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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25099 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 24, 2026

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This is a post that's been floating around in my head for a while that I finally wanted to get out. Apologies if this is a little rambling.

There's a phenomenon I observe on both the left and right that is a little mysterious to me and I'm interested in hearing people's thoughts on it. 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.

I don't think it's too hard to come up with examples. I'm confident a lot of innocent Jews or Palestinians have caught strays from people mad at the Israeli government or Hamas. There was that unrest in the UK after a Sikh Northern Ireland after an African man stabbed a guy to death. Go to probably any dating forum and you can find men and women generalizing about the evils of the other gender based on their dating experiences.

I think of myself as having an essentially liberal individualist view of moral responsibility. People are morally responsible for the things they actually do and not the things that other people who happen to share demographic characteristics with them do. This makes arguments or actions of the above kind feel alien to me. I don't see the logic, the reason, that connects "Person A of X demographic did a Bad Thing" to "Therefore it is justified for me to do a Bad Thing to Person B of demographic X." I also observe deployment of arguments of this type seem to have a whiff of hypocrisy. People who deploy these kinds of arguments about demographic X they are not a part of would ~never accept similar generalizations about demographic Y that they are a part of.

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.

I guess I'm trying to understand if there's some underlying logic, some theory of demographic-based moral responsibility I'm missing? Or is this all a kind of pre-rational responsibility assignment?

some underlying logic, some theory of demographic-based moral responsibility

Your own personal identity is a variation of your group identities. Genetics and culture decide much in life, and you qua your unique self did not choose either of these. You yourself, as a individual saying “I freely choose to do so-and-so”, have your interests and inclinations in large part chosen for you by your genes and culture, things preordained before you could talk. The deep you within which speaks inside, though you may construe it as totally unique, is significantly informed by the groups which you belong to, meaning that you share some of your identity with other people in your groups, as inheritors of identity. This means that sometimes when a person in your group does something good, the he who did it is the same you within you, and that fraction of the responsible identity is one and the same. And when someone in your group does something bad, sometimes it’s the same you within you, too. Sometimes, not all the time.

We can consider pitbulls and the concept of moral luck. You could have two genetically-cloned and culturally identical pitbulls, but only one savagely bites someone because of a random sequence of events (a particular noise and scent occurring at the same time, a mental fatigue of the dog, anything). This pitbull needs to be put down or sent to a farm upstate. But what about the other pitbull? The specific identity attribute of the pitbull in question — the fact that his identity is “I’m a dog that bites” — is shared completely with the cloned pitbull who didn’t bite. Why is the other pitbull blameless? Why is he not responsible? If it’s merely because of chance, then it’s weird that we are ascribing moral blame upon the biting pitbull for no other reason that a random sequence of events, while his cloned brother gets just as many goodboy pats as before. This would mean that we’re killing one dog and loving another due to a dice roll. It may be more reasonable to conclude that both pitbulls are responsible, because both share the same identity of “I bite humans”, and this is how we see sophisticated polities govern when they breed-ban pitbulls.

Genetics and culture work similar to the pitbull question, in part, because we know that certain good and bad traits are inherited, meaning the identity-portion-in-question is shared within a group. Terence Tao may live in Australia, but no aboriginal Australian (near as we can tell) could ever do what he does. But there are certainly other Chinese who come close. Why shouldn’t they feel proud of Tao? They see part of their identity in Tao, parts which led to his achievements. If those parts of Tao are not responsible for his achievements, then it would be wrong to attribute responsibility to Tao himself for his accomplishments, because it was actually just luck; or else it would be wrong to attribute responsibility to Tao because Tao-the-identity is mostly not his achievements. “This medal is given not to Tao, whose identity is all over the place, but only to the 1% of Tao which is the few extra IQ points separating him from those similar to him in China”.

Further, if the function of “responsibility” is to assign praises and demerits to people for the purposes of rewards (for the purposes of felicity in the longrun for the group and/or species), then it makes a lot of sense to think in terms of groups. A culture is good and should be praised so that it can increase so that felicity increases. A group is good and should be praised so that it increases so that felicity increases. Considering groups can hasten the increase in felicity, as we can more accurately determine which collection of individuals should be increased or given so-and-so privileges in a way that helps the world.

