Imagine a classroom discussion of Lawrence v. Texas, the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark decision holding sodomy laws unconstitutional.1 One student argues that the Court's ruling was correct because a state may not base its criminal laws on bare moral disapproval. Another student picks up on Justice Scalia's dissenting opinion and responds that, if that principle were sound, polygamy and bestiality would also be immune from punishment.2 A third student chimes in to observe that those comparisons are offensive, even harmful, and urges or intimates that the second should apologize. What should happen next? One natural thought is that it depends on whether the offense that the third student took (or supposed others would take) is justified. That is evidently what Justice Scalia himself thought: faced with an openly gay student's similar request for an apology, Scalia rebuked the questioner for failing to grasp the reductio argument that he had actually made.3 Insofar as Scalia had “compared” same-sex intercourse and bestiality, after all, he claimed only that bans on these practices are alike by the lights of the principle that the Court invoked to invalidate sodomy laws. As Scalia correctly observed, that claim really has nothing to do with whether same-sex intercourse is morally tantamount to bestiality at all. Yet I suspect many will share my instinct that this point of logic is not all that matters, from a moral point of view, in the kind of encounter that I have described. For if many people confronted with Scalia's analogical argument will foreseeably take its expression as implying a moral equivalence between same-sex intercourse and bestiality—or, more simply, as an anti-gay insult—that fact alone seems to bear on whether, or at least how, one should voice the argument. And insofar as Scalia or the second student in our imagined dialogue predictably caused gay audience members to think they were being insulted (even, in a sense, mistakenly), and did so without good reason, taking offense at that behavior—under that revised description—could well be warranted after all. In a sense, the listener's interpretation, which starts off foreseeable but mistaken, seems to bounce off of the speaker and return to the listener vindicated in the end.4 This line of thought might suggest that the second student did act wrongly and should indeed apologize. But that is not a comfortable result either. Treating the student's mere invocation of the analogical argument as an insult will tend to ratify the misunderstanding of what they actually said, to discourage the expression of other ideas that could also be misunderstood, and to raise the overall “symbolic temperature” within the community.5 Indeed, a general practice of validating reactions such as the third student's here could well result in gay students facing more, rather than fewer, comments that they rightly take as offensive—at least in a belief- or evidence-relative sense of rightness—and thus leave them only worse off. So, again, what should the characters in this story do? I am tempted to say that, if you think the answer is obvious, one of us is missing something important. Of course, my real topic is not this vignette, but the formidable genre of moral and political disputes of which it is a characteristic if stylized example.6 Roughly speaking, that genre involves claims (1) in the normative register of respect and offense that are (2) linked to membership in a presently or historically subordinated social group and (3) occasioned by symbolic or expressive items or acts (flags, monuments, mascots, pronouns, analogies, tweets, “tropes,” and the like). Any descriptive account of our public discourse respecting matters of social equality today would have to give these claims a prominent place. In part because they are now so politicized, however, they can be exceptionally difficult to parse and evaluate on their own terms. In fact, it can be difficult to say anything at all about them without seeming to enlist on one or another side of a sharp conflict whose battle lines are already set.7 And yet I do not see how we could make sense of this important domain, or navigate conscientiously within it, without engaging both sympathetically and critically with efforts to recognize and redress claims of identity-related offense or dignitary harm. The premise of this essay is that we might find it easier to do that if we reframe the problems of identity-related offense in a somewhat broader perspective. Viewed abstractly, these cases pose a more general set of issues relating to the formulation, operation, and enforcement of conventions for communicating attitudes of respect and disrespect for other people. As several philosophers have recognized, such conventions form the substance of codes of etiquette, manners, or politeness; in social life writ large, we negotiate them constantly and rely upon them to meet a variety of essentially communicative obligations to one another. What is at work in encounters such as the classroom discussion that I just sketched, I will suggest here, is a communicative apparatus of the same fundamental kind—an “etiquette of equality” that specifies what the public expression of certain broadly egalitarian attitudes, in particular, shall be taken to require and forbid. Understanding the problem in those terms clarifies the valuable functions that the norms at issue may serve and makes it easy to see why, even though these norms may be quite arbitrary in content, they have real moral weight.8 At the same time, this account casts in sharp relief the costs to which the same normative system can give rise, including by the lights of what seem its worthiest aims. By demanding ever-greater investments in the communicative dimensions of respect, the etiquette of equality threatens to divert us from, or even