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Expression and Indication in Ethics and Political Philosophy

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Abstract

We sometimes have reasons to perform actions due to what they would communicate. Those who have discussed such reasons have understood what an action ‘communicates’ as what it conventionally expresses. Brennan and Jaworski argue that when a convention ensures that expressing the appropriate thing would be costly, we should change or flout the convention. I argue that what really matters is often what attitudes we indicate rather than conventionally express, using social science to show that indicating our attitudes is often unavoidably costly, and sometimes worth the cost. I use this account to defend communicative arguments for egalitarian distributive policies.

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Notes

  1. The class of considerations I want to discuss have also been labeled ‘expressive’ (Anderson 1993), ‘symbolic’ (Nozick 1993, Adams 1999), and ‘semiotic’ (Brennan and Jaworski 2015, 2016). I use ‘communicative’ so as to avoid prejudging how communication of the relevant sort works (e.g., I doubt all CNCs depend on what actions symbolize). In using ‘communicative’, I do not mean to commit to any account of communication. I also do not mean to exclude cases where there is a failure of uptake, or where there is no one to indicate anything to except yourself.

  2. We should also distinguish communicative arguments from things that merely sound like communicative arguments. ‘Meaning’ can refer to a semiotic phenomenon (‘the meaning of a word’) or to something like importance or purpose (‘the meaning of life’). ‘Expression’ can refer to a semiotic phenomenon (as a sentence expresses a proposition, or ‘Yay!’ expresses approval) or to a kind of causal relationship whose semiotic status is controversial (geneticists speak of traits as ‘expressions’ of genes, but there is disagreement about whether this should be understood semiotically (El-Hani et al. 2006)). ‘Showing’ an attitude can mean demonstrating to someone that you have it (‘show you care with this gift’) or being motivated by it (‘they show preference for donors’ children, but try to hide it’). I will use the terms in their communicative senses here. I am also confident that the authors I discuss in the next paragraph all advance communicative arguments, usually because they explicitly say as much.

  3. So, by saying ‘I do’ at a certain point in the ceremony, I cause my mother to be distressed; in saying ‘I do’, I marry someone. The speech act is an illocutionary act, and it constitutes the act of marrying. The thought is that likewise, by putting up a ‘Whites Only’ sign, or portraying women as objects in pornography, someone might cause subordination (say, by encouraging others to adopt bad attitudes), but that in doing these things in the right context, they might also be performing an act of subordinating (Langton 2009, ch. 1).

  4. I did not mention Dworkin above when it came to egalitarian distributive policies because I think it is ambiguous which use of ‘show’ Dworkin has in mind when he is talking about distributive justice (see fn. 2). But an interesting view results if we interpret it as a communicative argument.

  5. E.g., they claim (2016, p. 65) that their opponents see ‘logically essential meaning’ where they see ‘contingent, socially constructed meanings’.

  6. As noted with the umbrella example above, it is impossible to avoid indicating that one holds bad attitudes. But one can often avoid making it likely, on the publicly available evidence, that one holds such attitudes.

  7. For instance, is what matters what is indicated to some actual person, or what is indicated from some objective perspective? If the former, what happens if, due to differing background information being available, the act indicates different things to different people? If the latter, what is that perspective and why is it important? Etc.

  8. We might also wonder about how we should behave when an observer is mistaken about what an action indicates, or when it (say) indicates a bad thing to them only because they have acquired their background knowledge in an epistemically criticizable way. Suppose supporting your political party indicates to your friend that you hold some bad attitude, because he gets his news from a biased source which only reports on the few members of your party who hold that attitude. Or suppose he mistakenly thinks your party membership indicates the attitude, due to his misinterpreting his evidence. These may have some of the same bad effects as if your friend found out that nearly all the other members of your party really did hold this attitude, but you may not have the same reasons to avoid these effects. I have no general account of how to handle this, but I suspect that what to do will often depend on how epistemically or morally blameworthy your friend is for the situation. If your friend watches the biased source because he’s extremely close-minded, maybe your reasons not to upset him are weakened or silenced, but if he has no way to know the source is so biased, your reasons to accommodate him by providing him with evidence of your real attitudes, or by avoiding talking politics altogether, may be strengthened.

  9. They (2016, p. 80) say something similar about a similar case from Sandel.

  10. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for pushing me to clarify this point. The referee also suggested that a utilitarian might level an accusation of fetishism against the person who is concerned with what a distributive policy indicates about attitudes: perhaps they just need to learn to stop caring what society thinks about them. One point (also suggested as a potential response by the referee) is that it seems to me that the psychological tendency to care about, and have one’s self-image influenced by, what society thinks of one is very well-entrenched in many people. I suspect it is more practical for utilitarians to accommodate this tendency than to try to eliminate it. Another point is that the role indication plays in promoting norms operates independently of how much I care what people think about me, and is clearly important from a utilitarian perspective due to the connection between norms and behavior.

  11. Admittedly, this might depend on how we interpret the difference principle; see Cohen (2008, pp. 129–132).

  12. Brennan and Jaworski (2016, p. 71) compare betting on the terrorism market to buying life insurance. In a way, buying life insurance is also a form of betting on death. But though some people historically thought life insurance was problematic in principle, few think that now. Notice, though, that even ordinary attitudes about life insurance tend to be complicated. Taking out a policy on yourself to ensure that your dependents will be cared for in the event of a tragedy is rightfully viewed as an indication of care and concern. But there is much more suspicion about the motives driving so-called ‘corporate-owned life insurance’, whereby companies profit from the deaths of their employees (cf. Schultz and Francis 2002). Perhaps there is something to this suspicion. And perhaps betting on terrorism markets, and thereby attempting to profit from the deaths of strangers, is psychologically more like buying the corporate-owned policy. In any event, my point here is just that I think the answer is not obvious either way, and the question requires investigation (I am grateful to an anonymous referee for pressing me to address this point).

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Robert Audi, Rebecca Chan, Nevin Climenhaga, Paul Weithman, and two anonymous referees, among others, for helpful feedback on this paper.

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Correspondence to Dustin Crummett.

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Crummett, D. Expression and Indication in Ethics and Political Philosophy. Res Publica 25, 387–406 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-018-09407-y

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