"Leave the Gun; Take the Cannoli!: The Pragmatic Topography of Second-Person Calls"

Leave the Gun; Take the Cannoli! The Pragmatic Topography of Second-Person CallsAuthor(s): Mark Lance and Rebecca KuklaSource: Ethics, Vol. 123, No. 3 (April 2013), pp. 456-478Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/669565 .

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Leave the Gun; Take the Cannoli!The Pragmatic Topography ofSecond-Person Calls*

Mark Lance and Rebecca Kukla

The pragmatic texture of second-person calls such as requesting, ordering, in-viting, and entreating is complex. None of these speech acts are interchangeable.All are appropriate in some contexts and inappropriate in others, and all can beenabled or precluded by specific power relations. We argue that one cannot un-derstand either the origin or the structure of many of our ethically significantnormative statuses and relationships without attending to how they are institutedand modified by calls and the uptake they receive. Our model also enables us togive a close analysis of various forms of defiance and transgression.

Now you come to me and you say “Don Corleone, give me justice.”But you don’t ask with respect. You don’t offer friendship. You don’teven think to call me Godfather. Instead, you come into my house onthe day my daughter’s to be married and you ask me to do murderfor money. . . . Someday, and that day may never come, I’ll call uponyou to do a service for me. But, until that day, accept this justice as agift on my daughter’s wedding day. ðDon Corleone, The Godfather,Part 1Þ

As Don Corleone well knew, the pragmatic texture of asking, offering, or-dering, calling upon, entreating, accepting, and gifting is rich and complex.None of these acts are interchangeable; all are appropriate in some con-texts 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 everystage of its conception and writing. We alternate the order in which our names are listed ineach of our joint publications. This article has had a long history, and we owe an enormousdebt to a huge number of people who have discussed it with us and provided detailedfeedback, including Bill Blattner, Maggie Little, Coleen MacNamara, Oren Magid ðwho also

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Ethics 123 (April 2013): 456–478© 2013 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0014-1704/2013/12303-0004$10.00



specific relations of power and authority. Corleone here references ex-amples of specific sorts of second-person addresses—speech acts that callupon “you” to give uptake to specific normative statuses by acting in somerange of ways. We refer to these generically as “calls.” Calls both dependupon and make use of existing normative contexts and roles for their pro-duction, and call into being new relations and statuses that revise the nor-mative structure of social space and action. As interactions with Godfathersmake particularly salient, amisplaced request or an unanticipated offer canreorganize social possibilities and relations of beholdenness, responsibi-lity, and authority in profound and even dangerous ways.

In this article we are interested in showing the kind of normativework that second-person calls can do. In the broadest terms, our thesis isthat one cannot understand either the origin or the structure of many ofour normative statuses and relationships without attending to how theyare instituted and modified by calls and the uptake they receive. Thisapplies not just to our “merely social” normative statuses and relation-ships but to our robustly moral ones: calls give shape to what it takes totreat someone decently, determine exactly how a particular act counts asa violation of someone, and so forth. We make no attempt to give an ac-count of the hypothetical or actual origin of morality or normativity it-self in this article; our story begins entirely in media res. It is no part ofour thesis that second-person calls can bootstrap nonnormative creaturesinto normative space.1

Our central thought is that second-person transactions—and morespecifically, for our purpose here, second-person calls—institute and re-configure normative statuses and relationships and that we cannot under-stand the normative structure of the resulting moral terrain withoutunderstanding it as the result of such transactions. This thought has a fa-miliar antecedent: from Hobbes and Rousseau through Rawls, Gauthier,Darwall, and others, philosophers have often argued that ðactual or hy-potheticalÞ transactions of contracting have such an instituting role andaccordingly that the contract is a central theoretical tool for understanding

1. Indeed, second-person calls are, on our reading, normatively articulated actionsthat depend on a rich array of background norms in order to exist at all, and so they could notserve as literal origins of normativity. See R. Kukla, “The Ontology and Temporality of Con-science,”Continental Philosophy Review 35 ð2002Þ: 1–34, and “Myth,Memory, andMisrecognitionin Sellars’ ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,’ ” Philosophical Studies 101 ð2000Þ: 161–211,for detailed arguments for why second-person calls cannot literally found normativity and foranalyses of how they might nonliterally do so. In any case, origin stories are not our concernhere.

helped us with background researchÞ, James Mattingly, Henry Richardson, and audiences atGeorgetown University, University of Sydney, Louisiana State University, George WashingtonUniversity, and the 2010 annual meeting of the Virginia Philosophical Society at MarymountUniversity, as well the associate editors at Ethics and two anonymous referees.

Lance and Kukla Pragmatic Topography of Second-Person Calls 457



our normative statuses and relationships. In a similar spirit, we wish to dem-onstrate that we can and indeed must expand our attention to a broaderarray of transactions; contracting and the resulting agreements are notrich enough tools to make sense of all the ways in which transactions in-stitute and reorganize normative statuses and relationships. By focusingon calls, we think that we can capture a great deal of deontic complexityand nuance in both the process of instituting and modifying normativestatuses and the resulting statuses themselves—complexity and nuancethat remain invisible if one keeps one’s focus on contracting as the cen-tral example of a normatively fecund transaction.

We give a close analysis of some different kinds of second-personcalls, distinguished by the kind of pragmatic, normative intervention theyeffect. We try to show how these different calls help constitute normativelycomplex situations whose structure is not detachable from the calls thatinstituted them. We make no attempt to give an exhaustive typology ofcalls or their normative effects. We also do not argue that second-personcalls are the only or even the privileged means by which normative statusesand relationships are created and shaped. Rather, we focus on three typesof calls: imperatives, requests, and entreaties. We show that each has animportantly different pragmatic structure and functions differently in ourmoral and social life. We hope that our discussion of these three exampleswill suggest that there are indefinitely many kinds of calls, with distinctivestructures, whose subtleties help to constitute a richmoral and social space.

