Social norms forbidding rape jokes, blackface, and flag-burning exemplify a peculiar form of etiquette, which I call political etiquette. Just as compliance with ordinary etiquette expresses respect for the other individuals involved in a social encounter, compliance with political etiquette expresses respect for social groups. In this paper, I propose that we understand political etiquette as a system of conventions whereby we indicate our commitment to treating vulnerable social groups in accordance with their rightful status. Because we have a standing obligation to assure all members of our community that their rightful social status will be respected, we have a powerful moral reason to conform with all existing political etiquette norms whose target social groups lack such assurance, even when compliance with these norms is not antecedently morally valuable. Alongside our moral reasons to comply with some existing political etiquette norms, we also have moral reasons to fortify good political etiquette norms and to reform or erode bad ones.

禁止强奸笑话、黑脸和焚烧国旗的社会规范体现了一种特殊的礼仪形式，我称之为政治礼仪。正如遵守普通礼仪表示对参与社会交往的其他个人的尊重一样，遵守政治礼仪表示对社会群体的尊重。在这篇论文中，我建议我们将政治礼仪理解为一种约定俗成的制度，我们借此表明我们致力于根据社会弱势群体的合法地位对待他们。因为我们有长期义务向我们社区的所有成员保证他们的合法社会地位将得到尊重，所以我们有强大的道德理由遵守所有现有的政治礼仪规范，其目标社会群体缺乏这种保证，即使遵守这些规范事先没有道德价值。除了遵守一些现有的政治礼仪规范的道德理由外，我们还有道德理由来强化良好的政治礼仪规范并改革或削弱不良的政治礼仪规范。