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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 429 4. Test Case #4: Political Discrimination The three foregoing errors involve failures of cognitive discrimination for which a well-intentioned individual could correct. For example, someone who regularly confuses people with personhood might simply take a moment to formulate a general principle of rational behavior that both applies to all the instances with which she is familiar from her particular community, and also has broader application as well; and remind herself, when confronted by theoretically anomalous behavior, to at least try to detect the operation of that principle within it. Similarly, it does not require excessive humility on the part of a person who falsely assumes privileged access to the self to remind himself that our beliefs about our own motives, feelings, and actions are exceedingly fallible and regularly disconfirmed; and that it is therefore even more presumptuous to suppose any authority about someone else's. Nor is it psychologically impossible to gather information about others' interiority - through research, appreciation of the arts, or direct questioning and careful listening, so as to cultivate one's imaginative and empathic capacities to envision other minds. Thus it is possible for someone to have such xenophobic reactions without being a full-blown xenophobe, in the event that she views them as causes for concern rather than celebration. She may experience these cognitive failures without being a first-order political discriminator, in the event that she has no personal investment in the defective empirical conception of people that results; and is identifiable as a bona fide first-order political discriminator to the extent that she does. By political discrimination, I mean what we ordinarily understand by the term "discrimination" in political contexts: A manifest attitude in which a particular property of a person that is irrelevant to judgments of that person's intrinsic value or competence, for example his race, gender, class, sexual orientation, or religious or ethnic affiliation, is seen as a source of intrinsic disvalue or incompetence; in general, as a source of inferiority. Just as I restricted my analysis of an ideal descriptive moral theory to Theory K in Chapters V.5.1 - 2 and IX for reasons of simplicity and structure, here I restrict my analysis of political discrimination to consideration of intrinsic value or competence, for similar reasons. Thus I ignore considerations of instrumental value or competence in furthering some specified social or institutional policy, of the sort that would figure in arguments that would justify, for example, hiring someone as a role model in a classroom, or to provide a unique and needed perspective in a business venture or court of law; or, on the other hand, hiring someone to a professional position solely in order to meet affirmative action quotas; or refusing to sell real estate in a certain neighborhood to an African American family because doing so would lower property values; or refusing to serve Asians at one's family diner because it would be bad for business. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
