In what way might public statues wrong people? In recent years, philosophers have drawn on speech act theory to answer this question by arguing that statues constitute harmful or disrespectful forms of speech. My aim in this paper will be add a different theoretical perspective to this discussion. I will argue that while the speech act approach provides a useful starting point for thinking about what is wrong with public statues, we can get a fuller understanding of these wrongs by (...) drawing on resources from recent work in situated affectivity. I will argue that public statues can be understood as affective artifacts and that this can both help us understand both the deep affective wrongs caused by public statues and offer a possible explanation as to why some people are so strongly opposed to their removal. (shrink)

In recent years, several philosophers have argued that statues which are morally tainted ought to be removed from public display. One objection to this claim is the free speech objection: removing the statues constitutes a violation of free speech rights. This objection suffers from two flaws. First, it is rarely articulated to its fullest potential. Second, the free speech objection is largely dismissed by philosophers who support the statues' removal. In this article, I will aim to rectify this situation by (...) providing three different formulations of the free speech objection, based, respectively, on First Amendment jurisprudence, on Mill's consequentialist defense of free speech, and on Susan Dwyer's non‐consequentialist defense of the same. After formulating the three versions of the objection, I will consider them against the alleged duty to remove tainted statues, and argue that even under the strongest formulation of the free speech objection, it does not amount to a defeater to the duty. (shrink)