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Notes -
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?
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.
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