I argue that the offense generation pattern of slurring terms parallels that of impoliteness behaviors, and is best explained by appeal to similar purely pragmatic mechanisms. In choosing to use a slurring term rather than its neutral counterpart, the speaker signals that she endorses the term (and its associations). Such an endorsement warrants offense, and consequently slurs generate offense whenever a speaker's use demonstrates a contrastive preference for the slurring term. Since this explanation comes at low theoretical cost and imposes few constraints on an account of the semantics of slurs, this suggests that we should not require semantic accounts to provide an independent explanation of the offense profile.When we use slurs, we communicate information about ourselves and our attitudes towards the targets. Recognizing this obvious fact requires no great insight, but taking it seriously yields a simple and remarkably powerful explanation of how and why slurs generate offense. Recent discussion of slurs has centered on their offense-generation pattern, characterized by phenomena that cluster into roughly five properties:Offensive Autonomy-slurs are offensive even when the speaker does not intend the use to be derogatory. 1 Embedding Failure-the offensiveness of slurs projects out of various forms of embedding, including indirect reports, negations, and mentions. 2 Perspective Dependence-use of a slur is taken to indicate that the speaker holds derogatory attitudes. 3 Offensive Variation-not all slurs, even if co-referential, appear to be equally offensive. 4 Insulation-despite all of the above, slurring terms can occasionally occur inoffensively, and this is true even of particularly potent terms. 5With some notable exceptions, the dominant strategy thus far has been to try to construct a semantics thick enough to account for this offense profile, and in turn * My thanks to Robin Jeshion and Mark Schroeder for working with me on several drafts on this paper. Thanks also to

I argue that inferences from highly probabilifying racial generalizations (e.g. believing that Jones is a janitor, on the grounds that most Salvadoreans at the school are janitors) are not solely objectionable because acting on such inferences would be problematic, or they violate a moral norm, but because they violate a distinctively epistemic norm. They involve accepting a proposition when, given the costs of a mistake, one is not adequately justified in doing so. First I sketch an account of the nature of adequate justification-practical adequacy with respect to eliminating the ¬p possibilities from one's epistemic statespace. Second, I argue that inferences based on demographic generalizations tend to disproportionately expose group members to the risks associated with mistakenly assuming stereotypical propositions, and so magnify the wrong involved in relying on such inferences without adequate justification. 1 Introducing the Problem There are cases-some familiar from debates over racial profiling, others from debates over naked statistical evidencein which even though an agent's evidence makes a proposition p very probable, it seems she still shouldn't believe that p. This holds even when the evidence seems to justify a credence in p that would ordinarily suffice for rational belief. Gendler (2011) offers one such case: Cosmos Club: The night before he is to be presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, John Hope Franklin hosts a celebratory dinner party at the Cosmos Club. All the other black men in the club are uniformed attendants. While walking through the club, a woman sees him, calls him over, presents her coat check ticket and orders him to bring her coat. It seems the woman shouldn't have assumed that John Hope Franklin was an attendant, but as Gendler notes, it isn't obvious what the nature of her error is: Franklin had been the Cosmos Club's first black member, and was still one of very few. By contrast, nearly all of the club's numerous attendants were men of African descent. So when the woman was presented with the visual experience of a black man in the club's lobby, she endorsed an empirically well-supported hypothesis-one that took full account of the prior probabilities. The likelihood that a black man present in the cosmos club was a member of the staff rather than a member of the club was very high-high enough, perhaps, to make it rational to assume that even though he was wearing a suit rather than a uniform, he was nonetheless an employee rather than a host. 1 There are several ways to gloss the case. We could say the problem is purely practical: that while she (for epistemic reasons) ought to have made the assumption, she (for reasons of morality or politeness) ought not to have acted on it. Or purely moral: that while epistemically permitted, the woman morally ought not have even believed that Franklin was staff. Gendler's discussion of the case suggests one of these two readings; on either, the woman's assumption violates no epistemic norms. 2 Recently, a number of theorists h...

Several authors have recently suggested that moral factors and norms ‘encroach’ on the epistemic, and because of salient parallels to pragmatic encroachment views in epistemology, these suggestions have been dubbed ‘moral encroachment views’. This paper distinguishes between variants of the moral encroachment thesis, pointing out how they address different problems, are motivated by different considerations, and are not all subject to the same objections. It also explores how the family of moral encroachment views compare to classical pragmatic encroachment accounts.

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