But! I think there are important reasons why we should abstain from thinking this way too much. Genes which are really good sometimes can be really bad some other times. Novelty-seeking may produce someone really skilled, or an adventurer, but it may produce someone who gambles too much or gets into drugs. I’m sure there are many interactions like this. We want crazy people who will make good films of music, even if these genes are bad 4 out of 5 times. So this is why we should be reluctant to consider group responsibility too much, without looking at the whole picture. William James and Darwin had family histories of mood disorders, genes which were highly adaptive in their own particular variations. Another reason is that you don’t want clans to develop, and they would probably inevitably develop if people start focusing on their last names.

I guess I'm trying to understand if there's some underlying logic, some theory of demographic-based moral responsibility I'm missing? Or is this all a kind of pre-rational responsibility assignment?

Humans are social creatures, and coordination/cooperation form the axle around which a large majority of what we do and care about rotates. The natural predator of coordination and cooperation is defection, taking and not giving in return. Prevention being better than cures, we prefer preventing defection to punishing it, and punishing it to not punishing it and risking a repeat.

I think of myself as having an essentially liberal individualist view of moral responsibility. People are morally responsible for the things they actually do and not the things that other people who happen to share demographic characteristics with them do.

That is a bold claim, of a sort that seems increasingly popular here. Could you describe how this cashes out with regard to the last century or two of American political history? Heck, here's a post from the last day or so just for starters.

Models of the sort you claim you can't grok underpin every aspect of the modern world. If you really couldn't understand the logic, discourse on racism or sexism or any part of the civil rights spectrum, feminism, rape culture, *phobia etc, etc would all be incomprehensible babble to you. So either you've been doing an excellent job concealing your confusion, or I think you are overstating your lack of understanding here. Because while I have been arguing about many of these things for more than a decade now, at no point have they struck me as ineffably inexplicable, and for many of them, at least at some point, I would have argued had reasonable points to raise.

In any case, the fact is that humans often act in groups, and so it is often necessary to judge them in groups. Atomic Individualism is a delicate hothouse flower that cannot survive contact with unfiltered reality.

I'm still not sure I follow. I don't deny that individuals can come to have aligned interests due to their membership in a group. Legal or socially permissible discrimination against members of a demographic is one way this has happened historically. How does that get you to a demographic theory of responsibility though?

If a woman suffragette commits a bombing is a woman anti-suffragette also partly responsible because she is a woman? Is a man suffragette responsible because he's aligned with the woman, even if he otherwise had no part in or knowledge of it? How abstract can a group be such that we can judge members by the actions of other members?

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.

"If I'm going to be blamed for the actions of my group, I should certainly promote the interests of that group which are now my own" would be precise, I think.

I think the basic rule of thumb is:

(1) if a member of the outgroup misbehaves, it reflects badly on the entire outgroup. The fact that the misbehaving person belonged to Group X needs to be emphasized.

(2) if a member of the ingroup misbehaves, it's just an isolated incident. The fact that the misbehaving person belonged to group X is not relevant.

If instead of misbehavior we are talking about a positive accomplishment, the standards flip.

I guess I'm trying to understand if there's some underlying logic, some theory of demographic-based moral responsibility I'm missing?

I think it's just ordinary who/whom partisanship.

Here is a comment from this week's thread.

I would like your argument that there is nothing expressed in that comment but isolated anecdotes of no relevance to our understanding of the broader social context. I'd pose the same question to anyone drinking deep of the New Individualism.

I would like your argument that there is nothing expressed in that comment but isolated anecdotes of no relevance to our understanding of the broader social context.

For what it may be worth, I'm not taking a position on the group responsibility / shared identity issue, at least for now. Except of course that I object when people are inconsistent in a partisan way.

The fundamental attribution error, essentially.

Rather, the fundamental rule of large-group human social interaction.

I guess I'm trying to understand if there's some underlying logic, some theory of demographic-based moral responsibility I'm missing? Or is this all a kind of pre-rational responsibility assignment?

I read an essay once that described the use of slurs as a speech act primarily intended to communicate that I can use a slur to refer to you and you can't stop me. It's a verbal act to demonstrate power relations.