impede, the ambition of constructing a social order in which all are actually treated as equals. With these ends in view, I begin in Sections II and III by sketching the moral functions of conventions of etiquette or politeness in general and of the etiquette of equality in particular. In Sections IV through VI, I then proceed to unpack three problematic, interconnected features of this distinctive etiquette regime: (1) the costly and potentially self-defeating overdetermination of relevant signals; (2) a recursive tendency toward inflation in respect's demands; and (3) a related set of incentives for testing, and then affirming, a group's status through the assertion and remediation of offense. Taken together, I suggest, these add up to a powerful indictment of the etiquette of equality as practiced today—but one fully consistent with recognizing the value of its aspirations and even the genuine normative force of its demands. I then conclude in Section VII by reflecting on the dilemma with which this indictment leaves us. In short, there may often be a powerful moral case for each of us as individuals to act in ways that our community's operative respect norms demand, even if we believe both that the norms themselves are in need of reform and that our collective observance of them harmfully fuels and entrenches them. The reason is that, for the most part, our individual choices simply have too little effect on what the norms will be in the future to outweigh the immediate effects that those same choices have in light of what the norms already are. I doubt that this predicament has any fully satisfactory solution. But I think it counsels an ambivalence about the etiquette of equality that neither its enthusiasts nor its critics have tended to cultivate or express, and I think there is some reason to hope that expressing and thereby normalizing such ambivalence might itself go some way toward reconciling our conflicting obligations in this domain. Let me start with a claim that I hope will be uncontroversial: people have an important interest in others' recognition of their status as equal members of the communities that structure their lives. The full satisfaction of this interest, moreover, requires not only that others in fact hold certain attitudes, but that a person be made aware of others' regard as well.9 That second, public or communicative dimension of the interest in recognition will prove especially important here, so we should pause at the outset to take stock of its grounds and weight. Two principal bases for the value of knowing of others' respect suggest themselves. First, the epistemic pillars of a person's self-respect could well erode without reason to believe that others consider them respect-worthy as well.10 Second, and in any event, the assurance of others' respect is often essential if a person is to enjoy genuine opportunities to share in the benefits of social cooperation. The litany of indignities and anxieties recounted in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” makes both of these points vivid. Black people in the Jim Crow South, King explained, were “forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’” engendered by others' withholding of the usual signs of respect.11 Meanwhile, the same lack of assurance about their standing in the eyes of others consigned them to “living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next,” be it a denial of a needed service, a public humiliation, or outright violence.12 The conditions that King described were extreme, of course, but the underlying concerns here apply more generally. If a community is to support its members' self-respect and warrant them in incurring the vulnerabilities inherent in social intercourse, it will have to make mutual respect a salient element of the publicly recognized common ground.13 But how can that collective, communicative obligation be discharged? Ideally, we would want some coordinated social practice that makes the signaling of mutual regard routine, manageable, and predictable. Such a practice should afford ample occasions for communicating the relevant assurances about our own attitudes—so that, in Jeremy Waldron's phrase, each of us is “visibly impressed by signs of one another's commitment” to respecting our dignity.14 But at the same time, a suitable practice should allow us to express these attitudes en passant, without constantly derailing the purposive activities that bring us into contact with one another in the first place. What we would want, in other words, is a “recognized social currency that symbolically operates as thoughtfulness but simultaneously alleviates its strains.”15 As several philosophers have observed, “etiquette,” in the sense of conventional rules of politeness or courtesy, is the social practice that best answers to this description.16 I hasten to add that not everything that goes by that name is squarely relevant here.17 But many etiquette norms (and by many estimations, the most important ones) are concerned precisely with the routinized expression of attitudes toward other people. We have norms about the appropriate manner and occasions for expressing gratitude and deference, about what to say in case of an interruption or collision, about how to issue commands and make requests, about greetings, even about where we direct our gaze—and, of course, about much more besides.18 As Sarah Buss observes, the combined effect of all of these norms is to ensure that there are “many occasions on which there is something rather particular people must be sure to do in order to be polite to one another.”19 And in placing these demands on us, the norms thus give us many opportunities for, “in effect, saying ‘I respect you,’ ‘I acknowledge your dignity,’”20 through the simple act of complying. As long as certain behaviors are generally understood as appropriate