the doors of the venue. As a general characteristic we can call this requirement of social sanction for a specific time or place to insult as the rule of situation. Certain types of insults that are not normally acceptable may be used only at specific locations and during certain events.
It is often the case that the social sanctions for insults have come about in order to
8 allow for some good that would otherwise be unavailable to a social group if it were the case that no insults were sanctioned. Some people enjoy nothing more than to be insulted and witness others being insulted at comedy shows. It is the social sanction that makes the otherwise impermissible statements of the comedian permissible in this specific setting and acts to bring a set of goods to the audience members: entertainment, laughter and excitement. While the exact purpose of the dozens is disputed among the various scholars who have studied it, the same general principle is likely true. Those who play the game do so because it brings about some good to those who choose to participate.
Sanctioned insults also have a rule of recognition. It would be senseless to have a social sanction for a specific kind of insult if it were impossible to recognize when that kind of insult was being used. The use of rhymed couplets in a game of the dozens is an obvious example of this since the linguistic convention clearly identifies the rhymed insult as being part of the game. One may also imagine two friends who have the habit of jokingly insulting each other as a greeting ("hey you old bastard!") while smiling or shaking hands. If the same insult was used without some other signal to indicate the intention of the speech, it would be impossible to determine whether the insult was eligible for sanction or not.
There may also be a rule of selection that determines which kinds of insults are acceptable within a sanctioned situation. When using racial slurs at his comedy show
Michael Richards got the rule of situation right, but the rule of selection wrong by choosing to use the kinds of insults that may be unacceptable regardless of the situation.
These rules of sanctioned insults function together as the social coding that surrounds the insults and regulates how and when they are used. The social coding is the
9 set of rules about situation, recognition and selection that allows us to judge when an insult is intentionally being used in a sanctioned manner and these rules are often internalized in people to the point where we don't notice that the social coding is there.
When I go to a comedy show I don't need to consciously review the rules to make sure that any insults used are sanctioned, I just know. An insult which meets the rules identified in the social coding will probably receive social sanction in a group that is aware of the social coding and an appropriate signal of assent, such as laughter, will be made.
Unsanctioned Insults
In our survey of the various different examples of sanctioned insults above we have noted the importance of "playing by the rules". The social sanction of an insult does not imply that there are no boundaries whatsoever. Sanctioned insults involve a set of rules that describe specific situations where insults may be used and those rules require the use of specific verbal actions such as the rhymed and memorized insults in the dozens. To leave this circumscribed zone is to court the danger of breaking the rules and moving into the realm of unsanctioned insults. This is true of the example of the cut direct with which we began. The act of completely and publicly severing all social ties with another person is still used today, but some of the overtones of insult have disappeared. Observing someone being cut at a social gathering may be seen as a private matter between people who might reconcile later. The overtone of the cut as a spectacle put on for observers may be absent from some current use, though use of the cut has not completely disappeared and it may be taken very seriously in some cases such as when
10 one public figure uses the cut against another public figure.
A modern cut may often be accomplished in the public space of a social networking website as opposed to occurring in a face to face confrontation and it may lack a physical audience to observe, discuss and report the event to others. In the 1922 etiquette manual, Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home, Emily Post describes the cut direct very differently from how we might view it today:
For one person to look directly at another and not acknowledge the other's bow is such a breach of civility that only an unforgivable misdemeanor can warrant the rebuke. Nor without the gravest cause may a lady "cut" a gentleman. But there are no circumstances under which a gentleman may "cut" any woman who, even by courtesy, can be called a lady.13
Post goes on to explain that the act is not only insulting to the man being cut, but also "embarrassing to every witness."1 According to Post, to cut someone for a minor slight or an absent-minded gesture would be a serious breach of etiquette. The cut is presented as a last-ditch manoeuvre where no arbitration between the parties is possible and the target of the cut must be publicly rebuked in front of others in order to send a message. This passage helpfully lays down the rules for the application of a cut; it is an explicit statement of a part of the social coding. In this case, the rules seek to safeguard the proper practice of this social manoeuvre by ruling out capricious use. The rules state that if one is a gentleman one may never cut a lady and if one is a lady a cut may only be performed under the most extreme of circumstances.
If a person were to start using the cut in order to express their displeasure at every possible slight, then they would not be sanctioned in its use. The result of unsanctioned use of the cut may be significant damage to one's relationships and social status. One who used the cut direct in such a frivolous way would no longer be considered part of polite society.
11 How often do we know what the rules are and when we might be breaking them?
In the case of the cut direct we have the aid of a book which describes the specific rules that one must observe. Some aspects of social coding may be communicated in this way.
Typically, the rules may already exist within the daily social practice of a community and are codified by a writer at a certain point. The codified version of the rules may then become a part of the general practice of people when they refer back to the work as the standard description of the rules from that point on.
However, recording and codification will not always result in that particular set of descriptions being used within the community. In the dozens, for instance, William
Labov observed and described an existing set of practices which were not explicitly circulated within the community of use and his book has not become a kind of "players manual" for the dozens in the way that Emily Post's Etiquette is a manual for proper social behaviour. No one goes to the library and takes out a copy of Labov's Language in the Inner City in order to learn how to properly play the dozens.
In many cases, the rules may not be found in a text or explicitly formulated by anyone in the community that observes them. The rules for the dozens involve the use of specific insults accepted by a social group in certain situations but it is unlikely that any single member alone would be able to come up with the comprehensive list and definitively state which insults are and are not acceptable. The same is true for the rules surrounding comedic responses to hecklers. Which insults fall within the rules and which do not? There is no book that will tell us which types of insults break the rules and it seems that this is necessarily so. The rules will be largely defined by the social mores of a particular community and audience. A crowd of white supremacists may see nothing
12 wrong with Michael Richards' use of lynching jokes when dealing with a heckler, while another audience would find the insults abhorrent. It will be necessary for the comedian to "read" the audience in order to determine what may or may not fall within the rules for a given group.
We must draw a distinction between two types of rules governing the use of insults: specific and general. The specific rules are the set of rules operating to sanction a specific insult situation (e.g. a game of the dozens, a comedy show); they are the rules of situation, recognition, and selection that we have described above. The specific rules are different from the general rules covering acceptable modes of expression more generally.
The general rules are the broader set of social mores within a given community. This is not to suggest that the general rules are held by all members of a community, they are the trends within a given community which may have widespread but not universal acceptance. For instance, the white supremacists who laugh at lynching jokes are a group which does not accept the trend against racist speech and humour. There may be many groups that accept certain trends and reject others.
A specific rule granting the acceptability of an insult or class of insults within a situation may not be accepted if it breaks one of the general rules that apply, assuming the audience is composed of people who accept and observe the moral trends which apply.
Michael Richards discovered this when he used a joke against a heckler that did not comport with the broader standards of the group he was dealing with. The specific rule of situation allows him to insult the heckler, but the general rule held by the audience proscribes the racial content of the insult. Specific rules are valid only insofar as they comport with the social mores of a given community and of the particular group hearing
13 the insult.
If an insult breaks a specific rule by using a type of insult that is not allowed or in a situation that is not acceptable, or when a general rule is broken by coming into conflict with social mores, then the insult is unsanctioned. If there is an audience, then social support may be withdrawn and the agent who breaks the rules may be insulted by those they have offended. At the very least, they will be rebuked or ignored.
Specific rules alone are insufficient for covering all the situations where insults may occur. It is obviously not the case that all unsanctioned insults are the result of social sanction having been withdrawn following the breaking of a specific rule. In the vast majority of situations involving unsanctioned insults there will not be a preceding sanctioned state and then a "crossing of the line" which results in sanction being withdrawn. Some insults and practices are unsanctioned from the start and there is no specific social coding to delimit what the acceptable practices are since there are no acceptable practices whatsoever. There is no social coding for how I should go about insulting a stranger on the street, nor is there social coding for how one should properly insult a partner or one's child, in order to make them cry. In such cases only general rules apply.
We must also be careful to avoid the position that the permissibility or impermissibility of insults can be described only by the reactions and expectations of a given social group. The fact that a group of white supremacists may find racial insults acceptable does nothing to establish the moral permissibility of those insults. The only thing that acceptance on the part of the white supremacists does is tell us that such insults will receive social sanction from a specific group which may not accept some of the
14 general trends in a community. It may also be the case that the general rules may be widely accepted by a group and yet be bad rules. Sanctioned and unsanctioned insults do not map onto morally acceptable and unacceptable insults. There are situations where sanctioned insults will be morally unacceptable and there may be some situations where unsanctioned are morally acceptable. The best that social sanction can do is to indicate trends in the social mores of a community and provide us with guidelines for what kinds of insults will and will not be accepted by a given group.
We might also imagine a society where all types of insults break the general rules such that there is a universal rule that "insults are always impermissible". Totally restricting the use of insults would be almost as bad as permitting types of insults that are morally wrong since such a restriction would prohibit the use of insults that bring about social goods. In a society which observed such restrictions, the entertainment goods of the comedy act would be impossible to experience, along with the sense of camaraderie that can develop among friends jokingly trading insults. There are more and deeper reasons for why a complete restriction of insult would be unacceptable and we will explore those reasons later on.
Conventional and Unconventional Insults
Insults are a form of communication and a primary goal of using an insult will be to have the recipient understand the meaning of what has been said. The social coding is important, but it is not the only factor involved in establishing the meaning of many insults. In many cases, the meaning of the insult relies on an accepted standard of use that acts as the interpretive background. Novel insults that lack such a background may
15 require more work to be understood. Deciphering the meaning of these novel insults will often involve considering their symbolic elements.
In Act 1, Scene 2 of Shakespeare's Henry V, The Dauphin sends the young King
Henry a gift of tennis balls with the intention to insult him. In the play, Henry responds
"We hope to make the sender blush at it" and indeed, at the later battle of Agincourt,
Henry and his army do make the French blush when they deliver a stunning defeat to a significantly larger French force. Although the gift itself is certainly not an actual historical event, but rather a fiction invented by Shakespeare, it is at least loosely based on a real historical meeting between the French and a group of English ambassadors sent to France by Henry V. At this meeting the French allegedly joke that they will send
Henry "little balls to play with and soft cushions to rest on until he should have grown to a man's strength" .
The brilliance of the Shakespearean version of the insult resides in the symbolic meaning behind the gift. A gift of tennis balls can be inoffensive or offensive, given the situation. There is nothing insulting about gifting tennis balls to a King if, for instance, he is a fan of tennis. The symbolic subtext of what this particular gift of tennis balls actually says may be: "you are a child. Here is something to play with while the adults deal with politics". The content and force of the insult are contained entirely in what the balls symbolize and understanding the meaning involves knowledge of the relationship between the monarchs at the time. When interpreting insults with a symbolic dimension such as this, it is often necessary to understand the situation and the relationships between individuals in order to understand the symbolic dimensions. The group which understands the symbolic meaning will often be limited in size.
16 Much like the Shakespearean example, we can see that there is a similar level of symbolic detail involved in the cut direct. The reason that such an insult was embarrassing even to people witnessing the insult is because the witnesses know exactly what the cut is intended to say, what the blank stare of refusal is intended to symbolize. It is likely that most modern people would probably recognize some significance behind someone performing a cut today, even without any direct knowledge of the cut through training in etiquette. The meaning of a cut can be rather obvious and admits of few other interpretations. If one former acquaintance rudely dismisses the welcoming gesture of another, the gesture may speak for itself and no further explanation is required. Other insults are not always so obvious.
The difference between the cut direct and the insult in Henry Fis that the former is a conventional insult and the latter is unconventional. Conventional insults are those words, gestures, and expressions that are generally considered to be insulting and are used by those intending to be insulting, within a given social group. We expect most people within a social group to be familiar with conventional insults and to be able to identify them for what they are if and when they are used. These are the "stock" insults of a given group. Such conventional insults may be used with little regard to the context of the statement or to the person being insulted.
Giving the finger, for example, is conventionally understood to be a sexual insult in Canada and may be coupled with an exclamation of "up yours!", but such a gesture would not be interpreted in the same way if it were performed in most parts of Asia where different conventional hand-gestures are understood to be insulting instead.
Conventional insults are often bound by location and time as well. Abusive terms and
17 gestures common to one area, culture or time may not have the same conventional usage as insults in other areas, cultures or times. This serves to illustrate the tremendous plasticity of the stock conventions which one might use to insult in a given place and time. Words and gestures that once served to insult others may be completely ineffective at a later time. Consider this exchange between Hal and Falstaff in Shakespeare's Henry
IV, Part I:
HAL: I'll be no longer guilty of this sin -this sanguine coward, this bed-presser, this horseback- breaker, this huge hill of flesh - FALSTAFF: 'Sblood, you starveling, you elf skin, you dried neat's tongue, you bull's pizzle, you stockfish. Oh, for breath to utter what is like thee! You tailor's yard, you sheat, you bow case, you vile standing tuck - (267ff)
We would need someone familiar with Shakespeare to even have a chance at insulting them by calling them a "tailor's yard". The terms being used here simply do not belong to the current lexicon of abusive terms that can be conventionally used in order the insult someone. Given the extreme number and the near boundless creativity of the insults present in Shakespeare's plays, it is likely that interpreting some of them requires some thought even from contemporaries of the playwright.
Some people seem to be true masters at the art of constructing novel insults and understanding them often requires the same interpretive resources we might apply when interpreting a poem or a piece of prose. These types of novel insults are unconventional insults. Such unconventional insults are often tailored to specific persons and purposes and many unconventional insults may not use any conventionally insulting words. To understand the meaning of an unconventional insult involves interpretation and this will often require knowledge of the background events, the person who is insulted, the relationship between the insulter and the insulted and other things.
There are far more possibilities for insult from unconventional expressions than
18 from the stock of conventional terms, which may be quite limited at any given time. In
Toward a Rhetoric of Insult, Thomas Conley noted the rather striking paucity of the conventional terms of abuse that his students knew when he conducted an informal survey and found that "the students came up with pretty much the same dozen or so terms that they agreed were insulting - and some of them could not even come up with ten terms!" This result contrasts with the sheer number of terms that have been used in an insulting manner at some point but are not a part of the current conventional lexicon.
Even a cursory scan of any volume of the journal Maledicta will reveal hundreds of insulting terms in English, French and various other languages. Conley also points to the
Dictionnaire des injures by Robert Edouard17 which contains nearly three thousand abusive and insulting French words. The total stock of possible terms that could be used for insults is much larger than the set of terms that will be in conventional circulation at any given time and neologisms may be added to the list when they become common currency. Old words can also retire from conventional use or be rehabilitated so that they no longer have the insulting meaning they used to. Conventional insults are a constantly shifting set of words and gestures but that set is relatively small at any one time.
To be insulting in conventional terms involves a lexical requirement: The terms that will be understood as conventionally insulting must belong to the current limited lexicon of insults which operate at a specific time and place. At present, everyone in
Canada will probably agree that calling someone an "idiot" is conventionally insulting and it would require very little in the way of interpretation for someone to understand the meaning of that expression. This requirement does not delimit the full domain of insults, but it identifies the set of insults that is most likely to be understood in common use.
19 The truly curious characteristic of insults is their plasticity. This plasticity means that the content and wording of an insult can range far beyond the conventional strictures of the lexical requirement. Any insults that do not meet this requirement will be unconventional. It is no surprise that unconventional insults will tend to be more complex than a simple statement of "asshole" or "jerk!" Forming an unconventional insult requires creativity and the more tailored the insult is to a specific person or group, the more effective it may be. It is no small wonder that writers, poets and playwrights seem to rank among the masters of unconventional insults. The insults that Colbert directed at President Bush in the roasting example above did not use any of the common terms of abuse. Colbert did not call Bush any names or use any terms that currently meet the lexical requirement. The force of the insult in the example above came from setting up expectations of a positive statement by using a cliche about thinking of a glass as "half full" and then promptly upsetting those expectations by calling the 32% of voters who approved of President Bush, "backwash". This can be interpreted as insulting both to
Bush and to his supporters but not because any of the words are on a conventional list of insults.
Colbert's insult also shows how the impact of an unconventional insult may be magnified by tailoring it to a particular target. President Bush is the only person the insult will work upon since he is the individual with a 32% approval rating. Using the same insult against a person who does not have an approval rating would make very little sense. This may help to explain why the conventional insults used in a game of the dozens are not taken seriously. The insults in the dozens are authored as responses to other memorized insults. They are not tailored towards a particular person but are
20 intended to be good responses to other statements. Both participants are "safe" from real insult if the rules are followed since distance can always be maintained between the participants and the content of the insults that are traded. The insults are like the pieces used in a board game. When playing a game of chess I do not get captured. The pawn that I am playing with is what gets captured.