Forcing others to take moral responsibility for their co-ethnics is similarly an act of power relations. Who has to apologize for nothing and who gets to just live their life is a pretty clear example of power dynamics in action.

This is why I simply try not to associate with illiberals. I have a "one-drop rule" for it: even the slightest inclination towards this nature of thinking (collective attribution) for any group from any group means your whole mind and epistemology and morality are, essentially, completely fucked. There is no hope for such a person.

One area where even people who are generally of a liberal mindset tend to falter is judgment of men and women. I'd like to say the SJW/woke/third-wave feminist thing would've been very warranted since this was one of the main things it attempted to address, but unfortunately a ton of them - albeit not all - just did and do the same sort of thing towards men.

I also basically consider this a kind of "spiritual rightism". A huge number of leftists are essentially spiritual rightists with some moral luck + a bit flip.

Isn't #YesAllMen kind of the central principle of feminism-tinged social justice? I'm not sure how to read your second paragraph coherently.

Among lots of feminists, sure. I addressed that in the post, though. You are describing third-wave feminism, which I described as "third-wave feminism" in my post, but you are simply saying "feminism".

Anyone who makes “morality” arguments like yourself is a spiritual rightists. It’s the same people who in the ‘90s did a morality crusade against rap music.

Arguing against any sort of care for morality is in fact a very right-wing position. Really, a right-wing child's position.

TBF, it's unfortunate that crusade failed. Not because of the lyrical content but because of the unmusicality of 99.99% of such music.

What is the essence of Left and Right to you? I'm having trouble making sense of your model.

To me, political Left and Right, to the degree that they represent something coherent that can be applied across different historical contexts, are something like hierarchy (Right) vs. egalitarianism (Left). You could think of this in terms of their differing stances towards hierarchy, where the extreme rightist says that a hierarchy is good by virtue of its very existence, the extreme leftist says no hierarchy is good, it is always suspect and corrupt and should be abolished. The golden mean / enlightened centrist take on this spectrum is something like, "Hierarchies are inevitable, but we need hierarchies based on competence and virtue that have checks against oppression and corruption" (though the awareness of the inevitability of hierarchy is probably seen as somewhat Right wing in our Post-WWII narrative context).

Individualism (the classical liberalism you describe) vs. Communalism represents a separate political axis. Communists and Fascists are both communalists, but one represents the Left and the other the Right. Likewise, classically liberal individualism can totally work for someone who appreciates hierarchy. It allows the great to differentiate themselves. Elite Human Capital types are Right wing individualists.

I like using my own slightly idiosyncratic definitions for things.

The definitions collide and contradict, a bit, such that an egalitarian leftist could be "rightist", but I don't mind it. Especially when you see tons of rightists demanding egalitarianism, albeit for solely their tribe/kind/ethnic group.

A while ago I saw somebody complain somewhere on the internet about a bunch of young Amish guys causing some annoyance to him. I don't remember the exact details, but something like they would take a shortcut over his property with their buggies and it would destroy some grass or something. Again, my memory isn't clear about the details, I seem to recall the poster put up a sign saying its private property or something and it was ignored and he was asking for advice on what to do. Multiple highly upvoted comments suggested he go find a local elder and tell him about it and the elder would make sure it would stop. Everybody in the thread seemed convinced that this would be pretty much guaranteed to work. If Amish youngsters are causing problems you can apparently just talk to an elder in their community and the problem is solved.

Personally, I would like the Western world to stop being individualist liberals who don't feel any responsibility for their communities and would rather have them act like the Amish in this regard. If the Amish elder in the anecdote above would have replied "people are morally responsible for the things they actually do, why are you coming to me? I didn't do anything", considering the subject of this anecdote already put up a sign which got ignored, he would have to escalate to the police or something. I think people should be in communities and communities should hold their members responsible to a moral standard. If somebody from a community does something bad and they can get away with it without getting into trouble with their community, that says something about their community.

Of course, this reasoning presupposes people actually are in a healthy community. In some specific cases I think the above logic does permit some sort of group judgement. In other cases people might have innate communal intuitions which might not do their job properly in the current unnatural hyper-individualistic societies we find ourselves in where we offload any responsibility for our fellow men unto the government.

