The coach of a college football team has been forced to resign

The coach of a college football team has been forced to resign after he started reading aloud the text on a distracted student's iBad, and in the process recited some taboo word.

The word is so taboo that CNN dares not say what it was — and indeed, it hardly matters which taboo word it was. I presume it was a slur of some sort.

The ethical issue here is whether to treat such slurs as insults, wrong to use as insults because that unjustifiably nasty, or treat them as taboos. Do people deserve punishment for inadvertently breaching taboos?

The coach believes that even though the words he spoke were not his words, his violation of the taboo was such a grave sin that he deserves to be shunned and lose his job for quoting them carelessly. By doing that, he lets down other future people condemned for violating taboos. If he had to resign, he should have done so without admitting guilt.

If you step on a flagstone that has a taboo word inscribed on it, should you be shunned? How about if you are photographed near a sign (in a non-English-speaking country perhaps) which has a taboo word on it? Should you be fired for that? Is "what people might think" more important than what really happened?

Using slurs to insult someone is nasty and wrong. But we ought to know better than to punish people for violating taboos. To do so indicates a lack of moral reflection.