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Leave the Gun; Take the Cannoli!

The Pragmatic Topography of Second-Person Calls Author(s): Mark Lance and Rebecca Kukla Source: Ethics, Vol. 123, No. 3 (April 2013), pp. 456-478 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/669565 . Accessed: 31/05/2013 08:45
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Leave the Gun; Take the Cannoli! The Pragmatic Topography of Second-Person Calls* Mark Lance and Rebecca Kukla
The pragmatic texture of second-person calls such as requesting, ordering, inviting, and entreating is complex. None of these speech acts are interchangeable. All are appropriate in some contexts and inappropriate in others, and all can be enabled or precluded by specic power relations. We argue that one cannot understand either the origin or the structure of many of our ethically signicant normative statuses and relationships without attending to how they are instituted and modied by calls and the uptake they receive. Our model also enables us to give a close analysis of various forms of deance and transgression.

Now you come to me and you say Don Corleone, give me justice. But you dont ask with respect. You dont offer friendship. You dont even think to call me Godfather. Instead, you come into my house on the day my daughters to be married and you ask me to do murder for money. . . . Someday, and that day may never come, Ill call upon you to do a service for me. But, until that day, accept this justice as a gift on my daughters wedding day. Don Corleone, The Godfather, Part 1 As Don Corleone well knew, the pragmatic texture of asking, offering, ordering, calling upon, entreating, accepting, and gifting is rich and complex. None of these acts are interchangeable; all are appropriate in some contexts and inappropriate in others; and all are enabled and precluded by
* Both of us contributed equally to this article, and we were equally involved in every stage of its conception and writing. We alternate the order in which our names are listed in each of our joint publications. This article has had a long history, and we owe an enormous debt to a huge number of people who have discussed it with us and provided detailed feedback, including Bill Blattner, Maggie Little, Coleen MacNamara, Oren Magid who also Ethics 123 (April 2013): 456478 2013 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0014-1704/2013/12303-0004$10.00

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specic relations of power and authority. Corleone here references examples of specic sorts of second-person addressesspeech acts that call upon you to give uptake to specic normative statuses by acting in some range of ways. We refer to these generically as calls. Calls both depend upon and make use of existing normative contexts and roles for their production, and call into being new relations and statuses that revise the normative structure of social space and action. As interactions with Godfathers make particularly salient, a misplaced request or an unanticipated offer can reorganize social possibilities and relations of beholdenness, responsibility, and authority in profound and even dangerous ways. In this article we are interested in showing the kind of normative work that second-person calls can do. In the broadest terms, our thesis is that one cannot understand either the origin or the structure of many of our normative statuses and relationships without attending to how they are instituted and modied by calls and the uptake they receive. This applies not just to our merely social normative statuses and relationships but to our robustly moral ones: calls give shape to what it takes to treat someone decently, determine exactly how a particular act counts as a violation of someone, and so forth. We make no attempt to give an account of the hypothetical or actual origin of morality or normativity itself in this article; our story begins entirely in media res. It is no part of our thesis that second-person calls can bootstrap nonnormative creatures into normative space.1 Our central thought is that second-person transactionsand more specically, for our purpose here, second-person callsinstitute and recongure normative statuses and relationships and that we cannot understand the normative structure of the resulting moral terrain without understanding it as the result of such transactions. This thought has a familiar antecedent: from Hobbes and Rousseau through Rawls, Gauthier, Darwall, and others, philosophers have often argued that actual or hypothetical transactions of contracting have such an instituting role and accordingly that the contract is a central theoretical tool for understanding
helped us with background research, James Mattingly, Henry Richardson, and audiences at Georgetown University, University of Sydney, Louisiana State University, George Washington University, and the 2010 annual meeting of the Virginia Philosophical Society at Marymount University, as well the associate editors at Ethics and two anonymous referees. 1. Indeed, second-person calls are, on our reading, normatively articulated actions that depend on a rich array of background norms in order to exist at all, and so they could not serve as literal origins of normativity. See R. Kukla, The Ontology and Temporality of Conscience, Continental Philosophy Review 35 2002: 134, and Myth, Memory, and Misrecognition in Sellars Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, Philosophical Studies 101 2000: 161211, for detailed arguments for why second-person calls cannot literally found normativity and for analyses of how they might nonliterally do so. In any case, origin stories are not our concern here.

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our normative statuses and relationships. In a similar spirit, we wish to demonstrate that we can and indeed must expand our attention to a broader array of transactions; contracting and the resulting agreements are not rich enough tools to make sense of all the ways in which transactions institute and reorganize normative statuses and relationships. By focusing on calls, we think that we can capture a great deal of deontic complexity and nuance in both the process of instituting and modifying normative statuses and the resulting statuses themselvescomplexity and nuance that remain invisible if one keeps ones focus on contracting as the central example of a normatively fecund transaction. We give a close analysis of some different kinds of second-person calls, distinguished by the kind of pragmatic, normative intervention they effect. We try to show how these different calls help constitute normatively complex situations whose structure is not detachable from the calls that instituted them. We make no attempt to give an exhaustive typology of calls or their normative effects. We also do not argue that second-person calls are the only or even the privileged means by which normative statuses and relationships are created and shaped. Rather, we focus on three types of calls: imperatives, requests, and entreaties. We show that each has an importantly different pragmatic structure and functions differently in our moral and social life. We hope that our discussion of these three examples will suggest that there are indenitely many kinds of calls, with distinctive structures, whose subtleties help to constitute a rich moral and social space. When philosophers have attended to second-person calls, they have tended to focus disproportionately on imperatives, often taking the imperative as the model for or paradigm of calls in general.2 That is, they have understood all calls as demands that can be either obeyed or transgressed, while taking the only difference between imperatives and less bossy speech acts such as requests and advisements to be the strength of the demand. John Searle, for instance, writes that the illocutionary point of imperatives, requests, entreaties, and a wide variety of other speech acts labeled directives consists in the fact that they are attempts of varying degrees, and hence, more precisely, they are determinates of the determinable which includes attempting by the speaker to get the hearer to do something. They may be very modest attempts as when I invite you to do it or suggest that you do it, or they may be very erce attempts as when I insist that you do it.3 We hope to show, during the course of this article, that strength or ferocity is not nearly an articulated enough tool for marking out the rel2. For instance, and most memorably, in R. M. Hare, The Language of Morals Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952. 3. J. R. Searle, A Classication of Illocutionary Acts, Language in Society 5 1976: 123, 11. Promises have also received a fair amount of philosophical attention, but they have been

