Philosophy & Public Affairs 51 (2023), 2

Imagine a classroom discussion of Lawrence v. Texas, the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark decision holding sodomy laws unconstitutional.1 One student argues that the Court's ruling was correct because a state may not base its criminal laws on bare moral disapproval. Another student picks up on Justice Scalia's dissenting opinion and responds that, if that principle were sound, polygamy and bestiality would also be immune from punishment.2 A third student chimes in to observe that those comparisons are offensive, even harmful, and urges or intimates that the second should apologize. What should happen next?

One natural thought is that it depends on whether the offense that the third student took (or supposed others would take) is justified. That is evidently what Justice Scalia himself thought: faced with an openly gay student's similar request for an apology, Scalia rebuked the questioner for failing to grasp the reductio argument that he had actually made.3 Insofar as Scalia had “compared” same-sex intercourse and bestiality, after all, he claimed only that bans on these practices are alike by the lights of the principle that the Court invoked to invalidate sodomy laws. As Scalia correctly observed, that claim really has nothing to do with whether same-sex intercourse is morally tantamount to bestiality at all.

Yet I suspect many will share my instinct that this point of logic is not all that matters, from a moral point of view, in the kind of encounter that I have described. For if many people confronted with Scalia's analogical argument will foreseeably take its expression as implying a moral equivalence between same-sex intercourse and bestiality—or, more simply, as an anti-gay insult—that fact alone seems to bear on whether, or at least how, one should voice the argument. And insofar as Scalia or the second student in our imagined dialogue predictably caused gay audience members to think they were being insulted (even, in a sense, mistakenly), and did so without good reason, taking offense at that behavior—under that revised description—could well be warranted after all. In a sense, the listener's interpretation, which starts off foreseeable but mistaken, seems to bounce off of the speaker and return to the listener vindicated in the end.4

This line of thought might suggest that the second student did act wrongly and should indeed apologize. But that is not a comfortable result either. Treating the student's mere invocation of the analogical argument as an insult will tend to ratify the misunderstanding of what they actually said, to discourage the expression of other ideas that could also be misunderstood, and to raise the overall “symbolic temperature” within the community.5 Indeed, a general practice of validating reactions such as the third student's here could well result in gay students facing more, rather than fewer, comments that they rightly take as offensive—at least in a belief- or evidence-relative sense of rightness—and thus leave them only worse off. So, again, what should the characters in this story do? I am tempted to say that, if you think the answer is obvious, one of us is missing something important.

Of course, my real topic is not this vignette, but the formidable genre of moral and political disputes of which it is a characteristic if stylized example.6 Roughly speaking, that genre involves claims (1) in the normative register of respect and offense that are (2) linked to membership in a presently or historically subordinated social group and (3) occasioned by symbolic or expressive items or acts (flags, monuments, mascots, pronouns, analogies, tweets, “tropes,” and the like). Any descriptive account of our public discourse respecting matters of social equality today would have to give these claims a prominent place. In part because they are now so politicized, however, they can be exceptionally difficult to parse and evaluate on their own terms. In fact, it can be difficult to say anything at all about them without seeming to enlist on one or another side of a sharp conflict whose battle lines are already set.7 And yet I do not see how we could make sense of this important domain, or navigate conscientiously within it, without engaging both sympathetically and critically with efforts to recognize and redress claims of identity-related offense or dignitary harm.

The premise of this essay is that we might find it easier to do that if we reframe the problems of identity-related offense in a somewhat broader perspective. Viewed abstractly, these cases pose a more general set of issues relating to the formulation, operation, and enforcement of conventions for communicating attitudes of respect and disrespect for other people. As several philosophers have recognized, such conventions form the substance of codes of etiquette, manners, or politeness; in social life writ large, we negotiate them constantly and rely upon them to meet a variety of essentially communicative obligations to one another. What is at work in encounters such as the classroom discussion that I just sketched, I will suggest here, is a communicative apparatus of the same fundamental kind—an “etiquette of equality” that specifies what the public expression of certain broadly egalitarian attitudes, in particular, shall be taken to require and forbid. Understanding the problem in those terms clarifies the valuable functions that the norms at issue may serve and makes it easy to see why, even though these norms may be quite arbitrary in content, they have real moral weight.8 At the same time, this account casts in sharp relief the costs to which the same normative system can give rise, including by the lights of what seem its worthiest aims. By demanding ever-greater investments in the communicative dimensions of respect, the etiquette of equality threatens to divert us from, or even impede, the ambition of constructing a social order in which all are actually treated as equals.

With these ends in view, I begin in Sections II and III by sketching the moral functions of conventions of etiquette or politeness in general and of the etiquette of equality in particular. In Sections IV through VI, I then proceed to unpack three problematic, interconnected features of this distinctive etiquette regime: (1) the costly and potentially self-defeating overdetermination of relevant signals; (2) a recursive tendency toward inflation in respect's demands; and (3) a related set of incentives for testing, and then affirming, a group's status through the assertion and remediation of offense. Taken together, I suggest, these add up to a powerful indictment of the etiquette of equality as practiced today—but one fully consistent with recognizing the value of its aspirations and even the genuine normative force of its demands.

I then conclude in Section VII by reflecting on the dilemma with which this indictment leaves us. In short, there may often be a powerful moral case for each of us as individuals to act in ways that our community's operative respect norms demand, even if we believe both that the norms themselves are in need of reform and that our collective observance of them harmfully fuels and entrenches them. The reason is that, for the most part, our individual choices simply have too little effect on what the norms will be in the future to outweigh the immediate effects that those same choices have in light of what the norms already are. I doubt that this predicament has any fully satisfactory solution. But I think it counsels an ambivalence about the etiquette of equality that neither its enthusiasts nor its critics have tended to cultivate or express, and I think there is some reason to hope that expressing and thereby normalizing such ambivalence might itself go some way toward reconciling our conflicting obligations in this domain.