It is curious that while some societies have become increasingly concerned about respecting people’s pronouns, they have been moving in the opposite, less respectful direction when it comes to other ways of addressing or referring to people. There was a time, not so long ago, when children and even younger adults would not have presumed to be on a first-name basis with those old enough to be their parents or grandparents. Similarly, strangers would not presume the familiarity of a first-name basis – at least not immediately. Many people now have no such compunctions.
Because some people prefer the previously dominant convention of greater formality, the steady change of the convention toward familiarity may be in tension with the practice of respecting people’s preferred pronouns. If we should refer to people using the pronouns they prefer, and we should do so precisely because they prefer those pronouns, how can it be acceptable to ignore other preferences for how one is referred to or addressed? The question is arguably most pressing for ‘progressives’ and liberals, who are much more likely than conservatives both to defer to pronoun preferences and to assume familiarity in address and reference.
One answer is that preferences to be referred to or addressed by a title are like my imagined student’s preference to be addressed as ‘Your Royal Highness’ in that such preferences all presuppose a hierarchy with associated delusions of grandeur. According to this view, the more egalitarian convention of familiarity is the better one.
However, there are at least two problems with this view. The first is that it confuses moral equality with other forms of equality. One can think that we all matter equally, without thinking that students and their teachers, for example, are or should be social equals. Many are quick to recognise such inequality if students and their teachers have (even consensual) sexual relations. We are then very quickly reminded about power differentials. If people are unequal in that sense, then it may be unreasonable to pretend otherwise.
Perhaps it will be objected that preserving a more respectful unidirectional form of address only reinforces power differentials. Here, we need to distinguish between objectionable and non-objectionable power differentials. It is wrong when power is distributed on the grounds of sex, race or ethnicity, for example. If there were a convention for women to address men respectfully, while men called women by their first names, that would be a convention that should quickly be subverted. But the convention that differentiates between children and adults, or students and teachers, is not of this kind. Here, social differentials are often unavoidable. If teachers are as ignorant and inexperienced as their students, we have not attained some ideal state of affairs.
The second reason is that, even if one thinks everybody should be on a first-name basis with everyone else, there are still constraints on how we ought to reach that goal. Conventions do not change in an instant. While conventions for deferential reference still persist to some extent, there is significant scope for particular instances of familiarity to be seen, with good reason, as disrespectful.
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