Firing bullets into the air and driving drunk are both crimes and there's zero dispute about it, so does this one really need discussion?
These extreme examples aren't even relevant to what the paper is discussing. If someone goes around using well-known racial slurs but then later tries to claim good intentions, it won't pass scrutiny. Claiming good intentions isn't a free pass, but it's not what the paper is claiming anyway.
> Why should the speaker be granted carte blanche any more than the listener?
No one is saying the speaker should be granted carte blanche. I don't know where this strawman argument came from, but it's not what the paper is about.
This paper isn't about a free pass to say anything and avoid scrutiny. It's about listeners denying the speaker's intent and substituting their own worst-case interpretations and rejecting the possibility of any other explanation.
I would say the problem here is that, in a vacuum, what establishes the speaker's intent as any more authoritative than the assumptions of the listener? The right to choose what it is you meant and to choose what it is you interpret are equally weighted here. Any additional weight that is to be applied must be applied within the context of a specific interpersonal relationship at a particular point in time.
Therefore generalized mappings of the weighting of such interactions cannot likely be established preemptively through a process of pure reason.
The divorce of intent (or lack thereof) in various scenarios exactly points out that there is not some unified notion of the necessity of intent (or lack thereof) being applied in order to come to judgement, but instead the conceptualization of when intent (or lack thereof) should matter is deployed, seemingly, on the very fundamentally subjective basis of 'I know it when I see it' or in terms of society: 'when it has been culturally deemed such'. So the friction here would not seem to be one of the misapplication of a schema, but the friction of running against a social more.
2nd, this seems very much to be predicated on Cartesian dualism, that the mind is independent of the body. Would someone growing up in a society where they were subjected to daily derogatory statements in regards to some group to which they belong, would their physical wellbeing be divorced from their mental wellbeing?
If the subjective is to be discounted, then there is little in the realm of human reality that will remain. Everything that a human perceives is part of their imagination. Our consciousness does not touch the real (so far as we may know); it constructs sensory data models that are by definition subjective.
Why should the speaker be granted carte blanche any more than the listener? The language game is not merely the pitcher and the passive receiver. Even silence is an interpretable phenomena. There no way out of the dance of meaning.