Research Abstract: I work on issues at the intersection of language, ethics, and social philosophy. My research contributes to a growing body of literature on pejoratives by focusing on under-theorized phenomena. I'm currently developing an account of derogation that explains why the expression of derogatory attitudes is morally wrong in non-standard speech contexts, including comedy, on social media in what is known as "internet trolling," and in soliloquies that occur in the privacy of one's own mind. Finally, I am interested in action guidance: what should we do when people disparage marginalized groups? Could pejoratives that target powerful majority groups be valuable tools for oppressed people? Below I've included abstracts of my published work. If you have trouble accessing my papers via the links below, feel free to email me at ralph.difranco [at] usd.edu for PDFs.
"No Harm, Still Foul: On the Effect-Independent Wrongness of Slurring," With Andrew Morgan, in the Journal of the American Philosophical Association (Forthcoming).
Intuitively, a speaker who uses slurs to refer to people is doing something morally objectionable even if no one is measurably affected by their speech. Perhaps they are only talking to themselves, or they are speaking with bigots who are already as vicious as they can be. This paper distinguishes between slurring as an expressive act and slurring as the act of causing a psychological effect. It then develops an expression-focused ethical account in order to explain the intuition that slurring involves an effect-independent moral wrong. The core idea is that the act of expressing a morally defective attitude is itself pro tanto morally objectionable. Unlike theories that focus only on problematic effects, this view is able to shift the moral burden of proof away from victims of slurring acts and onto speakers. It also offers moral guidance with respect to metalinguistic and pedagogical utterances of slurs.
"You shouldn't have laughed! The Ethics of Derogatory Amusement," with Andrew Morgan, in The Moral Psychology of Amusement, edited by Brian Robinson. Rowman and Littlefield (2021, pp. 113-133).
What makes humor derogatory? Is it wrong to laugh at or be amused by a derogatory joke? This paper argues that answering these questions requires investigating humor's expressive dimension. We use the notion of expressive derogation to explain why many forms of humor and amusement (racist, sexist, homophobic, etc.) are morally problematic independently of their consequences. Along the way we argue against harm-based theories of the wrongness of derogatory humor. We conclude by suggesting some ways in which derogatory humor can play a valuable role in peoples' moral lives, as a way of fostering solidarity among oppressed groups and undermining unjust institutions.
"I Wrote this Paper for the Lulz: the Ethics of Internet Trolling," Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 23: 931-45 (2020).
Over the last decade, research on derogatory communication has focused on ordinary speech contexts and the use of conventional pejoratives, like slurs. However, the use of social media has given rise to a new type of derogatory behavior that theorists have yet to address: internet trolling. Trolls make online utterances aiming to frustrate and offend other internet users. Their ultimate goal is amusement derived from observing a good faith interlocutor engage with their provocative posts. The basis for condeming a pejorative utterance is often taken to be the harm it causes or a defective attitude in the speaker. However, trolling complicates this picture, since trolling utterances are by definition insincere and should be recognizable as such to other trolls. Further, these utterances seem morally questionable even when they cause little to no harm (e.g. when the troll's utterance fails to secure uptake), and they often do not feature conventional pejoratives. I argue that while the potential for negative effects is relevant to ethical assessment, in general trolling is pro tanto wrong because the troll fails to accord others the proper respect that is their due (independently of whether they harm them). However, this characteristic wrong-making feature is sometimes overridden.
While a large body of literature on pejorative language has emerged recently, derogatory communication is a broader phenomenon that need not constitutively involve the use of words. This paper delineates the class of non-verbal pejoratives (NVPs) and sketches an account of the derogatory power of a subset of NVPs, namely those whose effectiveness crucially relies on iconicity. Along the way, I point out some ways in which iconic NVPs differ from wholly arbitrary NVPs and ritualized threat signals in the animal kingdom, such as the wolf's snarl, which do not threaten or demean targets by virtue of any kind of iconographic depiction. An iconic portrayal such as a racist caricature disparages its target by inviting recipients to entertain an unflattering image of the target. "Blackface" performers in the nineteenth-century, for example, promulgated an unflattering image of African-Americans by means of make-up, costumes, and vocal impersonations.
"Appropraite Slurs," Acta Analytica 32(3): 371-384 (2017).
It is natural to think that derogating people with slurs is wrong in principle. At least, this assumption appears safe when the target group is a racial or ethnic minority. But what about cases in which the speaker using a slur is a member of an oppressed minority group, and the slur in question targets a powerful majority group? Plausibly, members of an Indigenous group in the USA who derogate white Americans with slurs need not be doing anything morally objectionable. Slurs may also be vehicles for protesting groups like the KKK or Greece's Golden Dawn (a nationalistic, anti-immigrant political group). Slurring in these cases may be morally valuable in ways that slurring historically oppressed groups is not - or so I argue.
"Do Racists Speak Truly? On the Truth-Conditional Content of Slurs," Thought 4(1): 28-37 (2015).
Slurs derogate individuals qua members of certain groups, such as race or sexual orientation. Most theorists hold that each slur has a neutral counterpart, i.e. a term that references the slur's target group without disparaging them. According to a widely accepted view which I call 'Neutral Counterpart Theory', the truth-conditional content of a slur is identical to the truth-conditional content of its neutral counterpart (so, e.g. 'Jew' and 'k*ke' are truth-conditionally the same, yet the latter is an objectionable way of referring to a person's ethnic background). I argue that the view fails with respect to slurs that encode truth-conditional content which does more than merely classify someone as a member of the target group, as well as slurs that denigrate by virtue of their iconicity.