ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how human beings can use, have used, and continue to use language to effect large-scale violence. Our ugly examples are genocide and widespread sexual assault. A genocide becomes possible when enough people are motivated to kill other people. But how could some from a highly cooperative species kill entire groups of its own members? We agree with answers produced independently and refined jointly by Jonathan Leader Maynard and Susan Benesch: with a lot of linguistic preparation, which affects human dispositions. By (i) producing profuse amounts of language with (ii) harmful content in (iii) contexts with certain features, individuals’ dispositions for moral respect and restraint are weakened while their dispositions for aggressive, injurious behavior are strengthened. As they are, individuals’ attitudes toward mass killing progresses from revulsion, to approval, to moral permissibility, to moral obligation, to moral necessity, to moral valorization. Widespread sexual assault becomes possible when certain social narratives and scripts, especially about male and female sexual roles, are accepted. Such acceptance shapes certain linguistic dispositions, including the troubling linguistic disposition to cease accepting what certain words are used in a community to do. The results are various types of silencing of the target group.