When philosophers have attended to second-person calls, they havetended to focus disproportionately on imperatives, often taking the im-perative as the model for or paradigm of calls in general.2 That is, theyhave understood all calls as demands that can be either obeyed or trans-gressed, while taking the only difference between imperatives and lessbossy speech acts such as requests and advisements to be the strength ofthe demand. John Searle, for instance, writes that “the illocutionary pointof ½imperatives, requests, entreaties, and a wide variety of other speech actslabeled ‘directives’� consists in the fact that they are attempts ðof varyingdegrees, and hence, more precisely, they are determinates of the deter-minable which includes attemptingÞ by the speaker to get the hearer todo something. They may be very modest ‘attempts’ as when I invite you todo it or suggest that you do it, or they may be very fierce attempts as when Iinsist that you do it.”3

We hope to show, during the course of this article, that strength orferocity is not nearly an articulated enough tool for marking out the rel-

2. For instance, and most memorably, in R. M. Hare, The Language of Morals ðOxford:Oxford University Press, 1952Þ.

3. J. R. Searle, “A Classification of Illocutionary Acts,” Language in Society 5 ð1976Þ: 1–23,11. Promises have also received a fair amount of philosophical attention, but they have been

458 Ethics April 2013



evant differences between calls and their normative effects. Not all callsare designed to obligate, even weakly. Contractings, imperatives, and prom-ises are examples of speech acts that are distinctive in having obligationsas their upshot; for this reason, they will turn out to be insufficient buildingblocks when it comes to understanding the topography of the normativeterrain and how it is instituted.

Before we begin, we need to be clear about what rides on our focuson ‘speech acts’, and also about how we distinguish among types of speechacts. We treat speech acts as communicative transactional performances—com-municative moves within social space that function to transform the nor-mative status of members of the discursive community, including, typically,the speaker and the target audience of the speech act. We can give a func-tional characterization of speech act types in terms of the kind of entitle-ment that licenses their performance—their “input”—and the concretetransformation 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 actis my entitlement to perform it—my legal status, my situatedness withinthe right kind of ritual, and so forth. The output is the statuses it creates orchanges: that Kris and Sam are nowmarried, most centrally, but this comesalong with a host of other deontic changes, such as that they now need tocheck different boxes on their tax returns, that Kris’s mom is now amother-in-law, and so forth. On our view, while Austinean performatives like mar-riage pronouncements provide handy examples, all speech acts have inputsand outputs. Not much hangs on what counts as a speech act as opposedto some other kind of act, for us; we need them only to have enoughstructure to have content and a determinate input and output.

When we distinguish among types of speech acts in this article, we doso on the basis of their pragmatic form: their input and their output, or thecharacteristic difference they make if they are successful. Grammaticaldistinctions in mood often track such pragmatic distinctions in function.But this is not always so: something with the surface grammar of an in-terrogative can be used to make a request—“Isn’t it rather cold in herewith the window open?”—and so forth. Distinctions in surface grammarare not what interest us here. Whether someone is performing an orderor a request, for our purposes, is not primarily determined by surface gram-mar but by how her act, in all its material texture, is situated within a social

4. This is the picture we developed in detail in our book ðR. Kukla and M. Lance, ‘Yo!’and ‘Lo!’: The Pragmatic Topography of the Space of Reasons ½Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 2009�Þ.

5. Although this article is fully coauthored, we often need to use the first-person sin-gular in order to make our point clear.

treated more or less like reverse imperatives. Like imperatives, they oblige someone to dosomething for someone.




narrative that takes place in a context that is structured by normative re-lationships of authority, friendship, and the like, as well as a thick networkof 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 catego-ries. While our choice of labels is not arbitrary, we will be stipulating thatthese terms refer to specific types of pragmatic interventions with charac-teristic input and output structures. The ordinary-language uses of termslike “invite” and “request” are surely less precise and distinct than is our useof them here. We will use such terms to call attention to different kinds ofsocial acts we can perform with words, with correspondingly different per-formative force, and calling for correspondingly different kinds of uptake.

IMPERATIVES VERSUS REQUESTS

With that background in place, let’s now explore the difference betweenthe pragmatic structure of imperatives and of requests. Both typically in-volve an attempt by a speaker to bring it about that the target of thespeech act performs an action J. However, the type of normative trans-action involved in the two cases is quite different. Thus in both cases, wemight say, it is part of the constitutive goal of the speech act—what needsto happen for the speech act to be a complete success—that the targetJs. Yet the two speech acts have different normative outputs. The outputof a successful imperative is an obligation on the part of the person or-dered to do what the speaker ordered her to do. The output of a suc-cessful request is that the target now has a specific sort of reason to dowhat was requested, but it is essential to the notion of a request that thisreason is not an obligation. An imperative has failed in its pragmatic func-tion if the target does not acknowledge that she has an obligation to actas ordered; the normative function of the speech act is to impute a duty. Onthe other hand, it is integral to the very idea of a request that it present theone to whom the request has been made with a choice; it is part of thestructure of the speech act that it leaves the decision to grant or refuse itup to the one of whom the request has been made.

Now, at first glance, we might think, along with Searle ðsee aboveÞ,that this difference is just a matter of strength. Perhaps requests are justweaker, less “fierce” orders. But as we will see inmore detail as we go along,this is wrong: requests and imperatives have different pragmatic struc-tures and are not points along a single continuum. To start with, notice thatthe 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 struc-ture. If I ask you to come over and hang out with me on a lonely evening,for instance, I don’t seek to obligate you to come over. I want you to comeover, but I want you to choose to do so as a favor to me. I’d be somewhat




chagrined to learn that you came over out of a sense of obligation. It is, asDerrida nicely puts it, unfriendly to respond to a friend out of duty.6 But atthe same time, a request does not just open up a neutral space of choice. Inrequesting, I seek to impute a reason for its recipient to grant it. Requestsare closely related to invitations; both are characterized by this combinationof freedom and nonneutrality. Derrida writes, “An invitation leaves onefree, otherwise it becomes a constraint. It should never imply: you are ob-liged to come, you have to come, it is necessary. But the invitation must bepressing, not indifferent. It should never imply: You are free not to comeand if you don’t come, never mind, it doesn’t matter.”7The analogous pointserves equally well for requests, we think.

Furthermore, the reason imputed by the request is inherently rela-tional and second-personally instituted: whatever kinds of reasons I hadto J in advance, your request that I J, assuming it is entitled, now gives mea new reason to J for you.8And now, if I grant your request, I don’t just J; inJing, I perform a new, normatively rich type of action—one of “granting.”Granting itself is a second-person transaction with its own normative out-puts. For example, the pragmatically required response to a request beinggranted is always and distinctively gratitude, if sometimes only token grati-tude.9 On the other hand, gratitude is not only not called for but is in factinappropriate when someone obeys my order. If I express gratitude whenyou obey my order, I am in fact retroactively subverting that order and theentitlement with which I issued it.