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.

Talking about communities is missing the point. The groups in question "men", "women", "migrants" aren't communities at all, can't be or shouldn't be.

I don't see how it's missing the point. 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. This becomes doubly impossible under individualism, first because it forbids you from even recognizing there's a difference between the groups, and secondly because it dissolves the community structures that would allow for setting up these social rules.

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.

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.

I don't think I agree. The first time I went abroad my parents told me to be on my best behavior, because I won't be just representing myself, I'd be representing my entire nation. Were they wrong to tell me that? Or is an entire nation analogous to a community?

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.

That's you taking (additional) responsibility for your own behavior, and therefore categorically different from you taking responsibility for other people's behavior.

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.

"You're representing your country" is part aspirational, part practical, not moral.

"Part aspirational, part practical" is pretty much what morality is.

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.

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".

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.

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“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.”

I don’t think they would have a responsibility in moral sense. But as far as DNA is essentially Code then people who share DNA are likely to behave in the same way and if the fathers program does murder it is likely Sons code will do murder. Etc.

But as far as DNA is essentially Code then people who share DNA are likely to behave in the same way and if the fathers program does murder it is likely Sons code will do murder. Etc.

I pose to you the same question I've posed to 6tjk, hanikrummihundursvin and a few others on this forum.

Do you believe that I should care about who's someone father is more than I should care whether that person shares my interests or wants me dead?

Why do I have to choose between your conditions? It’s not an either/or.

I can care about someone’s genetic makeup and care if they share my interests or want me dead.

Isn’t your question obviously a false conundrum?

I supported Pinochet killing communists and I am anti-immigration of bad genetic fits.

Public polling shows non-whites and in fact every non-white race on net being against traditional liberalism. A persons father is a great predictor for whether they will be against your interests.

You're wrong.

It is in fact "an either/or" because when push comes to shove a person can only have one top priority.

So I pose the question again, do you really believe that I should care more about who's someone father is than whether that person shares my interests?

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That question presupposes that a) those two things are orthogonal, and b) that you know the answers to the latter queries. If you don't, and if lineage correlates to interests and aggression, then who someone's father is can be eminently worth caring about.

That question presupposes that a) those two things are orthogonal,

Are you trying to suggest that a "white man" would never wish death upon another "white man"? If I "pressupose" i do so with ample reason. Nor do I believe that you can extract more accurate answers to the latter queries from the color of one's skin thai I can from context clues like how someone speaks, how they dress, and to what God or gods they pray too.

So as with Opt-Out I pose the question again, do you really believe that I should care more about who's someone father is than whether that person shares my interests?

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I think it can be reasonable to hold X responsible for Y's actions in the case where X is in some kind of position of authority or responsibility over Y. I don't think sharing an ethnicity, or religion, or gender, and so on automatically puts you in that kind of position relative to others in the same demographic. Although even in your case it's not clear to me that petitioning the elder in the Amish community to use his authority to rectify the issue is coterminous with assigning some kind of blame to the elder for the issue. Something I've learned plenty of times in my own profession is that just because something is not your fault does not mean it is not your problem.

What about modern society gives you the impression that it is capable of working on that scale? The Amish elder in question almost certainly knows their families personally. And he is quite literally in a position of responsibility (even if informal). It’s not some abstract thing. This is virtually never the case for the examples listed in the OP.

What about modern society gives you the impression that it is capable of working on that scale?

That I remember it working in a large city under a communist government that was high on modernism. This isn't a technological issue, it's a social issue.

The phenomenon you are describing is just plain old bigotry. The steelman is that statistical discrimination is useful even if it isn't 100% accurate, but the reality is that these judgments are almost always formed off very limited information, in an unsystematic fashion, and with a careless neglect for causality. Humans developed in circumstances very different from the ones they now live in, and the instincts of hunter gatherers do not necessarily serve them very well.

The phenomenon you are describing is just plain old bigotry.

It is interesting to start your argument with moral appeal, with ethos. It really has to rely on a very specific definition of bigotry, which usually just goes into equivocation. I can use two examples: the first one being a literal group characteristic. For instance only women can get pregnant. It is a factual claim over billions of people. It attributes a characteristic to just that one group. Then there is the other angle, where suddenly some group characteristics do not have the same moral weight. E.g. everybody who supports any group wide policy such as Affirmative Action or SNAP is a bigot.