This should not be taken to suggest that unconventional insults are impossible to categorize and completely devoid of rules. Conley, for instance, identifies a stock list of topics that were covered in Roman invective and shows that many of the topics are still used in Shakespeare and in more modern insults. Most of these stock topics are hardly surprising and many will seem very familiar. A partial list includes: physical appearance, eccentricity of dress, gluttony and drunkenness, unacceptable sexual conduct, oratorical ineptitude, and stupidity. There are conventional insults that cover many of these topics but a creatively tailored unconventional insult is likely to be much more biting or in the case of a roast, funnier. Various insults that Colbert used during the roast were clearly directed at the intelligence of President Bush, but they were all phrased in ways that specifically avoided being open to conventional understanding.
The use of unconventional insults does raise a problem for the targets of such insults. How do you know that you have been insulted? It is relatively easy to understand the intentions of someone who yells "fuck you!" It may be much harder to identify the intentions of someone using a more complex form of expression. Robert
Martin Adams provides an excellent example in Bad Mouth:
Dr Johnson, being rowed down the Thames by a sculler, was assailed from the shore (as custom then was) by a foulmouthed fellow with a very generous flow of invective. Having endured as much as a man decently could, he turned on the scurrilist and said loudly and deliberately, "Sir, your mother, under pretext of keeping a bawdy house, was a receiver of stolen goods."19
21 Adams muses that the target of this insult probably "took it home and thought about it for several weeks" before understanding what Dr. Johnson meant. It is likely that, given the nature of the exchange, the "scurrilist" would have at least been able to identify the intention to insult in the statement but the complexity of the insult requires some thought.
Unconventional insults can be opaque and the recipient(s) may not understand the full weight of the speech act until later, either because the content is convoluted and difficult to understand or because of problems of equivocation. Insulting words and phrases can be used in non-insulting fashions. For example, friends may refer to each other using a conventionally insulting term. Complex, unconventional insults might simply be mistaken for some other kind of statement. The target of an unconventional insult might just not understand it and there is nothing that can be done to avoid this potentiality.
Non-Verbal Insults
Cicero, a Roman lawyer and master of rhetoric, was assassinated by Mark
Anthony following the publication of a speech against Anthony containing various personal insults. When the head of Cicero was brought back to Anthony and displayed in the forum, the wife of one of Anthony's allies "pulled out the tongue, and pierced it with hairpins while muttering brutal insults over it" in a symbolic act of vengeance against his offensive speech. But poison tongues are not the only thing capable of expressing insults. One may insult without the use of spoken or written words.
While the previous examples we explored almost all deal with verbal insults, there
22 are various non-verbal insults ranging from simply "giving the finger" to the complex set of circumstances that may be involved in performing a cut. An important point to note about the cut direct is that it is, by definition, a completely non-verbal insult. The entire message of the insult is contained within the conventional understanding of the manoeuvre. The social coding of a roast or a game of the dozens tells us "do not take this too seriously, it's all in jest" while the social coding of a cut direct says exactly the opposite: "take this very seriously, I have been wronged by you." In non-verbal insults there is often an implicit verbal subtext which the action stands in for. When I perform a cut it is as if I am stating to the target, "I am cutting all ties with you. You have done me wrong." A strong message is contained within the socially coded actions of the cut direct which may affect the relationships that the victim has with other witnesses or those who hear about the cut later, but the cut itself does not involve any speech.
Some non-verbal insults may be more heavily constrained by conventional understandings of the gestures in a way that verbal insults are not. With a bit of effort I can come up with an unconventional insult that will be understood as an insult by most people who hear it. Coming up with an unconventional non-verbal insult would seem to be much more difficult. I can make any number of gestures with my arms or fingers in an attempt to insult someone, but it is far from certain that they will understand what I am trying to do. An insulting gift of tennis balls would also be misunderstood outside of certain specific situations. The reason for this difficulty arises from the "as if relationship between many non-verbal insults and their socially coded meanings. When I give the finger it is as if I am saying "up yours!" There is a distinctly linguistic element to many non-verbal insults that cannot easily be translated without conventional
23 guidelines. With unconventional verbal insults we often have other resources for deciphering their meaning. We can always look at the meaning of the words being used and try to interpret what the person is trying to say or we may have to ask someone else what they think.
This does not mean that unconventional non-verbal insults are impossible, but they will require more ingenuity. Non-verbal insults will often be constrained by conventional understandings since they will often require an "as if relationship to some other more explicit statement. An unconventional non-verbal insult may only be understood if it has some family relationship to an existing conventional non-verbal insult or uses explicit pantomime to act out whatever is trying to be expressed.
It may be objected that there are many forms of non-verbal insults that should be counted as conventional. Imitation of someone's behaviour, mannerisms, or facial expressions may be an example of a conventional non-verbal insult. While it may be true that the specific content of the imitation will be unconventional in the sense that it is constructed to affect a specific individual, the form of the non-verbal insult is still conventional in nature. The same conventional form can be applied to a great many people and yet the imitation may have much the same meaning to the audience. I may imitate the strange gait of several different people, but the conventional message can be communicated as the statement that "you have a funny walk".
We certainly have a rich set of movements, postures and facial expressions which can be used to insult and there are certainly cases where unconventional non-verbal insults may be constructed using this vocabulary. However, the majority of non-verbal insults will involve either conventionally understood gestures with some specific
24 meaning, such as giving the finger, or conventional forms, such as imitation.
Feeling vs. Being Insulted
We have all heard the expression "I have never felt so insulted in all my life" or perhaps the slight variant, "I have never been so insulted in all my life". Are these two statements saying the same thing? Is it the same thing to feel insulted and to be insulted?
We should reject the notion that to feel insulted is always to be insulted. The most basic way to demonstrate why we should reject this identification is to point out some basic counter-examples where feeling and being insulted are clearly two different things. For instance, when the insulting statement that I hear is not the statement that is actually uttered and I feel insulted entirely because of a misunderstanding which is soon cleared up by the person making the statement.
Our emotional reactions to offensive or aggressive language may also rest on a hair trigger and we might be quick to take umbrage against someone for something which no reasonable person, correctly hearing the statement or clearly seeing the gesture, will find insulting. A person may also be overly sensitive to even the smallest possibility of a slight and react before having fully understood what someone is trying to say. We should not say that such an overly sensitive person is actually being insulted.
Aside from cases of misinterpretation, failures of communication, and other situations in which the message is somehow lost in transmission, shouldn't we still say that to feel insulted is to be insulted, so long as the statement is clearly understood and the insulted party is not over-reacting? Perhaps we can look at the situation quantitatively by asking "how many people would feel insulted by this?" and then
25 determine some threshold below which insult should not be taken. If you felt insulted by a statement and enough other people would also feel insulted by it, then you have really been insulted. There is a serious problem with this response: it only adequately deals with conventional insults.
Conventional insults are generally taken to be understood as insulting by cultural groups and such insults would likely achieve the necessary numbers, but this doesn't tell us anything about conventional insults that we don't already know. It is akin to saying that conventional insults are insults because they are conventional and thus normally understood by most people in a certain group to be insults. This completely leaves out unconventional insults, many of which are tailored to specific people, based on their situation, personality, or some other feature of their life and such insults may be understood by very few.
An unconventional insult may be insulting to only one person, the person for whom that insult is specifically constructed. There are also insults that can be used against minorities which are truly insulting but only to the members of the target group.
This group may be composed of relatively few individuals compared to the larger cultural group they live in, or the group may be quite large. If only a small group finds a racially charged statement insulting, for instance, should we say that it is not actually insulting based on the fact that the much larger group would take no offense? No, we should not.
If we play this numbers game with unconventional insults, then we will often find ourselves with a very low number of potentially insulted parties (perhaps just one) and we will be forced to conclude that the insults are not really insults at all, since the great majority of people will not feel insulted.
26 If we remain committed to the quantitative approach, we will also have to deal with a further problem. It is very hard to determine what a principled cut-off point would be. If 51% of people do not find something insulting, is that enough? Why is a bare majority enough? The 49% remaining could represent a numerically large group of people. Even if we move to a situation where 99% of people do not find a statement insulting, why should even an overwhelming majority determine what is and is not insulting? We do not seem to do this with other emotional reactions. It would be very strange to tell someone not to be angry about something because most other people would not be. The reasons for emotional reactions can be intensely personal and may only make sense to an individual or a small group. The quantitative approach to determining when feeling insulted means being insulted will not work.
There is also the interesting case of a person who has a clearly insulting statement directed at them but does not feel insulted by it. Perhaps she has thick skin and is impervious to insult, maybe she doesn't care about being insulted because she doesn't respect the person making the statement and doesn't take it seriously, or perhaps she has some other reason. This person may still say that she is insulted, in the sense that she understands an insulting statement has been made, but she does not feel insulted by it.
Interpreting when an insult has been made is a highly contextual matter and it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to develop a litmus test based entirely on feeling, which we can apply to the multitude of possible insult situations. There are cases where one will feel insulted without being insulted, be insulted without feeling insulted, and cases where one will both be and feel insulted. There is no single determining factor for deciding where we might be in a particular case. We can look at a broader set of
27 contextual questions that will help us to make accurate identifications of when someone is being insulted. These are some good questions that could be asked, though the list is not exhaustive and not all of the questions point to necessary conditions:
• Was it the intention of the agent to insult? • Is it possible that the insult was unintentional? • Was the statement a conventional or unconventional insult? • If the statement was not a conventional insult, is the interpretation of the statement as an unconventional insult justified?
• If an audience was present, what was their reaction to the possible insult?
Some questions will be more important than others, given the situation and none will be decisive. If someone uses a conventional insult, then the most germane question may be "was it the intention of the agent to insult?" If my friend uses conventional insults as a familiar greeting with me, then I am aware that the intent is not insulting even if the language is. If someone is clearly angry with me and uses a conventional insult, it is likely that I will be able to see the intention to insult behind the statement. In a case where someone says something that is not a conventional insult and I immediately feel insulted, the questions above and many more may be germane. Is the context such that it is likely this person has the intention to insult me? How and why did I interpret their statement as insulting and is there a different interpretation that would not be insulting?
How does the audience (if present) appear to have taken the statement? Our immediate reactions may be correct, or they may be badly mistaken.
If we feel insulted we may really be insulted, but there is no guarantee and no foolproof way of deciding for sure. The best approach may be to step back from immediate emotional reactions and examine the contextual factors closely. We will often feel insulted when we have been insulted, but feeling insulted alone is simply not enough to determine whether or we not we really have been insulted in all cases. 28 Relationships and Insults
It may often be assumed that insults can only be negative expressions. Some may say that insults are used to emotionally harm others, to declare dominance over them, to demean and destroy self-esteem, and to show a lack of respect for their victims. Jerome
Neu adopts a version of this view by arguing that all insults (barring a few exception cases) are dominance claims22 aimed at establishing personal power and control over other people and that such insults generally aim at some kind of injury to the target.
What an approach like this may assume is that the impact of an insult extends no further than the insulter, the insulted party or parties and whatever emotional or material harm is brought about by the insults. While this limited approach may be useful in examining some insult situations, it misses a key dimension of many instances where insults are used. There are other significant problems with Neu's account that will be explored later on.
Some of the examples explored above show this important dimension: the wider network of relationships between people. Consider the rules for the use of the cut direct.
The very public nature of the display suggests that the insult is meant as an act of communication to those who observe the cut by warning them that the target of the cut has committed some serious transgression. The cut not only serves as the ultimate admonishment to the target for whatever they have done, but also acts as a warning to others. If the grounds for performing the cut are well-founded, then such a warning may impact a large network of relationships. Others may be cautious in their dealings with the cut individual and avoid suffering the same kind of abuse at his or her hands. The cut is used to redress a wrong and provide an important warning to others with whom we have
29 relationships. There are further relationships to be considered than simply those persons directly involved in any insult event.
The claims made in an insult may not be true, but anyone who is present and overhears the insult may not know any better. A lie, or an insulting claim made in a fit of anger may be taken for the truth and others may view the target of the insult in a new light. The insult would have the effect of changing the appraisal that others have of the victim's character and this is just as real a kind of harm as emotional harm. If we limit our view only to those agents directly involved and attempt to understand insults by looking only at the actions of the insulter and the emotional distress of the victim, then our understanding of any insult will be incomplete. Insults can and will affect the relationships of both the insulter and the insulted.
Many unconventional insults may make insulting claims about a person that are just true enough to be believed and a carelessly spoken insult might live on through gossip about the insulted party. Such insults can bring real harm to the victim not only through emotional harm but through negative effects upon other relationships the victim has. For instance, if the cut direct is used improperly but the conventional meaning is accepted among those observing it, the victim may be unjustly be made a pariah in society or may be treated by others with unwarranted suspicion. Insults can have dire consequences for the place and status people have within communities and among friends. The impact on the extended set of relationships can be severe and must be considered when discussing insults.
30 Conclusion
In this explanation of insults we have avoided any attempts to formulate a definition of what an insult is. The breadth of the material we have presented should indicate why this is so. Insults are complex, multi-faceted, and can have very different features and meanings depending on the context of use. Any attempt to communicate what insults are in one short sentence will almost certainly leave out some of the things that should be called insults and may include some things that should not. For instance, we have shown how reducing our understanding of insults to one feature by identifying being insulted with feeling of insult is problematic and I suspect that this will be true of similar approaches. Insults are a cultural practice, an act of communication between people, and the best way to explicate them is to show where, when and why they are often used and to draw some basic distinctions.
We have described how insults can be sanctioned or unsanctioned, examined the rules which often regulate the uses of sanctioned insults, and explored the differences between conventional and unconventional uses. These terms and distinctions provide us with some of the most basic features of insults which will allow us to understand their meanings and uses and how they can affect human relationships. As we progress, we will develop some finer distinctions and concepts based on the basic structure we have articulated so far.
31 Chapter 2: Insults as Arguments
Introduction
Insults are a universal cultural practice,23 says Thomas Conley, but it would be more accurate to say that they represent a diverse set of cultural practices. What are we doing when we use insults and why do they abound in our relations with one another? In the previous chapter we have seen some of the depth and variety that the forms of insult may take and the possible intentions we may have when using them. Some insults are used simply to cause emotional pain, others are used in attempts to destroy public reputations, while yet others might be used in a complex game of verbal sparring like the insult game "the dozens". We can think of many additional types of insults that could populate such a list of uses, but it would be very uncommon to have the use of an insult as an argument included on such a list. It is quite reasonable to think that in a heated argument, the time when an insult is used is the time when the argument is over and a verbal fight begins, assuming it does not come to blows.
The Harm of Insults
Good argumentation is governed by rules. One such rule may be that proper arguments should conform to logical principles which bring the audience, or oneself, from true premises to the conclusion of the argument and avoid fallacies such as using personal attacks in an attempt to discredit a claim. When we start verbally fighting, we are no longer obeying the rules that govern good argumentation and at this time we might use insults, threats, and other emotionally charged locutions. With insults we are not
32 advancing a claim, we are simply aiming to cause emotional harm to our opponent or make them look bad in the eyes of the audience, if an audience is present. At best, insults are a lapse from the practice of good argumentation and at worst they are an unacceptable practice that can cause harm to a person or a group. In the case of direct personal insults, or insults against groups, this harm may be emotional. People may take scathing insults seriously and suffer serious negative effects to their emotional states, perhaps by becoming depressed, feeling self-loathing, or suffering some other emotional injury.
Insults may precipitate physical violence and lead to serious injuries. Harm can also come from damage to the relationships of the person or group that has been insulted or to the relationships of the person using insults. This harm may come from the damage to a person's reputation following an insult which causes others to distance themselves from the insulted party. Negative changes to relationships on account of insults could impact various areas of people's lives, including their careers, their ability to be taken seriously by other people, and relations with friends and families. The use of insults may also express inappropriate relationships between people. These types of damages to relationships fit into a larger set of social harms and not all social harms will involve harm to relationships. Insults can cause social harms to persons and groups that do not involve relationships at all.
There are many ways in which insults can cause harm to others. We may use these insults in verbal fights when we want to cause harm, but there does not seem to be a place for insults in the practice of good argumentation.
33 Insults as Fallacies
Good argumentation involves making claims and providing reasonable justifications for those claims in order to gain assent for the claims being proposed. The assent we look for in argumentation may be from a large audience, or the argumentation may be entirely in one's own mind, for instance, when we consider claims and argue with ourselves over their relative merit.
To use an insult may be to argue fallaciously. Insults may often be used as ad hominem attacks on opponents by arguing against a claim or justification by attacking the arguer instead of the argument. I may, for instance, say that "Dave may think that x provides justification for accepting C, but Dave is a morally repulsive monster and so he is clearly wrong". This is not an example of a good argument since the insulting attack on Dave has nothing to do with the justification x for the claim C. Dave may well be a morally repulsive monster, but that has nothing to do with his argument. Insults may also take other fallacious forms. For instance, one may claim that an opponent's argument should be not heeded because of some negative personal association they have or suggesting some associations that their reasoning has to other unacceptable positions or ideas (e.g. suggesting that the argument reveals the arguer is really a supporter of fascism or that their ideas are similar to those of fascists).