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evant differences between calls and their normative effects. Not all calls are designed to obligate, even weakly. Contractings, imperatives, and promises are examples of speech acts that are distinctive in having obligations as their upshot; for this reason, they will turn out to be insufcient building blocks when it comes to understanding the topography of the normative terrain and how it is instituted. Before we begin, we need to be clear about what rides on our focus on speech acts, and also about how we distinguish among types of speech acts. We treat speech acts as communicative transactional performances communicative moves within social space that function to transform the normative status of members of the discursive community, including, typically, the speaker and the target audience of the speech act. We can give a functional characterization of speech act types in terms of the kind of entitlement that licenses their performancetheir inputand the concrete transformation in normative statuses they achieve if all goes well their output.4 Thus, to give a hackneyed example, if I,5 as a justice of the peace, pronounce Sam and Kris to be legally married, the input of my speech act is my entitlement to perform itmy legal status, my situatedness within the right kind of ritual, and so forth. The output is the statuses it creates or changes: that Kris and Sam are now married, most centrally, but this comes along with a host of other deontic changes, such as that they now need to check different boxes on their tax returns, that Kriss mom is now a motherin-law, and so forth. On our view, while Austinean performatives like marriage pronouncements provide handy examples, all speech acts have inputs and outputs. Not much hangs on what counts as a speech act as opposed to some other kind of act, for us; we need them only to have enough structure to have content and a determinate input and output. When we distinguish among types of speech acts in this article, we do so on the basis of their pragmatic form: their input and their output, or the characteristic difference they make if they are successful. Grammatical distinctions in mood often track such pragmatic distinctions in function. But this is not always so: something with the surface grammar of an interrogative can be used to make a requestIsnt it rather cold in here with the window open?and so forth. Distinctions in surface grammar are not what interest us here. Whether someone is performing an order or a request, for our purposes, is not primarily determined by surface grammar but by how her act, in all its material texture, is situated within a social
treated more or less like reverse imperatives. Like imperatives, they oblige someone to do something for someone. 4. This is the picture we developed in detail in our book R. Kukla and M. Lance, Yo! and Lo!: The Pragmatic Topography of the Space of Reasons Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. 5. Although this article is fully coauthored, we often need to use the rst-person singular in order to make our point clear.

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narrative that takes place in a context that is structured by normative relationships of authority, friendship, and the like, as well as a thick network of discursive conventions and social rituals. We will be using ordinary-language names for types of speech acts, such as requests and imperatives, in order to specify pragmatic categories. While our choice of labels is not arbitrary, we will be stipulating that these terms refer to specic types of pragmatic interventions with characteristic input and output structures. The ordinary-language uses of terms like invite and request are surely less precise and distinct than is our use of them here. We will use such terms to call attention to different kinds of social acts we can perform with words, with correspondingly different performative force, and calling for correspondingly different kinds of uptake. IMPERATIVES VERSUS REQUESTS With that background in place, lets now explore the difference between the pragmatic structure of imperatives and of requests. Both typically involve an attempt by a speaker to bring it about that the target of the speech act performs an action J. However, the type of normative transaction involved in the two cases is quite different. Thus in both cases, we might say, it is part of the constitutive goal of the speech actwhat needs to happen for the speech act to be a complete successthat the target Js. Yet the two speech acts have different normative outputs. The output of a successful imperative is an obligation on the part of the person ordered to do what the speaker ordered her to do. The output of a successful request is that the target now has a specic sort of reason to do what was requested, but it is essential to the notion of a request that this reason is not an obligation. An imperative has failed in its pragmatic function if the target does not acknowledge that she has an obligation to act as ordered; the normative function of the speech act is to impute a duty. On the other hand, it is integral to the very idea of a request that it present the one to whom the request has been made with a choice; it is part of the structure of the speech act that it leaves the decision to grant or refuse it up to the one of whom the request has been made. Now, at rst glance, we might think, along with Searle see above, that this difference is just a matter of strength. Perhaps requests are just weaker, less erce orders. But as we will see in more detail as we go along, this is wrong: requests and imperatives have different pragmatic structures and are not points along a single continuum. To start with, notice that the freedom to grant or refuse a request is not a product of its being too weak to obligate; rather, this freedom is essential to the pragmatic structure. If I ask you to come over and hang out with me on a lonely evening, for instance, I dont seek to obligate you to come over. I want you to come over, but I want you to choose to do so as a favor to me. Id be somewhat

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chagrined to learn that you came over out of a sense of obligation. It is, as Derrida nicely puts it, unfriendly to respond to a friend out of duty.6 But at the same time, a request does not just open up a neutral space of choice. In requesting, I seek to impute a reason for its recipient to grant it. Requests are closely related to invitations; both are characterized by this combination of freedom and nonneutrality. Derrida writes, An invitation leaves one free, otherwise it becomes a constraint. It should never imply: you are obliged to come, you have to come, it is necessary. But the invitation must be pressing, not indifferent. It should never imply: You are free not to come and if you dont come, never mind, it doesnt matter.7 The analogous point serves equally well for requests, we think. Furthermore, the reason imputed by the request is inherently relational and second-personally instituted: whatever kinds of reasons I had to J in advance, your request that I J, assuming it is entitled, now gives me a new reason to J for you.8 And now, if I grant your request, I dont just J; in Jing, I perform a new, normatively rich type of actionone of granting. Granting itself is a second-person transaction with its own normative outputs. For example, the pragmatically required response to a request being granted is always and distinctively gratitude, if sometimes only token gratitude.9 On the other hand, gratitude is not only not called for but is in fact inappropriate when someone obeys my order. If I express gratitude when you obey my order, I am in fact retroactively subverting that order and the entitlement with which I issued it. A request is successful as a speech act, in one sense, if it gives the person requested a reason to grant the request. In another sense, requests are successful only if the one requested commits to granting the request. And nally, of course, a request is successful in yet another sense only if it
6. J. Derrida, On the Name Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995, 8. 7. Ibid., 14. 8. Imagine that Joe has some reason to stop on the way home and buy milk. Hes planning on baking a cake, perhaps. If Joes roommate Bob asks him to please buy milk on the way home, he now has another reason to do so: because Bob asked him to. Both reasons are defeatable. But there is a structural difference between them. The reason generated by the request is one that is inherently relationalJoe grants or refuses Bob in stopping for milk or not. We examine second-personally instituted relational reasons in detail in the next section. 9. Invitations are fascinating examples of second-person addresses that we do not have time to analyze thoroughly in this article. Briey, paradigmatic invitations demand gratitude from both the invited and the host if accepted, whereas paradigmatic requests demand gratitude only from the requester when granted. Invitations that are refused characteristically call for regret from the one invited, whereas requests that are refused characteristically call for apology from the one requested. Further, the structure of second-personality involved in granting a request is not identical to that involved in accepting an invitation. If I invite you to come over for the evening, you do not properly accept by coming over just for me. Your coming over is relational in that it is essentially the consummation of a joint engagement in a social eventbut it is not a favor ; it should be an expression of your desire to attend.