So no, the true steelman is that people use selective definition, equivocation, rhetoric and other underhanded tactics to selectively manipulate ungrounded morality to paint somebody as a bigot, while they put themselves outside of the same examination that would position them as bigots. Mostly utilizing weakly grounded and unspecified moral rules - e.g. some form of harm reductionism or utilitarianism, which again just collectivizes individual experience such as harm or utility, relying on the same ethos that enabled them to mark other people as bigots. Everybody evaluates other people on some group characteristics, it is not just some "availability heuristics".

I'm sorry you wrote all that, but OP specifically asked about:

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.

They were not asking about the capacity to make factual generalizations, but specifically about ascribing moral responsibility for an individual's actions to a demographic group they belong to. This is, as a description matter, called bigotry. It is not the full scope of it, of course, but it is a rather major element.

Now, labeling some specific thing as bigoted is morally charged because it is widely accepted that bigotry is bad, but it is fundamentally a descriptive rather than normative term. You can, I suppose, argue that being a bigot is good and/or rational, but you can't really argue that assigning collective moral responsibility to a demographic group on account of the actions of a specific member of that group is not bigoted.

Then there is the other angle, where suddenly some group characteristics do not have the same moral weight. E.g. everybody who supports any group wide policy such as Affirmative Action or SNAP is a bigot.

You're confusing different kinds of things (see the normative/positive confusion above as well). "SNAP supporters" and "women" are both groups in the sense that they refer to multiple people, but they are different kinds of category.

They were not asking about the capacity to make factual generalizations, but specifically about ascribing moral responsibility for an individual's actions to a demographic group they belong to.

Yes, people put moral responsibility and duties based on group characteristics. I have a duty to pay taxes and adhere to some regulations etc. You as well as OP operate under certain moral system, maybe utilitarianism or harm reductionism and you use them to impose moral duties on other people based on group characteristics. That is why I used women or SNAP recipients as an example. Women can get pregnant, therefore you have moral duty to accommodate them in various ways. What seems just like logical and descriptive term bleeds into moral categories and duties.

You can, I suppose, argue that being a bigot is good and/or rational, but you can't really argue that assigning collective moral responsibility to a demographic group on account of the actions of a specific member of that group is not bigoted.

Yes, for example some lunatic shoots up a school and now millions of individuals get their second amendment right curtailed for it. Again, we will evaluate a complex individual to a few characteristics such as "gun owner" which paints him morally as potential gun shooter and thus he has to have moral duties. And if you defend your right to own a gun as an individual, you are blamed as supporter of gun shooters in a very normative way. All policies paint a broad brush, evaluate individuals based on limited attributes and ascribes moral duties. It is just that policies the OP thinks of as good/rational are exempt of that, because they are good and rational while other bigots who have different way of evaluating the same are "bigoted" in pejorative way. It is pure Russel's conjugation.

You're confusing different kinds of things (see the normative/positive confusion above as well). "SNAP supporters" and "women" are both groups in the sense that they refer to multiple people, but they are different kinds of category.

They are all group characteristics that are basis on moral duties for other people. That is the category. Women get special treatment in all kinds of situations just because they are women and you are assigned moral duty to accommodate. SNAP recipients are evaluated by narrow criteria such as their gross income and some asset classes and if they pass, you have moral duty to pay taxes and literally feed them no matter if they are drug addicts or if they hide their income or assets etc. They are of the same category despite being millions of individual people with individual stories, and all of them are evaluated on narrow criteria, which then serve as a basis for you to have moral duties even if you never met them and if you live thousands of miles away.

I just have to reiterate that all the above categories, moral evaluations of groups and moral duties are put onto individuals are based on a very specific moral framework. You even put blame on people such as tax evader, gun control law criminal etc. It is seen as objectively bad and even punishable by law. But that punishment is based on prior narrow characteristics: you are a bad person because you own a banned gun, and the gun is banned because it causes school shootings.

