Rebecca Sanaeikia

Philosophical Foundations of the Ethics of Deadnaming: When Deadnaming is Wrong?
University of Rochester

Philosophical Foundations of the Ethics of Deadnaming: When Deadnaming is Wrong?
In this paper, I aim to give an account of wrongful deadnaming by using Deborah Hellman's theory of wrongful discrimination. In order to do so, I will use speech act theories of slurs to distinguish between the derogatory force of deadnaming and its offensiveness. I will argue that sometimes deadnaming is harmless yet wrong due to its derogatory force. Accordingly, the intention is a necessary component of an act of wrongful discriminatory deadnaming. On the contrary, Hellman’s account excludes intention as a necessary or sufficient condition. This will leave us either rejecting Hellman's view of wrongful discrimination and rejecting a unified account of wrongful discrimination or revising her account by including intention in all cases. In this paper, we end with this outcome and do not continue further.

Sessions:

• Contemporary Issues in Feminist Ethics
• Failure and Futurity:Reading the Hypatia Archives for Transformative Feminist Praxis