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is actually successfully grantedit is only then that it meets its constitutive goal. The one requested might acknowledge the request, commit to granting it, and still fail to grant it because of ineptitude, akrasia, lack of opportunity, and so forth. But insofar as the request really is a request rather than an implicit imperative, it must leave the target of the request the legitimate option of refusing it. If I request that you come keep me company on a lonely night, then I may be disappointed if you declineperhaps even disappointed in youbut I cannot legitimately accuse you of having failed to live up to a commitment imputed by my request just because you turned it down. Here we see one of the deepest differences between requests and imperatives. It is in the nature of imperatives that they impute obligations, and in doing so, they do not present their target with a choice of whether to obey them. Insofar as the target of an imperative acknowledges its legitimate force, she has already acknowledged her commitment to act as ordered; these are really the same acknowledgments although she may have conicting commitments that trump this one, as we will discuss below. This means that if she then fails to act as ordered, she has failed in her commitment. This difference between imperatives and requests, again, is not a difference in seriousness. If I tell my bank teller to transfer $20 from my checking to my savings account, this is best interpreted as an imperative, not a request, and he has failed in his commitments if he does not make the transfer. This is so even if my level of disappointment in the bank tellers failure would be trivial compared to my level of disappointment were you to freely and legitimately decline to come keep me company. One upshot so far is this: while all calls give their targets reasons to act, different kinds of calls create different kinds of reasons, and these kinds often cannot be understood except in relation to the types of secondpersonal transactions that institute them. We may give the name petitionary reasons to the distinctive kinds of reasons created by requeststhat is, those that give the one requested the right kind of reason to act that opens up the right kind of space of freedom, pressure, and so forth. We suggest that petitionary reasons can be created only by a requestyou simply cant have this kind of reason absent the context of the relevant kind of secondperson transaction. Likewise, the kinds of apologies and gratitude made possible by the request are not coherent social acts outside of this context. An imperative is structurally incapable of giving its target a petitionary reason to act. Petitionary reasons are not just weak obligations, nor are they obligations backed up by weak desires on the part of the requester; they are a different variety of reason altogether. The differences between the various kinds of reasons are not reducible to and cannot be individuated in terms of any particular constellation of desires or intentions. I can genuinely request that you do something that I privately hope you will not do such as give me a fty-page draft of a dissertation chapter for me to comment on over the weekend, perhaps; I can

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make a request unintentionally, or intend to make a request and fail; I can request that you do something I am pretty sure you will not actually do or even intend to do, and so on.10 In fact, as we continue to examine the negrained structure of various second-person transactions, we think it will become less and less tempting to try to reduce these transactional kinds in any way, whether it is to one another, to nonnormative behavioral dispositions, or to patterns of mental states. We suggest that it is most productive to think of our notions of requesting and ordering as emergent pragmatic categories of social acts, which can only be understood in terms of their relationship to other such acts and the broader transactional context in which they occur. SECOND-PERSONALITY AND DIRECTED COMMITMENTS It is essential to the distinctive functioning of imperatives, requests, and other calls that they are second-person addresses.11 The constitutive goal of an imperative, for instance, is obedience. But obedience is an essentially relational notion that cannot be understood just as action that is in accordance with a speech act. When I order you to J, it is not sufcient for the success of my speech act that you happen to J, nor even that my imperative causes you to J. Rather, it requires that you J out of your recognition of your obligation to me to J. If my mother orders me, at the age of thirty-ve, say, to break up with someone I am dating whom I had already decided to break up with anyhow, I may well reject her entitlement to issue this imperative while going ahead with the breakup; I have not thereby obeyed her order, although I have conformed with it. Even if her order causes me to reassess my relationship and decide it needs to end, I am still not being obedient unless I break up with my partner out of a recognition of the claim the order makes on me. If I obey the order, I am in an important sense breaking up with my partner for or out of beholdenness to my mother, whereas in these other scenarios I am not. That is, obeying an
10. Although, on our view, neither the categories of calls nor the statuses they institute can be reduced to mental states and intentions, this doesnt mean they have no constitutive connection to them. Both requests and imperatives structurally express desires on the part of the speaker that the one called do what she is called to do, even though this desire may be absent. On this we agree with Searle in A Classication of Illocutionary Acts. If they did not express mental states and defeasibly track intentions, there would be no calls. But, we claim, this does not mean that we can build an account of requesting or ordering out of these materials. 11. We talked extensively about second-person addresses in Yo! and Lo! Almost simultaneously, Stephen Darwall also discussed them extensively in The Second-Person Standpoint Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. His account of second-personality and second-person speech differs from ours in the details, and accordingly he uses the phrase second-person address slightly differently than we do. We intend the phrase to be used in our sense rather than Darwalls sense. We hope that context makes our use of the phrase sufciently clear here, but those wishing for more details and curious about the differences between our account and Darwalls can consult Yo! and Lo!, sec. 5.4 and chap. 7.