And I can even grant you the definition of a bigot. Somebody is a bigot because he holds all Muslims as morally culpable for promoting Islamism that leads to terrorism. Another person is a bigot because he holds all gun owners and their defense of 2nd amendment as morally culpable for school shootings. But then if everybody is a bigot, the word loses its differentiating power and becomes an empty word.

People have mentioned the epistemic reasons for doing this (stereotypes as heuristics), but separately there is also the game-theoretic (contractualist) reason: Individualism is a social contract that has both costs and benefits. In order for a social contract to work, you can't let people get away with getting the benefits without also incurring the costs. Here, the benefit of individualism is that you don't have to get blamed for the actions of other people just because they share some characteristic with you. The cost is that you have to reject any preferential treatment you may receive from others who share that characteristic on that basis.

Therefore, if you see that members of a certain group treat each other with special preference (most of their friends or marriage partners are fellow [X]s, they tend to hire each other, they refrain from "snitching" when one has broken the law, etc.), then it makes sense to collectivize blame onto them, even as you might prefer that they join the individualist social contract instead.

I would feel it would be more rational and, in particular, more moral to simply universally demand individualism, rather than say "people of this group or ethnicity are not sufficiently individualistic!" and violate the very contract you are attempting to enshrine. (This is basically why rightism is, at heart, an immoral and often irrational, hypocritical, and incoherent ideology. Some of the more intellectual far-right strains are more rational but trade that for being far more immoral.)

There is no "contract" to "violate" if only one side ever accepted it. If I hire you to paint my house but you don't do it, I'm under no obligation to pay you.

This seems to be a well-known psychological bias. However most psychological biases have evolutionary benefits. Group differences do exists. If you import a lot of Central American natives you likely do get a permanent underclass. So stereotyping has very important macro implications.

Realizing this is why people become post-liberal and the libertarian to fascists pipeline.

You do not get a permanent underclass, you get a browner local working class, they intermarry with natives.

That’s the same thing, a new permanent underclass. And if tfr is constant between classes you’ve now increased your working class relative to other capabilities.

No? You have the same working class you’ve always had, except now they (pretend to)speak Spanish and have darker skin.

“A New permanent underclass”

Your response: No….speak Spanish and have darker skin.

Where are you disagreeing. That is a new larger working class with different demographics.

And polls show that there are certain characters that do matter. White working class vote GOP and broadly support Capitalism and Democracy. Brown working class polls have shown do not majority support these things.

But regardless even if you want to claim there is no difference (which is false) you have changed the population pyramid ratio of day laborers to engineers. Which matters.

And a further important point if you have a society where all the brown people clean houses and the white people are rich the brown people will end up viewing themselves as the lower class. White laborers will look at Elon Musks and believe their kids can be Elon Musks.

Depends on the welfare situation I think.

Centraco migrants, even legal ones, seem to prefer work to welfare- like other Hispanics in general.

That doesn’t mean they won’t take free stuff they’re eligible for. But these aren’t Somalis. They’re not ultra-clannish or opposed to work. Im continually baffled by thé attempts to portray Hispanic immigration as bad because they are lazy(in general, they are not) as opposed to because of the negative effects on wages, the breakdown of law and order, or because of the bad things that actually do go along with Hispanic social norms.

Someone's already linked to a Scott post on Weakmanning, but Scott also gives examples of this in Ethnic Tensions (search "mccain"). It's mostly about associating positive things with the ingroup and negative things with the outgroup.

Reading this immediately reminded me of the Goomba Fallacy, which is an example of the Association Fallacy that you're broadly speaking to. I'm not normally one to bandy around fallacies, but it fits here.

To discuss the rationality of it requires specific examples. In some cases, the association is utterly ridiculous, like in the Goomba Fallacy. Another example that comes to mind is the notion that people in "red states" or "blue states" ought to suffer or experience material consequences as penance for the sins of their political leaders. Wine moms in North Carolina should not be denied natural disaster relief as penance for their sin of voting for Trump, not to mention the countless Democrats living there. On the other hand, some associations are quite viscous and difficult to overlook. The common pop-feminist idea — I've been victimized by a man, therefore I should act aloof and oppositional toward most men — may legitimately have protective value. Sure, #notallmen, but I think a young woman keeping her distance from young men she hasn't personally vetted may be protective, even if it is irrational. And, of course, plenty of associations are pre-rational, made entirely on the basis of in-group identification or out-group animosity.