A request is successful as a speech act, in one sense, if it gives theperson requested a reason to grant the request. In another sense, requestsare successful only if the one requested commits to granting the request.And finally, of course, a request is successful in yet another sense only if it

7. Ibid., 14.8. Imagine that Joe has some reason to stop on the way home and buy milk. He’s plan-

ning on baking a cake, perhaps. If Joe’s roommate Bob asks him to please buy milk on theway home, he now has another reason to do so: because Bob asked him to. Both reasons aredefeatable. But there is a structural difference between them. The reason generated by therequest is one that is inherently relational—Joe grants or refuses Bob in stopping for milk ornot. 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 havetime to analyze thoroughly in this article. Briefly, paradigmatic invitations demand gratitudefrom both the invited and the host if accepted, whereas paradigmatic requests demandgratitude only from the requester when granted. Invitations that are refused characteristi-cally call for regret from the one invited, whereas requests that are refused characteristicallycall for apology from the one requested. Further, the structure of second-personality in-volved in granting a request is not identical to that involved in accepting an invitation. If Iinvite you to come over for the evening, you do not properly accept by coming over just forme. Your coming over is relational in that it is essentially the consummation of a jointengagement in a social event—but it is not a favor ; it should be an expression of your desireto attend.

6. J. Derrida, On the Name ðPalo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995Þ, 8.




is actually successfully granted—it is only then that it meets its constitutivegoal. The one requested might acknowledge the request, commit to grant-ing it, and still fail to grant it because of ineptitude, akrasia, lack of oppor-tunity, and so forth. But insofar as the request really is a request rather thanan implicit imperative, it must leave the target of the request the legitimateoption of refusing it. If I request that you come keepme company on a lonelynight, then Imaybedisappointed if youdecline—perhaps evendisappointedin you—but I cannot legitimately accuse you of having failed to live up to acommitment imputed by my request just because you turned it down.

Here we see one of the deepest differences between requests andimperatives. 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 whetherto obey them. Insofar as the target of an imperative acknowledges its le-gitimate force, she has already acknowledged her commitment to act asordered; these are really the same acknowledgments ðalthough she mayhave conflicting commitments that trump this one, as we will discuss be-lowÞ. This means that if she then fails to act as ordered, she has failed inher commitment. This difference between imperatives and requests, again,is not a difference in “seriousness.” If I tell my bank teller to transfer $20from my checking to my savings account, this is best interpreted as an im-perative, not a request, and he has failed in his commitments if he does notmake the transfer. This is so even if my level of disappointment in the bankteller’s failure would be trivial compared tomy level of disappointment wereyou to freely and legitimately decline to come keep me company.

One upshot so far is this: while all calls give their targets reasons toact, different kinds of calls create different kinds of reasons, and these kindsoften cannot be understood except in relation to the types of second-personal transactions that institute them. We may give the name “petition-ary reasons” to the distinctive kinds of reasons created by requests—that is,those that give the one requested the right kind of reason to act that opensup the right kind of space of freedom, pressure, and so forth. We suggestthat petitionary reasons can be created only by a request—you simply can’thave this kind of reason absent the context of the relevant kind of second-person transaction. Likewise, the kinds of apologies and gratitude madepossible by the request are not coherent social acts outside of this context.An imperative is structurally incapable of giving its target a petitionary rea-son to act. Petitionary reasons are not just weak obligations, nor are they ob-ligations backed up by weak desires on the part of the requester; they are adifferent variety of reason altogether.

The differences between the various kinds of reasons are not reduc-ible to and cannot be individuated in terms of any particular constellationof desires or intentions. I can genuinely request that you do something thatI privately hope you will not do ðsuch as give me a fifty-page draft of a dis-sertation chapter for me to comment on over the weekend, perhapsÞ; I can




make a request unintentionally, or intend to make a request and fail; I canrequest that you do something I am pretty sure you will not actually do oreven intend to do, and so on.10 In fact, as we continue to examine the fine-grained structure of various second-person transactions, we think it will be-come less and less tempting to try to reduce these transactional kinds in anyway, whether it is to one another, to nonnormative behavioral dispositions,or to patterns of mental states. We suggest that it is most productive to thinkof our notions of requesting and ordering as emergent pragmatic categoriesof social acts, which can only be understood in terms of their relationship toother 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, andother calls that they are second-person addresses.11 The constitutive goalof an imperative, for instance, is obedience. But obedience is an essentiallyrelational notion that cannot be understood just as action that is in ac-cordance with a speech act. When I order you to J, it is not sufficient forthe success of my speech act that you happen to J, nor even that my im-perative causes you to J. Rather, it requires that you J out of your recog-nition of your obligation tome to J. If mymother “orders”me, at the age ofthirty-five, say, to break up with someone I am dating whom I had alreadydecided to break up with anyhow, I may well reject her entitlement to issuethis imperative while going ahead with the breakup; I have not therebyobeyed 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 stillnot being obedient unless I break up with my partner out of a recognitionof the claim the order makes on me. If I obey the order, I am in an im-portant sense breaking up with my partner for or out of beholdenness tomy 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 institutecan be reduced to mental states and intentions, this doesn’t mean they have no constitutiveconnection to them. Both requests and imperatives structurally express desires on the partof the speaker that the one called do what she is called to do, even though this desire may beabsent. ðOn this we agree with Searle in “A Classification of Illocutionary Acts.”Þ If they didnot express mental states and defeasibly track intentions, there would be no calls. But, weclaim, this does not mean that we can build an account of requesting or ordering out ofthese materials.

11. We talked extensively about second-person addresses in ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’ Almostsimultaneously, Stephen Darwall also discussed them extensively in The Second-Person Stand-

point ðCambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009Þ. His account of second-personalityand 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 oursense rather thanDarwall’s sense.We hope that contextmakes our use of the phrase sufficientlyclear here, but those wishing for more details and curious about the differences between ouraccount and Darwall’s can consult ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’, sec. 5.4 and chap. 7.




imperative to J requires not only that I J, but that I ðaÞ take myselfas obligated to J and ðbÞ take myself as relationally owing it to the onewho issued the imperative that I J. The same holds for defying an orderto J, which is also an inherently relational act; it requires that I take up aconfrontational stance toward the orderer, not merely that I refrain fromJing.

