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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?
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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