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husband? , when that question is posed by a priest or registrar, in the presence of
witnesses, with banns having been posted, and all other legal conditions met, I
perform the act of marrying: to say  I do , with the relevant felicity conditions
met, is to do something, i.e. get married. Or, in placing the sign in Figure 9.1 at
the entrance to a road, traffic authorities perform the act of denying entry to
vehicles, even though this expressive act lacks propositional content.
The categories  locution ,  perlocution , and  illocution are not, of course, mutually
exclusive: many expressive acts qualify as more than one type of speech act. In what
follows I shall focus on an interpretation of pornography as an illocutionary speech
act which denies to women the felicity conditions whereby they can perform
certain illocutionary speech acts. If this argument succeeds then the right to
freedom of expression as exercised by pornographers is not compossible with the
same right as exercised by women, in which case the  clash of rights argument for
the censorship of pornography may not be as easy to dismiss as Dworkin thinks.
Furthermore, the success of the argument would also establish that pornography
denies to women the power of speech required to shape their moral environment, in
which case a commitment to equal concern and respect as evinced in the argument
for freedom of expression from democracy requires the censorship of pornography.
Rae Langton argues that, in a quite literal sense, pornography silences
women.39 Pornography does this not only by humiliating and frightening
women (and thereby succeeding in terms of these perlocutionary effects, as
Figure 9.1 No entry sign
PORNOGRAPHY AND CENSORSHIP 147
Dworkin admits), but furthermore in terms of its illocutionary force. It does this
in virtue of the fact that the felicity conditions it sets for certain illocutionary
speech acts make it impossible for women to perform those acts: pornography
causes illocutionary disablement in women. As Langton puts it,
Some speech acts build a space, as it were, for other speech acts, making it
possible for some people to marry, vote, and divorce. Some speech acts, in
contrast, set limits to that space, making it impossible for other people to
marry, vote, divorce. Some speech determines the kind of speech there can
be. This shows that it is indeed possible to silence someone, not just by
ordering or threatening them into simple silence, not just by frustrating
their perlocutionary goals, but by making their speech acts unspeakable. . . .
The felicity conditions for women s speech acts are set by the speech acts of
pornography. The words of the pornographer, like the words of the legislator,
are  words that set conditions . They are words that constrain, that make
certain actions  refusal, protest  unspeakable for women in some
contexts. This is speech that determines the kind of speech there can be.40
Consider an analogy. Current UK law specifies various felicity conditions for
persons to succeed in performing the act of marrying by performing the speech
act of saying  I do . These conditions mean that it is impossible for same sex
couples, people who are already married, close blood relations, and minors to
perform the act of marrying by saying  I do . It is not that such people who try to
perform this speech act fail because they do not secure others understanding of
their utterances (the case is not analogous to people on a beach who fail to see
that a gesturing woman is  not waving, but drowning 41). Rather, the conven-
tions that govern the utterance of the words  I do in the context of marriage
mean that, however often such people repeat these words in surroundings that
resemble those in which genuine marriages are performed (registry office,
flowers, tearful mothers, etc.), and however well they are understood qua locu-
tions by others, they will never succeed in marrying by uttering them.42
As with marriage, so with sex, and the illocutions through which much of it is
performed, according to Langton. In the domain of sex and sexuality, pornography
sets the felicity conditions for illocutionary speech acts of consent and refusal,
acceptance and protest, encouragement and rejection, abandonment and with-
drawal: by depicting women in the ways described by the Model Ordinance,
pornography limits what it is possible for women to say in sexual contexts, and
causes illocutionary disablement for women with respect to speaking the acts in
the second set of conjuncts just listed. This is particularly worrying with respect to
rape: the conventional force of pornography with respect to  the language games of
sex [is] such that saying  no can fail to count as making a refusal move, and telling
the story of one s own subordination can fail to count as a move of protest .43
If Langton s analysis is convincing then it will not do, à la Dworkin, to claim
that women ought to protest against pornography with more speech rather than
with prohibitive legislation, because the class of illocutionary speech acts consti-
148 TOLERATION
tutive of protest are made impossible for women by pornography. If Langton is
correct then there is a genuine clash of rights contained in the First Amendment,
and the argument that in a society of equals this clash would be resolved by means
of the censorship of pornography looks more promising: only one class of people 
women  suffer illocutionary disablement through pornography, so banning it
would make women better off, and pornographers no worse off, with respect to
their capabilities for performing the illocutionary acts in question.44 And if
commitment to an egalitarian ideal of democracy requires securing for each
person the opportunity to shape the moral environment of their society, and illo-
cutionary speech acts are an important way of doing this, then realisation of the
ideal of democracy also requires the censorship of pornography.45
Are things this straightforward? In what follows I shall focus on problems in
Langton s analysis related to the fact that the illocutionary disablement of one group
by another requires that the former have authority in the domain in which the
disablement is caused. With respect to pornography and women s speech, this can
be seen in Langton s claim that the type of illocutions performed by pornographers
so as to silence women are exercitive, that is, speech acts that  confer powers and
rights on people, or deprive people of powers and rights :46 pornography is an exerci-
tive speech act because it deprives women of the powers to refuse, reject, and
withdraw from sex, and to protest against pornography.47 For a speaker to perform
exercitive speech acts requires that that speaker have authority with respect to the
domain in which she does things with her words. Langton s argument is that
pornographers silence women by performing such speech acts in the domain of sex,
in which case she must be committed to the claim that pornographers have
authority in that domain.48
What does it mean for a person or group to have authority in a domain?
Langton gives the following examples: a legislator exercises authority so as to
deprive certain citizens of political powers (as in the denial of the right to vote to
blacks in apartheid South Africa); a slave is deprived by his master of the power of
issuing orders to his master; a parent prohibits a child from walking barefoot in
the snow; and a patient prohibits a doctor from performing a treatment on her
body.49 However, only in the first two cases does the authority figure effect illocu-
tionary disablement on others (the parent does not make it impossible for the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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