The case of requesting and granting is analogous. I count as grant-ing your request that I J only if I J for you, thereby acknowledging yourentitlement to make the request and the kind of reason for action that itgives me. If my mother asks me to stop dating my current partner, mydoing so does not count as granting her request unless I take myself ashaving a petitionary reason to break up with that person for my mother, inaddition to whatever reasons I might have for doing so. Both imperativesand 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 onlymakes sense in terms of a relationship between s and t. Not all normativestatuses are relational in this way. Anobligation to, say, refrain from leavinga grotesquely disproportionate carbon footprint is not an obligation to

anyone in particular, but an obligation arising from an order is always tosomeone.

But the point is even stronger than this. Many obligations are owedto someone in particular, without arising out of a second-personal trans-action. If I agree to teach a class, I now have specific obligations to mystudents and they to me, even before I know who they are or have had theopportunity to interact with them. Likewise, I have specific obligations tomy child in virtue of my causal role in her existence, prior to my ability toengage in second-person transactions with her ðand independent of anyagreements I forgewith anyone elseÞ. In contrast, imperatives and requestsare second-person speech acts and their proper upshot is a normativestatus that makes sense only within this transactional context. If I defy,obey, grant, or refuse, I necessarily defy, obey, grant, or refuse you, thespeaker, and this is so even if what you ordered or asked me to do wassomething that did not materially involve you at all. If you asked me toteach the class and I agreed, in teaching the class I have granted your re-quest. It may well be that my teaching of the class will have no interestingmaterial impact on you whatsoever, and I would engage in the same actionsas 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 materiallyinvolves you—to grade your paper, give you a syllabus—or it might meanthat whatever I am materially committed to doing, my commitment is di-rected at you, in the sense that I have failed you if I renege upon it. Or-ganizations like Alcoholics Anonymous derive part of their point andpower from the potential gap between impersonal reasons and the direc-




ted reasons instituted by second-personal calls; in joining, I ðamong otherthingsÞ give my sponsor power to request and order me to do things wherenormally no second-person holding would be appropriate, even though Ialready had plenty of reasons to do the things my sponsor calls me to do.12

We think that this essential directedness of ðsomeÞ normative statusesand social transactions is a major theoretical dimension of normative andsocial life that has not received sufficient acknowledgment or exploration.Evenmoral theories that explicitly make the second person central do notconsistently distinguish between second-personally instituted and merelyrelational 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 anobligation toward someone, and those that are relational in the sense ofbeing a second-personally instituted obligation to someone.14

SUCCESSFUL AND FAILED CALLS

As we have described them, calls create and modify specific normative sta-tuses and relationships and secure specific kinds of uptake. Now, becausespeech acts have this power to shift normative status and elicit actions, it ispolitically, practically, and theoretically important that this power is not ab-solute. Often, speech acts are not taken up at all, or they are taken up in waysthat do not enable them to meet their constitutive goal. Disempoweredspeakers’ speech acts may not get the uptake they justly deserve, and con-versely, inappropriate or oppressive discursive power plays can be resisted. Ifwe are going to understand the details of how speech acts can institutecomplex normative statuses second-personally, then we also need to un-derstand the limits of theirpowers.More specifically, weneed tounderstandhow the ways in which speech acts can fail are themselves varied and com-plex. 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, wheresuch responses have all the normative complexity of that to which they re-spond. A speech act that fails to get appropriate uptake may be resisted,ignored, simply misunderstood, greeted with an act of pointed transgres-sion, and so forth. In this section we explore and provisionally categorizethe ways in which second-personal calls can fail. Doing so will give us in-

12. This gap between what it is appropriate for someone to hold you to doing andwhat you have reason to do has been discussed in productive detail in Coleen MacNamara,“Holding Others Responsible,” Philosophical Studies 152 ð2009Þ: 81–102; and in M. O. Little,“Abortion, Intimacy, and the Duty to Gestate,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 2 ð1999Þ:295–312.

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.




sight into the kind of power that speech has and the limits of that power. Itwill also give us conceptual tools for understanding how the power of dis-cursive calls, and ðmore broadlyÞ the normative structures that enable andare instituted by speech acts can be resisted.

The constitutive goal of a call is some kind of action on the part ofthe one called: obeying an order, accepting an invitation, or heeding awarning, perhaps. In order to make it all the way to the fulfillment of sucha goal, several stages must be traversed. The utterance has to be felicitousand recognizable as an entitled performance; the target of the speech actmust recognize it as the speech act that it is; the target must give uptake tothe speech act, taking on the statuses it imputes; the target must, finally,act in such a way that the goal of the speech act is satisfied ðby obeying anorder or granting a request, for instanceÞ. We think there is a variety ofways that speech acts can fail over the course of the temporally extendedseries of events they initiate.

Some types of speech act failure are familiar from the literature.First, an attempted call ðlike any attempted speech actÞ can fail by simplynot managing to be the kind of speech act the speaker is trying to per-form. That is, it canmisfire, or be infelicitous. Perhaps there is no target ofthe call present; a request issued to a store mannequin simply fails to be acall at all. An attempted call is infelicitous when it is hopelessly incoher-ent, or the target of a call doesn’t hear or understand it and hence isn’t in aposition to give or deny uptake to it, or it calls its target to take up a normativestatus that makes no sense in context. ðFor instance, my son cannot felic-itously request that I sign him up for gladiator training.Þ

Second, a call that does not misfire can lack entitlement. The privatecan order the colonel to drop and give her twenty, but the order won’t beentitled. An imperative that is not recognizable as an entitled performancehas none of the binding force characteristic of its function, and in thissense it is a performative failure. The colonel does not defy the private byfailing 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 makein the first place, quite apart from the question of whether the target islikely to act as requested. An entitled request succeeds in petitioning thetarget of the request, thereby putting her in the distinctive, nonneutral po-sition of choice characteristic of the status of being petitioned. An unen-titled request fails to petition its target. Such an unentitled request is pre-cisely what DonCorleone attributes to Bonasera. Bonasera did not, of course,presume to order DonCorleone to bring justice to his daughter’s attackers;he asked him to do so as a favor. Although Corleone clearly recognizes thespeech act as a request, and not as pragmatic gobbledygook—“You comeinto my house on the day my daughter is to be married and you ask meto do murder for money”—he does not acknowledge that this requestpetitions him. Instead, he responds by focusing on issues of status and




relationship, making clear to Bonasera just why he has, as yet, no enti-tlement 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 mightrequest that I water your plants for you while you’re out of town, and I mayagree to do so, and then fail to do it because I broke my leg trying to getthere, got so caught up playing Minecraft that I couldn’t bring myself tostop despite my best efforts, or whatever. Any speech act that concretelyfails to bring about the realization of its constitutive goal for any reason isin some sense ultimately a failure. Unless my order was actually obeyed ormy request actually granted, the speech act can’t be deemed an unquali-fied success at the end of the day.

