Voyager
3d ago
Fair enough, and I agree this is genuinely not caught by Scotts categorization, which is too narrow in only focusing on hatred.
But I still think categorizing it under "by belief" leads you wrong. Instead I'd suggest amending the definition of "by motivation" such that "didn't hire someone (or treated them different in any other way) because of their race" counts as "by motive": The specific action or rule is motivated by race.
I guess on the object level in this discussion it comes down to "Do the 'sexist' men actually support formally unequal treatment of men and women?"
Voyager
4d ago
Serious question would you support a 50 50 gender ratio quota in combat arms to get rid of that moral hazard?
Equal rights regarding conscription both in theory and practice would go a long way. If female conscription is treated the same as male, they carry the same risk as men (all else being equal, but two men of different age, health, occupation, etc. don't carry the same risk either).
Quotas aren't justice, because they treat groups as ethical entities, not persons.
Voyager
4d ago
Haven't they? Every major Western country has an all volunteer military that allows women in combat roles. No one is forcing you to go die for anything.
Not right now, because it's peacetime. But that can change, and for example Germany is debating to reinstall conscription - and constitutionally, only men can be conscripted.
Ukraine (not obviously a non-western country) shows that if the need becomes pressing, it's still men's job to die, and Ukraine's western allies support this state of affairs.
Voyager
4d ago
It has also directly negatively affected modern men. Any man who didn't get a job because of gender quotas, any man who was victim of domestic violence but treated as the perpetrator, etc.
I don't support repealing the 19th either. There are many equality-improving things we can try first.
Voyager
4d ago
But the "decision" part is doing all the work here: If someone were to categorically refuse hiring black people, that would generally be considered racism no matter the motivation. If anything, the belief would be the closest candidate to a valid justification.
So it's not about the belief, the belief is a red herring. To conclude racism, you need to observe the decision, which as @FtttG pointed out doesn't automatically follow from the belief. If you equivocate between belief and belief + decision, you'll incorrectly conclude racism.
Voyager
7d ago
Not just them, my fellow countrymen in general.
Nothing in "you're representing your country" assigns responsibility for your behavior to your countrymen. That's simply a total non-sequitur. Your parents' statement is all about your own (heightened) responsibility for your behavior.
I don't see how. Morality is very often the exact same combination of exactly the same kind of aspirations and practical matters that you just described.
You're doing wordplay around the term "morality". When I said "not moral", I meant that you're parents don't have a moral belief that you're actually a representative in an ideal sense. To the degree they believe it, it's a concession to practicality.
Also, morality [as you might use the term] might originate in practice from something like that, but to become morality it needs to be detached from its origins.
Doesn't "retribution" mean the kind of distrust that you've been talking about?
No. Distrust is just the self-interested response to a belief. It has nothing to do with any deliberate moral judgment.
Reparations would be one of the clearer examples, but all sorts of woke identity politics count.
Voyager
7d ago
My parent's statement rested on the assumption that other people are responsible for my behavior. If we accept that no such responsibility exists, what they said is nonsensical.
Which other people? Your parents? Yes, we accept that parents specifically have some responsibility for their behavior of specifically their children. This doesn't imply a man is responsible for the behavior of other men. It's personal relationship, not group membership at play there.
"Part aspirational, part practical" is pretty much what morality is.
That's wordplay and has nothing to do with my point. "Aspirational" here means "you should should consider this as a way to aspire to high standards for yourself", not "you're actually a representant". And "practical" means "behaving badly might ruin your country's reputation and therefore hurt your countrymen", without having to take a position on whether the locals are morally in the right to stereotype on your example.
In my opinion the OP is about the former, not the latter. He didn't say "I don't get why people do this thing where they hold someone legally liable for crimes they didn't commit, just because someone from their group did it".
OP is very clearly about the latter, and they did say:
There seems to be a tendency to take the actions of particular individuals and ascribe some kind of moral responsibility for those actions to demographic groups the perpetrator is a part of. Such and such man/woman/white/black/migrant/christian/etc did a bad thing and, actually, all men/women/whites/blacks/migrants/christians/etc are in some sense responsible for it. Such that it is reasonable to think less of or perhaps take retribution against all members of whatever the relevant demographic group is.
Voyager
7d ago
That's you taking (additional) responsibility for your own behavior, and therefore categorically different from you taking responsibility for other people's behavior.
"You're representing your country" is part aspirational, part practical, not moral. If you misbehaved abroad and then another countryman of yours comes in, the locals might distrust him (because you represented your country in the minds of the locals), but if they try to hold him to account for what you did, he'd be right to point out that you don't actually represent him.
Voyager
7d ago
I should also mention that I sometimes see a reverse of this. People of a particular demographic want credit for the good things other members of their demographic have done, regardless of what they themselves have done. The examples that come to mind here are all right-coded to me ("men built society so I, as a man, should get credit for what those other men did regardless of what I personally have done". s/men/whites) but that is probably just my bubble.
My impression is that this is mostly a reaction to the reverse. "If I'm to blame for the bad things my demographic did, shouldn't I also be credited for the good things?" With the hope of getting the interlocutor to abandon the position of demographic blame or at least have a counter for the condemnation.
Voyager
8d ago
It's missing the point because the post it was responding to wasn't about communities. As an independent criticism of individualism it's fine. As applied to groups that aren't communities (but are sometimes thought of as communities when considered as identity groups, like "men" or "women" or "blacks"), it goes in the wrong direction.
Men and women tend to act in pretty distinct ways, and healthy communities tend to recognize it,and set up social rules that take the differences into account.
