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Show Chapter XI. Xenophobia and Moral Anomaly 426 to judgments of that person's intrinsic value or competence - for example her race, gender, class, sexual orientation, or religious or ethnic affiliation. Conversely, I call any such arbitrary property perceived as a source of value or superiority a primary valued property. Or take another example, in which the verbal convention in my subculture is to disclose pain and offer solace, whereas in yours it is to suppress pain and advert to impersonal topics; and that our only interpersonal contact occurs when I come to work as your housemaid.3 Again each of us perceives the other as deficient in some characteristic of rationality: You perceive me as dull and phlegmatic in my lack of responsiveness to the impersonal topics you raise for discussion, whereas I perceive you as almost schizophrenically dissociated from the painful realities that confront us. Again, unless this perceived deficit is corrected by further contact and fuller information, each of us will perceive the other as less of a person because of it, thereby contributing to one-dimensional stereotypes of, for example, African Americans as stupid and of European Americans as ignorant and out of touch with reality; or of men as alienated and women as "in touch with their feelings," that similarly poison both the expectations and the behavior of each toward the other. These are some further ways in which race or gender become primary disvalued properties. In such cases there are multiple sources of empirical error. The first one is our respective failures to discriminate cognitively between the possession of rationality as an active capacity in general, and particular empirical uses or instantiations of it under a given set of circumstances and for a given set of ends. Because your particular behavior and ends strike me as irrational, I surmise that you must be irrational. Here the error consists in equating the particular set of empirical behaviors and ends with which I am familiar from my own and similar cases with unified rational agency in general. It is as though I assume that the only rational agents there are are the particular people I identify as such. Kant might put the point by saying that each of us has conflated his empirically limited conception of people with the transcendent concept of personhood. 3.2. The Error of Assuming Privileged Access to the Self But now suppose we each recognize at least the intentionality of the other's behavior, if not its rationality. Since each of us equates rational agency in general exclusively with the motives and actions of her own subculture in particular, each also believes that the motives and ends that guide the other's actions - and therefore the evidence of conformity to the rule and order of rationality - nevertheless remain inaccessible in a way we each believe our 3 Here see Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression (New York: Scribner, 1997). © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