The types of failure we havementioned so far should be distinguishedfrom another that is external to the pragmatic structure of the speech actaltogether. A call may conflict with other social or moral norms that are inplace, so that issuing it is ethically or socially inappropriate. My spousemight ask me to come home early from a dear friend’s birthday party inorder to fold laundry, or my boss may order me to take a visiting dignitaryto a strip club. These calls violate broader social ormoral norms, even whenthey are in good order when it comes to their performative structure, enti-tlement, and recognition. They are not failed speech acts, in the sense re-levant to this article.

Some of the ways in which speech acts fail to secure appropriateuptake and meet their constitutive goal are especially important from thepoint of view of ethical theory, because they involve not just a discursivebreakdown but an ethically significant response to the speech act in theirown right; a speech actmay bemet with resistance or defiance, for example.Sometimes, the target of the speech act transgresses the norms marshaledby the speech act in failing to give it appropriate uptake. Analyzing the prag-matic structureof defiance, transgression, and so forth, as formsof responsesto speech acts, is no easy task. In order to make some preliminary moves inthat direction, we will need to introduce a bit of theoretical apparatus andterminology.

We beginwith the original call, which by stipulation is targeted second-personally at someone or ones, and calls upon its target to do somethingthat gives uptake to the normative claimmade in the call ðto obey an order,grant or refuse a request, etc.Þ. As long as the call does not misfire, it restruc-tures normative space. Calls make new actions possible and old actionsimpossible: once I invite you to my house, accepting the invitation is nowan action that is possible for you; once I declare my love to you and begyou to run away with me, maintaining a distant but polite professional re-lationship with me is impossible. Often calls create and foreclose actionpossibilities by changing the normative significance of various forms ofbehavior, including the significance of lack of behavior. For example, if I




request that you give me a copy of your latest paper, and then you do not doso, this becomes an act of refusing a request or perhaps even ignoring arequest, rather than just an absence of paper-giving; anything you do nextwith respect to me and the paper now counts as an act with some kind ofnormative significance that it would not have had were it not for my re-quest. Any call creates a normatively articulated space of possible responsesðthe SPRÞ by shifting and recasting action possibilities in this way.15

Since calls are targeted events that essentially call for uptake, theyhave a special normative impact upon their targeted audience; there arenorms of discursive pragmatics that govern what counts as an appropriateway of acknowledging and responding to a particular call, and the call mo-bilizes these norms. Thus, for the oneðsÞ called, the call creates, within theSPR, a space of possibilities for normatively appropriate uptake, or an SAU. If Iinvite you to a party in my home, your accepting the invitation is within theSAU, as is your declining the invitation with regret, but simply ignoring theinvitation is, though within the SPR, not within the SAU—it is a violation ofthe norms imputed by the call. The response to a call may or may not bean action from within the SAU, but it will always, of necessity, be within theSPR. Once a call is recognized by its target, even inaction counts as a re-sponse, since the call calls for uptake. Finally, within the smaller space of theSAU, there is a yet smaller space of responses that meet the constitutive goalof the speech act. A response may be within the SAU ðand the SPRÞ but stillnot one that satisfies the constitutive goal—declining an invitation with re-gret, for instance.

So, for instance, if I give you a felicitous order that I am entitled toissue, then obeying the order is within the SAUbut failing to act as orderedis not. This doesn’tmean you’ll actually act as ordered, of course.We don’talways act as we are normatively called upon to do. But if you ðpointedlyÞdon’t do what I ordered you to do, then that constitutes an act of disobe-dience—that is, an act within the SPR ðwhich couldn’t exist before myorderÞ but outside the SAU. As long as a call is felicitous, the SPR it createsis, in effect, inescapable; any action that happens next is one within theslightly reconstituted normative space created by the action. The SAU, onthe other hand, is always escapable; no matter how forceful the claim thata norm makes on us is, it is always at least conceptually possible to violateit—this is indeed a distinctive mark of normative force. For instance, forany call, ignoring it altogether is always in the SPR, but it is not typicallyin the SAU.

15. The point generalizes: as we move about in the world, normatively significantevents condition the space of possible future actions, and speech acts are examples of suchevents. Rushing to work as fast as possible is a normatively different action once you see ableeding child on the side of the road, burning a cross is a different act than it would havebeen were it not for race lynchings, and so on.




Thus we can model the event as shown in figure 1. Now it may look,on first glance, like imperatives and requests have exceptionally boringSAUs. An imperative to J appears to have only one action in its SAU,namely Jing. Not Jing is, accordingly, a transgression falling outside theSAU. A request to J appears to include everything in its SAU—both Jingand not Jing ðas suchÞ are always appropriate possibilities opened up bya request; likewise, it seems difficult to understand how a request couldbe defied, 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 ðrequestedto J, advised to J, invited to J, etc.Þ, the determination whether she thenJs or not is not fine-grained enough to capture the kind of uptake she givesto the call. In giving uptake to a call to J, I can J or not J in a wide variety ofways, some appropriate and some inappropriate. And things I do other thanJing or refraining from Jing can be part of how I give uptake to the call aswell. For example, if you inviteme to your home, I can accept your invitationor turn it down, and eithermight be appropriate. But if I turn it down, I amcalled upon to express regret. Turning it down insouciantly and ignoringit are both ways of refraining from Jing that violate the norms imputedby the invitation, whereas turning it down with regret does not. ðBut allthree are within the SPR; indeed none of these are coherent acts except inthe context created by the call.Þ Likewise, just because I J when called to doso doesn’t mean that I automatically have given appropriate uptake to theoriginal call. I might accept an invitation as if I am doing the host a favorby agreeing to come. Or I might follow an order, but in a way that is clearlydesigned to thwart the authority of the orderer—by acting on it so slowly or

FIG. 1




shoddily that the practice breaks down, for instance.16 ðThere will never bea crisp boundary around the SAU; we cannot give general criteria for whena way of giving uptake becomes nonstandard enough to count as outsidethis boundary.Þ

We have already seen that someone’s response to a call may fall out-side the SAU for a variety of reasons. It might be because she didn’t un-derstand or hear the call, which is a kind of infelicity. Or it might be thatshe tried to respond appropriately but failed because of limitations of phy-sical capacity, opportunity, or will power, in which case the speech act failsto reach its constitutive goal but does not fail to impute the normative sta-tuses it is designed to impute. But sometimes, the target of a call pointedlychooses a form of uptake from outside the SAU. In this case, we can say thatthe speech act hasmet with defiance. Defiance is a possibility in the SPR thatis created by the call, but it is never in the SAU. I can defy an order by point-edly refusing to obey it. In contrast, merely refusing to grant a request never,in itself, constitutes defiance. Still, I can defy a request by pointedly refusingto acknowledge the claim itmakes onme, for example—by dramatically ignor-ing it, perhaps, or by treating it as giving a reason to do the exact opposite ofwhat was requested. Or I might defy it by acting as though the request was justevidence of the speaker’s psychological desires rather than something thatmakes a second-person claimonme.17Any call can be defied.