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imperative to J requires not only that I J, but that I a take myself as obligated to J and b take myself as relationally owing it to the one who issued the imperative that I J. The same holds for defying an order to J, which is also an inherently relational act; it requires that I take up a confrontational stance toward the orderer, not merely that I refrain from Jing. The case of requesting and granting is analogous. I count as granting your request that I J only if I J for you, thereby acknowledging your entitlement to make the request and the kind of reason for action that it gives me. If my mother asks me to stop dating my current partner, my doing so does not count as granting her request unless I take myself as having a petitionary reason to break up with that person for my mother, in addition to whatever reasons I might have for doing so. Both imperatives and requests, then, have essentially relational statuses as their outputs. The status of s of being obligated to t, or petitioned by t, is one that only makes sense in terms of a relationship between s and t. Not all normative statuses are relational in this way. An obligation to, say, refrain from leaving a grotesquely disproportionate carbon footprint is not an obligation to anyone in particular, but an obligation arising from an order is always to someone. But the point is even stronger than this. Many obligations are owed to someone in particular, without arising out of a second-personal transaction. If I agree to teach a class, I now have specic obligations to my students and they to me, even before I know who they are or have had the opportunity to interact with them. Likewise, I have specic obligations to my child in virtue of my causal role in her existence, prior to my ability to engage in second-person transactions with her and independent of any agreements I forge with anyone else. In contrast, imperatives and requests are second-person speech acts and their proper upshot is a normative status that makes sense only within this transactional context. If I defy, obey, grant, or refuse, I necessarily defy, obey, grant, or refuse you, the speaker, and this is so even if what you ordered or asked me to do was something that did not materially involve you at all. If you asked me to teach the class and I agreed, in teaching the class I have granted your request. It may well be that my teaching of the class will have no interesting material impact on you whatsoever, and I would engage in the same actions as a teacher as I would have had you not made the request. Indeed, notice that there is an ambiguity in the phrase obligation to s. It might mean that I am obligated to do something that materially involves youto grade your paper, give you a syllabusor it might mean that whatever I am materially committed to doing, my commitment is directed at you, in the sense that I have failed you if I renege upon it. Organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous derive part of their point and power from the potential gap between impersonal reasons and the direc-

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ted reasons instituted by second-personal calls; in joining, I among other things give my sponsor power to request and order me to do things where normally no second-person holding would be appropriate, even though I already had plenty of reasons to do the things my sponsor calls me to do.12 We think that this essential directedness of some normative statuses and social transactions is a major theoretical dimension of normative and social life that has not received sufcient acknowledgment or exploration. Even moral theories that explicitly make the second person central do not consistently distinguish between second-personally instituted and merely relational statuses.13 Accordingly, it is unfortunate that the same word, obligation, is used for at least three distinct kinds of normative statuses those that are impersonal, those that are relational in the sense of being an obligation toward someone, and those that are relational in the sense of being a second-personally instituted obligation to someone.14 SUCCESSFUL AND FAILED CALLS As we have described them, calls create and modify specic normative statuses and relationships and secure specic kinds of uptake. Now, because speech acts have this power to shift normative status and elicit actions, it is politically, practically, and theoretically important that this power is not absolute. Often, speech acts are not taken up at all, or they are taken up in ways that do not enable them to meet their constitutive goal. Disempowered speakers speech acts may not get the uptake they justly deserve, and conversely, inappropriate or oppressive discursive power plays can be resisted. If we are going to understand the details of how speech acts can institute complex normative statuses second-personally, then we also need to understand the limits of their powers. More specically, we need to understand how the ways in which speech acts can fail are themselves varied and complex. This should be no surprise, at this point. Speech acts call for uptake, and this uptake itself takes the form of a concrete social response, where such responses have all the normative complexity of that to which they respond. A speech act that fails to get appropriate uptake may be resisted, ignored, simply misunderstood, greeted with an act of pointed transgression, and so forth. In this section we explore and provisionally categorize the ways in which second-personal calls can fail. Doing so will give us in12. This gap between what it is appropriate for someone to hold you to doing and what you have reason to do has been discussed in productive detail in Coleen MacNamara, Holding Others Responsible, Philosophical Studies 152 2009: 81102; and in M. O. Little, Abortion, Intimacy, and the Duty to Gestate, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 2 1999: 295312. 13. Most notably Darwall in The Second-Person Standpoint. 14. See Kukla and Lance, Yo! and Lo! for more on directionality, second-personality, and normativity.

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sight into the kind of power that speech has and the limits of that power. It will also give us conceptual tools for understanding how the power of discursive calls, and more broadly the normative structures that enable and are instituted by speech acts can be resisted. The constitutive goal of a call is some kind of action on the part of the one called: obeying an order, accepting an invitation, or heeding a warning, perhaps. In order to make it all the way to the fulllment of such a goal, several stages must be traversed. The utterance has to be felicitous and recognizable as an entitled performance; the target of the speech act must recognize it as the speech act that it is; the target must give uptake to the speech act, taking on the statuses it imputes; the target must, nally, act in such a way that the goal of the speech act is satised by obeying an order or granting a request, for instance. We think there is a variety of ways that speech acts can fail over the course of the temporally extended series of events they initiate. Some types of speech act failure are familiar from the literature. First, an attempted call like any attempted speech act can fail by simply not managing to be the kind of speech act the speaker is trying to perform. That is, it can misre, or be infelicitous. Perhaps there is no target of the call present; a request issued to a store mannequin simply fails to be a call at all. An attempted call is infelicitous when it is hopelessly incoherent, or the target of a call doesnt hear or understand it and hence isnt in a position to give or deny uptake to it, or it calls its target to take up a normative status that makes no sense in context. For instance, my son cannot felicitously request that I sign him up for gladiator training. Second, a call that does not misre can lack entitlement. The private can order the colonel to drop and give her twenty, but the order wont be entitled. An imperative that is not recognizable as an entitled performance has none of the binding force characteristic of its function, and in this sense it is a performative failure. The colonel does not defy the private by failing to act as ordered. More subtly, requests can also fail to be entitled. That is, they may be requests that the requester is in no position to make in the rst place, quite apart from the question of whether the target is likely to act as requested. An entitled request succeeds in petitioning the target of the request, thereby putting her in the distinctive, nonneutral position of choice characteristic of the status of being petitioned. An unentitled request fails to petition its target. Such an unentitled request is precisely what Don Corleone attributes to Bonasera. Bonasera did not, of course, presume to order Don Corleone to bring justice to his daughters attackers; he asked him to do so as a favor. Although Corleone clearly recognizes the speech act as a request, and not as pragmatic gobbledygook You come into my house on the day my daughter is to be married and you ask me to do murder for moneyhe does not acknowledge that this request petitions him. Instead, he responds by focusing on issues of status and