when it comes to persons owed respect, after all, we can express respect for someone simply by visibly including them within the class of beings to whom we evidently take those standard-issue obligations to run. We are thus relieved of the practical burdens and game-theoretic conjectures that successfully communicating appropriate attitudes to a host of other people, each perhaps with their own beliefs about how respectful people tend to behave, could otherwise demand of us. At the same time, threading these practices through our interactions can serve to inculcate the very attitudes that we are being enjoined to express, as well as the more general sensitivity to the perceptions and interests of others that underwrites the injunction to publicly express them.21 The price of enjoying these opportunities for signaling respect through politeness, of course, is that we will also signal something when we fail to use them. In particular, omitting some standard respect-communicating performance, and especially seeming to do so purposely, will naturally bear the opposite meaning—not because the forgone behavior is beneficial in itself, but because of the valued message that is being withheld, and thereby inverted. This is why refusing to address Black people with standard honorifics, such as “the respected title ‘Mrs.,’” was one of the routinized forms of insult that King described.22 Or for a more pedestrian example, consider someone who wears bright, colorful clothes to a typical American funeral.23 Why is that disrespectful of the bereaved family? The core of the answer is simply that a prevailing convention makes wearing dark clothes at a funeral a means of expressing sadness or showing respect for those mourning the death. That convention allows people to express fitting attitudes, and in so doing, it inevitably creates opportunities (if one can call them that) for communicating opposite signals, through nonconformity, as well.24 We can now turn squarely to the thesis that ordinary etiquette, understood along the lines that I have just sketched, offers a valuable paradigm for understanding the problems of identity-related offense with which I began. The gist of that comparison will now be clear: in both contexts, we are concerned with the attitudes toward others that a person's behavior shows by the lights of some set of semiotic conventions, and with the moral implications that those meanings then have in light of (among other things) the interest in one another's recognition that I highlighted a moment ago. But in order to build out a more nuanced account of how the conventions of interest here function, it will help to start by considering the paradigm case of slur words specifically. If there is a distinctive etiquette of equality, after all, using a slur for a subordinated group would seem the quintessential violation of it—much as employing certain vulgarities would represent a paradigmatic violation of etiquette generally. And because I find Geoff Nunberg's recent account of the pragmatics of slurs particularly illuminating, I will use it to cast light on a wider class of identity-related affronts that appear to work in a similar way.25 Nunberg's view, in short, is that there is no difference in semantic content between slur words and their neutral counterparts (e.g., between “redskin” and “Indian”)—just as there is no such difference between “ain't” and “isn't,” or between “pulchritude” and “beauty.”26 Rather, the important differences within each of these pairs lie in the sorts of features that a dictionary would mark with labels alongside a definition: tags such as offensive, formal, slang, archaic, and the like. These bits of “lexical metadata” capture sociolinguistic facts—facts about who uses the words at issue, or the discourses to which they belong, not about what the words themselves mean.27 The special effect of any given person's using a slur is then achieved through a kind of “‘affiliatory’ speech act”: the speaker signals or declares, through their use of one term rather than another, membership in or solidarity with the community whose word of choice it already is.28 Thus, as Nunberg sums up his view, “racists don't use slurs because they're derogative; slurs are derogative because they're the words that racists use.”29 This analysis directly and convincingly explains the mechanism of offense in one familiar class of cases. Suppose, for instance, that I describe Obergefell v. Hodges to students as the case in which the Supreme Court recognized a right to of them would be by that even though their would have taken the same as essentially a neutral not long ago. Why is the words and may be but was the word within a particular and my choice to from the word in my community in of that would signal a to or with the prevailing attitudes of that rather than those of my toward the at In other words, my word choice would what Nunberg a would thus take offense at my word choice because they would take it as a or that I gay people with the And their might well warrant that on their part, even though the same from the same at some would have This is a good but the to the etiquette of equality is recognizing that we can the same fundamental analysis well matters of word as an dictionary might now with or offensive, I want to suggest, we all with a kind of that similar not only to words, but to other items as the reductio argument for the of sodomy laws with which I began. If same-sex intercourse to the very sense of that the are alike by the lights of some offensive, it seems to be so in much the same way that using the word now At least in the of that the speech act of this is itself an in the relevant sociolinguistic in effect, it is as If slurs are the words that racists we might then comparisons are the comparisons that In fact, some and now or that make this quite to the content they are