One may fallaciously appeal to ridicule by either claiming that an opponent's argument is ridiculous in some way or re-casting it in a ridiculous manner. In the case of the appeal to ridicule, only certain cases could adequately be called insulting and fallacious. It is not true that simply claiming an argument is ridiculous is inherently insulting since the argument may well be ridiculous. A person may feel insulted by the
34 mere suggestion that their argument is ridiculous but we have established above that this is not a sufficient condition for them having actually been insulted. What matters is the manner in which this ridicule is expressed. For instance, if I respond to a claim by ridiculing one's maturity or personal credentials by saying, "You may think that's true, but you're immature and just need to grow up!" or "I'm sure all community college graduates would say the same thing," I may at once be insulting you and ridiculing your claim.
Both these examples are also personal attacks, but twisting a claim into a ridiculous facsimile with some extremely unfavourable consequences may also be insulting to the arguer and a fallacious form of argumentation.
The possible examples of insults being used fallaciously are limitless, given that unconventional insults can be invented and are as expansive as people are creative. Most of these fallacious uses of insults will probably be adhominem attacks since most insults tend to take the form of personal attacks, but given the fluid nature of insults, they could take many other forms and be fallacious in different ways. What we can conclude is that the use of insults in argumentation is often fallacious, but we should stop short of concluding that insults are always fallacious. There may be some exceptional cases where insults can be used in good argumentation. In order to identify these exceptional cases we will first explain the context-dependence of many arguments and explicate two specific features of context-dependent arguments: audience and background.
The Context of an Argument
In Acts of Arguing, Christopher Tindale offers an alternative to traditional views on argumentation by arguing that in order to have a complete theory of argumentation we
35 must look at the context in which actual arguments occur, the goal of rational persuasion held by the arguer, and the role of the audience in interpreting and judging argumentation.
In examining arguments we should be concerned with the process of persuasion in argumentation, the "means by which arguers make their cases for the adherence of audiences"24 and the manner in which the arguer proceeds towards the goal of adherence may be heavily dependent on the context of the argumentation.
Context should be understood quite broadly as involving anything surrounding the argument itself such as the time the argument is made, the time the argument is heard or read by an audience, the method of transmission, the background events surrounding the argument, the particular people who comprise the audience, what beliefs and assumptions particular audiences hold when they hear the argument, and other things. Some contextual factors can have a large impact on an argument while others will have no effect at all. The particular time when an argument is constructed, for instance, can have a profound impact on how the arguer chooses to phrase their argument and how the audience will understand the argument and come to a judgement of whether or not to agree with the arguer when they encounter the argument. Tindale points to this contextual feature when he asks,
How often have we seen writers criticize authors of antiquity for failing to think with the clarity that centuries of subsequent development have made possible for those same writers (or speakers)? This is more than a lack of charity on such people's part. It is a failure to recognize that reasoning takes place within the milieu familiar to the reasoner. [...] It is one matter to decide that Plato's Republic (once we understand it) would not work in modern contexts. It is quite another matter, and an unfair one, to criticize it for failing to anticipate decidedly modern concerns.25
The arguments in Plato's Republic are written at a particular time with a particular method of reasoning and they have been constructed based on that cultural and intellectual milieu. How an argument is put together in terms of its structure, manner of
36 expression, style of reasoning and the assumptions made within it, all depend heavily on when that argument is made. We can rightly expect modern arguments to differ from those of antiquity in terms of how they are constructed.
How the argument is interpreted by the audience will be affected by when it is constructed, but also by when it is read or heard by the audience. The audience that Plato is communicating to in his lifetime is very different from the audience that reads him today. The ancient audience probably brought their own assumptions and methods of reasoning to their interpretation of the arguments that Plato makes and they may have come up with very different understandings, questions, and concerns that do not occur to modern readers. What knowledge we have about the concepts used in arguments is heavily dependent upon when we read them. Our understanding of justice, truth, the good and other concepts we see in Plato are influenced by where and when we live, and modern readers will probably understand these terms and their place within the arguments differently than people from another time. What we take an argument to mean is heavily dependent on context.
Whether or not we accept the claims being made in an argument will also be influenced by the time when it is read. Readers of different periods may have access to very different methods of analysis that are not available to Plato or his contemporaries.
For instance, today we have a large tradition of thought on logical fallacies that was not available to Plato which we may apply when reading his work. Some of our current methods of reasoning and analysis of argumentation may also be unavailable to Plato and his contemporary audience. We may judge Plato's arguments in a manner that is simply inaccessible to audiences of other times. Conversely, an audience from the time of Plato
37 may have access to insights that are not available to us now. The people of one time may find an argument to be persuasive while those of an earlier or later time may find the same argument severely lacking. Often we may look at an argument that at a past point in time is taken to be quite persuasive and wonder how anyone could have accepted it. In such cases we should not fault previous audiences for their lack of perspicacity, but credit the contextual factors that allow us to see and appraise the argument differently.
Just this one feature of context, the time of the construction and reception of the argument, can have a profound impact on both how the arguer chooses to communicate claims and how an audience interprets and judges those claims. By contrast, other features of context may have little to no impact; there is probably a gradient. Some contextual factors will be highly influential while others will only be important on occasion and some will not be important at all. Modern audiences may read Plato on a digital device like their laptop or listen to a book on tape, while previous readers have had to make do with paper books or scrolls. This particular contextual feature will probably not have any impact on how the audience interprets and judges the arguments and it is certain that Plato did not construct his arguments with modern modes of production and presentation in mind. Some features of context are relevant to the construction, interpretation and judgement of arguments and some are not. Of the relevant aspects of context, the two that are important to us are background and audience.
The Context of an Argument: Background
Time is just one of a set of contextual features that we will call the background of the argument. Time was a useful example to begin with since it implicates some other
38 parts of the background as well, such as the events surrounding the argument. According to Tindale, background refers only to "those events that bear on the argumentation in question" , but we will extend this feature of context to include time, location, events, and some other things. The relevant events that bear on argumentation take place in a certain time and in certain places. Given the time and place, certain events will probably be fresh in the minds of both the arguer and audience and so time, place and background events are often inextricably linked. The arguer may directly refer to these events during the course of the argument or allude to them. Alternatively, some members of the audience may find connections between the argument and such events independently of the arguer. Audiences are free to see meanings and implications in an argument that the arguer has not considered. For instance, if I am engaged in presenting an argument about current Canadian politics, then the events that will probably have an impact both on how
I construct my argument and how it is received by my audience will be recent events in the Canadian political environment. It is possible that political events that occurred in ancient Greece may seem relevant to some members of the audience, but those background events can be considered altogether more distant and will probably not have more influence than recent political events close to the subject of the argument.
The background to the argumentation is more specific than just the general events that may be happening during the same time as the argument. Arguments are generally about something and in order to understand what the argument is trying to present for our acceptance, we must understand the story that goes along with the argument. That story will often be composed of events. General political events are distant examples of background events, but other events may be much closer to the argument. Background
39 events may have precipitated the argument, or the events may be the subject of the argument. We may present arguments about what a certain set of events means, what we should do in response to those events, or argue as to why it was good that those events happened. Previous arguments can also be classified as events. My argument may be a response to the event of a previous argument which I am attempting to rebut. An editorial in a newspaper arguing for a particular position may be the event that elicits argumentative responses in another column, another paper, in the letters section, and among the readership of the paper in their conversations with one another.
We often need to have at least a basic knowledge of the background if we are to understand an argument and come to a judgement on whether or not to accept it. If I am completely unaware of the events which an argument directly relates to, I will find it very difficult to interpret and judge the argument. Keeping with our Canadian politics example, if the argument which I hear is about a specific piece of legislation being considered in Parliament, then some basic knowledge about the legislation is probably a basic requirement for my understanding of the argument and it will be difficult for me to judge whether the arguer's position on the legislation is right or not if I know nothing about it.
There are other features of argumentative context that can also be a relevant part of the background and have an influence upon the way arguments are constructed, interpreted, and judged. We do not have to be exhaustive in listing them, but only show that some features such as background events, time and location will often play significant roles and must be taken into account as important contextual factors in many arguments.
40 The Context of an Argument: Audience
The audience of an argument is another important part of the context of many arguments. It is the audience that is responsible for the interpretation and judgement of the argument and it is the audience that is affected by many contextual factors. We will now examine the role of the audience more closely. There are various media in which we can present arguments such as books, academic papers, speeches, films, art. Almost anything "may promote a point of view for which an audience's adherence is sought [...]
What will characterize each one as having an argumentative aspect is the common denominator of involving an attempt to gain adherence for the position proffered" and such adherence for a claim or claims is often sought from an audience. This is a basic principle of almost all argumentation, even in cases where the audience is not immediately present when the argument is made.
Reading argumentation in a newspaper or a book, for instance, does not involve direct face-to-face communication between the arguer and the audience, but an audience is present nonetheless and the argumentative practices of the writer will probably take into consideration the audience to which they are communicating when they put the argumentation into words. We have, however, pointed out at least one situation where there is no audience: arguing with oneself. It does not seem proper to say that I am the audience to my own argumentation if it remains entirely within my own mind and is never communicated to anyone. We will depart from Tindale, who argues that all argumentation involves an audience, by adopting the more moderate position that many types of argumentation involve an audience, but not all. For our purposes audience- directed arguments are the ones we will consider.
41 The purpose of audience-directed argumentation will often be the rhetorical goal of attempting to gain acceptance from the audience for a claim, though an arguer may also pursue other goals. The arguer may, for example, want to present their views or the views of a group they represent in order to gain recognition and add some diversity to a debate without aiming directly for audience acceptance of the claims they make. Tindale
98 says that "there is no argumentation without rhetorical effect" and what Tindale means by "rhetorical effect" is that all argumentation is directed towards gaining the acceptance of the audience for the claims being made but his position is too strong and I will suggest a slightly modified version: "there is a lot of argumentation with rhetorical effect".
Looking at argumentation from a rhetorical perspective involves looking at the role of the audience and the methods which the arguer uses to convince the audience to accept the claims being made. There is much to look at since audiences are complex and will vary from argument to argument. Audiences can be composed of people with very similar sets of beliefs and ways of thinking, or audiences can be composed of people with radically different views. The audience may be a group of specialists hearing a talk on a particular issue, or they may have nothing more than a general understanding of the issue 90 being discussed . Audiences will also change during an argument. Not only may the composition of the audience change as people come and go, but the beliefs that the audience hold may also change. As argumentation proceeds, audience members may be convinced of the truth of some premises but not others, they may come up with new questions and concerns about the issue, or they may become completely disgusted with the avenues the argument is taking and walk away in disgust. We have all been a member of an audience at some point, and we probably had the experience of listening to and
42 following the reasoning of the arguer. As the argumentation proceeded we may have come up with counter-points, drawn up associations to other arguments, ideas, or events, posed critical questions to the arguer, or done any other number of things that involved our participation in the argument.
The role of the audience can be active throughout the course of the argument. We can imagine a completely passive audience which simply sits and absorbs an argument, but it does not seem that such an audience would be being argued to, as much as being told what to think. What probably happens much more often is that in the course of argumentation the audience applies premises and assumptions that they already hold to the argument being presented. They may also influence the course of the argumentation by interacting directly with the arguer and posing questions or challenges. The audience will be actively engaged in following the reasoning of the arguer and attempting to piece together exactly what the arguer is trying to say. This potential for active participation means that audiences do not sit silently and absorb the argument but rather engage with it, even if this is done entirely in their thoughts. By applying their assumptions and beliefs and critically following the reasoning they can construct the argument for themselves and it may be through their own construction of the argument that they are convinced or resolve to reject the argument. The rhetorical goal of argumentation does not necessarily involve tricking audiences, leading them around by their noses, or misleading them, but allowing them to participate in the argument and come to their own conclusions.
The audience is the target, the central focus of much argumentation, and it is often the goal of the arguer to gain the assent of the audience for the main claims that are being
43 presented to that audience. The audience's judgement of the argument at a particular time is contingent upon the complex features of the audience that we described above. One audience may find an argument acceptable while a later audience may interpret the argument differently and come to a different judgement. Perhaps they will find the argument completely unpersuasive while previous audiences found it a sublime and persuasive example of reasoning. The audience is an important contextual feature that matters to the construction, interpretation, and judgement of many arguments.
Background and Audience: An Example
We can exhibit the importance of both audience and background with an example.
At my university there is a large sign visible through a window that states "Top Schools
Have Women's Studies Programs" and below this statement is a list of Canadian universities. The University of Guelph is listed at the bottom and is crossed off with red marker. The sign, as I interpret it, is presenting an argument about the University of
Guelph and the women's studies program, but what argument is it making? Someone visiting the campus without much awareness of the background events behind the creation of this sign might see that at least two basic interpretations of the sign are possible. One may see it as arguing that the University of Guelph should add a women's studies program in order to become a top institution, or that the University has lost its status as a top institution because it no longer has such a program. The former interpretation might be taken as an advocacy argument suggesting that the school should add a women's studies program which will contribute to improving the university overall while the latter might lead us to the conclude that the argument is an indictment of the
44 administration of the institution since they cancelled a program that significantly contributed to the standing of the school. There is also the possibility that the person who made the sign is protesting the potential cancellation of the women's studies program if such a decision is under current consideration. Without knowing the background we will have trouble deciding which of these interpretations is correct. One significant background question immediately comes up: Does the University of Guelph have a women's studies program, or does it not? The answer to this contextual question will impact our interpretation of the sign significantly.
We can also enquire about the particular audience to which this message is being directed. If the aim of the sign is to persuade the audience that adding a women's studies program is a good thing, then it might be directed at the portion of the student body which is either unaware of the issue, undecided, or even against such a program. The sign might also be directed at the administration of the University in an attempt to convince them either that their decision to cancel the program is wrong or that they should make a decision to introduce such a program if it is absent. These different audiences may be more receptive to one approach to argumentation rather than another.
This relates to our point above that the construction of an argument may often take into account the target audience. The rhetorical approach that may be suitable for one audience may be very different from the approach suitable for another. Audience can impact argument construction.
The administrators, for instance, probably have a shared value with the sign writer in that they also want the university to be a "top institution." This would probably be a concern for much of the student body as well. Do they want to be studying at an inferior
45 school? What would that mean for the value of their degrees? Alternatively, a visitor to the campus, unfamiliar with Canadian Universities and holding no strong investment in which institutions are at the "top" would probably find the sign to be unpersuasive, or at least, far less persuasive than a sign which took a different argumentative approach constructed with visitors in mind. Such a visitor-directed sign might attempt to point out the value that a women's studies program has to society as a whole and thus exhibit more relevance to the interests of the visitor.
The true background story is that the sign was a response to the University of
Guelph having recently cancelled the women's studies program. Knowing the background events of the argument leads us clearly to an interpretation of the argument as being an indictment of the administrative decision to cancel the program and an advocacy position directed to other students. It also allows us to understand how the sign was crafted with particular audiences in mind. The appeal to top institutions reflects shared values between the administration, the students, and the arguer. Administrators want to run a top institution and students want to attend one and so the administration should re-instate the program and the students should demand that this be done.
There is a further peculiarity to examine: the argument on the sign is incomplete.
The sign does not give us an explicit set of premises and a conclusion. It is left to the audience to engage with the presentation of the argument on the sign in order to think through what the argument is saying. We could complete the reasoning in a set of premises and a conclusion as follows:
P: Top Universities have women's studies programs. P: The University of Guelph does not presently have a women's studies program. C: The University of Guelph should have a women's studies program to be a top institution.
46 We might come to an alternative conclusion that "The University of Guelph should have a women's studies program to become a top institution again." It is up to the audience to determine for themselves whether or not the University was a top institution.
The possible logical structure of the argument will be affected by the audience which reads it and reflects upon the reasoning and by their selection of what premises they use to "fill in" the incomplete argument and come to a judgement. Perhaps they accept the premise that the University is no longer a top institution, or maybe they think it still is.
The assumptions of the audience will have a significant impact on how the rest of the argument is interpreted and what judgements they might make.
We can also see how other contextual factors such as the place will affect the argument. Suppose we change the place and put up the same sign at the University of
Toronto, one of the "top institutions" listed on the sign. A reasonable way to interpret the argument on the sign would be to see it as an arguments/or celebrating the fact that there is a women's studies program at the University of Toronto (e.g. "It's good that we have a women's studies program so that we are not like the University of Guelph") rather than a critique of institutions that do not have such programs, though such an interpretation is still open to the audience.
Among the important background features involved in interpreting the sign from our example are: the fact that the women's studies program was cancelled; the fact that such programs are valued by many in the student body and faculty; the broader values many people hold for supporting and encouraging women's studies programs; the location where the sign is presented. These are some of the many contextual factors involved in assessing this particular example of argumentation and some set of contextual
47 factors will contribute to the construction, interpretation and judgement of many arguments.
