The relationship between speech and harm is an intriguing and timely topic, presenting complex theoretical challenges with remarkable political implications. Although it is widely recognized that speech can be harmful in different ways, it is by far not uncontroversial which harms can be brought about by speech, and how. Philosophical work elaborating on different connections between speech and harm, beyond being of undoubtedly speculative interest for a wide spectrum of disciplines, can also valuably contribute to political and legal debates concerning issues of speech regulation.

Within the growing body of literature on harmful speech, in the last decades a coherent path of linguistic-philosophical research has been emerging, marked by clear-defined analytical methods and social justice concerns. Drawing on the theoretical resources of speech act theory, the representatives of this philosophical strand aim at unveiling the role of speech in creating and maintaining unjust social patterns by way of discrimination, subordination and oppression. This approach has been eminently developed by thinkers pursuing a feminist agenda, like Rae Langton and Catharine McKinnon, among others. Mary Kate McGowan explicitly situates her own work within this philosophical tradition, delivering with Just Words: on Speech and Hidden Harm a book-length elaboration of her precedent publications on this topic.

The first chapter of the book is dedicated to an accurate presentation of the conceptual framework on which McGowan`s elaborations rest. In outlining fundamental notions of philosophy of language and speech act theory, the author does a good job in balancing the complex nature of the issues with a clear and simplifying explanation. This approach makes the book suitable both for informed readers and for an interested audience less acquainted with philosophy of language technicalities.

McGowan’s focus is on one particular class of harmful speech, namely, on speech enacting norms that prescribe harmful practices (18). 

Speech can enact norms in different ways. A norm can be enacted via exercise of speaker authority (20), which can be formal, like in the case of a policy enacted by a major, or informal, for instance when a parent establishes a rule for her children. 

McGowan’s project in Just Words is to outline a different mechanism of norm enacting, which does not require speaker’s authority, nor the intention to enact a norm, nor even speaker’s or hearers’ awareness of a norm being enacted. 

The author shows that besides official and explicit norm enactment – like recommending a policy, prescribing a behaviour – there is another class of norms, which are routinely and covertly enacted by everyday speakers in everyday conversations. “Norm” is here broadly understood as what counts as appropriate in a given context. McGowan points out that norms governing social activities are subject to updates: what counts as permissible and appropriate in a given activity routinely changes. The crucial point is, that these changes can be brought about by speech. 

McGowan’s in-depth elaboration of how unauthoritative speech can covertly enact permissibility facts — and thus, also harmful norms — is carried out in two steps: firstly, she analyzes the phenomenon within the realm of conversations (chapters 2 and 3); then she widens the scope of her analysis from the domain of conversations to that of other norm-governed social activities (chapter 4). The final chapters explore the mechanism of covert norm enactment referring to concrete examples of sexist oppression, pornography and racism.

Undoubtedly, one of the strengths of the book is the accurate, in-depth exploration of covert dynamics by which conversational rules – and more broadly, social rules – are rooted and perpetuated. Highlighting the unintentional and mostly unnoticed ways, in which what is tolerated and what counts as permissible in a given social context routinely shifts, McGowan performs an important and original contribution in harmful speech studies. Moreover, she manages to balance theoretically complex elaborations with easy understandable examples from everyday conversations, sometimes lightening the serious tone of the book with amusing short stories of communication failures and misunderstandings (71-72). 

The book offers a rich and multilayered discussion of linguistic phenomena as well as critical engagement with different philosophical approaches to harmful speech. In this respect, McGowan’s work is both instructive and thought-provoking. 

Though, one may wonder if the core assumption of the book has been at last satisfactorily defended, namely that by enacting permissibility norms, verbal contributions can constitute, as opposed to cause, harm. The notion of harm constitution plays a fundamental role within the philosophical debate McGowan relates to. Some readers could possibly find the statement of harm constitution in Just Words not entirely convincing.

At the end of the day, as McGowan admits, to constitute harm is just one specific way of causing it, if certain conditions are met. For an utterance to constitute harm “three conditions are required. The utterance enacts a norm; that norm is followed and harm results from following that norm” (24). 

The book focuses on the first condition, namely on norm enactment. The project of showing how speech can enact conversational norms by hidden dynamics of accommodation, without relying on speaker’s authority, could face the challenge of the ephemere life-duration of conversational norms: as McGowan points out, the way utterances can change the relevant features of a conversation is extremely dynamic and flexible – a norm enacted can be very short-lived, being subject to immediate rebuttal or left-behind by new verbal contributions.

Despite this, McGowan succeeds in carrying through her proposition, by showing that, even if just for a very short time, an utterance can produce changes in the set of permissibility rules of a conversation. Some of these changes are automatic adjustments of the conversational rules, which remain mostly unnoticed: for instance, an utterance can make a topic salient in that conversation; it can make it permissible to refer to it; it can simply indicate, that now it is someone else’s turn to speak. 

The problem is that highlighting the dynamics of conversational norms does not suffice to satisfactorily show how harmful norms are enacted. 

Bringing up a discriminatory association — like for instance, “even a woman could manage to drive this car” — can well make it appropriate, from now on, to refer to it; anyway, it cannot per se, context-independently, enact a rule about how to properly refer to it in that conversation, and in the broader context of other social activities – as McGowan recognizes.

Eventually, if and how a potentially harmful, unauthoritative utterance will enact harmful norms and bring about harm, will depend from a complex web of factors. Among these, some are intentional, like other participants’ responses to the utterance; some are due to psychological, social and cultural dynamics, like normalization processes and the pervasive effect of negative associations. Norm-governed activities are not just dynamic and pliable, they have a fundamentally relational nature. McGowan is surely aware of this, as her aforesaid three-pronged definition of an utterance constituting harm reveals; though a reader can be left with the wish to know more about the other two conditions for an utterance to constitute harm, namely, that the enacted norm is followed and harm results. For instance: why should an utterance constitute harm just in case harm factually occurs? Doesn’t McGowan’s account actually suggest that also potential speech-related harm matters? 

McGowan thorough exploration of the power of speech in steering and modifying permissibility rules, focusing on the crucial aspect of hidden norm enactment, leaves some related important aspects – which factors can increase the risk of harm, the role of other speakers and hearers – slightly in the background. Moreover, it should be noted that the reader interested in issues of responsibility will possibly not find exhaustive directions. 

However, a complex and theoretically dense book like Just Words should not be charged with additional expectations: McGowan’s contribution to the debate is crucial, delivering plenty of thought-provoking insights about covert dynamics of norm-enactment and accommodation. An important and original work, which will surely influence the literature on the relation between speech and harm.

Categories: Ethics, Sexuality, Philosophical

Keywords: feminism, pornography, speech