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Show Chapter XI. Xenophobia and Moral Anomaly 456 substance-property relational category. Since my transcendental concept of personhood is not equivalent to the transcendental concept of a thing or substance in general, my failure to recognize the other's personhood does not imply a failure to recognize her as an object with properties altogether. I may recognize another who is anomalous with respect to my concept of personhood as consistent with my concept of objects in general. However, if the other must conform to my limited conception of people in order to conform to my concept of personhood - i. e. if something is a person for me if and only if it falls under my empirical conception of people, but does not, then from my perspective, an object is all that she can ever be. In this case, my xenophobia in general and political discrimination more specifically is a hardwired cognitive disposition that is impervious to empirical modification. But suppose instead that the higher-order discriminator's cognitive malfunctions are better described by (B). (B) identifies the case in which an otherwise unfamiliar object - in this case, an anomalous subject - is subsumed under the highest-order concept of the self-consciousness property, i.e. as an experience she has, even if there are few lower-order concepts in her empirical arsenal that would render it familiar to her. So (B) describes a xenophobe whose cognitive condition satisfies vertical consistency to some degree. (B) leaves open the possibility that a person might have an empirically limited conception of people yet fail to be a xenophobe, just in case she acknowledges as a matter of principle that there must be other ways to do things and other ways to live besides those with which she is familiar; and just in case she is able to put this principle into practice when confronted by some of them. This is the case described in Section 4 and 4.1, of the individual who commits cognitive errors 3.1 - 3.3, but has no personal investment in the defective empirical conception that results. (B) thus leaves open the possibility that one could be a xenophobe in the sense discussed in Section 4 and 4.1, yet be corrigible in one's xenophobia. For (B) acknowledges the possibility that even though the xenophobe equates her limited conception of people with her transcendental concept of personhood, someone might conform to her transcendental concept of personhood without conforming to her empirical conception of people. That is, in this case it is cognitively possible to introduce into her range of conscious experience a new object the behavior of which satisfies the rule and order of rationality, even though it fails to satisfy her honorific stereotype of personhood. And it is possible for her to recognize in this conceptually anomalous behavior the rule and order of rationality, and so the personhood of another who nevertheless violates that honorific stereotype. Since recognition of the existence of such a theoretical anomaly constitutes a counterexample to her honorific stereotype of personhood, the xenophobe has two options, according to (B). Either she may, through the mechanisms of pseudorationality, seek some strategy for explaining this © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