Audience Assumptions and Arguments
Contextual features are often an important part of understanding what an argument is and how it should evaluated. Many of these contextual factors play an important role in the rhetorical goal of effective persuasion. How effective argumentation is can also depend on how close the argument is to the assumptions of the audience. Both Tindale and Conley suggest that good argumentation begins with assumptions accepted by the audience and this may require the arguer to have some knowledge of background and audience. If I am trying to convince an audience that my claim is correct, then it may be a good approach to begin from a position where both the audience and 1 are in agreement or share common ground. One way of establishing such common ground with the audience is to use rhetorical devices in the course of the argument. Rhetorical devices involve using figures of speech for persuasive purposes, often by evoking thoughts and associations in the audience.
A common example of a figure of speech that can be used as a rhetorical device is allusion. We can use allusion in all sorts of ways that don't involve persuasion. In novels, for instance, allusion can be used for literary impact. Allusion can be used in visual art in order to make an artistic statement by putting an indirect reference in the work of art. We can also use an allusion as part of an attempt to persuade an audience with an argument. The allusion is not the argument itself but it can contribute to the persuasive effect of an argument. This could be done in a speech, for instance, by
48 indirectly referencing some historical event that evokes patriotic feelings or associations in the audience. The patriotic associations may be a part of the background that the arguer thinks will increase the likelihood of a claim being accepted. The allusion may reference an event that is germane to the current argument and encourage the audience to think through the relation of that event and any assumptions they have about that event to the argument they are currently hearing. Argumentation may often involve calling up particular associations and assumptions in an audience and then constructing an argument. The use of a rhetorical device such as allusion is one way to do this.
Accumulation can also be used as a rhetorical device which often plays upon assumptions and it involves the "piling on" or listing of a large number of points in short succession. Like allusion, this device can be used for more than persuasion. Take this example of an insult: "You are a beggar, a scoundrel, a liar, a cheat, a thief, and you smell!" The impact of the insult may be heightened by piling on one insulting term after another. In argumentation the goal of accumulation may be to list a large number of points in order to suggest or draw connections between them, or accumulation could be used to make a particular part of a spoken argument memorable by repeating the same point several times.
Conley, intentionally or otherwise, provides an excellent example of accumulation supported by audience assumptions in his discussion of The Dearborn Independent, a paper that was purchased and run by Henry Ford in order to disseminate his anti-Semitic ideas in the United States. In his discussion of the paper Conley starts by quoting several lengthy examples from the paper. In these examples the Jewish people are denigrated for destroying Anglo-Saxon moral standards, wanting nothing but money, and negatively
49 influencing the conduct of crowds at baseball games, among other things '. Following this presentation of several examples using direct quotations, Conley gives us five more anti-Semitic claims made by the paper, paraphrased in his own words and in one short paragraph:
The Jew is everywhere. Jews were behind the treason of Benedict Arnold (see 4:67-99); Jews control Tammany Hall (fooling the Irish, who think they are in control, 3:141-66); they manipulate the Federal Reserve Plan (3:205-16); have made American labour unions "hot-beds of Bolshevism" (3:88-100); and, as one comes to expect, are responsible for "America's money famine" (3:243-56).32
Conley is using accumulation in an interesting manner by listing, in quick succession, a series of potentially insulting claims against Jews. In insulting someone it may be an effective strategy to "pile on" a string of insults, but one must have a sense of proportion. If one makes the list of insults too long then it may become tiresome or even self-contradictory. If for instance one insults both an individual's loose sexual mores and their lack of a sex life then the insult may make little sense. If the piling on is overdone, then the insult may become ineffective and the insulter may lose the assent of the audience (assuming they had it to begin with).
Instead of avoiding such a result Conley encourages the audience by piling on the various insulting claims made in the Dearborn Independent until the aggregate of those claims is something which almost no one would accept. Conley never says this, but the argument behind the accumulation may be that the various claims against the Jews are not worth taking seriously. By accumulating them all in such a small space he makes them seem more and more far-fetched to the point where very few people would believe such a collection of claims about any group of people. Individually the claims will probably not be accepted anyway, but when presented so closely together the strength of the audience reaction against the claims may be amplified. 50 Conley makes no explicit argument saying the collection of claims should be dismissed, but he doesn't have to. The accumulation does the argumentative work by making the collection of claims against the Jews seem outlandish and extreme. This is where the importance of audience assumptions comes into play. If Conley is confident that the audience of his book rejects anti-Semitism and finds anti-Semitic statements to be abhorrent, then he can be secure in the audience taking up the argument to dismiss the claims without being explicit about it. The conclusion can remain unstated in such a situation since we can be confident that any reader who shares certain assumptions about anti-Semitism will be able to infer the conclusion: The extravagant claims about Jews in this newspaper should not be taken seriously. Using accumulation serves to accentuate this and move the audience from assumptions about anti-Semitism generally to a conclusion about the specific claims.
Audience Assumptions and Insults
Much of what we have said about the role of audience assumptions in argumentation also applies to insults. Conley makes much of the impact that audience assumptions will have on how an insult is received. In his examination of the writing of
Cicero, Conley suggests that an important part of constructing an effective insult is directing the content of the insult to what the audience already knows or at least suspects is true. Cicero is able to level insulting charges of corruption and unacceptable sexual conduct against Mark Antony because "members of a speaker's audience who had heard similar charges before might be just as suspicious. [...] 'Everybody knows' that politicians are greedy and corrupt. 'Everybody knows' that the powerful and influential attend wild
51 parties and indulge in bizarre sexual behaviours."
When Cicero takes advantage of such suspicions to insult Roman politicians,
Conley calls it "negotiating the incompatibilities between suspicion and plausibility"34.
What he means by this is that the insulting claims being made against Mark Antony are in line with what his audience assumes to be true of Roman politicians and thus the claims made by Cicero appear plausible to the audience. The audience is willing, or is in a position to accept the insulting claims based on premises, assumptions and suspicions that they already hold about what those politicians are really getting up to.
This is not true of all insults. Many conventional insults may have little to do with audience assumptions. However, many unconventional insults constructed to be used against a specific person holding a particular position such as a public office, or an identifiable group of people, may take into account the assumptions of the audience.
If someone with racist beliefs decides to insult a member of a particular racial group and they have an audience that shares certain racist assumptions about that group, a racially charged insult may be constructed in order to maximize the chances that the audience will understand and accept the insult. Alternatively, if the person using the racial insult misreads the audience and they do not hold the same racist assumptions, then the racially charged insult may not be understood. If it is understood, the audience reaction may justifiably be one of hostility towards the person using the racist insult.
These assumptions are often not, as Conley has it, what "everybody knows", but rather what the audience members are open to believing. The audience may already hold suspicions about politicians and so they will give claims about greedy politicians the benefit of the doubt and believe them without much evidence. Audience members have,
52 says Tindale, "a set of facts and assumptions that an individual, or, [...] a number of individuals, is capable of mentally representing and accepting as true (although they may be mistaken in doing so)"35. This is a rather complicated way of saying that we all have our own mental lives full of thoughts, memories, ways of thinking and reasoning and there will be some overlap in these among groups of people.
An insult, much like an argument, is relevant relative to our mental life. Each individual has a different mental life, by virtue of having different memories and different ways of thinking. The differences between those memories and ways of thinking may allow us to infer things that others will not. However, such mental lives will also overlap36 to form the shared mental environment of an audience as a collective of individuals. Unconventional insults, much like arguments, can aim to impact this shared mental space. If they do not, they may have little chance of being effective.
Insults as Arguments
At an academic conference on the philosophy of science a critical question was posed to a presenter. The question was based on some material that the person asking the question had explained in a session just a few hours beforehand. The response to the question by the presenter could be interpreted as an insult: "I was at your talk, I understand what you're saying, and I think you're crazy." We can set aside any attempt at judging the validity or merit of this response for the moment and make a basic observation. Insults are used in what appear to be argumentative situations between people today and, based on evidence from textual material, throughout history as well.
Insults in the course of argumentation can be a part of human relations, even at academic
53 conferences. Was this particular example an argument or not? We will need some guidelines in order to be able to judge whether an insult is or is not being used in argumentative fashion.
Some insults can be arguments and context is a primary concern for understanding the meaning of the insults as arguments. None of the examples of insults we saw in the previous chapter involved a set of premises followed by a conclusion and so we will need to examine the intended meaning of the insult closely. If we analyze insults in order to determine what they may mean when used as arguments, the analysis must be done with a focus on the audience and the broader set of social norms through which the speech is identified as insulting, in other words, the background. In order to decide if and when an insult is used for the purposes of good argumentation, we can ask
"How would an audience interpret this insult?"; "What are the background features involved in its use?" Our focus on context and the social norms means that what one audience might take to be an argument may be interpreted as a personal attack by a different audience.
We may first need to pare down the possible set of insults as arguments that we intend to deal with here. Not all insults are potential arguments. Many types of insults, particularly unsanctioned conventional insults, are probably not used to advance an argument. If I am angry at a driver who has cut me off on the road and I roll down my window at a stoplight to yell "Learn how to drive, you stupid asshole!" we might best interpret this as a charged emotional response with intent to emotionally harm the offending driver. Angrily insulting someone is a type of communication, but not often the type of communication that is intended to convince an audience of a claim. To use a
54 distinction we made earlier, I may not be making an argument about the driving skill of the motorist; I am engaging in a verbal fight, or trying to cause some kind of emotional harm, or trying to change the behaviour of the driver. Given the general context of use for most conventional insults, it is probable that many of them will be excluded from being considered arguments or components of arguments by any audience, though some conventional insults may be attempts to change the offending behaviour of a person. It would take a considerable amount of imagination to construe an exclamation of "Fuck you!" as argumentation.
We can distinguish between arguments that argue for a claim and counter arguments directed against the claims of someone else. An editorial in a local newspaper may argue for the claim that "the government should invest more money in infrastructure". The author of the editorial may give a set of premises and then conclude that government investment in infrastructure is a good thing. Alternatively, argumentation may also involve a more direct attack upon some other position and advance a claim for why we should reject that position. An argumentative response to the editorial may not advance a competing claim, but simply claim that the argument for government spending is invalid and should be rejected.
There are a variety of ways that one could approach the goal of arguing for the rejection of a claim. One may attack the premises and attempt to show that some of them are not true or one may attempt to demonstrate that the conclusion does not follow from the premises. Insults would not be a good way to present such arguments. However, there may be some claims that we do not wish to challenge by questioning premises or the validity of the reasoning. There are some claims that simply do not deserve that level
55 of attention and we may want to argue that they should be dismissed without going into further details. If someone makes the morally objectionable claim that women deserve fewer rights than men, one could come up with counter-arguments to their claims, or one could argue that we should not respect the claim being made and should immediately dismiss it without further consideration or discussion. Such morally objectionable claims are simply not worth arguing against any more in the same way as other kinds of arguments. Insults may be used as dismissal arguments when the claims being challenged do not deserve our respect. This means that the insult may be interpreted by the audience as indicating that the insulter thinks the claims are not worthy of serious discussion and should be dropped immediately.
Respect for Claims
When we have respect for a claim we consider the claim to be one that can be held by reasonable people and that if we disagree with the position then it warrants a counter-argument involving reasons. We may strongly disagree with a claim that we are arguing against, but the very fact that we are arguing using reasons, means that we respect the position enough to engage with it and to give it due consideration. Providing reasonable counter-arguments often involves thinking deeply about the claims we are arguing against and putting serious effort into developing reasonable challenges and retorts.
When giving an argument for a claim we are supporting we may raise some potential objections to the claim and then give our own counter-arguments to deal with those possible objections in order to show that they are not valid. This approach may be
56 used to present "straw man" counter-arguments which are then struck down to make our claim appear stronger, but an arguer using such a tactic suffers the risk of the audience seeing through the ruse and thus weakening their position, their credibility, or both. In many cases the practice of bringing up potential objections to our own claims may be used responsibly to bring up and respond to what we believe to be legitimate (but ultimately unfounded) challenges to our position that deserve respect and thus must be considered and argued against. If the arguer is not trying to mislead the audience with poor objections, then a strong reason for the arguer to anticipate and ultimately reject the counter-arguments is if they think that the challenges will warrant respect from the audience and thus deserve reasonable rebuttal. The objections deserving of respect may often be those that are most likely to occur for the audience of the argument. Showing in advance that they are unfounded may increase the persuasiveness of the argument. The audience may find the argument less persuasive if it does not take into account reasonable objections that they also respect. On the other hand, it would be very strange for an audience to judge an argument poorly on the grounds that it failed to counter objections that they did not respect.
We should not assume that every claim is deserving of respect or critical response involving reasons. We may often encounter claims which are simply not deserving of respect. Our example above from Conley on the Dearborn Independent provides a good example. Most audiences (I hope) do not find arguments based on anti-Semitic sentiments or arguments that promote such sentiments to be worthy of respect and they should not be seriously considered. Claims that do not deserve respect may still warrant a response, but a response of a much different kind from arguments that do deserve
57 respect. The conference example which we used above where the response to a challenge was "I understand what you're saying and I think you're crazy" exhibits this quite well.
The speaker did not view the critical challenge being presented as deserving of respect.
He still delivered a response to the challenge, but his response did not give any reasons for rejecting the critical challenge and instead expressed outright dismissal of the critical challenge. The response was one of complete dismissal and this is a goal of insults used in argumentation.
Critique vs. Dismissal
There is a distinction to be made between dismissal of a claim and critique of a claim. The goal of argumentative insults can be the dismissal of the insulted position with the added implication that the position does not deserve respect from either the arguer using the insult, nor from the audience. The goal of critique is to provide reasons to reject a claim that is judged to be deserving of respect. I will explain critique first and then show what dismissal is and how insults can argue for dismissal.
Critique of a position may involve a reasonable challenge or an appeal to reject a position and this is done from a position of respect. In providing a critique of a claim, I give reasons for why I think the claim should be rejected, or why I think the audience should reject the claim. Rejection means that I withhold my assent for the claim now being advanced based on reasons which I can articulate. Rejection may be further divided into categories such as the provisional or total rejection of a claim. It may be that
I offer a provisional or partial rejection of a claim such that with certain suggested modifications I may be willing to accept the claim. I may claim that the conclusion does
58 not follow from the premises, or that the premises are false, or I may give some other reasons for my rejection, but I will give reasons. The fact that I give reasons indicates that I find the position worthy of enough respect to warrant reasonable critical thought and rejection. My goal in a critique may be to convince the audience to reject a claim or I may be providing a critique to a colleague so that they can improve their work. My critique may also aim to explicate a claim for an audience so that they may further understand the position and, if I think the claim requires further development but not total rejection, I might provide questions and suggestions for further work and thought.
Providing a critique means providing reasonable arguments against a position and it also means having some form of rejection as an argumentative goal.
When the arguer does not think a position deserves respect but sees fit to respond, there is still a kind of argument being made, but one of a much different character. In responding to such a claim, the arguer may make the case to the audience that such a claim is not deserving of respect and warrants only immediate dismissal from our consideration. Any other approach would be to give the claim respect it does not deserve.
To provide reasons to reject a claim is to accept that the claim deserves respect. To dismiss a claim outright, with the use of an insult, for instance, is to assert that it does not deserve such respect and should not be considered at all. Dismissal of a position does not involve advancing any reasons against that claim. It is the proposal that we stop all consideration of the claim here and now and refrain from discussing it further because it deserves no credence or serious thought.
How effective such an argumentative move will be depends on contextual factors, such as the manner in which the argument for dismissal is communicated to the audience.
59 One way in which such an appeal can be made is with the use of an insult. In the case of using an insult in response to a clearly misogynistic claim, for instance, one may well expect the audience to harbour similar assumptions about the lack of respect that should be given to misogynistic claims. An arguer may be well aware that such assumptions against misogyny are held by the audience and they can use an insult directed at the misogynistic claims of the arguer as an effective avenue for dismissal. If the arguer uses an insult to argue for dismissal, they should be sensitive to the construction of insult since having the assumptions of the audience on one's side does not guarantee success if the insult is ill-chosen. For instance, insulting an anti-Semitic claim with a racially charged insult will probably play against the assumptions of the audience in just the same way as the anti-Semitic claim that was meant to be dismissed and the insult will not gain acceptance by the audience.
Insults cannot be used indiscriminately and without thought in argumentative contexts. Insults must be constructed based on the careful considerations of the assumptions of the audience and the context of the discourse. This means that non- conventional insults which are constructed to appeal to a particular audience will probably be an effective choice for advocating dismissal. Such insults should be directed towards the assumptions of the audience, especially if we suspect they also think the claims being made are morally objectionable.
In using an insult against a claim we indicate to the audience that we do not respect the claim and we suspect that they do not respect the claim either. If we are right about the assumptions of the audience, then the insult may be understood by the audience as arguing for the dismissal of the claims and they may act on that argument by refusing
60 to listen to the claims. The insult will not explicitly say "we should dismiss this claim," it will take the form of an unconventional insult that can be interpreted by the audience as arguing for dismissal.