That doesn't mean at all the group of "men" is a community. You can have communities that are all one gender, like maybe the boy scouts or girl scouts, but you can be male without being in the boy scouts.
Remember, the top-level post was about the responsibility of group members for the behavior of other group members. If the group is just something you are born into and says nothing about your relation to other group members, this doesn't make sense.
An example of something that can be a community, is so less often in modernity and arguably should be more so, is a neighborhood. A gender is not.
Personally, I would like the Western world to stop being individualist liberals who don't feel any responsibility for their communities
Of course, this reasoning presupposes people actually are in a healthy community.
Talking about communities is missing the point. The groups in question "men", "women", "migrants" aren't communities at all, can't be and shouldn't be.
For example, most healthy communities contain both men and women, but two men living on opposite sides of the country and have never met aren't part of the same community.
Demographics aren't the same as community, and unlike a community, there's zero sense in assigning a moral identity to a demographic that makes it members beholden to each other.
Voyager
11d ago
It may be safe to ignore their statements if all you care about is finding the truth, but from a practical political standpoint I'm not so sure they can be safely ignored.
Voyager
12d ago
I mean, strictly speaking, Rowling didn't die, so it wouldn't count as a lynching, so a principled steelman isn't that difficult.
However, I doubt that if hypothetically Rowling were to commit suicide, anyone would call that a lynching.
It's not like anyone called the death of Jeffrey Epstein a lynching.
Voyager
13d ago
You can disagree, of course, but I think colorblindness is a good and important principle (unlike nationality-blindness) and there would have to be a very pressing need to give it up. And in a world where races overlap in traits, the need isn't pressing, because there are better proxies for the traits you care about.
Nationality, education level or net worth are things you want to know anyway, checking them is no harder than checking race (honestly easier: How do you administer mixed or otherwise ambiguous race? Color chart like in the meme? Do you treat Japanese the same as Koreans? Indonesians? Mongolians? ). It's far from obvious to me that using race is either more efficient or more accurate than something built from my proposals.
Nor is you claim that any other system will be abused obvious. Yes, there are more abusable systems, but not all them are so. And yes, under Biden anything that can be abused will be abused, but under Biden not letting black people in is a non-starter anyway.
Voyager
14d ago
Your own counterexample of Brazil disproves this claim. In general, two actions might have a mostly similar outcome in practice, but that doesn't mean they're ethically equal if they're motivated by different rules.
You don't actually have to commit to a single rules. Individual socioeconomic status and education level are easily measured and might well capture the difference between brazilians you want and brazilians you don't want better.
And giving visas to ukrainians for geopolitical reasons can also happen independently of the rest of your immigration policy.
Voyager
14d ago
No, its discrimination by nationality. And visas applications being treated differently by country of origin is not unreasonable.
It also catches economic and cultural factors, and is easier to administer than race.
Or you could just give visas to Norwegians freely but scrutinize Somalians, while agnostic to typical somalian skin color.
Use anything from wealth to culture to average IQ (again race agnostic) to previously observed behavior of tourists of the origin country to justify this.
Voyager
14d ago
Pragmatically you have to do this. At an international level for instance you can’t give out tourist visas to a Somalian and a Norwegian at the same rate or demographic change would occur.
Colorblindness doesn't require that. You can take a standard for visas that captures what you care about without any reference to race. Only when your policy receives complaints about disparate impact you might need to do invoke HBD.
Voyager
15d ago
Was addressed in a follow-up: https://x.com/Devon_Eriksen_/status/1949169427062173810
Voyager
23d ago
I fully agree with your point. But I think there's one additional aspect that's present in webfics that isn't found elsewhere, which the social aspect of webfic.
The social aspects of serial releases are the main advantage offsetting the difficulties finding something actually good (Sturgeon's law says "Ninety percent of everything is crap" - for web fiction it's more like 95%, although the cream of the crop is still up there).
If the release is chapter by chapter, you get to discover each step of the story together with everyone. Everything can be discussed, analyzed, theorized together, unlike a normal book you read in one sitting and are only able to share your thought on the final conclusion, not the intermediate steps.
Voyager
25d ago
I was talking about roughly this with some friends recently, and it came up that in some ways post-industrial humans seem to be suffering the same sorts of malaise that zoo animals do. Sure, we have plenty of food and are kept safe, but we've socially isolated ourselves, and many of us are, at a fundamental level, mentally and physically unhealthy. We engage in over-grooming and self-destructive activities. Can't get pandas in captivity to maintain species-wide TFR either.
Related idea: "Humans won't breed in captivity" by Devon Eriksen. https://x.com/Devon_Eriksen_/status/1918506702267175234
Voyager
28d ago
I will say, though, that I think leftwing and liberal attitudes about sex and race have created very fertile grounds for being preyed upon by fabulists.
Yes. The problem isn't liars, liars will always exist. With healthy scepticism and verification procedures, you can mitigate the damage they do. The problem is that when your culture considers questioning certain claims anathema, you're systemically unable to deal with liars who exploit this.
One of the best professors I had would sometimes in his lectures go "Proof (1. Attempt): [...] and therefore the proposition is proven ... wrong! The proof I gave had a flaw! Can anyone see what the problem is?" When no one could, he explained the flaw, gave a 2. Attempt, which fixed the flaw, but there was another unfixed flaw, and only the third attempt was the real proof.
He also constantly asked questions to the students, he was really committed to teaching actual thinking.
He also held a lecture once where he gave no sample solutions to the exercises. The exercise was always supposed to be the students discussing what they came up with, with the assistant only supervising, and the exam was just a selection of the exercise problems. One of my prouder moments was when my solution was simpler than the one the assistant had in mind, and I was eventually able to convince him it was correct.
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