Browsing by Subject "Slurs"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Exactly why are slurs wrong?
    (Universidad de Murcia. Servicio de Publicaciones, ) Thaddeus Metz
    This article seeks to provide a comprehensive and fundamental account of why racial epithets and similar slurs are immoral, whenever they are. It considers three major theories, roughly according to which they are immoral because they are harmful (welfarism), because they undermine autonomy (Kantianism), or because they are unfriendly (an under-considered, relational approach informed by ideas from the Global South). This article presents new objections to the former two theories, and concludes in favour of the latter rationale. Deeming slurs to be wrong insofar as they are unfriendly is shown to capture the advantages of the other theories, while avoiding their disadvantages.
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    Paving the road to hell: The Spanish word menas as a case study
    (Universidad de Murcia. Servicio de Publicaciones, ) Bordonaba Plou, David; Torices, José R.
    Menas is a term that has attracted a great deal of attention on the political scene in Spain at present. Although the term had a neutral usage originally, being an acronym for unaccompanied foreign minors, it has recently evolved into a term with clear negative connotations. This article explores what kind of term menas is today. Specifically, we will examine whether menas is a slur or an ESTI, an ethnic/social term used as an insult. First, we point out the most defining characteristics of both types of terms. Then, using analyses on linguistic corpora, we show that menas exhibits the most defining characteristics of ESTIs. We end by discussing the possible evolution of the term, pointing out that, although the term presents the features related to ESTIs, there are two possible scenarios. On the one hand, the term may retain its neutral uses and thus remain an ESTI. On the other hand, the neutral uses may disappear, and thus the term may become a slur.
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    The resistant effect of slurs: A nonpropositional, presuppositional account
    (Universidad de Murcia. Servicio de Publicaciones, ) Moreno Zurita, Alba; Pérez Navarro, Eduardo
    The aim of this paper is to account for the resistance to cancelation, rejection, and retraction exhibited by slurs. The kind of explanation we offer is a presuppositional one. Like the most recent presuppositional accounts, moreover, ours is a nonpropositional presuppositional proposal. Our view is that, to be felicitous, utterances of sentences featuring slurs require certain components to be part of the common ground, but these components are not propositions, but worldorderings.