Insults used in argumentation rely upon the underlying assumptions of the audience to advance a claim for outright dismissal of claims that do not deserve respect.
This reliance on audience assumptions and background beliefs also leaves us with a striking connection to some of the claims we made above. Audiences actively participate in arguments by following the reasoning from the assumptions and beliefs they already hold to the conclusion. A critical audience can recognize an insult used in an argumentative context for what it is, an argument for the dismissal of a claim and, if they find it justified, they may show their assent by agreeing with the insult by laughing at the insult, refusing to listen to the insulted party any further, or by performing any other action which shows that they too dismiss the offending claim and will not engage with it, nor the person making the claim. There are some claims that simply do not need to be discussed and an effective way to argue for the dismissal of such claims is by using an insult. Insults can be used as arguments for the dismissal of positions that do not warrant our respect. Whether insults should be used in this way is another matter entirely.
61 Chapter 3: Jerome Neu and Thomas Conley
Introduction
Insults are diverse and they can be studied from a variety of different perspectives. At the most basic level of analysis, we can collect insults from various sources and produce lists, such as those contained in Maledicta: The International
Journal of Verbal Aggression or the recent book, Poisoned Pens, which compiles the insults used by various literary figures. This amounts to little more than collecting the raw material and possibly organizing the insults into some basic categories based on subject, historical period, or some other feature(s). A deeper level of analysis for insults might be historical, psychological, or philosophical. If we chose a historical approach, for instance, we may look at the historical development of a particular insulting term, or look more broadly at the way conventional insults developed over time in a certain culture.
We are presently interested specifically in a philosophical analysis of insults and such an approach encompasses a variety of different potential areas of study. Will we focus on the moral aspects of insult? Epistemological considerations? Logical features?
Historical, psychological, lexicographical, and other sources may be used to produce a philosophical account and to give it depth. And yet the philosophy of insults is something distinct from psychology, history, or any other disciplinary focus, though it may be informed profitably by all of them. One of the goals of a philosophy of insults is to organize and explicate the meaning of insults, and present rational arguments to show how that meaning is constructed and what impact insults will have upon those who use
62 them, those who they are used upon, and the wider network of relationships that insults will often affect. Regardless of what philosophical approach is taken, it must not remain embroiled entirely in other disciplines, such as psychology. Jerome Neu and Thomas
Conley have both written recent studies of insults. Neu gives us a putative philosophy of insults based heavily on psychology and psychoanalysis, while Conley gives us a study of how insults fit into the larger tradition of rhetoric. We will explain some key features of their work and appraise their merit.
Jerome Neu: Where is the Philosophy?
In Sticks and Stones: The Philosophy of Insults Jerome Neu does not deliver on the promise of his book's title and instead gives us a survey of psychological and psychoanalytical thinking on insults along with a great variety of interesting examples and some interesting material in insults and the law. Neu's treatment of the insult game which we have discussed, the dozens, brings his reliance on psychological and psychoanalytical concerns into sharp relief. The dozens, as I have presented it above, is a highly contextual and audience-oriented form of communication. The psychological motivations behind playing the dozens are an interesting topic for research. However, the exposition of those psychological features alone does not provide us with a robust understanding of how insults function in this and broader contexts. In his explanation of individuals playing the dozens Neu presents the possible psychological motivations for the dozens as explicated by psychologists John Dollard and later by Roger D. Abrahams.
Only at the very end of his treatment of the dozens does Neu attempt to turn beyond the psychological material to consider the role of the audience. But the role of
63 the peer group watching the game is, for Neu, to "provide the audience essential to affirming the honour and status that take the place of the childhood search for
on approval" . The audience is there simply to fulfil the psychological motivations of the participants. There is no attempt to look at many of the significant roles which the audience can play. We have described above how the audience can take an active role in the interpretation and judgement of statements. The person using the insult may also construct their insult with the assumptions of a particular audience in mind, in order to tailor the insult to the audience in order to get the best reception possible.
Neu also focuses on psychoanalytic resources for exploring and explaining insults. This is the most consistent feature of Neu's book and there is a heavy reliance on
Freud (he is the most-cited source in the book). While it may be true that there is still
"much to learn from Freud" , one should ask whether a philosophical treatment of insults is the proper place for such heavy use of Freudian thought and terminology. This is not to suggest that Freudian insights cannot serve an important role in understanding insults, they certainly can. However, over-reliance on just one source of thought in an attempt to make that source a universal explanatory mechanism may unnecessarily constrain our understanding of insults and this is exactly what happens with Neu.
An example of this kind is Neu's connection of certain conventional insults with a
Freudian conception of anal eroticism. Insults such as "fuck you!" and "up yours!" are, according to Neu, attempts to turn the male target into a passive homosexual and to establish "dominance via a sexualized assault on the opponent's ass"40. The androcentric conceit shown here is palpable and it is enough to threaten his claims, but his wholesale conflation of specific kinds of insults with sexual dominance claims is also problematic.
64 We say "Fuck you!" and "Up yours!" because they are conventional insults within our culture and we can be certain that the message will be received. That message may not be one of sexual dominance, but simply one of anger, disgust, or hatred.
Conventional insults may often be uttered without much consideration for their content; they are just insulting terms we know we can use in moments of strong emotion since they are well known to those around us. Insults are acts of communication and it is often pointless to use insults if no one understands them. Enquiry into the question of why sexual themes are prevalent in many conventional insults is a worthy topic, but not a specifically philosophical one. We can come up with explanations based on psychoanalytic sources like Freud, as Neu does, or use other resources from psychology or history to trace the development of sexually-themed insults or trace the motivations to unconscious sexual motivations. But the possible motivations are diverse and cannot be reduced simply to sexual features of the unconscious. Further, to focus explicitly on one set of insults involving sexual content, particularly those insults focused on the anus, is not a fruitful mode of investigation for getting at the more general features of insults.
There are many kinds of insults that do not involve explicit or implicit sexual terms, imagery or metaphors and the majority of insults do not involve anyone's "ass". In attempting to understand insults it is safer to look at their commonalities instead of focusing our attention on just one group with just one set of potential motivations or desires.
On Neu's account we are stuck in a world of individual motivations for dominance over others. What is missing here is any detailed engagement with the wider set of persons and relationships involved in insults, such as the audience which will be
65 present and play a significant role for many insults. While the psychological and psychoanalytical material may provide us with insight into the possible goals of individuals using insults, it does not provide us with philosophical insights since it does not move beyond the psychological account and the psychoanalytical material to produce further arguments or draw wider conclusions.
Jerome Neu: Individualism
Neu tells us that by participating in the dozens, the adolescents are jockeying for personal honour and symbolic domination over their opponents . What Neu means by this is that the participants are fighting for social accolades and recognition of their superiority in their group. This is a claim about individual goal-oriented action. This is surprising since honour, like insult, involves an important contextual feature: the audience. Whether or not I am able to wrest honour and status from my opponent depends on an audience recognizing that fact. This process may involve a wide set of relationships since honour exists not as some objective quality within people, but within social groups. This is to say that honour involves the relationships between people and the appraisals that people make of the character and actions of others. When discussing honour, Neu does not look beyond the atomized individuals to this wider group. While avoiding considerations beyond the individual may be a sin of omission, it is a systematic omission. Neu consistently ignores or misses the role of the others in the construction, interpretation, and judgement of insults. He focuses on psychological and psychoanalytical explanations and relates these to almost entirely personal motivations and emotional states. This focus on individuals (almost always limited to the insulter and
66 the insulted) is a symptom of the way he has defined insults.
Neu defines insults as something that "is (or aims at) a kind of injury"42 and he characterizes the emotional reactions of insulted individuals as "a kind of pain caused by disappointed expectations of attention and respect"43. Viewing insult as inextricably connected to injury is a poor approach. Some insults do not aim at injury, nor do they produce any injuries. For instance, our example of the comedian performing a "roast" is not a situation where the aim is to injure the person being roasted. The insults are understood to be aiming at comedic effect for all involved and the target of the insults will often laugh along with the audience. Defining insults through injury means Neu leaves out this and many other examples of insults, right from the start. The view of injury he presents is also highly individualistic. When we discussed the potential harms that insults can cause, we noted that many of those harms may relate to relationships.
The harm of an insult may extend well beyond hurt feelings. The insult may damage some of the relationships of the insulted person. A person who is quick to use insults may also damage their own relationships by developing a poor social reputation. In many cases the true harm of an insult will not be seen until we examine the impact it has upon the relationships of both the insulter and the insulted. Neu almost never talks about injury to relationships and only very briefly about injury to groups . He almost always emphasizes the personal aspects of injury, such as the shock and disappointed expectations of the target of the insult.
His approach to the emotional impact of the injury is also highly individualistic and fails to account for the role of the audience or any other individuals other than the injured party in many situations involving insults. It may be that an individual does not
67 feel insulted until the audience reacts favourably to their having been insulted, or perhaps the individual will only feel insulted if there is an audience. Such audience assent may indicate to the insulted party that they have accepted the insult and are on the side of the insulter. This may indicate to the insulted party that some of their relationships to those in the audience have been impacted and it is then that they will feel insulted. Sometimes it may not be just the lack of respect from the insulter that one reacts to, but the acceptance of that disrespect by the audience or of other people they have relationships with.
To understand what "feeling insulted" involves will often require casting a critical eye at the audience involved and the relationships impacted by the insult. Further, it does not appear helpful to delimit the phenomenology of feeling insulted to such a limited sphere of emotional reaction. As we have seen, insults range from subtle to obvious, tame to intense, and the feelings involved will likely vary as well. I may feel insulted, while at the same time I may be aware that I deserve the insult since respect and attention are not due to me in a particular situation, or that I did something that merits a strong rebuke such as an insult. I may be insulted by someone who I know does not respect me and yet still feel the sting of the words anyway. In this case it would be very strange to claim that my feelings were precipitated by expectations of respect when I had prior knowledge that respect was absent and perhaps justifiably so. Insults from some people are just not shocking. Quite the contrary, they may be expected and they may hurt anyway. Respect and attention are no doubt important features of our reactions to insult, but to distinguish these emotional reactions from all others and to focus on kinds of individual injury to a victim is to seriously limit our understanding. Insults are diverse
68 and catch-all definitions will not do.
In the few cases where Neu does engage with the wider relationships involved in many insults, he still relates them back to how individuals will emotionally respond to insults: "Others are central in our self-understanding and in (insulting) shocks to that self- understanding. [...] That those different initial relationships to an insulting other should have implications for how we emotionally respond to our disappointed expectations seems natural enough"45. Here, Neu remains at the level of very basic inter-subjective evaluation. There is the insulter, the insulted person and the initial relationship between the two.
I must once again emphasize that, given the highly contextual and audience- sensitive nature of many insults, the relationship between the insulter and insulted is only one in a network of relationships that should be considered. How will the insult impact the relationships of the insulter, the insulted? How did the wider network of relationships affect the way the insult was constructed, interpreted, and judged? Was there injury to a set of relationships and not just the individual? Were some of the relationships not injured but rather strengthened? These are all important considerations and they are necessarily overlooked when the audience and the larger network of relationships is either given a minor role or ignored completely, as Neu often does.
Jerome Neu and Thomas Conley on the "Shakespeare Insult Kit"
Thomas Conley takes a very different approach to insults. The most notable contrast between Neu and Conley and the best way to introduce Conley's audience- oriented approach is to show their divergent views of the "Shakespeare Insult Kit"46. The
69 Insult Kit is an on-line tool composed of three columns of insulting terms taken from
Shakespeare. The instructions for using the kit direct you to take a term from each of the three columns and preface the trio of terms with "Thou", thus creating a personalized
Shakespearean insult. Neu seems blissfully unaware of the contextual factors at play here and he simply comments that the kit demonstrates that "Shakespeare's language is a fertile generator of insults"47. The mistake that Neu makes is to assume that insult construction entails the simple organization and combination of the proper lexical constituents: develop a list of insulting terms, combine them arbitrarily, as the insult kit suggests, and presto, you have an insult! However, Conley points out that a naive user of the kit will come up against two basic problems. The first is that many of the terms are not likely to be understood by an audience. What exactly is a "bum-bailey", a
"gudgeon", or a "coxcomb" ? Most of the insults generated by the list will probably have no effect, since no one would understand what the words mean.
The second and more pressing concern is that many of the insults that could be generated from the list are meaningless as sentences, even if we know the meanings of the individual words. Conley points to the combination "mewling dizzy-eyed bladder", composed from the Insult Kit, and asks "What on earth is a dizzy-eyed bladder? And how can bladders mewl?"49 This particular example and many others that could be composed from the insult kit are absurd. Even if we manage to avoid these kinds of errors, in which we mix and match words that simply do not belong together, then there is still a fair bit of background information that needs to be filled in before the meaning of the insult becomes clear: "Unless one knows why and to whom such things are said and, perhaps, more importantly, why we should care, we cannot easily discern the insults"30.
70 In short, what unconsidered use of Insult Kit is missing, and what Neu fails to appreciate, is the awareness of contextual factors, particularly background and audience. It isn't until we look at these two features that we realize many of the insults generated by the kit will be strings of words which would not be readily recognized as meaningful by anyone nor be effective as insults. Insults are context-dependent and using an insult kit to combine putatively insulting words does nothing to escape this fact. Conley is aware of this, Neu is not.
Thomas Conley's Rhetoric of Insult: Situation is Everything
In Toward a Rhetoric of Insult Thomas Conley notices the importance of contextual factors when examining various types of insult. Conley is approaching insults from a rhetorical perspective which focuses his attention upon the roles of the background and audience. His rhetorical perspective on insults focuses on the impact that an insult has upon an audience, whether that audience is a single individual or a group. He also takes into account the power relationships between the individuals or groups involved in the use of insults. Insults may be traded between individuals, between individuals and groups, or between groups and other groups. There may be power differences between the parties involved. Insults may be exchanges between equals, from superior to subordinate or vice versa (e.g. a manager insulting an employee, or the employee insulting the manager)51. The individuals and groups involved as well as their relationships are what Conley calls the dimension of the "Scenario" and the scenario also includes whether or not a particular use of an insult has social assent or not. The insults that have social assent are those that we have called sanctioned and those which do not
71 have social assent we have called unsanctioned.
I suggest that the scenario is best understood as identifying a feature of what we have previously called background. The relationships between individuals and groups, as well as the social status of the insult or insults being used, are all important parts of the background information that will be involved in construction, interpretation and judgement of an insult.
Along with scenario, Conley also identifies the "intensity" and the "vehicle" of the insult as two other dimensions for consideration and these dimensions may be considered part of the background as well. When Conley talks about the intensity he means the severity of the insult, or as he puts it, the "scale of'hurt'" upon which insults may be plotted. The scale may extend from no hurt to insults that are extremely hurtful.
It may be helpful to replace Conley's "hurt" with the broader word harm, which we described above, since hurt may be taken to apply only to individual emotional pain. The potential harm of an insult may extend well beyond a person's feelings, or the harm may not impact feelings at all while having serious consequences for their relationships, or other aspects of their life, and "harm" communicates this more clearly.
It is also problematic that whether the intensity is understood in terms of hurt or harm, it still fails to account for some of Conley's own examples which don't seem to fall onto the scale of harm at all. For instance, when discussing the extent of the harm,
Conley says "consider the ways in which characters in comedy situations {Seinfeld comes to mind) sometimes actually strengthen their bonds with one another through insults" .
Does it make sense to extend harm to situations that don't seem to involve any harm at all, but rather involve a benefit to the participants in terms of their social bonding? This
72 is the same problem we saw with Jerome Neu when he identified insults as aiming at a kind of injury since such identification necessarily excludes insults that do not aim to injure or harm. Some insults may not aim for such goals at all. To speak of insults in relation to harm or injury does not always make sense.
This problem is not as severe for Conley at it is for Neu since intensity is identified as only one dimension of insult and we can make more sense of where intensity takes its place by including it in the background as one possible consideration when dealing with insults. Intensity, if present, will often be determined by wider social considerations. Some insults are understood, within certain groups, to be more intense than others and some insults may be taken as more or less intense depending on the reaction of the audience. If an audience witnesses my being insulted and laughs at me along with the person who insulted me, the intensity of the insult may be increased dramatically. If some of my friends are in the audience or hear about the incident later and they treat me differently because of my public humiliation on account of the insult, then the intensity will be greater than if the insult had no effect on my relationships at all.
The intensity must be understood within the broader contextual category of background and that will often involve looking at the affect upon the relationships involved.
