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Show Chapter X. The Criterion of Inclusiveness 408 of segregation is insensitive to issues of racial equity, must then battle the skepticism and resistance of regulatory agencies staffed primarily by European Americans who, also socialized in segregated environments, are equally insensitive to issues of racial equity. Or a homosexual who suffers harassment at the hands of delinquent teenagers must battle the skepticism and resistance of a largely heterosexual public. (3) protects the moral significance of the victim's special insight into injustice even when (or particularly when) the preponderance of social practices and the weight of collective skepticism are allied against her. These two devaluations - of a victim's pain and of a victim's insight into the transgressor - are not unrelated. When an agent commits a moral transgression from a position of credibility and authority, part of what constitutes that position of power surely must be empowerment, in the form of the presumption of moral rectitude, by the same community that confers legitimacy and status on that agent in the first place. So it is unsurprising that members of that community might be reluctant to withdraw that presumption by giving a privileged place to accusations which, if well-founded, would have precisely that consequence; and unsurprising that it might deny equal empowerment, legitimacy and status to the accuser. Moreover, we have seen in the preceding chapter that preserving one's view of an acquaintance or colleague as a paragon of moral rectitude is a natural expression of a more general form of pseudorationality. Vigilant self-defense is needed against the loss of moral innocence threatened by the clear and unvarnished presence of moral corruption, for it sullies those who witness it. The attraction of denying, dissociating, or rationalizing away the bad news that the victim has to disseminate is evident. Thus (3) is needed in order to balance a natural tendency to assume that tempting viewpoint on the moral interpretation of action discussed in Volume I, Chapter XII, namely the viewpoint of the cognoscenti of one's favored moral theory. This is that self-defined subgroup that not only knows and avows the theory in question, but also implicitly regards itself and its members as embodying the theory's ideal of moral rectitude. Although virtually any moral theory may generate a cognoscenti among its proponents - the Bloomsbury devotees of Moore's Ideal Utilitarianism being a particularly obnoxious example of this, some moral theories are more susceptible to this form of corruption than others. Moral theories that stipulate as a condition of moral knowledge a special faculty or insight that not all members of the moral community can have are particularly vulnerable to this form of abuse, because they implicitly arrogate possession of the special quality to the moral theorist; and invite the inference that one's special faculty or insight sanctify one's behavior as morally acceptable even if it diverges sharply and noticeably from the plebian, Golden Rule brand of moral conduct by which most of us feel obligated. These cognoscenti moral theories that stipulate an esoteric inner circle possessing special moral wisdom that ordinary moral agents lack, and by © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
