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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 423 provincial self-conception and conception of the world, from which significant available data are excluded. Thus violating inclusiveness reduces the scope of application of one's moral theory to the severely provincial. For its terms pick out only a small subset of the agents to whom in fact the theory applies. This provincial theory is then sustained with the aid of denial, by enforcing those stereotypes through such tactics as exclusion, ostracism, scapegoating, tribalism, and segregation in housing, education or employment. My thesis is that xenophobia is the originating phenomenon to which each of these forms of political discrimination is a response. The need for criteria of inclusiveness for a practically adequate moral theory arises from the operations of these pseudorational mechanisms in the non-ideal social context. Nevertheless, even if it is true that we are innately cognitively disposed to respond to any conceptual and experiential anomaly in this way, it does not follow that our necessarily limited empirical conception of people must be so limited and provincial as to invite it. A person could be so cosmopolitan and intimately familiar with the full range of human variety that only The Alien would rattle him. On the other hand, his empirical conception of people might be so limited that any variation in race, nationality, gender, sexual preference, or class would be cause for panic. How easily one's empirical conception of people is violated is one index of the scope of one's xenophobia; how central and pervasive it is in one's personality is another. In what follows I focus primarily on cases of political discrimination midpoint between such extremes: for example, of a European American who is thoughtful, wellrounded and well-read about the problems of racism in the United States, but who nevertheless feels fearful at being alone in the house with an African American television repairman. In all such cases, the range of individuals in fact identifiable as persons is larger than the range of individuals to whom one's empirical conception of people apply. In all such cases political discrimination can be understood in terms of certain corrigible cognitive errors that characterize prereflective xenophobia. 3. Failures of Cognitive Discrimination By cognitive discrimination, I mean what we ordinarily understand by the term "discrimination" in cognitive contexts: A manifest capacity to distinguish veridically between one property and another, and to respond appropriately to each. When we say of someone that she is a discriminating person, for example, or that she has discriminating judgment, we mean, in part, that she is a person of refined tastes or subtle convictions; that she exercises a capacity to make fine distinctions between properties of a thing, and bases her positive or negative valuations on these actual properties. By contrast, when we say of a person that he lacks discrimination, we mean that he is unable to discern subtle differences or make fine distinctions; that he conflates properties or © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
