Do We Have a Duty to Mitigate the Deterioration of Democratic Communication?

Starting from the observation that the deterioration of democratic communication is a political problem that requires individual and collective, private and public actions, I first defend a baseline duty to avoid using expressions that conventionally show a disrespectful attitude toward targeted groups. Then I develop a set of guidelines that can guide political theorists in distributing additional duties that respect the situated agency of different individuals. I propose two normative constraints (“capacity to act” and “influence”) that should influence how theorists assign duties. Then I present three criteria (“pointless,” “antisocial,” and “lawfulness”) to specify the content in a context-sensitive way.