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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: neolib who wrote (96765)	1/25/2005 7:32:21 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793717

There is a reason, but you may be right its all environment. I'm not arguing that it's ALL environment. I don't know that. What I'm arguing is that the part that isn't environment is trivial in the grand scheme of things. There are myriad ways to slice up humanity. The major cuts we make are sex, age, and race. Fill out any form and it asks for sex, age, and race. Is race as a category really in a class with sex and age? I don't think so. I think there are scores of categorizations we can make that are at least as important as race. Yet we let it be one of our primary slices. Some even make it THE primary slice. It doesn't warrant that. And what would be the theoretical basis for this? The majority of people use the first part (all humans are identical) to stonewall the second part. I at least have a theoretical basis. I'm willing to extent moral treatment to distant genetic vectors. I'm willing to extend moral treatment to distant genetic vectors, too. There are plenty of spiders in residence in my residence. I let them be. My basis isn't theoretical so much as pragmatic. It seems to me that if you want people to feel kinship with spiders, n, you have to first get them to find kinship with a, b, c, d, e, f, etc. If you assign a, b, c, and d to other races of humans, you have to argue with people to get people past their sense of difference with other humans before you can engage them on chimpanzees, cows are a long way off, and spiders are off the charts. If, OTOH, you group all humans as a, with the implicit assumption that there are no material differences, then you can make chimpanzees b and get right at it. You say that if you lump all humans in a, then people stonewall? That seems counter-intuitive to me but you seem to have more experience than I do so maybe you can explain that. You continue to think that my seeing differences in humans is somehow an obstacle. It raises zero obstacles for my treatment of other humans. No, I don't imagine that your seeing difference between races affects your treatment of other humans. Anyone who feels kinship with a spider couldn't possibly let any perceived differences between races have a negative effect on his interpersonal relations. Where I see it as an obstacle is the message it sends to the community that is not so predisposed to be welcoming. If you assert differences, whether you intend to or not, you validate their sense of difference, which is not as benign as yours, and perpetuate something undesirable. If you can as easily in good conscience conclude that the differences are immaterial and unworthy of attention (which I assume you could do if you were so inclined given that the sports chestnut was the best you could come up with) then it seems to me that it is advantageous for you to do so.