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relationship, making clear to Bonasera just why he has, as yet, no entitlement to make such a request. Third, at the end of the process, a call can fail due to physical frailty, lack of opportunity, or akrasia on the part of the one called. You might request that I water your plants for you while youre out of town, and I may agree to do so, and then fail to do it because I broke my leg trying to get there, got so caught up playing Minecraft that I couldnt bring myself to stop despite my best efforts, or whatever. Any speech act that concretely fails to bring about the realization of its constitutive goal for any reason is in some sense ultimately a failure. Unless my order was actually obeyed or my request actually granted, the speech act cant be deemed an unqualied success at the end of the day. The types of failure we have mentioned so far should be distinguished from another that is external to the pragmatic structure of the speech act altogether. A call may conict with other social or moral norms that are in place, so that issuing it is ethically or socially inappropriate. My spouse might ask me to come home early from a dear friends birthday party in order to fold laundry, or my boss may order me to take a visiting dignitary to a strip club. These calls violate broader social or moral norms, even when they are in good order when it comes to their performative structure, entitlement, and recognition. They are not failed speech acts, in the sense relevant to this article. Some of the ways in which speech acts fail to secure appropriate uptake and meet their constitutive goal are especially important from the point of view of ethical theory, because they involve not just a discursive breakdown but an ethically signicant response to the speech act in their own right; a speech act may be met with resistance or deance, for example. Sometimes, the target of the speech act transgresses the norms marshaled by the speech act in failing to give it appropriate uptake. Analyzing the pragmatic structure of deance, transgression, and so forth, as forms of responses to speech acts, is no easy task. In order to make some preliminary moves in that direction, we will need to introduce a bit of theoretical apparatus and terminology. We begin with the original call, which by stipulation is targeted secondpersonally at someone or ones, and calls upon its target to do something that gives uptake to the normative claim made in the call to obey an order, grant or refuse a request, etc.. As long as the call does not misre, it restructures normative space. Calls make new actions possible and old actions impossible: once I invite you to my house, accepting the invitation is now an action that is possible for you; once I declare my love to you and beg you to run away with me, maintaining a distant but polite professional relationship with me is impossible. Often calls create and foreclose action possibilities by changing the normative signicance of various forms of behavior, including the signicance of lack of behavior. For example, if I

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request that you give me a copy of your latest paper, and then you do not do so, this becomes an act of refusing a request or perhaps even ignoring a request, rather than just an absence of paper-giving; anything you do next with respect to me and the paper now counts as an act with some kind of normative signicance that it would not have had were it not for my request. Any call creates a normatively articulated space of possible responses the SPR by shifting and recasting action possibilities in this way.15 Since calls are targeted events that essentially call for uptake, they have a special normative impact upon their targeted audience; there are norms of discursive pragmatics that govern what counts as an appropriate way of acknowledging and responding to a particular call, and the call mobilizes these norms. Thus, for the ones called, the call creates, within the SPR, a space of possibilities for normatively appropriate uptake, or an SAU. If I invite you to a party in my home, your accepting the invitation is within the SAU, as is your declining the invitation with regret, but simply ignoring the invitation is, though within the SPR, not within the SAUit is a violation of the norms imputed by the call. The response to a call may or may not be an action from within the SAU, but it will always, of necessity, be within the SPR. Once a call is recognized by its target, even inaction counts as a response, since the call calls for uptake. Finally, within the smaller space of the SAU, there is a yet smaller space of responses that meet the constitutive goal of the speech act. A response may be within the SAU and the SPR but still not one that satises the constitutive goaldeclining an invitation with regret, for instance. So, for instance, if I give you a felicitous order that I am entitled to issue, then obeying the order is within the SAU but failing to act as ordered is not. This doesnt mean youll actually act as ordered, of course. We dont always act as we are normatively called upon to do. But if you pointedly dont do what I ordered you to do, then that constitutes an act of disobediencethat is, an act within the SPR which couldnt exist before my order but outside the SAU. As long as a call is felicitous, the SPR it creates is, in effect, inescapable; any action that happens next is one within the slightly reconstituted normative space created by the action. The SAU, on the other hand, is always escapable; no matter how forceful the claim that a norm makes on us is, it is always at least conceptually possible to violate itthis is indeed a distinctive mark of normative force. For instance, for any call, ignoring it altogether is always in the SPR, but it is not typically in the SAU.
15. The point generalizes: as we move about in the world, normatively signicant events condition the space of possible future actions, and speech acts are examples of such events. Rushing to work as fast as possible is a normatively different action once you see a bleeding child on the side of the road, burning a cross is a different act than it would have been were it not for race lynchings, and so on.

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FIG. 1

Thus we can model the event as shown in gure 1. Now it may look, on rst glance, like imperatives and requests have exceptionally boring SAUs. An imperative to J appears to have only one action in its SAU, namely Jing. Not Jing is, accordingly, a transgression falling outside the SAU. A request to J appears to include everything in its SAUboth Jing and not Jing as such are always appropriate possibilities opened up by a request; likewise, it seems difcult to understand how a request could be deed, since neither Jing nor failing to J are ruled out by it. But this story is too simple. For when someone is called to J requested to J, advised to J, invited to J, etc., the determination whether she then Js or not is not ne-grained enough to capture the kind of uptake she gives to the call. In giving uptake to a call to J, I can J or not J in a wide variety of ways, some appropriate and some inappropriate. And things I do other than Jing or refraining from Jing can be part of how I give uptake to the call as well. For example, if you invite me to your home, I can accept your invitation or turn it down, and either might be appropriate. But if I turn it down, I am called upon to express regret. Turning it down insouciantly and ignoring it are both ways of refraining from Jing that violate the norms imputed by the invitation, whereas turning it down with regret does not. But all three are within the SPR; indeed none of these are coherent acts except in the context created by the call. Likewise, just because I J when called to do so doesnt mean that I automatically have given appropriate uptake to the original call. I might accept an invitation as if I am doing the host a favor by agreeing to come. Or I might follow an order, but in a way that is clearly designed to thwart the authority of the ordererby acting on it so slowly or