The question that remains for me is how to distinguish between counterproductive, over-fitted associations vs. ultimately helpful ones. I think perhaps the solution is trying not to rely on just one demographic variable. Instead of screening against "men" as a category, perhaps it's best to screen against men of certain backgrounds, men who appear impoverished, men who have drinking problems, etc. so the associations can get more granular and actionable.

I think there’s a few things going on here, some more justifiable than others. Sure pure collective guilt is wrong and pre-rational. But that’s not all that’s happening.

I don’t think it’s crazy to say that society leaned too hard into blank slatist atomic liberalism and that some updating back is actually very rational.

You’ve got a spectrum of what you’re describing that goes from “irrational guilt by association” to “observing stereotypes” to “actual acting in collective interest”.

If I blame all people who wear sneakers because I got assaulted by someone wearing sneakers, I’m acting irrationally. If I blame people who dress like homeless bums for drug needles on the streets, I’m generalizing a stereotype and acting semi rationally even if I end up placing blame on individuals who aren’t users. If I blame Democrats for the outcomes of a Democratic policy implementation. I’m acting rationally.

What we’re seeing is that a lot of things we wanted to be entirely in camp 1, turn out to belong in camp 2 and 3.

It’s not just actually racial stereotypes are true sometimes and you’re not a bad person for noticing and acting on probabilities. Because this, while rational, still does have the problem of assigning collective guilt in your frame which I agree isn’t right.

No it’s observing that actually a lot of affinity groups do act in group interest. We want things like race or place or origin or gender or religion to be neutral associations, but we do see that in some cases it is much more like “democrats” than “people wearing sneakers”. So when you have groups collectively acting in group interest, you can rationally and morally place group blame on them, while withholding individual judgement.

I am not saying I always agree with this but it’s not dismissable as “pre-rational”. Regardless of being factually or morally correct, it’s coherent to claim that say, X group seems to act in their groups self interest over their neighbors, and blame them for it, even while giving any 1:1 interaction with an Xian the benefit of being treated like an individual

Society needs to lean much harder into non-blank-slatist atomic liberalism. (i.e., Scott Alexander Thought)

Non blank slatist liberalism is extremely complex because you would essentially need different rules for different groups. Whose actually accomplish something like this? 1865-1960 Southern United States?

You do not actually have to do that at all.

Historically the US has had to do that when different races and cultures co-exists. After the Great Migration the cities that experience migration had to significantly increase their police forces to deal with crime.

There was that unrest in the UK after a Sikh man stabbed a guy to death

But that unrest had nothing to do with the proposition that Sikhs are all/mostly stabby.

The issue was that the police, who are ostensibly supposed to facilitate justice, handcuffed a dying man who'd just been stabbed. He told them he'd been stabbed, and they said: "don't think you have, mate".

The issue was that they allowed an innocent man to bleed out, while treating his killer as a victim, based on their race. This was not an isolated incident; this is in the context of the police systematically siding with people based on the colour of their skin, rather than whether they need immediate medical attention due to having been stabbed.

I appreciate that you're making a general point. But the specific examples need to support it. So this might go some way to dissolving how mysterious you find the phenomenon: sometimes, the thing you perceive as people blaming an entire group for individual actions isn't actually what's happening. It's a convenient cudgel for people to be able to dismiss the outrage over Henry Nowak's murder as "oh, that's just a bunch of racists who are blaming sikhs", but that doesn't make it true.

The issue was that the police, who are ostensibly supposed to facilitate justice, handcuffed a dying man who'd just been stabbed.

Four police officers were at the scene. "The police" is a group made up of people, and you are attributing the actions of those four people to the entire group.

I think you're right. If anyone is anti-group enough to argue against it, I'd like to hear why.

"The police" in that case as an organization has shown decades of conscious two-tiered policing letting things slide for fear of being called racist and/or corruption (the grooming gangs). The entire govt apparatus has been shown to disenfranchise its own population. So yes, "the police" is actually a better example because that is a coherent "community" with top down membership control.

