Topics Language

Question I don't think that using profanity tends to be wrong. (Maybe if, "Damn it!!!" were the vocal trigger for some terrible weapon that could destroy the Earth...) It can’t be the sound of the profane expression that makes it wrong—else "ck" would be a sin to say even if used to refer to a certain aviary kind. And it can’t be the meaning: to say "sex" is not in itself unethical. What about a combination of a given sound and a given meaning, an emergent (supervenient) property of this combination? It could be argued that to use a certain word as slang for something aggressive or sexual is wrong. But how? If I said "door" to mean the same as "damn" (as in, “Damn it!”), would this be transgression? Here we run into a problem of differentiating between the supposed permissibility of saying, say, “What the heck…” instead of, “What the hell…” or, “What the fk…” Why is the first generally regarded as acceptable yet the next two are taken to be increasingly unethical (in some circumstances)? It doesn't make sense to me. Is the widespread belief that profanity is, well, profane anything more than some kind of prejudice?

Accepted:
November 13, 2008

Comments

Thanks for your nice question(s). One issue here is whether there are in fact any words that it is morally improper to utter, at least in a given language. Another question is whether, if there are any such words, the impropriety of uttering them is justifiable in some way. I separate these two questions because the impropriety of something might have no basis, or at least no justification: some aspects of morals might just be "brute".

You're right that two words might refer to the same thing and yet only one of them be considered improper. Many philosophers of language would try to explain that difference in the following terms. Two such words might refer to the same thing and yet one of them express an attitude that the other does not. Some racial epithets, for instance, might not only refer to a racial group, but also express contempt toward that group. Note also that some expressions of contempt might be considered demeaning to their target. If I explicitly tell you that you're inferior because of your race, you might find that demeaning. If on the other hand I use a word that expresses the same contemptuous attitude, that seems to convey the message more deftly, and perhaps more effectively. The suggestion then is that words that express contemptuous attitudes seem particularly effective at demeaning their referents.

These points can also be applied to uses of certain words in private. Suppose you were to find out that a friend of yours talks to himself, and that on the basis of a recording that was secretly made of his doing this, it turns out that he uses a lot of racial epithets. I suspect that this might make you wonder about him: Does he really hold contemptuous attitudes towards the people he is referring to? This seems like a genuine question even if no one's feelings are getting hurt by his speaking to himself this way.

If this is correct, then one might be able to see some justification for many people finding some words morally suspect--or at least to say that uttering them in certain contexts is immoral. That could be the case even when other words that refer to the same thing don't have any particular moral "valence". Accordingly, one might be able to see that the moral significance of some profanity might have some basis.

Yours,

Mitch Green