Political correctness only censors, not changes

The argument

The position here is that political correctness is neither the force for good its defenders claim nor the threat its opponents describe, because it does not accomplish very much in either direction. Its effects are confined to what people are permitted to say. It has no effect on the physical outcomes of the matters it concerns, and none on what people actually think or actually do — so both the credit and the blame attached to it are misplaced. The argument's central illustration is drawn from Robert Longley, who observes that telling people it is socially wrong to express certain feelings and beliefs does not make those feelings and beliefs go away. Sexism, on his example, will not end by referring to salesmen and saleswomen as salespersons. The vocabulary changes while the attitude underneath it is untouched, and the person who held the attitude before the change continues to hold it afterwards, having simply learned which words now attract objection. The same point is made about material conditions. Referring to the homeless as "temporarily displaced" does not create a single job or wipe out any poverty. The substitution alters the description of the problem without altering anything in the situation described, and a homeless person is no better housed for having been renamed. What is achieved is a change in register, which can be mistaken for a change in circumstances precisely because the new language sounds more humane. The one further effect the argument allows is reputational, and it falls on political correctness itself: the effort to minimise offence, taken too far, makes the Left appear ridiculous. Because political correctness only censors rather than changing anything, this argument concludes, it is neither good nor bad for our society.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Political correctness does have an impact on what people think because it changes what is regarded as an acceptable view. This unconsciously affects everybody and changes people's perceptions about what is and isn’t a disrespectful view or description of a someone.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The premise asserts the absence of an effect that would be difficult to establish either way, and the counter names the mechanism it overlooks: what a society treats as sayable shapes what its members take to be respectable, which is a change in thinking and not only in wording. [Rejecting P2] The examples set up a standard nobody claims. Changing a job title was never offered as a cure for sexism, nor a euphemism as a jobs programme, so showing that a word does not by itself end a structural problem leaves the modest claim actually made for it untouched — that language marks and reinforces how people are regarded. The premise also sits oddly with the position it supports: holding that political correctness censors while changing nothing attributes to it both a real effect and a real cost, which is not neutrality.