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Show Chapter XI. Xenophobia and Moral Anomaly 436 to an outstanding degree. The thesis that women make better friends is often supported by arguments to the effect that they become closer confidantes more quickly. But there are many other properties that contribute to friendship - trustworthiness, loyalty, dependability, honesty, mutual respect, etc. - that such arguments ignore. Epistemic probability judgments about the concatenation of any such primary valued properties with genuinely valuable traits, such as sensitivity or similarity of interests, also may bias our ability to perceive clearly the properties a particular individual actually has - as when a wife minimizes the reality and seriousness of her husband's physical abuse of her, because of the weight she accords his class background. This would be a case of reciprocal first-order discrimination, according to the above definition, because she sees a primary valued property - class background - that is irrelevant to judgments of the valuee's noninstrumental value or competence as a spouse as a (compensating) source of superiority. It might be objected that such epistemic rules of thumb are inductive generalizations, however irrational or poorly grounded, that we need in order to survive in a world of morally opaque others: How ought one behave, for example, alone in a subway car with four hooded African American male teenagers carrying ghetto blasters and wearing running shoes? However, even if it were true that most muggers were hooded African American male teenagers in running shoes, it still would not follow that most hooded African American male teenagers in running shoes were muggers. This epistemic rule of thumb is a stereotype, not an inductive generalization, if it leads one to react to every hooded African American male teenager in running shoes one encounters as though he were a mugger when there is no independent justification for thinking he is. Alternately, one may make a judgment of value about some such property abstractly and independently considered. One may value being African American, or Irish American, or of working class origins, for its own sake. Or one may choose a partner from the same religion because one views that religion and its traditions themselves as intrinsically valuable, independently of one's partner's compatibility with respect to lifestyle, values, or worldview. Here the judgment of value is directed not at the valuee's value or competence, but rather at the property she bears and to the preservation or affirmation of which one's choice of her is instrumental. Nothing in the following discussion addresses or precludes such judgments, although there is much to say about them. My target is judgments of noninstrumental value about individuals, not about properties of individuals abstractly and independently considered, to which individuals themselves are instrumental. Is it humanly possible to value a person just and only because he bears some such primary valued property - not because of the further properties with which we expect that one to be conjoined, but just for the sake of that property in itself? It is difficult to make sense of this. Suppose I value © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
