Morality as a Social Phenomenon

Chapter 2 explored the normative significance of moral rightness for the agent. This chapter, shifts the focus from the agent to those potentially affected by what the agent does. A leading idea here will be that interpersonal morality apparently has normative significance not only for the agent, but for other parties as well, and that it is an important but neglected task for moral theory to make sense of this aspect of it. Moral standards of right and wrong purport to define constraints on agency; but they also purport to provide a basis for interpersonal accountability relations between individuals, articulating what we can expect of each other as each of us pursues our private ends. Disregard of such interpersonal expectations by an agent thus has normative implications for other parties, giving them reason to adjust their attitudes and behavior in response, in the characteristic register of blame.

Implying an impolite belief: A case of tikkeh in Persian

The focus of this study is on a particular type of implied impoliteness in Persian commonly known astikkeh. Given the lack of critical attention paid to the notion of implied impoliteness in the literature, the present study seeks to explore this issue further by addressing the following questions: (i) What is implied impoliteness? (ii) What are the properties which make it different from other types of conventionalized impoliteness? (iii) For whom is it offensive? And finally (iv) how does one evaluate an implied meaning as offensive? It will be argued that, in the right context, any utterance can potentially be evaluated as atikkehwhich can convey a negative impolite belief about the ratified and/or unratified hearer(s). In this respect, examples from both dyadic and polylogal interactions are provided. Along the way, the influence of relational histories as well as interpersonal expectations are also discussed.