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Show Chapter XI. Xenophobia and Moral Anomaly 416 agents from the moral community of such agents altogether. This is the attitude toward and treatment of others that defines xenophobia, and the treatment against which Chapter X's criteria of inclusiveness were proposed as an antidote. In this concluding chapter, I dissect in detail in what the disposition to xenophobia consists, in order to understand better how and why a practically inadequate moral theory can fail to satisfy these criteria of inclusiveness. This analysis does not purport to be exhaustive, or to supply necessary and sufficient conditions of practical inadequacy for any moral theory. But it does aim to systematize some of the more familiar and recognizable breaches of inclusiveness that give so much of our actual moral conduct its peculiarly clubby flavor. My approach assumes that the xenophobic response is an innate, hard-wired, inescapable part of our cognitive make up that we cannot eradicate; but also that it is possible to control it and guide its targets appropriately through social conditioning. I also assume that xenophobia is not best understood as a transaction between different groups, but rather as a transaction between individuals in interpersonal relationships. Indeed, the most pressing question a competent analysis of xenophobia must answer is how such abstractions as nation, race, ethnicity, or religion can turn neighbors, friends, couples, colleagues or co-workers into enemies virtually overnight; I address this question directly in Section 5, below. Thus individual transactions have important implications for different racial, ethnic, or social groups and the interactions among them. But on the proposed analysis, xenophobia initially and primarily occurs in transactions between individuals: partners or friends or relatives or co-workers or neighbors or fellow citizens. If we are to understand the behavior of larger groups, and of the official representatives or delegates of these groups, we need to understand these more elemental interactions first. So my analysis presupposes methodological individualism. In Chapter II I argued that our scope of judgment is confined to those properties and particulars that conform to pre-existing categories and concepts that structure not only our experience, but thereby our selves. I also argued that we are compelled either to conceptualize the objects of our experience in familiar terms, or else not to register them at all; and that this is a necessary condition of preserving the unity and internal coherence of the self against anomalous data that threaten it. Correspondingly, in Chapter VII I argued that resistance to integrating conceptual anomaly is a general feature of human intellection that attempts to satisfy the Kantian requirement of literal self-preservation described in Chapter V.2. I locate my analysis of xenophobia within this context. I invoke the proposed Kantian conception of the self to explain the phenomenon of xenophobia as fear of another who fails to satisfy our provincial preconceptions about bona fide persons; and xenophobia, in turn, to explain the phenomenon of political discrimination. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