to These can be understood as etiquette more in than in from those by Martin or simultaneously describe and the with particular with a to the of respectful attitudes and the of offense within a particular domain. What and the etiquette of equality, at least as I the is thus the set of attitudes whose expression it the particular that it just how to or the attitudes that this is not obvious, and the of the “etiquette of equality” will not be without such an my choice to as the a certain point of and would be natural of the relevant of attitudes, for example, that these lack the general of the relevant are to make the a and I will take the as a First, there are derogative attitudes and with particular subordinated social and the etiquette of equality specifies how to expressing or those attitudes or Second, much as not only can offense but also can the etiquette of equality specifies how to signal of the same disrespectful of the conditions with which they are makes sense that we would have a set of conventions to these a of and it would be to rely on the etiquette of and alone to meet the communicative obligations in Section people have particular for about their more of respect will be needed to the same of So, for example, norms that particular terms as respectful valuable occasions for respect for members of the for so when their group membership is some of expression is already often linked to an moreover, norms that this can discourage the relevant behavior and members of subordinated of some of the that they otherwise when it And both of these a with the functions of etiquette writ by etiquette such norms are also to as of efforts to our thought and in other The reason for might be that simple us to for instance, but one effect of efforts to our practices has to the use of on account of its sociolinguistic This of the etiquette of equality casts it, etiquette in a broadly A system for respect for members of subordinated and signaling seems a natural to a social in which such respect be taken for And we the issue that it seems that those who at norms on the that they are or that there is nothing disrespectful about to “the or where a person of is from, and so often just missing the is nothing about wearing to a funeral but you do If an etiquette to communicating respect for members of subordinated a of etiquette in it be simply for as other codes of etiquette if one the value of these moreover, that is no more a moral for without regard for and of in this than in any And yet it seems that the of this etiquette and the to it are also our practices for communicating respect, and the broader communicative we in ways that can be at that costs alongside their costs are to be if those of us in ways in these lack a sense of what is the of the and the variety of I any to But the three I will turn to three such that seem particularly important and to out some of the characteristic of of our ordinary etiquette as the of saying and for their and very these conventions are so if they lack what Nunberg a a social group whose recognizing a common in a for some or on a convention that they are then taken to That is part of the reason that the observance of these norms generally anything the bare respect that Buss as the special of act as our most familiar politeness conventions is to at one of “the The etiquette of equality is in this state the obvious, the people most in their expression with special of the standing of members of subordinated are not an of And the and norms on which they are thus inevitably by that and political Indeed, this seems to how those practices serve their communicative as slurs by the conventions of many of the practices seem to respect in a by the conventions prevailing who have these with their own attitudes toward the at If “the of is by the interests and of the communities that and own as Nunberg then we should expect the same to be of what we might call or word such as the that serve to give those with egalitarian their own distinctive for about the same of politeness, use of these etiquette conventions a social membership perhaps But in light of the and of the social that this domain, it seems that people will often have of just who the of what attitudes those people or of which of their attitudes are to any given one of as to to the of a person's choice to As a people will also have of the with which the relevant speech act a own Indeed, even one recognizing that all of the just matters of will take such an act of to of The of all this is that the of the relevant in the sense of the attitudes a person is taken to express by it, will often be By way of consider wearing a in the symbolic act whose is I in much the same At one wearing the is naturally taken simply to express or to the That is the of that most the semantic content of a of the behavior by the operative own Yet it is a social fact that those who use that particular to express that content today tend also to hold a particular, of what demands. For me to the could thus about my on any of I the of in that I of the who have taken to the and so who that I moreover, may take my choice not only as of these other but as an on my part to signal them. So, if I do not want to or these that me a reason for the if I a of and would all to express it in this that reason wearing the has force even if rightly not actually any of these even if my audience not think that it and even if many who by that to express as such and nothing most this reason for the its force even if my so might itself to light of their own of the relevant a lack of on my In that event, I will find in an expressive and I will simply have to the in the at of the ways of being of the practices by the etiquette of equality are to their salient but in the same they may be and out by some as and signals of ways of the equal standing of members of subordinated of