The "vehicle" identifies the medium in which the insult is communicated5 . We can insult people with words, but also with gestures, improper mariners, images and cartoons, movies, and many other things. This dimension also fits nicely into the broader category of background. When we look at an insult and try to interpret it, these background factors can work in concert to produce an understanding of the meaning of the insult. For instance, the medium in which the insult is communicated may carry with
73 it certain relevant cultural features as when there may be a tradition of insults being communicated in a particular medium. We may ask of the insult, "does it fit into a tradition connected with medium?" and the answer may affect our understanding of the intensity, among other things. A caricature, for example, drawn in person by a street art vendor may traditionally involve an insulting representation of the subject, but the intensity is probably understood to be negligible. The subject has, after all, explicitly asked for a caricature and they probably know that they will get a comedic, if unflattering, representation of themselves as a souvenir. The caricature may be insulting but not in a hurtful manner. It is meant to be funny and enjoyable.
These background features lead Conley to propose that an approach to understanding insults that only involves looking at the meanings of individual insulting words will not be a profitable way to examine insults in general. This lexical approach will tell us what some conventionally insulting terms are, but it will fail to get at the wider contextual factors.
We can produce a list of insulting terms and organize them into categories, but there will always be exceptions and the items on the list will constantly change. A term that is insulting in one situation may not be in another. A term that was once insulting may be rehabilitated so that it is not insulting any longer. In surveying the vast number of terms that could potentially be insulting Conley concludes that "no term is inherently abusive or belittling"55. What matters is the context of use. What Conley means by this is that in a given time and place certain terms, phrases, and gestures will usually be considered to be insulting, but most of the terms should not be expected to stick around forever. Some conventional insults will simply become outmoded and be forgotten.
74 Other terms may be put through concerted campaigns to remove their offending connotations or to replace old meanings with new ones. The term "bitch" was once toxic but now we have Bitch, a feminist magazine and the Skinny Bitch book series and may praise something by saying it is "bitchin"'.
The rehabilitation of "bitch" is certainly not complete, but this example serves to show that even conventionally insulting terms may not remain that way forever. For
Conley, there is nothing intrinsically insulting about "bitch" or any other word, outside of our conventions of use and understanding. Those conventions can and do change.
Conley calls the fact that no words are inherently insulting "the problem of the intrinsic"56 and his suggested solution is to look, as we have been suggesting, at a wider range of contextual factors when considering insults. We should not only ask "what is the relation between what is said and what is meant," says Conley, but also "who 'means' it, and where and when?"57. Situation is everything.
Thomas Conley: Identification
What is most interesting about Conley's examination of insults is his insistence that there is an underlying "identification" between the insulter, the insulted party, and the audience if one is present. This "identification" does not mean that insulter and insulted become the same person, but that there is often a set of common assumptions and understandings that is shared between the various parties involved. When I use an insult and someone else understands it and is insulted, it may be because of things the insulted person shares with me. Why, asks Conley, are we insulted by certain statements and why is it that someone insulting us manages to choose exactly those things that will be
75 insulting? There are plenty of opportunities to bungle the job by using insults that will not be effective, or that will not even be understood by the target. The key to effectiveness, for Conley, is this kind "identification" between the insulter, the insulted, and potentially the audience:
Why was Antony insulted when Cicero accused him of being a drunkard and a catamite? Looked at one way, we might say that it is only natural that one who has been injured seeks revenge. But looked at another, might we not say that Antony and Cicero share the same opinion of drunkards and catamites? That is, beneath their enmity there is a substratum of agreement?58
The "substratum of agreement" between both parties about what they find undesirable is the "identification" that Conley is describing. When I call someone an ass hole, a filthy liar, or a shill, it is in part because I would not want to be any of those things myself and I believe that the person I am trying to insult is of a similar opinion. This notion of "identification" can also apply to the audience, if one is present, since the audience can also share the opinion of the insulter. This kind of audience assent is often a key component of whether or not an insult is effective. If I choose an insult poorly, the audience may not respond, or may react to me in a hostile manner. What factor might determine the difference between audience assent and a negative audience reaction is whether or not the same opinions are shared between the audience and the person using the insult. Conley says of Shakespeare's use of insults that he "communicates to his audience of Londoners his negative feelings towards obtuse lawyers [...], thus bringing to his audience's mind the feelings they share with one another"59, and we may say the same about insulting the claims of a misogynist, or a racist in order to dismiss their claims.
When we insult someone in front of an audience, we are playing on a fertile ground of background assumptions and opinions. It will be important to take into account the beliefs, assumptions and opinions of a particular audience if we wish an insult to be
76 positively judged by them.
Conley exhibits this feature of "identification" by looking at the Latin poet
Martial who was not only a talented poet, but also a master of insult who published a series of epigrams for upper-class Roman readers . Some of the epigrams involved serious maledictions against various parties, including this striking piece of invective against someone named Santra:
Santra is the most miserly and greediest of beings. When he has an invitation and runs off to a formal dinner, for which he has been angling for so many days and nights, he asks for three helpings or boar's sweetmeats, four of loin, both haunches of hare, and two shoulders; nor does he blush to lie about a thrush and snatch the milky beards of oysters. He smears his dirty napkin with mouthfuls of cake. Therein are assembled preserved grapes and a few pomegranate grains, and the ugly skins of a hollowed matrix and an oozy fig and a crippled mushroom. But when the napkin bursts with a thousand thefts, he hides gnawed vertebrae in his warm pocket together with the remains of a pigeon whose head has been devoured. Nor does he think shame to collect with a long arm whatever the sweeper and the dogs have left. Edible plunder is not enough for his gullet. He fills a flagon at his feet with mixed wine. When he has carried all this home up two hundred stairs and anxiously shuts himself in his barred chamber, this greedy fellow - sells it all the next day.61
There is one important bit of background to this piece: Martial made up Santra, along with the other targets for his insults and abuse in his other epigrams . The
"identification" is entirely between Martial and the audience, through an appeal to communal values. In reading Martial's insults we are "looking over his shoulder," says
Conley, "as he points to the disreputable and disgusting Santras [...] around him" .
Later, Conley puts this same thought into ethical language and suggests that what Martial and the audience are identifying with is "public morality" and the "ethical norms" of society64.
Thomas Conley: Malign and Benign Insults
Conley's claim about "identification" and ethical norms stands in stark contrast to the conclusion that he draws about insults: they can be either "malign" or "benign"65. It
77 is difficult to come to a clear understanding of what Conley means by these two terms, but we will attempt to explain and clarify. What Conley calls "malign" are the insults that are intended to denigrate their target and cause harm. "Malign" insults are the ones we would probably judge as unsanctioned and their use would be, as Conley says, "a moral or social failing" . How exactly these "malign" insults are supposed to contrast with "benign" insults is less than clear. For instance, Conley says that "the put-down or denigration designed to demonstrate the inferiority of one's opponents (i.e. Insult), can be seen as having a benign side" . What could Conley mean by "benign"? If we are speaking of "malign" insults as those directed at harming someone, one might assume that "benign" insults are those that involve no harm because they are not understood or not taken seriously by anyone. Yet when Conley lists examples of "benign" insults, what he seems to be identifying are the beneficial features that insults can often have. Insults can be a way of "reinforcing social bonds"; "celebrations of public virtue"; "a method of motivating people to do their best"; and a "powerful mode of truth-telling"68. This does not seem to be the "benign" side of insult, but rather a very clear list of the benefits and advantages that using insults, as a social act, can bring. The problem is that "benign" could be taken either as identifying the beneficial aspects of insult, or simply those that are neutral and not harmful. If what Conley means to say is that the "benign" insults are those that not only avoid harms, but also bring about goods, then he should use a less ambiguous term. If this is correct then it may be better to use three terms: malign, neutral, and benign. The "malign" insults are those that aim at and may cause harm, neutral insults do not aim at or cause harm, and "benign" insults aim at and bring benefits.
78 Conley seems reticent about drawing such a conclusion. He is willing to allow that completely barring all use of insults through the law or some other form of coercion would be "an unwarranted limitation on social interaction"69 and he suggests, however briefly, that some insults are used justifiably as a form of criticism . He stops short of making an explicit statement about the good insults may bring, though he provides several convincing examples of this. If we take Conley to be implicitly saying that insults can be used for good, there is still an important argument missing. Maybe insults can be used for good, but why should they be used at all? Given the very grave harms that are possible results of the use of insults, shouldn't insults be the very last avenue for critique or building social bonds that one would be justified in taking? Aren't there other ways of offering critique that do not have the significant potential negative impacts of insults? One obvious response to this challenge would be that insults offer a way of bringing about some good or avoiding some harm which other forms of expression do not or cannot bring about with the same level of effectiveness. What we need is a further argument for why insults should be chosen to bring about the goods mentioned above, not simply why they could bring them about. It is this crucial argument that Conley does not provide.
79 Chapter 4: Moral Arguments for the Use of Insults
Introduction
Should insults be used in argumentative situations? We may be tempted to respond that the answer should be "never!" In supporting the judgement that insults should never be used, we might point to the harms that insults can cause. These harms can be quite varied and may range from personal emotional harm, professional harm, damage to relationships, loss of self esteem, and other things. However, there are fairly common uses of insults that do not cause any harm at all. The trading of insults among friends may not cause any harm and it may be a form of social bonding that strengthens ties between people. Insults can also be profitably used by comedians for entertainment, roasts and in other settings where insults are conventionally understood to be expected.
No matter how many situations we come up with where insults can cause harm and no matter which supporting arguments we deploy for why insults should not be used, there will always be the possibility of exception cases.
The Good of Insults
We have already mentioned several uses of insults which bring about goods: some kinds of insults used in comedy settings can be entertaining instead of threatening; the practice of trading insults between friends can reinforce the bonds of friendship and strengthen social relations; the use of the cut direct can communicate important social information to other individuals who are watching the cut. These examples are only three contexts in which insults might bring goods, there may be others. All of these examples
80 are forms of sanctioned insult which are acceptable in part because they follow rules which govern their use. These rules specify the locations where and when insults may be used, the verbal cues (such as rhyming) which indicate that the insults are part of an insult game, the broader social standards of what is and is not acceptable speech within a community, and other things. It is clear why some sanctioned insults are considered acceptable practice while many other forms of insult are not: they can bring about social goods, and they can develop and strengthen appropriate relationships between people.
This is not to suggest that all cases where comedians or friends use insults are necessarily good. The simple fact that an insult is used in a comedy show with social sanction should not lead us to the conclusion that the insult is morally acceptable.
Sanctioned insults are not necessarily morally acceptable insults. The content of the insult still matters. Even if the insult is sanctioned by the comedian's audience, it may still express morally unacceptable attitudes towards women, disabled people, or some other group. The same is true of insults traded among friends. While the insults may promote camaraderie, they may also be motivated by thinly veiled hostility or they may start out as well-intentioned only to descend into aggression.
It is true that many kinds of insults are morally unacceptable. For instance, the dominance relationship which Jerome Neu focuses upon may be seen as an inappropriate attempt by one agent to gain power over other persons through the use of insults. Insults may also be used for aggressive purposes to scare, humiliate, and harass other people.
Such uses of insults for dominance and aggression are very real, but they are not the whole story.
81 Some sanctioned varieties of insult are involved in promulgating acceptable relationships and bringing about social goods but this is, in part, because they have rules to follow which attempt to curtail the negative social and political possibilities of insults.
We have seen that there are rules that are both specific to the situation (e.g. the rules for the cut direct described by Emily Post) and rules covering the broader set of morally acceptable expressions based on moral trends within communities (e.g. the rule against racial insults which Michael Richard breaks when insulting a heckler with racial slurs).
These rules can sometimes insure that the social goods which sanctioned insults can bring do not end up becoming harmful. Racial slurs may still get laughs at some comedy shows, but they do so by expressing inappropriate opinions of the targeted racial group and contributing to a toxic social system. The cut direct may be used capriciously against anyone and everyone, but its usefulness in communicating social information about relationships will be degraded to the point of uselessness and it may bring serious harm to many relationships.
Though there is some debate about the motivations behind playing the insult game that we have called "the dozens", many of the proposals center on the game developing positive peer bonds and allowing for expressions of anger against a hostile world. For instance, the sociologist John Dollard suggests in "The Dozens: Dialectic of Insult" that
71 the dozens acts as a "valve for aggression" among the adolescent boys who feel threatened by an oppressive and hostile society and often live in economically depressed situations. There is no way for these boys to vent their anger at the causes of their oppressed status, but they can participate in a game that offers a safe outlet for such aggression to be expressed among peers. No matter what the true motivations behind the
82 dozens really are, it is clearly an activity that can develop peer-bonding much like playing other games can. The peer bonding may be motivated by an oppressive social situation or some other factor, but the cause is not as much of an interest to us as the development of peer relationships that the insult game can facilitate.
Some sanctioned insults can and do bring about goods. Where insults are used in such ways, they should continue to be used. However, it may be argued that such sanctioned insults are not really insults because they often lack the characteristic features of real aggression and harm that we may often think of when considering insults. From the material we have presented so far, it is clear that this is an unnecessarily narrow view.
Harm, aggression, and dominance are all features of some types of insults, but not all of them. Some goods may flow from the use of some insults and we should recognize the good along with the bad. Any attempt to ignore the positive aspects of insults or to claim that they are not real insults involves blinding ourselves to the complexity and breadth of this social act. Insults that are currently sanctioned may give us an indication of which kinds of insults may bring about goods. But sanction cannot do more than this, it is merely a pointer.
Sanctioned insults really are insults and they may be acceptable because they bring about social goods or develop relationships through peer bonding and camaraderie among friends. We are, however, left with an interesting problem. There may be situations in which the use of insults is morally good and should have social sanction, but there are no rules in place for their use and no acceptable way of expressing them. While social sanction does not indicate that an insult is morally good, it can facilitate the use of insults that do bring about goods. Lack of social sanction may hinder our ability to use
83 insults in situations where they could bring some benefit. We may be able to identify further uses for insults which do not currently have social sanction, but should because they are morally acceptable and bring about some kind of good.
When insults are used in unfamiliar situations it is often hard to judge whether or not sanction should be given. Consider our example from the academic conference where one academic responded to the critical question of another by saying "I think you're crazy". The audience did not know how to react. Insults in unfamiliar situations can shock us to the point where we do not know how to respond. Are such insults morally acceptable or unacceptable? The only way to decide is to examine contexts in which insults can bring about goods and explicate their meaning in those contexts. We may be able to identify novel uses of insults that are good and should be sanctioned.
Competing Moral Commitments
Insults can take many different forms and can be directed towards a large range of goals. Sometimes those goals will aim at a harm of some kind. We have also pointed to a way in which insults can be used as a kind of argument calling for the dismissal of a claim that is not worthy of respect, but we have not yet articulated any justificatory arguments for why insults should be used in this way. It may well be the case that insults can be used to dismiss morally unacceptable positions, but it is a further step to say that insults should be used in this way.
Shouldn't we try to find other forms of expression which we can use to dismiss claims, without abandoning what seems to be a moral commitment to avoid using insults, based on the harm they may cause?
84 The answer to that question depends on the situation we are considering. For instance, in cases where conventional insults are elicited by anger there does not seem to be anything "at stake" if we refrain from using an insult. In such a situation, maintaining a moral commitment to avoid using insults does not result in a failure to meet any other moral commitments we may also have. However, there may also be situations where our commitment to avoid using insults comes into conflict with other moral commitments and this is why we cannot have an absolute rule against insult use. There should be a way to arbitrate between competing commitments and the result of such arbitration may lead us to conclude that we should use an insult in order to meet some other commitment we have.
Arguments are often context dependent, relying on both audience and background. Our understanding of an argument will be affected by those contextual factors. What we should ask is whether or not there is a set of contextual features that can obtain in some situations, such that insults would be a suitable form of expression to argue for dismissal of morally unacceptable views.
The first contextual features we might look at are elements of the background. Is the putatively unacceptable position which we wish to dismiss with an insult widely held to be morally unacceptable? Positions advocating slavery, for instance, may be widely seen as morally unacceptable and even those who still argue for such positions are, in all likelihood, aware that they are a minority view. Alternatively, the position being advanced may only be deemed morally inappropriate by a minority of people in a given society, or it may not even be known that it is a moral issue.
85 Instead of focussing on specific positions, we may ask whether there are sets of claims which all share a general form or purpose that we may have a moral commitment to challenge. In such cases, our general commitment to avoid the use of insults may come into conflict with our commitment to resist such claims and our judgement on what to do may lead us to endorse the use of insults.
Insults and Oppression
Claims advocating slavery, anti-Semitism, and subjugation of women, or the lack of rights for animals can all be considered part of a broader class of positions advocating for the oppression of a group. Arguments made about the "proper" place of women and arguments against the gains made by the women's rights movement are proposals for the oppression of women. Claims that advocate lowering the legal status of an ethnic group within a community are advocating a form of oppression. Those who argue for oppression often argue either for establishing power imbalances or for maintaining inappropriate power imbalances where they exist. There is a broad range of possibilities open to those who make arguments for oppression.