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shoddily that the practice breaks down, for instance.16 There will never be a crisp boundary around the SAU; we cannot give general criteria for when a way of giving uptake becomes nonstandard enough to count as outside this boundary. We have already seen that someones response to a call may fall outside the SAU for a variety of reasons. It might be because she didnt understand or hear the call, which is a kind of infelicity. Or it might be that she tried to respond appropriately but failed because of limitations of physical capacity, opportunity, or will power, in which case the speech act fails to reach its constitutive goal but does not fail to impute the normative statuses it is designed to impute. But sometimes, the target of a call pointedly chooses a form of uptake from outside the SAU. In this case, we can say that the speech act has met with deance. Deance is a possibility in the SPR that is created by the call, but it is never in the SAU. I can defy an order by pointedly refusing to obey it. In contrast, merely refusing to grant a request never, in itself, constitutes deance. Still, I can defy a request by pointedly refusing to acknowledge the claim it makes on me, for exampleby dramatically ignoring it, perhaps, or by treating it as giving a reason to do the exact opposite of what was requested. Or I might defy it by acting as though the request was just evidence of the speakers psychological desires rather than something that makes a second-person claim on me.17 Any call can be deed. Deances can be divided into responses that serve to challenge the speakers entitlement to the original speech act and those that do not. Orthogonally, they can be divided into responses that seek to reconstitute some of the norms that enabled the speech act in the rst place and those that do not. Let us consider briey some examples of deance from across this multidimensional spectrum without any attempt at giving an exhaustive explication of it. First consider some kinds of deance that challenge the entitlement of the call: 1. I respond to a call in a way that challenges the legitimacy of either the local discursive norms or the background norms that enable them or both: You invite me to attend a function at your all-white country club,
16. Imagine here a factory worker who follows work orders subversively as an act of resistance, or the infamous genie who nds overly literal readings of the wishes he is ordered to fulll. 17. If Searle, in A Classication of Illocutionary Acts, were right that directives were ultimately just ercer or milder attempts to get someone to do something, then it would be enough to make such a speech act successful that the target recognize that it expressed a desire, independently wish to satisfy that desire, and act accordingly. Indeed, we assume Searle would be perfectly happy with this analysis. But on our account, because this bypasses the second-personal claim made by the call, such a response wouldnt even count as giving it uptake as a request, not to mention appropriate uptake.

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and I pointedly fail to dignify the invitation with any kind of response at all. I refuse to be drawn into the economy of hospitality, gratitude, and regret that engaging with this invitation as an invitation would require, because of the normative structures that made the invitation possible in the rst place, thereby challenging the legitimacy of the original speech act. 2. I might challenge your entitlement by challenging your particular right to issue the kind of call you didyou invite me to a party you are not actually hosting, or you orderrather than request or begme to grade a stack of papers by Monday as if I am your teaching assistant when we are in fact co-teaching the class. In such cases, I may respond outside the SAU your speech act sought to establish. In these rst two cases, I give your call uptake in a way that resists the attempt of the original call to establish the SAU it sought to establish, by deantly challenging the entitlement of the call in the rst place. Next consider some types of deance that leave the entitlement to the call intact. I may simply not do what it would be appropriate for me to do, while acknowledging that my action is in some sense impermissible. These are cases, in contrast to the last set, where I acknowledge that the call successfully established a particular SAU, but I pointedly respond in a way that is outside this SAU. This can take various forms: 3. I deantly refuse to respond appropriately, not because I question the entitlement of the call but because I have some other motivation that isnt sufcient to undercut your entitlement. Or maybe I even defy just because for the thrill of transgression, or because I choose to act impermissibly and take the consequences in order to achieve some other end. I stand up my date and accept the moral residue and unpleasant practical consequences that will follow because I just cant stand the idea of going; I light up a cigarette and blow it in your face when you tell me not to smoke because I want to be a badass. 4. I defy you because I resent or wish to protest the fact that you in particular have the status that you have: I refuse to treat your proposal in a meeting as requiring a reasoned response, even though I understand that you and I are on the same legitimately formed committee and that this gives you the right to make proposals for me to consider. I do it because I think you are a deeply unpleasant person whose presence on the committee is repellent to me, and I dont want to cooperate. These latter two types of deance, unlike the rst two, are pointedly transgressive perhaps for good reason and perhaps not, precisely because they do not challenge the entitlement of the original call. I act transgressively only insofar as I acknowledge the force of the norm that I am violating, whereas in the previous two cases I called that force into question.

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In all of the cases of deance we have considered so far, the response does not particularly aim at reconsitituting the normative structures that it to some degree is at odds with. Because compliance with social norms has to be the defeasible rule for them to count as social norms at all, any deance likely chips away a tiny bit at the stability of the norms that undergird the original speech act. But this is not the function of deance in these cases. At other times, however, I seek to reconstitute or destabilize the norms mobilized by the call through how I give it uptake. These might be the local discursive norms, background social norms, or some combination of the two. We can dub these activist responses to calls. Instead of ignoring the invitation to the event at the all-white country club, perhaps I ll out the RSVP card on behalf of a black date and myself. Familiarly, a group of people who are commonly called by a derogatory term bitch, queer, etc. can collectively respond to that call in a way that reappropriates it and refuses to acknowledge it as an insult Were here, were queer, get used to it, etc.. Even though a speech act establishes an SPR and an SAU at the time of its utterance, it relies on cooperative uptake from its target for its success. There is a wide array of possibilities for creative, deant uptake that aims to subvert or reconstitute the normative order by playing with the space outside the SAU. We suggested at the start of this article that our understanding of the pragmatic topography of calls is distorted and attened if we privilege the imperative as the paradigmatic or model call. We can now see in detail at least one way in which this is so. Imperatives are special among calls in that, unless we get quite ne-grained about varieties of uptake, the contents of their SAU match their constitutive goal. The only appropriate response to an imperative to J is Jing, and only if the respondent Js can the imperative meet its goal. So if we only focus on imperatives, it can look as though the only possible responses to a call are obedience or transgression. But by attending to a wide range of calls, weve shown that there are typically a variety of possibilities in the SAU that do not count as meeting the constitutive goal of the call graciously turning down an invitation with regret, etc.. In reality we decide whether a response is appropriate by looking at all sorts of rich detail concerning how someone gives uptake; looking at whether he Jed or not is insufcient. An entire dimension of complexitythe way that a call structures the normative terrain in creating a space of possible responses and a space of possibilities for appropriate and inappropriate uptakevanishes if we collapse the SAU together with the constitutive goal. In turn, once this complexity becomes clear, we see that even imperatives have it. Not every Jing in response to an order to J is obedient, and hence not every such Jing counts as meeting the orders constitutive goal; not all failures to J in response to the order are equivalent forms of deance.