Defiances can be divided into responses that serve to challenge thespeaker’s entitlement to the original speech act and those that do not.Orthogonally, they can be divided into responses that seek to reconstitutesome of the norms that enabled the speech act in the first place and thosethat do not. Let us consider briefly some examples of defiance from acrossthis multidimensional spectrum ðwithout any attempt at giving an exhaus-tive explication of itÞ.

First consider some kinds of defiance that challenge the entitlementof the call:

1. I respond to a call in a way that challenges the legitimacy of eitherthe local discursive norms or the background norms that enable them ðorbothÞ: 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 ofresistance, or the infamous genie who finds overly literal readings of the wishes he is orderedto fulfill.

17. If Searle, in “A Classification of Illocutionary Acts,” were right that directives wereultimately just fiercer or milder attempts to get someone to do something, then it would beenough to make such a speech act successful that the target recognize that it expressed adesire, independently wish to satisfy that desire, and act accordingly. Indeed, we assumeSearle would be perfectly happy with this analysis. But on our account, because this bypassesthe second-personal claimmade by the call, such a response wouldn’t even count as giving ituptake as a request, not to mention appropriate uptake.




and I pointedly fail to dignify the invitation with any kind of response atall. I refuse to be drawn into the economy of hospitality, gratitude, andregret that engaging with this invitation as an invitation would require,because of the normative structures that made the invitation possible inthe first place, thereby challenging the legitimacy of the original speechact.

2. I might challenge your entitlement by challenging your particularright to issue the kind of call you did—you invite me to a party you arenot actually hosting, or you order—rather than request or beg—me tograde a stack of papers by Monday as if I am your teaching assistant whenwe are in fact co-teaching the class. In such cases, I may respond outsidethe SAU your speech act sought to establish.

In these first two cases, I give your call uptake in a way that resiststhe attempt of the original call to establish the SAU it sought to establish,by defiantly challenging the entitlement of the call in the first place. Nextconsider some types of defiance that leave the entitlement to the callintact.

I may simply not do what it would be appropriate for me to do, whileacknowledging that my action is in some sense impermissible. These arecases, in contrast to the last set, where I acknowledge that the call suc-cessfully established a particular SAU, but I ðpointedlyÞ respond in a waythat is outside this SAU. This can take various forms:

3. I defiantly refuse to respond appropriately, not because I questionthe entitlement of the call but because I have some other motivationthat isn’t sufficient to undercut your entitlement. Or maybe I even defyjust because—for the thrill of transgression, or because I choose to act im-permissibly and take the consequences in order to achieve some otherend. ðI stand up my date and accept the moral residue and unpleasantpractical consequences that will follow because I just can’t stand the ideaof going; I light up a cigarette and blow it in your face when you tell menot to smoke because I want to be a badass.Þ

4. I defy you because I resent or wish to protest the fact that you inparticular have the status that you have: I refuse to treat your proposal in ameeting as requiring a reasoned response, even though I understand thatyou and I are on the same legitimately formed committee and that thisgives you the right to make proposals for me to consider. I do it because Ithink you are a deeply unpleasant person whose presence on the com-mittee is repellent to me, and I don’t want to cooperate.

These latter two types of defiance, unlike the first two, are pointedlytransgressive ðperhaps for good reason and perhaps notÞ, precisely be-cause they do not challenge the entitlement of the original call. I act trans-gressively only insofar as I acknowledge the force of the norm that I amviolating, whereas in the previous two cases I called that force into question.




In all of the cases of defiance we have considered so far, the responsedoes not particularly aim at reconsitituting the normative structures that itto some degree is at odds with. Because compliance with social normshas to be the defeasible rule for them to count as social norms at all, anydefiance likely chips away a tiny bit at the stability of the norms that un-dergird the original speech act. But this is not the function of defiance inthese cases. At other times, however, I seek to reconstitute or destabilizethe norms mobilized by the call through how I give it uptake. These mightbe the local discursive norms, background social norms, or some combi-nation of the two. We can dub these “activist” responses to calls.

Instead of ignoring the invitation to the event at the all-white countryclub, perhaps I fill out the RSVP card on behalf of a black date andmyself.Familiarly, a group of people who are commonly called by a derogatoryterm ð“bitch,” “queer,” etc.Þ can collectively respond to that call in a waythat reappropriates it and refuses to acknowledge it as an insult ð“We’rehere, we’re queer, get used to it,” etc.Þ. Even though a speech act estab-lishes an SPR and an SAU at the time of its utterance, it relies on cooper-ative uptake from its target for its success. There is a wide array of possi-bilities for creative, defiant uptake that aims to subvert or reconstitute thenormative order by playing with the space outside the SAU.

We suggested at the start of this article that our understanding ofthe pragmatic topography of calls is distorted and flattened if we privilegethe imperative as the paradigmatic or model call. We can now see in detailat least one way in which this is so. Imperatives are special among calls inthat, unless we get quite fine-grained about varieties of uptake, the con-tents of their SAU match their constitutive goal. The only appropriateresponse to an imperative to J is Jing, and only if the respondent Js canthe imperative meet its goal. So if we only focus on imperatives, it can lookas though the only possible responses to a call are obedience or trans-gression. But by attending to a wide range of calls, we’ve shown that thereare typically a variety of possibilities in the SAU that do not count asmeeting the constitutive goal of the call ðgraciously turning down an in-vitation with regret, etc.Þ. In reality we decide whether a response is ap-propriate by looking at all sorts of rich detail concerning how someonegives uptake; looking at whether he Jed or not is insufficient. An entiredimension of complexity—the way that a call structures the normativeterrain in creating a space of possible responses and a space of possibili-ties for appropriate and inappropriate uptake—vanishes if we collapsethe SAU together with the constitutive goal. In turn, once this complex-ity becomes clear, we see that even imperatives have it. Not every Jingin response to an order to J is obedient, and hence not every such Jingcounts as meeting the order’s constitutive goal; not all failures to J inresponse to the order are equivalent forms of defiance.