We may often think of oppression as pertaining to unjust distributions of goods within a community or with tyrannical governments which have taken power against the will of the people they control. Philosophers such as Iris Marion Young have argued for a much broader understanding of what constitutes oppression. In Justice and the Politics of Difference, Young argues that it is not only small groups of tyrants and antagonistic governments that oppress others, but also the attitudes, assumptions and habits that may often underlie the behaviour of ordinary people . We may not be at all aware that the
86 daily actions we perfonn while working jobs and fulfilling institutional roles may lead to
"systemic constraints on groups" . Oppression manifests itself as a social system that excludes certain persons and groups from opportunities, positions and social benefits and may subject them to serious hardships.
Generally accepted cultural stereotypes of a group may lead to systemic constraints being placed upon the members of a group. For example, people with physical disabilities may be judged less capable of performing tasks, even when their disability in no way affects their performance of those tasks. Women may be deemed less suitable for management positions based entirely on stereotypes about gender. Such judgements may not be made out of conscious spite for the oppressed group but are part of everyday life. Some group will be placed in a privileged position because of the constraints on the oppressed group. There will always be those who benefit from the oppression of a group, but they may not necessarily know that they have those benefits, or that they come at a cost to others7 .
A person may make an argument that indirectly supports oppression of a group while being unaware that such oppression is entailed by their position. They may also argue for the wholesale oppression or systematic mistreatment of a group and know exactly what their claims entail. These types of claims advocate for unacceptable power relations and politically unacceptable social systems. Such claims do not deserve respect and should be dismissed.
We may often have trouble deciding whether or not a particular issue is one of oppression, but we can more generally state that oppression itself is unacceptable and
87 when claims are made which advocate for well-known forms of oppression, they should be challenged through some form of argumentation.
More subtle forms of oppression must first be identified before they can be argued against. In situations where the status of a possibly oppressive claim is unclear we should probably take other argumentative approaches against it. We might first attempt to clarify what the claim really means. Is this person really arguing for the oppression of a group or are we mistaken? Could this position be clarified in such a way that we could understand it as not advocating oppression? In cases where the potential for advocacy of oppression is unintentional on the part of the arguer, it may be a good strategy to bring this potential up as a critical challenge to the arguer. Are they aware that their position involves some morally unacceptable results and does that possibility count as a reason for them to change or abandon their view? Bringing the arguer to awareness of the possible connotations of the position may be an approach that is persuasive enough to result in withdrawal of the claim, or at least some serious reconsideration.
It may not be until we get the perspective of another that we can see the wider implications of our claims and there may be no moral fault involved in our mistake.
Simply dismissing a claim outright, without first offering the arguer a chance to see why their position is morally unacceptable may not be the appropriate strategy in some situations.
It may be thought that insults can more easily be used^br the purposes of oppression. In situations where there is an unacceptable power imbalance between groups, the more powerful group may be willing to insult the oppressed group since the possibilities for retaliation by the oppressed group are small or non-existent. The
88 oppressed group will probably avoid using any insults against the more powerful oppressors since such expressions could lead to negative consequences for members of the group. The use of insults may be taken to be a form of oppression in itself. Frequent, public insults against persons or groups may lead to toxic life situations for the insulted parties who are forced to live in a community, surrounded by the lack of respect expressed by the insulting language. Under constant attack through insults, one may feel segregated from the community, afraid to participate in public life, and one may suffer many of the harms we have been describing.
Insults will often accompany oppression and may be used to remind the dominated of their position in an imbalanced power relationship. While this illustrates the oppressive possibility of insults, it is not a reason to completely avoid using insults.
In some contexts it may be useful to take advantage of them in the struggle against oppression. The tools of the oppressors and potential oppressors can sometimes be appropriated and used by oppressed groups or those who attempt to defend oppressed groups. This is exactly what I propose should be done. For instance, oppressed groups may direct insults against their oppressors communally and without the knowledge of the oppressors, in order to develop solidarity with each other and facilitate social bonding within the oppressed group. We have already suggested that this may be what is occurring when black adolescents play the dozens. The development of close relationships through the use of insults against a common foe can make unbearable situations slightly more agreeable to those who are caught in them.
The oppressed can still fight back, even if not directly, by insulting their opponents and demonstrating that while the privileged may have power, that power has
89 not silenced them completely, nor the third-party agents who may also protest the injustices of the dominators. This kind of approach indicates what I think is the proper attitude we should hold towards power when it is held unjustly and at the expense of other people and groups. Insults may be a tool of oppressive groups, but properly employed insults also hold radical possibilities for undermining claims advocating some forms of oppression.
When Insults Should be Used
An insult can be used as a particular kind of argument for dismissal and may be an argument of last resort. This means that their use should be limited to cases where other argumentative strategies lack the necessary force. Someone who is explicitly arguing for the removal of women's voting rights is unequivocally arguing for the oppression of women through legal means and we can expect that most reasonable people would be able to identify the position as advocating oppression of women. Such an explicit position does not require more critical discussion or more common argumentative strategies. We could give reasons why women should continue to be allowed to vote, but the position against which we would give those reasons is not one that deserves respect in the first place. There is no justifiable reason to engage with the question of whether or not women should be able to vote; it not a question worth asking.
The fact that such a position is direct advocacy for the oppression of women probably does not require clarification either for the potential audience or for the arguer advancing the position. When someone argues for imposing systematic political or social constraints on some group such as the removal of voting rights, the arguer may know
90 exactly where they stand and what they are supporting. The position is morally unacceptable and not worthy of respect. It should be dealt with using the appropriate argumentative strategy: argumentative dismissal. William Lloyd Garrison, an outspoken opponent of slavery in the United States during the 19th Century once expressed a very similar sentiment: "With reasonable men, I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost"75.
We can understand a "tyrant" broadly as anyone who advocates the oppression of another group, though Garrison would have directed this term chiefly at those who advocated for slavery and the inequality of African Americans, or against opponents of women's suffrage, when he turned his attentions to the struggle of women to gain the right to vote. Garrison's position may have been hard to understand and probably objectionable to some people reading him at the time. It is easier to accept his position now, at least within regards to slavery, since slavery is now commonly understood to be a particularly insidious form of oppression and one which many societies have moved to abolish.
If we encounter someone who argues for a practice that we generally accept to be oppressive then there may be little difficulty in judging them a "tyrant". Such people may not presently have the power to bring about the tyranny they advocate, but the fact that they cannot easily impose their tyranny on others does not mean we don't have an obligation to challenge those arguments. Quite the contrary, many claims for oppression have been discredited and they should continue to be challenged whenever they are articulated. There are a range of argumentative strategies that can be used to publicly
91 challenge such claims when they are used and dismissal through insulting speech may be one such strategy.
It is difficult to challenge the assertion that we should argue against oppressive claims and attitudes when they arise and we have been careful to identify some insults as being forms of argument which are suitable for just this purpose. The use of insults is one argumentative strategy that is qualified to respond to oppressive claims. But why not avoid insults and make other kinds of arguments for dismissal instead? Against the kinds of morally offensive positions we have been discussing one may explicitly state: "these claims amount to advocacy for oppression of a group and I think they should be immediately dismissed". There are two reasons why we should sometimes choose insults over more direct expressions of dismissal in some situations.
The first reason is that arguing for dismissal through an explicit statement and arguing for dismissal using an insult are two approaches with very different characters.
Arguing for dismissal involves a range of possible attitudes and the right type of dismissal argument should be chosen to communicate the attitude properly. Dismissal does suggest that we do not respect the claims being made and do not see the need to give reasons against them, but there may be many contexts for this type of argument. A modern astronomer may well dismiss claims about the structure of the solar system based on the Ptolemaic system because that system is empirically false. If I dismiss claims that are morally unacceptable, I want my dismissal to communicate not only that I do not respect the claims and will not discuss them, but also that I find them to worthy of moral reproach. Claims that are clearly empirically false may be explicitly dismissed, but to make claims that are morally wrong should involve both dismissal and the
92 communication of an attitude of moral reproach. Simply stating "I dismiss your claims" to a morally inappropriate claim does not express this kind of attitude in the same way either to the arguer or the potential audience. In order to communicate such an attitude of reproach without using an insult, one may be required to express a further argument for why the dismissed claim should also be considered worthy of moral reproach, which is something that an insult could have communicated on its own.
The second reason why insults should be chosen in some situations is because they can be effective in ways other argumentative strategies may not be. As I have argued above, unconventional insults which are constructed for particular situations, can affect the emotions and assumptions of audience members in ways that sober statements such as "I think we should dismiss this argument" do not. If the unconventional insults are constructed with a particular argumentative goal in mind and take into account the background and the audience in order to appeal to assumptions and background events, then they may have a great deal of argumentative force. Such unconventional insults can be tailored as specific responses to particular morally unacceptable claims and can move audiences.
If I am judicious in my choice of content when constructing the insult, then the audience may make the associations I intend them to make and the impact of the argument for dismissal can be quite strong. A good example of this comes from a pamphlet arguing against the live dissection of animals, written by the 19l century
English novelist Marie Louise Rame. In the pamphlet Rame is arguing against there being any scientific interest in live dissection, a practice which no doubt caused extreme suffering to many animals. While the pamphlet does employ a range of argumentative
93 strategies, Rame also engages in what I take to be an insulting dismissal of the putative scientific "interest" in vivisection:
The most intricate social problems wait unsolved; political economy remains merely a name; all the revolutions and reasonings of mankind have failed to produce any even balance of property or any just division of pleasure; drink, vice, dirt, prostitution, hunger, and unnatural crimes work their wholesale ruin amidst millions of miserable creatures who crowd together in all the cities of the world: yet the scientists think that the whole key of study and knowledge lies in a rabbit's rectum or a dog's pancreas [...].76
We can see that the insult is unconventional and constructed based on the background. This is what gives it such force when read by the audience. Rame's intention here is to dismiss the misplaced interests of certain scientists by providing a list of some serious societal problems which she thinks science could help to resolve and then contrasting those problems with an apparently unfounded interest in cutting up live rabbits to look at their rectums.
In this case the insult is being directed against those causing harm to animals and not humans, but I think live vivisection can equally be understood as a form of oppression and its practice is evidence of an unacceptable treatment of animals. If we find it acceptable to cut open live animals, it may be because we don't see ourselves as having any responsibility to avoid causing them such suffering. Rame sees the nature of this treatment and employs insults in her arguments against it.
The impact on the audience is not the only reason that insults can be appropriate forms of dismissal. The person making the morally inappropriate claims may also feel the impact of the insult and they may be humiliated or feel the attitude of moral reproach communicated by the insult. We may consider humiliation to be one of the unjustified harms that may come from insults in certain contexts, but this is not one of those contexts. The result of such humiliation may be that the person avoids making such claims again for fear of similar results. 94 An even better result would be that the moral reproach communicated by the insult may lead the person to reconsider their position. It may not be until we are sternly rebuked for an unacceptable comment that we can appreciate how wrong it really is. If strong, dismissive language in the form of insults encourages this positive moral thought, then we should use that language when possible.
Insulting language also offers us a compelling alternative to the use of legal force to silence unacceptable claims. Such a person may be found guilty not in a court of law, but in a court of public opinion as John Stuart Mill argues in On Liberty . The law may not be the best place to deal with offensive and harmful forms of speech, even those forms that directly advocate oppression. Louis Brandeis, an Associate Justice of the
Supreme Court of California once remarked in a ruling that "if there be a time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."
The character of the speech I am recommending here may be a fair distance from what Brandeis is thinking of, but the idea is much the same. We can respond to unacceptable claims with insulting speech. Such speech does not "enforce silence" but silence on the part of the offending speaker may still be the result. This silence is won using "more speech" through the justified dismissal of the speaker, not through legal coercion.
The good that may come from silencing those with morally unacceptable claims should also be considered. The very act of expressing an oppressive claim can itself be a form of oppression, particularly when that claim is made in the presence of members of groups who have recently made gains with regards to their freedoms. The movement
95 towards women's equality is, unfortunately, still young and many women still remember the unacceptable claims made about them and the oppressive situations in which they were forced to live, or continue to live.
There may be backlash as some people react negatively to the advances that women have made. Backlash may involve some people making claims against the recent, hard-won victories of women and may lead women to feel that they are under attack once again, that the security of freedoms only recently won is being placed in jeopardy. Such claims may act as reminders of the unacceptable situations women were and are forced to live with. The claims may also be an attempt to re-establish those unacceptable constraints in order to turn back the clock on the struggle against oppression. There is no reason to allow such claims to go unchallenged and strong language may be used both to argue against such claims and communicate an appropriate attitude.
We may now be able to answer our question about the possible insult at the academic conference when a presenter said "I think you're crazy". What judgement should we make about it? Is the use of an insult an acceptable response to a critical question? As was the case with our detailed example of the sign at the University of
Guelph, the answer depends on the context. There is nothing about academic conferences that should completely disbar the use of insults. The claims of someone arguing for the oppression of a group in the context of an academic conference deserve no more respect than the claims of someone arguing for the same form of oppression in the street, at work, or anywhere else. The location in which an argument for oppression is made does not change the fact that the claims are morally unacceptable and should be
96 dismissed. Once again, care should be taken. If speakers are not aware of what their positions entail, one may only need to point out the character of their claims. Dismissive arguments such as insults should be reserved for occasions where the oppressive content is egregious and it is clear that the speakers are aware of this.
The background of "I think you're crazy" argument had nothing to do with oppression. The insulted person was asking a question of a purely logical nature and I was very interested to hear a reasoned response. The insult given by the presenter in response to the logical question was not a justifiable way of responding. It is entirely possible that the critical question was completely misguided, involved poor reasoning or was deficient in some other way, but none of those possibilities warranted the insult.
Unless the questioner is the academic equivalent of a heckler, then the academic presenting the paper should respond to the question with a reasoned response. Restricting the use of insults to all but serious situations will help to avoid some of the serious harms that insults may cause in academic contexts.
Insults during academic presentations may affect the relationships that already exist between the academics involved, or even curtail the formation of new ones. This applies to both the person using the insult and the insulted party. The insulter may find that relationships they once had based on mutual open communication become distorted by their public use of insults. I may be afraid to ask reasonable questions of my colleague if I know she has a tendency to insult people who ask such questions. If I do not know the insulter, I may decide that they are not worth knowing and a potential relationship does not develop.
97 There may be consequences for the insulted person as well. Perhaps some of their professional relationships suffer because of the insult, or new relationships may not form because the insulted person may appear discredited in the eyes of others. This latter impact may be quite problematic when there is an existing power imbalance between the insulter and the insulted. If a famous speaker with a long career and quite a bit of prestige in a field publicly uses an insult to respond to the question of a relatively unknown scholar then the negative impact upon the professional relationships of the scholar may be pronounced. Such an insult may take advantage of the power imbalance between the insulter and insulted in an unacceptable way by using the prestige and social status of the famous speaker to discredit the scholar asking the question.
The power differential between the person making oppressive claims and the victim(s) may have a significant impact on whether an insult or some other kind of language should be chosen. In cases where there is no power differential at all, one may expect the victim to be capable of dealing with the issue. When oppressive claims are directed by the powerful against a person group that is already severely disadvantaged there may be a certain urgency to silence the speech immediately and vigorously and the kinds of language we may be justified in using will depend in part on how large the power difference is.
Insults and Respect
Even though insults may offer us an occasionally effective way to dismiss some morally unacceptable claims, there may still be an argument against using insults. This argument may be rooted in the two notions of respect articulated in "Two Kinds of
98 Respect" by Stephen Darwall. We should appreciate the fact that respect is not a single attitude, argues Darwall, and he distinguishes between appraisal respect and recognition respect. When we render a positive judgement about a person either as a person or in
70 regards to some project they are engaged in, we are talking about appraisal respect . The grounds for having appraisal respect for someone are the character of the person being considered and their dispositions to act based on what the best reasons suggest.
People who deserve appraisal respect are conscientious agents who consider the reasons for acting in a particular way and choose the right actions based on their reasoning. This kind of respect can apply to the specific pursuits in which people can be engaged. Darwall gives the example of a tennis player who may have excellent technical skills but is not worthy of appraisal respect as a tennis player because they fail to observe the standards of behaviour that good tennis players should. A tennis player who does observe the proper standards by avoiding heckling, not laughing at missed shots, and generally behaving in a manner that is appropriate to the activity is worthy of appraisal on respect, while a tennis player who does not observe those standards is worthy of none.
Recognition respect with regards to persons is an attitude that does not involve the particular pursuits of agents or the character of the person. To have such respect for a person is to "give appropriate weight to the fact that he or she is a person by being willing Q 1 to constrain one's behaviour in ways required by that fact." We restrict our actions based on what we reasonably consider to be appropriate and inappropriate actions towards persons. Our actions are restricted because we are moral agents who have requirements on how we should and should not treat other persons.
