Starting from the observation that the deterioration of democratic communication is a political problem that requires individual and collective, private and public, actions, I first defend a baseline duty to avoid using expressions that conventionally show a disrespectful attitude toward targeted groups. Then, I develop a set of guidelines that can guide political theorists in distributing additional duties that respect the situated agency of different individuals. I propose two normative constraints (capacity-to-act and influence) that should influence how theorists assign duties. (...) Then, I present three criteria (pointless, antisocial, and lawfulness) to specify the content in a context-sensitive way. (shrink)

Hate speech and misinformation are rife. How to respond? Counterspeech proposals say: with more and better speech. This paper considers the treatment of counterspeech in Maxime Lepoutre’s Democratic Speech In Divided Times. Lepoutre provides a nuanced defence of counterspeech. Some counterspeech, he grants, is flawed. But, he says: counterspeech can be debugged. Once we understand why counterspeech fails – when fail it does – we can engineer more effective counterspeech strategies. Lepoutre argues that the failures of counterspeech can be theorised (...) using the ideology of salience. Negative counterspeech fails because it reinforces the salience of the very ideas or associations that it contests. His solution? Positive counterspeech – a form of counterspeech which avoids the salience trap. I argue that the salience paradigm is ill-suited to theorise the failures of counterspeech. I suggest some alternatives. Further, I show that these alternative paradigms make importantly different practical recommendations – recommendations concerning how we ought to engineer our counterspeech – from those issued by the salience paradigm. (shrink)

This paper critically evaluates two aspects of Maxime Lepoutre's important book, Democratic Speech in Divided Times. First, I examine Lepoutre's approach to the shared reasons constraint—the requirement to offer shared reasons within public deliberation—and the place of emotions in public discourse. I argue that he, and indeed all who adopt such a highly inclusivist approach, face a dilemma that pushes him either to apply the shared reasons constraint more widely than he desires or to abandon it completely. I chart a (...) course through this dilemma, but one that involves significant revisions to Lepoutre's position, particularly regarding the need for idealization. Second, I consider Lepoutre's use of the systemic approach to public discourse, which is central to many of his arguments, including his responses to critics of the discursive democratic ideal. Using his arguments regarding angry speech and dogmatic group cognition as illustrative, I highlight the somewhat speculative nature of these systemic arguments, which often rely on conjectures about how the system might operate, how its parts fit together, and how the system as a whole might attenuate seemingly problematic features of its component parts. This limits the ultimate persuasiveness of Lepoutre's responses to skepticism about democratic speech in our divided times. (shrink)

Our interpretive resources enable us to make sense of, navigate, and communicate about our shared world. These resources not only carve the world up into categories, but also guide how we, individually and collectively, are oriented towards it. In this thesis, I examine how these resources, and the dispositions they guide, may be harmful. A vital kind of interpretive resources are frames, which equip us with unified perspectives on the world. Perspectives are suites of open-ended interpretive (inquisitive, attentional, inferential, evaluative, (...) and affective) dispositions. Frames thereby guide how we interpret, respond to, and navigate the world. I show that these perspectives are epistemically powerful and indispensable. I argue that flawed perspectives, and the distorting frames that produce them, are deeply pernicious and I examine their relationship to oppression. (shrink)

This article defends the democratic ideal of inclusive public discourse, as articulated in Democratic Speech in Divided Times, against the critiques offered by Billingham, Fraser, and Hannon. Specifically, it considers and responds to three core challenges. The first challenge argues, notably, that the “shared reasons” constraint should either apply everywhere or not at all, and that, if this constraint is to apply in divided circumstances, its justificatory constituency must be idealized. The second challenge contends that the resistance of hate speech (...) and misinformation to counterspeech cannot adequately be explained by considerations of salience, and therefore cannot adequately by countered (as I suggest) by “positive” forms of counterspeech. Finally, the last challenge objects that the ideal of inclusive public discourse I defend remains, as pessimists allege, excessively idealistic. (shrink)