DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c127-625080
title: Speaking with attitude: moral discourse and pejoratives

description: This project arose from my interest in a hybrid expressivist account of moral language.  One of the main reasons to be optimistic about such an account is that hybrid expressivism seems to be the correct account for pejorative language.  For instance, just as ‘Paul is a wop’ may express both the belief that Paul is Italian and a negative attitude about being Italian, ‘Stealing is wrong’ may express both the belief that stealing has the property of wrongness and a negative attitude about wrongness.  At the heart of my dissertation is the serious consideration of this analogy.  The work I do in the first two chapters of the dissertation—discussing noncognitivism, the embedding problem, and a range of hybrid views—all leads up to the analogy between moral and pejorative language discussed in the third chapter. ❧ One of the major contributions of the dissertation is that certain general pejoratives (like ‘jerk’) can be distinguished in two significant ways from pejorative racial and ethnic slurs (like ‘wop’).   And with regard to both of these distinctions, a correct hybrid framework for moral language should hold that moral terms work more like general pejoratives than slurs.  By taking the analogy between moral terms and general pejoratives seriously, I examine two ways in which a hybrid picture of general pejoratives might be called into question. ❧ One issue is that general pejoratives may in fact be genuinely thick; their descriptions may be infused with evaluation.  For instance, perhaps what it is to be a ‘jerk’ is just to be inconsiderate in inappropriate circumstances.  If general pejoratives turn out to be genuinely thick, it would seem strange to model thin moral terms on how they work.  I examine this in the fourth chapter, and I argue that general pejoratives are not genuinely thick.  Clarifying where slurs and general pejoratives stand with relation to the thick/thin distinction is also another main contribution of the dissertation. ❧ Another issue in drawing an analogy between moral language and pejoratives is that many pejorative terms—including both slurs and general pejoratives—are offensive, and this is a quality that moral language seems to lack altogether.  In the fifth chapter, I examine the concept of offensiveness, and its potential relation to the expressive capacity of pejoratives.  While it is clear that certain pejoratives can be offensive in multiple respects- they can be useful for offending or downright obscene, or both- the fact that they may be so does not interfere with a hybrid expressivist account of their meanings. ❧ So I make several distinctions between moral language, general pejorative language, slurs, and thick-evaluative terms.  The distinctions I have made here should be relevant not only to hybrid theorists interested in the nature of moral language, but also those who are interested in the meaning of pejoratives, including racial and ethnic slurs.  While this investigation arose originally from my interest in a hybrid expressivist account of moral language, I think that there are useful lessons here even if, in the end, one is uneasy about a hybrid view for moral language specifically.