99 One might object to the use of insults on the grounds that the use of insults necessarily impinges upon the recognition respect we duly owe all persons. Insults are an aggressive form of communication that will often aim at harming another person or a group and such a form of communication may not be morally acceptable when dealing with other persons, even if those persons are articulating claims that are morally unacceptable. Whether or not we find such persons worthy of any appraisal respect given their dispositions for advocating oppression or other morally unacceptable claims, our use of insults in our responses will surely leave us in a moral position that is no better.
There are two reasons why we should reject such a challenge. The first involves clarifying what kind of respect we are talking about when dismissing claims using insults.
In our discussion of respect for claims we were very careful to identify the respect involved as being related to the claims a person is making and not to the person who is making the claims. Darwall writes only of respect for persons and so I will extend his notion of appraisal respect to cover the claims that people make. When I hear someone make a claim and judge it worthy of appraisal respect what I am considering in my judgement are the dispositions and methods of reasoning that lead the person to make such a claim.
The kinds of situations in which we have suggested insults be used are those where oppressive claims are being made. When one uses insults against such claims what is lacking is appraisal respect: the insults indicate that we do not respect the dispositions and methods of reasoning that lead this person to make morally unacceptable claims. What this lack of appraisal respect is based on is the fact that such dispositions show that the insulted party is not expressing due consideration - moral recognition
100 respect - for the targets of the claims. Our use of insults is not an expression of our lack of recognition respect for the person making the claim, but rather our acknowledgement and moral protest over the fact that the insulter lacks such respect for the targeted people or groups. In using arguments for dismissal we are fulfilling our obligations to the targets of the oppressive claims. The use of insults is one argumentative strategy that will be appropriate, in some situations.
The second reason to reject this challenge is that the impact upon recognition respect is quite the opposite of what has been suggested. If we hear oppressive claims being made by someone and choose not to use insults or respond in some other dismissive way, we may be failing in our moral obligations both to that person and to the person or people targeted by the insult. It has been suggested by Jean Harvey in Civilized
Oppression that we may have a reciprocal moral obligation to help each other become better moral agents by providing each other information and arguments that may advance our moral thought and development .
By using insults as arguments, we may sometimes be able to communicate the need to think about the claims we are making and examine the moral status of our positions more closely. Others may use insults on us to foster our own moral development.
This will not always be the case. Insults may often cause people to shut down their thinking or cling to their offending views ever more closely, but privately. Further thought will not always follow the use of dismissive or insulting arguments, though this may be equally true of other forms of argumentation as well. The possibility of such moral development can be seen as a benefit that will sometimes accompany the primary
101 goals of immediately dismissing the oppressive claims, expressing strong moral protest, and communicating respect to the victims, but it is an important benefit.
But why should we not use other forms of argumentation instead of insults to foster such reciprocal moral development? In the situations we are discussing there is also something at stake for the targets of the oppressive claims. For instance, if I am the target and allow the claim to be made without protest, then I may be failing to give recognition respect to myself. I will be accepting the claim that I should be denied my rights in some way and this may threaten my self-respect . Using insults may communicate both my lack of appraisal respect for the claims being made and also establish recognition respect for myself. The insult can express my outrage at my treatment in a way that other forms of argumentation may not.
If the target of the claims is not oneself but some other group then there will still be occasions where we should still use an insult as a response. I have argued above that making oppressive claims can itself be a form of oppression by establishing or reminding formerly or currently oppressed groups of unacceptable life situations and contributing to oppressive social systems. Uttering oppressive claims amounts to one agent expressing a lack of recognition respect for the persons or groups they have targeted. Dismissing those claims with insults is one possible approach which can be used in some cases, in order communicate to the targeted persons or groups that they are respected members of the community and to indicate that the claims are worthy only of moral reproach and should be reconsidered or abandoned. There are certainly other methods for communicating moral reproach and in many cases, less vivid language may be
102 appropriate and effective. There are ways of rebuking or chiding a person that will not involve insults, and these may, more often than not, be the appropriate choice.
It may be objected that milder forms of dismissal and protest should always be used and that in the case of insults, "two wrongs don't make a right". This will be often be true and I have been careful to state that in many cases, alternative forms of expression will be the appropriate choice, instead of the use of even mild insults. Insults will often be the wrong approach, but on occasion they will be the best choice. Such occasions are when an insult will: (a) effectively communicate dismissal; (b) express moral protest; (c) indicate respect for the victims of the claims; (d) take into account the significant power differential between the person making the claims and the victim(s); and (e) open the possibility of moral development. In situations where all the conditions obtain I do not think we would be justified in calling the use of an insult a "wrong", particularly if other forms of argumentation are not able to bring about the same results. If a rebuke or a sober dismissal were not able to produce the same results, then it would be the wrong choice, not the insult.
Such situations may be rare and it may also be hard to judge when they exist. The person who intends to use an insult should look carefully at the various contextual features we have discussed. For example, social sanction despite not being a perfect metric for moral acceptability will have a bearing on audience reaction and whether or not an insult will be an effective form of dismissal. Social sanction functions as one of the background assumptions that a speaker can take into account when crafting an insult or another form of argument and if the insult breaks social sanction, it will not be effective.
103 Personal knowledge of the character of the person being insulted may tell us whether the insult will elicit further thought, or whether it will simply shut down any further considerations. As with other argumentative strategies, a measure of judgement must be applied to determine whether vivid, insulting language will bring about argumentative goals in a way that more mild forms of rebuke and dismissal may not. It is certainly possible that the person using an insult may botch the job and use an insult when some other form of expression may be preferable, but this is true of other forms of expression as well. We may not always choose the right thing to say and there is no way to provide a foolproof test for when insults should be used and we may judge poorly. My aim is only to provide guidelines and clarifications to aid in such judgement.
Using insults to counter oppressive claims does not always conflict with our moral obligations to other persons and groups. Quite the contrary, the use of insults can sometimes be a way for us to meet our obligations to others and to ourselves by defending the vulnerable from oppressive claims. Even if our attempts to defend the vulnerable are not effective, we are certainly in a good moral position for having tried by using dismissive language and expressing an appropriate attitude of reproach.
Extra Obligations to Use Insults
When we encounter oppressive claims, we should use dismissive arguments as one of our strategies for challenging those claims. There may be some situations where one bears extra obligations to use such arguments over and above what I have already presented. One may at first be drawn to the obvious examples of oppression and suggest that what degree of obligation we have depends on the degree of oppression. Such an
104 approach may look to the most serious types of oppressive claims and practices. Perhaps we are aware that the claims being made stand a good chance of resulting in a moral atrocity such as genocide or the wholesale disenfranchisement of a large group within our community.
Would this not be more serious than claims which only affect a small group or do not lead to an atrocity?
The problem with such an approach is in finding a principled place where these extra obligations may arise. What demarcates the level of severity of the oppressive claims or the threshold number of victims where we have extra obligations to use insults or other dismissive arguments and what is the next step? Once we arrive at the obvious possibility of widespread genocide developing from the oppressive speech of some person or group, would it not be wiser to deal with the issue through more direct means such as legal persuasion or even physical intervention? In situations where we know that moral atrocities are imminent, we may not want to say that the best we could do was insult the oppressors. Insults can be effective, but only up to a point and if we rely on them in such extreme situations, our actions may be morally questionable.
Some persons in some situations may bear extra obligations to challenge oppressive claims . In our discussion of when insults or other dismissive arguments should be used we talked primarily about third-party agents who overhear or encounter oppressive claims but may not have any close associations to the arguer or the targeted group, and we also talked about the persons directly targeted by the oppressive claims. In such cases a third-party agent does have a moral obligation to defend the victims of the oppressive claims even if they have little connection with the targets. I may not know the
105 persons who are targets of anti-Semitic claims, but that does not mean I can simply ignore the statements simply by virtue of my personal distance.
The same is not true of the victims. It would be unfair to the victims of the oppressive claims to say that they have a similar obligation to protest for themselves.
The victim(s) may already be disenfranchised and their self-respect may have already suffered such that they are not in a position to respond with insults or any other form of protest, either for fear of reprisal, because they see the situation as hopeless, or because
Of social oppression, as Mill says "enslaves the soul itself and the victims come to believe what is being said. We may only say that the victims of the claims should use insults if they are in an appropriate position to do so, but not that they have an obligation to do so.
They do not have extra obligations over third-parties simply by virtue of being victims.
However, some agents may have a different position with respect to the victims.
By allowing the oppressive claims to be made without challenge, some people may be morally complicit in the results of those claims simply by remaining silent. If it is a formal institution such as a corporation, a government, a church, a non-profit organization or some representative of such an institution that is making the claims for oppression, then the members of that institution may bear an extra obligation for dismissing those particular claims, if and when they see them for what they are86.
Remaining silent does not amount to giving explicit assent to claims made by a formal institution of which I am a member, but I may lend tacit support to those institutional claims if I do not raise my voice in opposition.
For example, a government official may make a speech suggesting that a certain ethnic or religious group is responsible for some civic problems and that sanctions should
106 be imposed upon that group to improve the situation. Perhaps an executive of a corporation makes some public statements at a press conference claiming that economic problems are caused by poor people, who don't work simply because they are lazy. The claims of the government official and the CEO may be morally unacceptable, even if stated privately, but they may take on the form of statements that represent the goals and beliefs of the institution, depending on where and how they are said. Such statements may implicate other institutional members and those members may have extra obligations to challenge such statements over third-parties.
It is true that third-party witnesses bear an obligation to challenge the claims of an institution, but the representatives of the institution are in a unique position. Those representatives have an additional obligation since the failure of institutional representatives to challenge the claims of the institution and defend the victims may result in further harms. Failure by institutional agents to attempt to amend the situation between the institution and the victim(s) may indicate an attitude of moral contempt and
87 such contempt may itself be a serious harm to the victim(s) . While the third-party agents may be morally complicit by not speaking out when they hear oppressive claims, we may not want to say they are contemptuous of the victims in the way that institutional agents may be if they do not act.
As an institutional agent I can try to avoid this result by cutting my ties with the institution, but this will amount to little more than shirking my duties towards the victims.
This is an example of what Jean Harvey aptly calls "moral abandonment". Even if no good may come of my protest because the victims will not be spared the tangible harms that come from the oppressive claims and activities of the institution, I may still be
107 obligated to protest on their behalf, especially if the victims are unable to do so. The oppressive claims and my failure to protest using insults or other dismissive arguments may result in the position of the victims within the community being degraded . If the institution is suppressing the ability of the victims to protest the oppressive claims or actions being made against them, then the members of that institution may bear an extra obligation to the victims since failure to protest means they will be abandoning them to an unacceptable moral status, even if the harms cannot be avoided through protest.
Members of an institution may know exactly what the institution is doing and they may be aware that the claims being made or the actions being taken are morally inappropriate. We do not need to go so far as to claim that such agents should use insults specifically. What I argue is that some form of argument for dismissal may be used to avoid moral complicity in the oppressive activities of the institution and possible moral abandonment of the victims, if dismissive argumentation is deemed an appropriate response. There will be situations where merely using dismissive arguments such as insults may be too little and the institutional agents may still be complicit by virtue of not having engaged in more direct action. Insults alone are one way of working towards better political and social relations and they may only be a part of what showing solidarity with the victims involves.
Some agents may quite rightly choose insults as their dismissive arguments by looking at context, the background and the audience, and deciding that insults would be the most effective form of argumentation. The point is not to use a specific form of dismissal, but to argue in the most effective way possible in order to communicate both that the claims of the institution or certain institutional representatives are not worthy of
108 respect, that they should be summarily dropped from serious discussion, and that the institution or the offending representatives are worthy of moral reproach. This approach will communicate to the victims that while the institution or some of its representatives may not view the victims with respect, the institutional agents engaged in protest do hold such respect for the victims. In the cases where insults can do this, insults should be used, perhaps in concert with other forms of protest.
Conclusion
Our treatment of insults has moved very quickly from the broad considerations of various kinds of insults in the first chapter to a focus upon specific kinds of audience- oriented insults which can be used to achieve the argumentative goal of dismissal for oppressive claims. In the first chapter I presented two key distinctions in order to explain insults: sanctioned vs. unsanctioned insults and conventional vs. unconventional.
Following this, I explained how some unconventional insults can function as arguments that advocate for the dismissal of claims which do not deserve respect. Argumentation using insults is sometimes an appropriate and effective method for challenging some types of oppressive claims and I have argued that insults should be used in some situations.
We have been pursuing two central goals throughout our discussion of insults.
The first is to make the underlying structure and meaning of insults more visible in order to understand their use and make the appropriate responses and judgements when they are used. The second goal is one of advocacy. I do not think that we use insults enough.
This may be because the use for insults which I have articulated is not a use that presently
109 has social sanction. If this changes such that we become comfortable using insults as a good argumentative strategy when we hear oppressive claims, then we may occasionally choose to use insults when we challenge those claims, though I must stress that other argumentative strategies should be considered first.
I have specifically identified claims advocating oppression as the types of claims that should sometimes be challenged by using insults. However, the range of unacceptable claims to which insults could apply may extend beyond those that argue for oppression and I am hopeful that further work and thought may uncover new contexts in which insults should also be used.
110 REFERENCES
' Jerome Neu, Sticks and Stones (London: Oxford University Press, 2008), 243-269. 2 "Speech at the White House Correspondent's Dinner (2006), Google Video, Retrieved August 17, 2010 from http://www.google.com/url?url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSE_saVX_2A. J Andrew Conway, "The Stand-Up Comedian's Response to the Heckler", Maledicta 11 (Winter 1995): 35- 46,35. 4 Conway, 40. 5 Conway, 41. 6 William Labov, Language in the Inner City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), 325. 7 Labov, 329. 8 Labov, 308. 9 Jerome Neu, Sticks and Stones (London: Oxford University Press, 2008), 71. 10 Labov, 352. "Labov, 362. 12 Labov, 353. 13 Emily Post, Etiquette, (Teddington: The Echo Library, 2007), 23-24. 14 Post, 24. 15 R.A. Meyers, English Historical Documents (New York: Routledge, 1969), 208. 16 Thomas Conley, Toward a Rhetoric of Insult (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 9. 17 Robert Edouard, Dictionnaire des injures (Paris: Tchou, 1967). 18 Conley (2010), 37-38. 19 Richard Martin Adams, Bad Mouth (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), 33. 20 Adams, 33. 21 Conley, 37. 22 Neu, 58. 2j Thomas Conley, Towards a Rhetoric of Insult (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 2. 24 Christopher Tindale, Acts of Arguing (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 4. 25 Tindale, 76 26 Tindale, 76. 27 Tindale, 84. 28 Tindale, 84. 29 Tindale, 85. 30 Tindale, 119. 31 Conley, 102-105. 32 Conley, 105. 33 Conley, 39. 34 Conley, 39. 35 Tindale, 106. 36 Tindale, 104. 37 Witnessed by the author at the 2010 meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association. 38 Jerome Neu, Sticks and Stones: The Philosophy of Insults (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 68. 39 Neu, 22. 40 Neu, 99. 41 Neu, 58. 42 Neu, 3. 43 Neu, 94-95 44 Neu, 24-26. 45 Neu, 112. 46 "Shakespeare Insult Kit", accessed February 24, 2011, http://www.pangloss.com/seidel/shake_rule.html. 47 Neu, 118. 48 Thomas Conley, Toward a Rhetoric of Insult (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 15. 49 Conley, 15.
Ill 50Conley, 16. 51Conley, 3. 52 Conley, 4. 53 Conley, 4. 54 Conley, 7. 55 Conley, 22. 56 Conley, 25. 57 Conley, 28. 58 Conley, 98. 59 Conley, 98. 60 Conley, 41. 61 Conley, 44. 62 Conley, 48. 63 Conley, 49. 64 Conley, 98. 65 Conley, 125. 66 Conley, 126. 67 Conley, 125. 68 Conley, 125. 69 Conley, 120. 70 Conley, 121. 71 John Dollard, "The Dozens: Dialectic of Insult" The American Imago 1, (1939), 22. 72 Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 41. 73 Young, 41. 74 Young, 42. 75 Quote by Wendell Phillips Garrison, Francis Jackson Garrison, in William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879 : The Story of His Life Told by His Children, Vol. 1 (Charleston: Nabu Press, 2010), 188. 76 Hugh Kingsmill, More Invective (New York: The Dial Press, 1930), 169. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (London: Penguin Books, 2010), 110. Whitney v. California, 247 U.S. 377, (1927). 79 Stephen Darwall, "Two Kinds of Respect" Ethics 88, no. 1 (October 1977), 44. 80 Darwall, 42. 81 Darwall, 45. 82 Jean Harvey, Civilized Oppression (Boston: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1999), 102. 83 Bernard Boxill, "Self-Respect and Protest" Philosophy and Public Affairs 6, no. 4 (Fall 1976), 61. 84 Harvey, 20. 85 Mill, 10. 86 Harvey, 129. 87 Harvey, 138-139. Harvey, 71.
112