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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 SikhNorthern 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?
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.
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.
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