This is my fault. I inadvertently conflated the Henry Nowak murder with a different stabbing that did lead to more general anti-migrant violence in Northern Ireland.

Pitbull Twitter. Which is its own issue as society has more pitbulls. But pit bulls do seem to statistically be much more likely to just randomly go on killing sprees. Personally I would rather just ban pitbulls from my neighborhood.

But I’ve always had an instinct that pitbull Twitter was a way to talk about race without using any human races. The idea being different human “breeds” have much different rates of doing antisocial things.

The problem with those statistics is they're compiled by accepting the identification made by people, like police officers and news reporters, who don't have any expertise in dog breeds. For most non-experts, any big dog that's not obviously a shepherd or rottweiler gets labelled "pit bull". Then a category that actually consists of a dozen breeds—plus mixes—gets compared with attacks made by single breeds. Of course they're going to have larger totals.

From: In Defense Of the Pit Bull (Salon; Feb. 5, 2013)

Karen Delise studied every fatal dog bite reported in the years between 2002-2005, and found that “eleven dogs involved in fatal attacks with no Pitbull characteristics were counted as Pitbulls, while their ‘true’ breeds were not reported, and three dogs that were clearly not Rottweilers were identified as Rottweilers.” That was among a total of 47 fatal attacks (by all breeds) reported during that period.

AFAIK pit bull data is based off of lots of different sources which mutually add up. Many of these sources, like animal shelter personnel or police officers, can be taken as better at identifying dog breeds than average. Even pit bull breeders seem to recommend that it isn’t for first time dog owners.

That doesn’t mean every pit bull everywhere is A Problem, because as you point out it’s a varied group. But it does gesture to an issue with the group as a whole.

Animal shelter personnel sure but there's no way am I buying that the average cop is better than average citizen at identifying dog breeds. When it comes to dog attacks, it's the police report that typically serves as the source of identification. Even if the animal survives to be taken to a shelter, the news isn't going to ask shelter workers what the dog's breed is. They're going to quote the police report.

Unfortunately, as far as I can see these activists are the ones actually doing the thing they claim the police is doing. There certainly will be always be a small number of misreports, especially due to unfamiliarity, but it's in practice quite easy even for a non-expert to recognize pit bulls. As breeds go, they have very obvious features, you really don't need to be an expert. Obligatory Cremieux post.

On the other hand, activists consciously and deliberately mislabel closely related breeds, strays and other mixes to "protect" pit bulls. I've seen more than a few articles where everyone is totally surprised by an attack coming out of nowhere from a "loving family dog", and if there is an image, every single fucking time it's an obvious pit bull mix.

The opening of Cremieux' blog comes right out and acknowledges that "pit bull...refers to a type of dog rather than a breed". It then goes on to list several different breeds that get lumped together under that heading and admits that additional breeds sometimes get tossed in as well. So, once again, if you compare "pit bull" attacks to German Shepherd attacks, you're comparing apples to oranges.

There is an old joke in anti-cop circles that certain words have an unusual technical meaning in police reports. On the list is "Pitbull": a small pale-coloured dog that barked at a cop and "Rottweiler": a large dark-coloured dog that barked at a cop.

A large part of what makes humans so successful is extrapolating or generalizing from very small amounts of data. Because the actions of an individual and of a group to which they belong may be correlated, I think that group identity => group agency => group responsibility is a pretty natural leap.

And it is true that groups often coordinate (I say this as an individualist). But I think it's more likely you will accurately describe a group as coordinating if it is small, and groups today are considerably larger than they have been historically.

It’s not treating strangers as individuals. Which is the psychological norm.

People think ‘Christians are bad, because some are homophobes’ or ‘Christians are good, because they run charitable endeavors’. In practice, neither of these people has met very many religious Christians.

I don't think these behaviors make sense when you model people as individuals who are trying to maximize fairness, but they do make sense when you think of people as members of groups that are in competition (whether they wish to be or not, we are all members of some recognizable group). Scott has a good post about these sorts of dynamics called Weak Men Are Superweapons.

I think most people exhibiting these behaviors (hypocrisy, unfairness) are using pre-rational heuristics, albeit heuristics that are rational when the goal is for you and your group to win.

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