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The specic normative positions of and relations between any two discursive agents make possible some calls and not others; in turn, speech acts can reconstitute these relations. If you invite me to a lavish dinner, I now have a relational reason to reciprocate in some way especially but not only if I accept the invitation. My new beholdenness to you subtly shifts our normative relationship. Thus, calling inuences and partially controls the normative space inhabited by both caller and called. Likewise, if I join an Alcoholics Anonymous group and ask you to be my sponsor, my request, if you accept it, initiates a relationship in which it is now your right and responsibility to hold me to my commitments not to drink. Such calls create a new normative structure in which various sorts of second-personal transactions are entitled that ordinarily would not be: orders from the sponsor to the sponsored, requests for help from the sponsor in the middle of the night, and so forth. In the last section we introduced the notion of an activist speech act: one that does not merely draw upon but in fact functions to subvert or recongure the normative context in which it operates. Any speech act must function within a particular SPR that is constituted by prior speech acts, but this never completely controls the utterance, which always is to some extent creative. And the utterance will not be without consequence for the social norms that enabled it, for these norms are dynamic. In this section we take up a type of activist call that is a special sort of meta-call: one in which the primary function of the call is not to generate some specic SAU but rather to restructure normative relationships and possibilities for making rst-order calls that is, to restructure the possibilities for making calls with their own SAUs by eliciting a restructuring response from the one called. Recall the scene with which we opened: Bonasera came to see the Godfather with the purpose of making a request of him. But Corleone rejects Bonaseras speech act. He does not respond to the request with either a refusal or an agreementhe does not take himself to be in the presence of a petitionary reason at allbut rather explains that Bonasera has not offered the friendship and respect that would entitle him to so much as petition the Godfather to act on his behalf. Eventually, and ominously, Bonasera supplicates himself, bowing and kissing Corleones ring and hailing him in the preferred terms: Be my friend . . . Godfather? At this point, Corleone makes it clear that he will do as Bonasera wishes, although even here distances himself from having acknowledged Bonasera as making a request. Rather, he frames his service as a gift. Giving a gift is importantly different from granting a requested favor. One does not properly request giftswhich is why Miss Manners, the leading analyst

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of the pragmatics of second-person speech, strenuously objects to announcements of gift registries being included in wedding invitations. Gifts and gifting have exceptionally complicated normative structures that have fascinated anthropologists and social theorists. For example, gifts impose pressures to reciprocate in one form or another, but this pressure cannot be discharged by simply immediately reciprocating in kind; this turns the gift into a trade and insults the giver. Giving a gift is not merely generous but a complex display and exercise of power over the recipient; Corleones transformation of his response from favor to gift is thus quite signicant. Although Bonaseras supplication did not have quite the effect he wanted, it is clear that it changed his normative relation to Corleone; he can now make claims upon him that were impossible moments before. What kind of speech act is Bonaseras supplicant call, Be my friend . . . Godfather? It is certainly not the initiation of an ordinary relationship of friendship. Rather, it is a ritualized speech act, the constitutive goal of which is to change Bonaseras status so as to entitle him to make requests that would not otherwise be entitled and to assume a range of other specic normative relations as well. We call this sort of speech act an entreaty, and the resulting status is that of being entreated, which is importantly different from being petitioned, ordered, and so forth. Entreaties are, in many ways, similar to requests. If successful, they can be refused or granted, as can requests, and their SAU, like that of requests, inherently gives constitutive freedom to the target of the call. One can appropriately refuse the entreaty and give no reason for doing so, though one who has been entreated now has a relational reason to grant the entreaty. But an entreaty is a meta-call: it calls someone to grant to the caller an entitlement to make certain kinds of claims that the caller is not yet in a position to make. One can successfully entreat only someone who, at least in local context, is positioned so as to have the power to grant the entreatybut if it is granted, then the caller now possesses a new kind of power over the called that she did not have before: the power to make requests, or give orders, or issue invitations, for instance. Thus, Bonasera is attempting to bootstrap himself into a stronger normative position with respect to Corleone; he is entreating Corleone to give him the status of someone entitled to make certain kinds of requests, whether or not they will then be granted.18 The structure of second-person normative negotiation in The Godfather is exceptionally explicit. In everyday discourse, single speech events

18. R. Kukla, Performative Force, Convention, and Discursive Injustice, Hypatia 2012, doi:10.1111/j.1527-2001.2012.01316.x, also discusses entreaties, dening them slightly differently.

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often do double duty as requests and entreaties, for instance, or as invitations and entreaties, and it is by no means always clear whether we have an entreaty on our hands. Arguably, when a homeless person on the street asks passersby for a dollar, he is entreating for the right to be heard as making a request with the same utterance with which he is attempting to make the request. His utterance may not be heard as a request at all, and passing by without acknowledging him does not necessarily constitute a refusal of a request, though it does constitute rejection of the entreaty. In accepting the entreaty, a passerby may give uptake to the speech act in a way that constitutes it as having the force of a request. But this happens only if the passerby freely decides to make it so; morality may well recommend such a response, but discursive pragmatics do not compel it, and in practice we often reject such utterances with the thinnest of uptake. In all cases, it is necessary but not sufcient for the success of an entreaty that the one entreated freely grants access to new discursive privileges. Such entreaties challenge the existing normative pragmatic context. Not all meta-calls are challenging in this way: A standard marriage proposal, for instance, calls upon the one propositioned to accept a status that will shift normative relationships and license new speech acts, but it doesnt do so in a way that interestingly dismantles or reconstitutes existing normative practices. When we approach strangers, the appropriate way to do so is with a mild meta-call for their attention; we dont have a standing entitlement to demand or even request the attention of passersby. This is why we excuse ourselves even before asking a stranger for directions or the time. There is nothing especially challenging about this type of secondorder intervention. In contrast, the homeless person intervenes upon standing norms that exclude people like him from various sorts of human interactions. And the point of such a deance of the prevailing norms is to reconstitute them so as to allow him entitlement to request. So entreaties are interventions into the standing normative conditions even when we also have standing norms that ritualize such interventions, as they apparently do in the maa. In the examples we have focused on in this section, the entreater is globally disempowered with respect to the one entreated. It is true that, as we have dened entreaties, the one entreated is free to grant or refuse the entreater into the space of discursive possibilities she seeks to enter, and in this sense there is a power inequality undergirding any entreaty. But local power inequalities can sufce to make entreaties possible between rough social equals. If my new mother-in-law says Please call me mom she is probably not just making a request about what I call her but trying to get me to recognize her as having a kind of intimate family relationship with her. Not only can I turn down her request, but I can decide not to grant uptake to her attempt to forge this kind of relationship with methat is, I can choose

