ABSTRACT
This chapter is about three different ways in which we might say that people's moral talk has significance. We can talk of, say, Gordon Brown's speech on 'fairness' in terms of its social life, its ethical life, and its political life. The social life has to do with the social meanings of moral talk, in the sense in which the terms 'social life' and 'social meaning' are used in recent 'third wave' sociolinguistic work. The ethical life has to do with the fact that the things that people are able to do with language have significance for their well-being, and for that of others. The political life aims to make it somewhat more specific, first by outlining a particular conception of what politics is, and then by discussing how language is involved in that conception of politics. The chapter discusses largely with discussion of a speech by the Labour Member of Parliament Michael Meacher about the recently deceased Margaret Thatcher.