ENTREATIES

The specific normative positions of and relations between any two dis-cursive agents make possible some calls and not others; in turn, speechacts can reconstitute these relations. If you invite me to a lavish dinner, Inow have a relational reason to reciprocate in someway ðespecially but notonly if I accept the invitationÞ. My new beholdenness to you subtly shiftsour normative relationship. Thus, calling influences and partially con-trols 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 nowyour right and responsibility to hold me to my commitments not to drink.Such calls create a new normative structure in which various sorts ofsecond-personal transactions are entitled that ordinarily would not be:orders from the sponsor to the sponsored, requests for help from the spon-sor in themiddle 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 orreconfigure the normative context in which it operates. Any speech actmust function within a particular SPR that is constituted by prior speechacts, but this never completely controls the utterance, which always is tosome extent creative. And the utterance will not be without consequencefor the social norms that enabled it, for these norms are dynamic. In thissection 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 somespecific SAU but rather to restructure normative relationships and pos-sibilities for making first-order calls ðthat is, to restructure the possibilitiesfor making calls with their own SAUsÞ by eliciting a restructuring responsefrom the one called.

Recall the scene with which we opened: Bonasera came to see theGodfather with the purpose of making a request of him. But Corleonerejects Bonasera’s speech act. He does not respond to the request witheither a refusal or an agreement—he does not take himself to be in thepresence of a petitionary reason at all—but rather explains that Bonaserahas not offered the “friendship” and respect that would entitle him to somuch as petition the Godfather to act on his behalf. Eventually, and om-inously, Bonasera supplicates himself, bowing and kissing Corleone’s ringand hailing him in the preferred terms: “Be my friend . . . Godfather?” Atthis point, Corleone makes it clear that he will do as Bonasera wishes,although even here distances himself from having acknowledged Bona-sera as making a request. Rather, he frames his service as a “gift.” ðGivinga gift is importantly different from granting a requested favor. One doesnot properly request gifts—which is whyMiss Manners, the leading analyst




of the pragmatics of second-person speech, strenuously objects to an-nouncements of gift registries being included in wedding invitations. Giftsand gifting have exceptionally complicated normative structures thathave fascinated anthropologists and social theorists. For example, gifts im-pose pressures to reciprocate in one form or another, but this pressurecannot be discharged by simply immediately reciprocating in kind; thisturns the gift into a trade and insults the giver. Giving a gift is not merelygenerous but a complex display and exercise of power over the recipient;Corleone’s transformation of his response from favor to gift is thus quitesignificant.Þ Although Bonasera’s supplication did not have quite theeffect he wanted, it is clear that it changed his normative relation toCorleone; he can now make claims upon him that were impossible mo-ments before.

What kindof speech act is Bonasera’s supplicant call, “Bemy friend . . .Godfather?” It is certainly not the initiation of an ordinary relationshipof friendship. Rather, it is a ritualized speech act, the constitutive goal ofwhich is to change Bonasera’s status so as to entitle him to make requeststhat would not otherwise be entitled ðand to assume a range of otherspecific normative relations as wellÞ. We call this sort of speech act anentreaty, and the resulting status is that of being entreated, which is impor-tantly different from being petitioned, ordered, and so forth. Entreatiesare, in many ways, similar to requests. If successful, they can be refused orgranted, as can requests, and their SAU, like that of requests, inherentlygives constitutive freedom to the target of the call. One can appropriatelyrefuse the entreaty and give no reason for doing so, though one who hasbeen entreated now has a relational reason to grant the entreaty. But anentreaty is ameta-call: it calls someone to grant to the caller an entitlementto make certain kinds of claims that the caller is not yet in a position tomake. One can successfully entreat only someone who, at least in local con-text, is positioned so as to have the power to grant the entreaty—but if it isgranted, then the caller now possesses a new kind of power over the calledthat she did not have before: the power to make requests, or give orders,or issue invitations, for instance. Thus, Bonasera is attempting to bootstraphimself into a stronger normative position with respect to Corleone; he isentreating Corleone to give him the status of someone entitled to make cer-tain kinds of requests, whether or not they will then be granted.18

The structure of second-person normative negotiation in The Godfa-

ther is exceptionally explicit. In everyday discourse, single speech events

18. R. Kukla, “Performative Force, Convention, and Discursive Injustice,” Hypatia

ð2012Þ, doi:10.1111/j.1527-2001.2012.01316.x, also discusses entreaties, defining themslightlydifferently.




often do double duty as requests and entreaties, for instance, or as invi-tations and entreaties, and it is by no means always clear whether we havean 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 asmaking a request with the same utterance with which he is attempting tomake the request. His utterance may not be heard as a request at all, andpassing by without acknowledging him does not necessarily constitute arefusal of a request, though it does constitute rejection of the entreaty.In accepting the entreaty, a passerby may give uptake to the speech act ina way that constitutes it as having the force of a request. But this happensonly if the passerby freely decides to make it so; morality may well recom-mend such a response, but discursive pragmatics do not compel it, and inpractice we often reject such utterances with the thinnest of uptake. In allcases, it is necessary ðbut not sufficientÞ for the success of an entreaty thatthe 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 pro-posal, for instance, calls upon the one propositioned to accept a status thatwill shift normative relationships and license new speech acts, but it doesn’tdo so in a way that interestingly dismantles or reconstitutes existing nor-mative practices.Whenwe approach strangers, the appropriate way to do sois with a mild meta-call for their attention; we don’t have a standing enti-tlement to demand or even request the attention of passersby. This is whywe excuse ourselves even before asking a stranger for directions or thetime. There is nothing especially challenging about this type of second-order intervention. Incontrast, thehomelessperson intervenesuponstandingnorms that exclude people like him from various sorts of human interac-tions. And the point of such a defiance of the prevailing norms is to recon-stitute them so as to allow him entitlement to request. So entreaties areinterventions into the standing normative conditions ðeven when we alsohave standing norms that ritualize such interventions, as they apparentlydo in the mafiaÞ.