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to reject her entreaty rather than just the request in which the entreaty is packaged.19 CONCLUDING REMARKS We began this article with the claim that contracting could not be used as a model for all normatively productive transactions between individuals. Our goal was not to take on any specic incarnation of contractarianism. Rather, we shared an important starting point with many philosophers who have been interested in the constitutive role of hypothetical or actual contracts, in beginning from the normative structure that can be established through interpersonal transactions. We hope that our analysis of second-person calls has let us offer a richer toolbox that can capture more of the normative terrain than can be captured through attention to contracts though surely we have still not captured all of that terrain. Contracting is a specic sort of communicative performance with a distinctive pragmatic input and output. It takes at least two to contract; unlike calling, we cannot think of contracting as a single speech act. All the same, contracting lends itself to the kind of analysis we have been giving here. Contractings share a distinctive feature with imperatives, as we mentioned at the start: both have duties and obligations as their characteristic outputs, in contrast to the outputs of requests or invitations, for instance. Accordingly, for both contractings and imperatives there is at least a prima facie convergence between what we called the SAU and the constitutive goal of the actfullling a contract or obeying an order is the only appropriate uptake, and any other action possibility counts as deance or failure of some other sort. This means that contracts will not help us understand normative spaces that contain other sorts of statuses than obligation. The kind of performance that an entreaty is, for instanceits pragmatic structure and normative outputsimply cant be modeled with contractings, imperatives, or any other transactions whose characteristic outputs are obligations. Another feature of contracting distinguishes it from all the speech acts we have examined in this article and makes it a problematically blunt tool for modeling the deontic landscape: contracts, at least in their ideal form, are symmetrical, in the sense that both parties must agree to be bound by a contract in order for it to exist at all. That is, they are sym19. One of the interesting features of occupying a position of power is that the specic power you have constrains what sort of calls you can utter and doesnt just enable more of them. It is by no means straightforward, for example, for a boss to make a mere request of an employee or for a noble to merely invite a peasant to a party. And this, in turn, opens the possibility of entreaties that are needed because the caller has too much power rather than too little.

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metrical in the sense that they require voluntary buy-in from both parties; a contract may of course be deeply asymmetrical with respect to what obligations it imposes on the contracting parties, their relative positions of power, and so on. A contract cannot reconstitute the SPR the space of action possibilities or produce an SAU until both parties sign onto it. In contrast, imperatives, requests, and entreaties and perhaps all calls are asymmetrical: they can shift the normative status of their target even before they receive uptake, and whether or not that target wishes to give it. While I am not under contract unless I contract, I can be ordered, petitioned, entreated, invited, and so forth without doing anything at all, and such statuses are normatively signicant.20 As we saw, I can resist and defy such calls in various ways, and so their normative effect is not deterministic or automatic. But this doesnt imply that the caller needs the specic collaborative agreement of the called in order for the call to exist and have a normative effect. Our focus on asymmetric performances thus helps illuminate how people can nd themselves with normative statuses they did not agree to or expect, some of which may be oppressive or unfair. Of course, people can be pressured or coerced into signing contracts, and the terms of contracts may be unjust, but these are features external to the structure of contracting itself. We cannot use the idea of a contract to explain how someone may change my normative status merely by addressing me. Nor will a pragmatic analysis of contracting explain how some kinds of addresses like entreaties are premised on the addressee having specic sorts of power over the speaker. We think that an important product of our discussion in this article is our analysis of the various ways that calls can fail to meet their constitutive goal; we outlined a pragmatic theory of deance, transgression, and other attempts to subvert the force of speech acts. Too often, we think, moral theory focuses on how normative statuses get established, at the cost of an analysis of the various ways in which people can fail to live up to norms. Not all failure to live up to norms is deant or transgressive. Transgression and deance have to be analyzed in their own right, and not just conated with not good or rule violating. We have discussed these things only in the context of calls, of course, but we hope that this opens an important domain of exploration. Furthermore, once again, a focus on contractings, imperatives, and the like makes it hard to see the room for this kind of question. Since any pointed failure to do as legitimately ordered or contracted is a transgressive failure to live up to ones obligations, such a focus
20. On the other hand, if we did not have in place defeasible practices and conventions that establish when someone has the authority to impose a normative status, and if we did not defeasibly recognize this authority when it is exercised, we would not have discursive practices and the normative possibilities they create at all.

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masks a variety of ethically meaty distinctions.21 One of the reasons such distinctions are important is because successfully established normative statuses are often worth resisting, and not all forms of resistance are ethically or pragmatically equivalent. Hence it helps to have a theoretical toolbox that lets us distinguish between different kinds of deance. We have demonstrated some of the ways that second-personal transactions institute new norms. This gives cash value to the broad idea that at least part of morality is socially constructed. This is not, however, the kind of social constructivism that turns morality into a subjective projection gilding and staining all natural objects with moral value,22 as it does for Humeans, but rather a broadening of the roughly contractarian idea that norms are socially constructed insofar as they are transactionally instituted. We offer no opinion, here, as to whether there is some part of the moral terrain that is independent of such transactions. What seems clear is not only that such transactions do, in fact, institute normative statuses but that there are types of normative statuses the status of being entreated or invited, for instance that can only come to be in this way. Our goal was not to provide a complete theory of the sources of normativity or the varieties of normative status, but rather to draw theoretical attention to the rich variety of interpersonal transactions that create and shape norms, and the complexity of the resulting ethical terrain.

21. For instance, the difference between merely turning down a request, which neednt be at all transgressive, and defying it by refusing to acknowledge the petitionary reason it gives for action. See our earlier discussion of failed calls for more developed examples. 22. D. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751; Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983, 88.

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