Maitra’s strategy in responding to the challenge presented by the Authority Problem is to disentangle authority from social position. Through her account of “licensing,” speakers can come to have authority over others without occupying any recognizable position of authority. This allows even ordinary hate speakers to gain the authority they need for their subordinating speech acts to succeed.
To explain this idea, she asks us to consider a group of friends trying to plan a hike together (Maitra 2012, 106). As no one expresses any strong preferences in the logistics of the trip, they fail to make much headway in actually planning the outing. After having enough of this, one friend, Andy, decides to take charge and make decisions. He assigns specific tasks to
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each of the different members of the group. No one objects, the tasks are all completed, and the hike later takes place as Andy planned.
Maitra’s claim here is that in this case Andy clearly comes to have the authority to assign tasks to the group, and that his “instructions, moreover, are authoritative speech” (ibid.). That is to say, his speech act constructs viable norms for his audience, and this can be seen by the group following his directions. However, as Maitra points out, Andy’s authority is not in virtue of any clear social position. It’s therefore, she claims, a type of speaker authority that isn’t positional authority. Furthermore, it’s only through the act of speaking itself that Andy comes to have any authority at all. That is, he has no authority prior to giving the instructions, but is granted this authority by the group only when no one objects to his orders and it becomes clear they plan on following through with the tasks he assigns—as Maitra notes, though, the boundaries here are essentially fuzzy. Finally, we may note that for speech to be licensed like this, it doesn’t require “the licensors agree with the license in any substantive sense” but only that any reservations aren’t made public (ibid., 107). So, some of Andy’s friends may not be too pleased with his choices, and yet, so long as they keep these thoughts private, they are still expected to do as instructed—that is, the norms are still applicable. As such, disagreement—even strong
disagreement—is compatible with an audience granting a speaker authority and thereby enabling her speech to construct new norms in social space. To summarize, then, here we seem to have a clear case of authority that’s not positional, didn’t require any formal granting of authority, results mainly from omissions rather than acts, and is perhaps open ended.
With this account of licensing in mind, Maitra claims we now have the tools to interpret the earlier example of ordinary hate speech as authoritative. As was previously said, the speaker can be thought to be issuing an attempted ranking that aims to mark his target as inferior. Given
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what was said above, however, it’s now possible to see how he succeeds with his ranking. In drawing the attention of all the other passengers in the subway car with his tirade, Maitra suggests we might think of the passengers all as participants in a single conversation, like the hike-planners (ibid., 115). And, by failing to voice any objection, we can now see the hate
speaker’s audience as licensing his speech, therefore granting him the authority he needs to make this ranking succeed.
As we just saw, the fact that the speaker occupies no formal position of authority prior to his utterance doesn’t entail his audience cannot give him—even unwillingly—the authority his speech act needs. Like Andy’s friends, the subway passengers’ continued silence allows them to grant the speaker the authority he lacked prior to speaking. With their silence, the passengers refuse to challenge the hate speaker’s ranking of the Arab woman as inferior, and this permits the ranking to add its content to the shared background of the conversation, making it successful.96 And so, even ordinary instances of hate speech may in fact subordinate, since even ordinary hate speakers can be licensed in this way.97
Now we should pause to note that this is not to claim this is what happens in every, or even most, cases of hate speech. Maitra’s claim is more modest, saying only that there is no principled reason to outright reject the idea that ordinary instances of hate speech might
sometimes subordinate in this way. It is a claim about sufficient conditions, not necessary ones. Yet, this is still a potentially significant result, as it would demonstrate that the authority to
96 The idea of a conversational ‘background’ or ‘common ground’ appealed to here comes from Robert Stalnaker;
see Stalnaker (2002).
97 In a similar (though distinct) manner, McGowan argues that any contribution to a conversation invokes rules of
accommodation, and that an ordinary instance of hate speech can constitute subordination in virtue of functioning as a “conversational exercitive,” that is, an illocution that enacts permissibility conditions in a particular domain. Rae Langton, Sally Haslanger, and Luvell Anderson see this as one way to account for the Authority Problem. See McGowan (2004, 99–101); as well as Langton, Haslanger, and Anderson (2012, 759–60); and, for background, see Lewis (1979). I thank an anonymous reviewer for Social Theory & Practice for highlighting this connection for me.
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subordinate need not always be tied to formal positional authority, like that of a legislator. In what follows I want to suggest that Maitra’s account is half right. That is, I argue that Maitra is correct in saying that subordinating authority is not always formal positional authority, but incorrect in claiming that it is not positional authority, nonetheless. Indeed, I believe the type of authority that makes ordinary instances of hate speech subordinating is fundamentally positional, and intend to show this through a critique of licensing.