In the examples we have focused on in this section, the entreater isglobally disempowered with respect to the one entreated. It is true that, aswe have defined entreaties, the one entreated is free to grant or refuse theentreater into the space of discursive possibilities she seeks to enter, andin this sense there is a power inequality undergirding any entreaty. But lo-cal power inequalities can suffice tomake entreaties possible between roughsocial equals. If my new mother-in-law says “Please call me mom” she is prob-ably not just making a request about what I call her but trying to get me torecognize her as having a kind of intimate family relationship with her. Notonly can I turn down her request, but I can decide not to grant uptake toher attempt to forge this kind of relationshipwithme—that is, I can choose




to reject her entreaty rather than just the request in which the entreaty ispackaged.19

CONCLUDING REMARKS

We began this article with the claim that contracting could not be used asa model for all normatively productive transactions between individuals.Our goal was not to take on any specific incarnation of contractarianism.Rather, we shared an important starting point with many philosopherswho have been interested in the constitutive role of ðhypothetical or ac-tualÞ contracts, in beginning from the normative structure that can beestablished through interpersonal transactions. We hope that our analysisof second-person calls has let us offer a richer toolbox that can capturemore of the normative terrain than can be captured through attention tocontracts ðthough surely we have still not captured all of that terrainÞ.

Contracting is a specific sort of communicative performance with adistinctive pragmatic input and output. It takes at least two to contract;unlike calling, we cannot think of contracting as a single speech act. Allthe same, contracting lends itself to the kind of analysis we have beengiving here. Contractings share a distinctive feature with imperatives, aswe mentioned at the start: both have duties and obligations as their char-acteristic outputs, in contrast to the outputs of requests or invitations, forinstance. Accordingly, for both contractings and imperatives there is atleast a prima facie convergence between what we called the SAU and theconstitutive goal of the act—fulfilling a contract or obeying an order is theonly appropriate uptake, and any other action possibility counts as defianceor failure of some other sort. This means that contracts will not help usunderstand normative spaces that contain other sorts of statuses than ob-ligation. The kind of performance that an entreaty is, for instance—itspragmatic structure and normative output—simply can’t be modeled withcontractings, imperatives, or any other transactions whose characteristicoutputs are obligations.

Another feature of contracting distinguishes it from all the speechacts we have examined in this article and makes it a problematically blunttool for modeling the deontic landscape: contracts, at least in their idealform, are symmetrical, in the sense that both parties must agree to bebound by a contract in order for it to exist at all. ðThat is, they are sym-

19. One of the interesting features of occupying a position of power is that the specificpower you have constrains what sort of calls you can utter and doesn’t just enable more ofthem. It is by no means straightforward, for example, for a boss to make a mere request ofan employee or for a noble to merely invite a peasant to a party. And this, in turn, opensthe possibility of entreaties that are needed because the caller has too much power ratherthan too little.




metrical in the sense that they require voluntary buy-in from both parties;a contract may of course be deeply asymmetrical with respect to whatobligations it imposes on the contracting parties, their relative positionsof power, and so on.Þ A contract cannot reconstitute the SPR ðthe spaceof action possibilitiesÞ or produce an SAU until both parties sign ontoit. In contrast, imperatives, requests, and entreaties ðand perhaps all callsÞare asymmetrical: they can shift the normative status of their target evenbefore they receive uptake, and whether or not that target wishes to giveit. While I am not under contract unless I contract, I can be ordered, pe-titioned, entreated, invited, and so forth without doing anything at all,and such statuses are normatively significant.20 As we saw, I can resist anddefy such calls in various ways, and so their normative effect is not deter-ministic or automatic. But this doesn’t imply that the caller needs thespecific collaborative agreement of the called in order for the call to existand have a normative effect. Our focus on asymmetric performancesthus helps illuminate how people can find themselves with normativestatuses they did not agree to or expect, some of which may be oppres-sive or unfair. Of course, people can be pressured or coerced into signingcontracts, and the terms of contracts may be unjust, but these are featuresexternal to the structure of contracting itself. We cannot use the idea of acontract to explain how someone may change my normative status merelyby addressing me. Nor will a pragmatic analysis of contracting explain howsome kinds of addresses ðlike entreatiesÞ are premised on the addresseehaving specific sorts of power over the speaker.

We think that an important product of our discussion in this articleis our analysis of the various ways that calls can fail to meet their con-stitutive goal; we outlined a pragmatic theory of defiance, 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 costof an analysis of the various ways in which people can fail to live up tonorms. Not all failure to live up to norms is defiant or transgressive. Trans-gression and defiance have to be analyzed in their own right, and not justconflatedwith “not good”or “rule violating.”Wehavediscussed these thingsonly in the context of calls, of course, but we hope that this opens an im-portant domain of exploration. Furthermore, once again, a focus on con-tractings, imperatives, and the likemakes it hard to see the room for this kindof question. Since any pointed failure to do as legitimately ordered or con-tracted is a transgressive failure to live up to one’s obligations, such a focus

20. On the other hand, if we did not have in place defeasible practices and conventionsthat establish when someone has the authority to impose a normative status, and if we didnot defeasibly recognize this authority when it is exercised, we would not have discursivepractices and the normative possibilities they create at all.




masks a variety of ethically meaty distinctions.21 One of the reasons suchdistinctions are important is because successfully established normativestatuses are often worth resisting, and not all forms of resistance are ethi-cally or pragmatically equivalent. Hence it helps to have a theoreticaltoolbox that lets us distinguish between different kinds of defiance.

We have demonstrated some of the ways that second-personal trans-actions institute new norms. This gives cash value to the broad idea thatat least part of morality is “socially constructed.” This is not, however, thekind of social constructivism that turns morality into a subjective projec-tion “gilding and staining all natural objects” with moral value,22 as it doesfor Humeans, but rather a broadening of the roughly contractarian ideathat norms are socially constructed insofar as they are transactionally in-stituted. We offer no opinion, here, as to whether there is some part of themoral terrain that is independent of such transactions.What seems clear isnot only that such transactions do, in fact, institute normative statuses butthat there are types of normative statuses ðthe status of being entreated orinvited, for instanceÞ that can only come to be in this way. Our goal was notto provide a complete theory of the sources of normativity or the varietiesof normative status, but rather to draw theoretical attention to the rich va-riety of interpersonal transactions that create and shape norms, and thecomplexity of the resulting ethical terrain.

21. For instance, the difference betweenmerely turning down a request, which needn’tbe at all transgressive, and defying it by refusing to acknowledge the petitionary reason itgives 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,1983Þ, 88.




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"Leave the Gun; Take the Cannoli!: The Pragmatic Topography of Second-Person Calls"

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