I fear our moral systems are too divergent for a profitable discussion on this topic; I cannot accept that cold-blooded murder can ever be other than wrong, but nor can I admit the argument that the murder of an innocent child is morally equivalent to the murder of a brutal rapist.
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Nor could I. But that is perhaps because I see the act of murder as being immoral no matter what the circumstances. Is one of those acts a more terrible act than the other? Yes of course. But is there a moral distinction? Not in my view since it is the act we must judge as immoral or moral and not the scope and both acts are immoral.
Now, if you ask if there is a moral distinction between killing a brutal rapist and letting them die, now that’s an example of a situation where moral distinction may come in to play. The end result is the same so there is no difference in effect. The only difference is in action. The former would be a participatory act which necessarily includes intention to harm. The later is a passive non-action with no clear sign of intent. Both situations leave you with a dead person who may have survived had you acted differently but only one of them involves an immoral act thus the moral distinction.
Ahh, I see the crux of it!
You define the morality of an act by the act itself, divorced from its effects, but I argue rather that an act is inseparable from its effects, as an act with no effects does neither harm nor good, and thus is absent moral weight.
Though I concur with you inasmuch as intent colours the morality of deed, and that to drop a brick on a man with the intent to kill him is thus morally worse than to accidentally knock a brick off a ledge and kill a man by accident, despite the outcomes being identical.
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Simply put, an act with no effect is not an act and cannot be judged for mortality due to its inexistence.
You are right in that I define morality based on act and not effect because the effect of the same action in different times or locations may have different effects. So, we are forced to divorce effect from our view of what it morally right and wrong and instead are only left able to deal with the act itself since we cannot pretend to know how that same act will affect the world depending on where and when it takes place.
This is why if you kill a person in self defense you are still brought up on charges and will at least have your case heard by a grand jury. Murder is always wrong. However, in some cases society will deem the murder to be justified but that does not make murder moral.
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It isn’t though, is it? And I figure you know every single thing I’m going to say, but for the benefit of an audience: It’s a definition of racism. It isn’t the only definition of racism unless you subscribe to a particularly rigid form of linguistic prescriptivism (in which case linguists will point and laugh).
What it is is a technical definition of racism used by a particular intellectual discipline which relies on it for precision. Which is nice, but a great majority of people who use the word don’t use it in this sense and citing dictionaries (who are, in the modern day and in English, pretty much purely descriptivist, and so a citation to a recent dictionary to prove that a certain word is used in a certain way is an entirely reasonable thing to do) shows this handily.
It’s rather like the people who get really upset when people use weight and mass interchangeably or when people use speed and velocity as synonyms. Alas, various academic disciplines don’t get to make everyone use terms in the exact technical sense they prefer. Unless you are in France, of course, in which case the Academy will try.
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This statement is an absurdity.
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The pedantry of whether or not stereotyping is racism can stop now, thank you. That’s not what this story is about, nor is it about any single poster.
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No, the inference you’re assuming. I’m not arguing they’re acting in bad faith - but we’d be silly to deny that such people do also exist in the tech industry. I’m saying that they’re simply blind to the privilege and inequality that they’ve built into the system, as they’ve not had to confront or consider such issues in their own lives.
Yes, that. It’s a common tech company problem. The default Silicon Valley belief is that tech (incl. algorithms) is “neutral” and “unbiased.” Though lately I’ve seen a number of Google and Facebook engineers beginning to realize the kinds of biases they’ve encoded in their systems, unwittingly, and they’re horrified, I’m also seeing Facebook and Google executives forcefully in denial about the biases built into their systems. They’ve spent a long time believing that if they were having any impact on the world, it was necessarily a good one; the reality is a bitter pill they’d rather not swallow.
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I don’t know if you’re just in desperate want of a clue, or if you’re actually that deliberately obtuse. But your interlocutors have gone above and beyond to explain to you the basics of background/ambient racism. And let’s be honest, if you’ve been online for more than a few months, you’ve seen those explanations before. We GET that you don’t agree with them. Point. Fucking. Made. But can you please stop pretending to argue in good faith when all you try to do is pretend ignorance? It’s not a good look for you and you’re clogging up the intertubes.
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yep.
this.
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So you think people’s behavior isn’t ever dictated by their social status in our society?
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That’s just funny, actually. It’s a funny word. Have you not seen this?
And history is apparently irrelevant.
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It’s not? Well, good thing you have a better definition than all those scholars who’ve worked on the problem. It might not be the ONLY definition of racism, but with regards to the problem at hand, structural racism IS the definition that we should attend to. Because more likely than not, the creators of that algorithm were not consciously trying to create something racist, but they indeed did.
And as for the lack of academics, it’s really funny that so many people here are more than happy to throw experts out the window when it’s anything but science. Academics studying people and our interactions with each others aren’t seen as people with knowledge about that, but as just people with “opinions.” And this is why we’re in the trouble we are today, because the pursuit of knowledge in the humanities isn’t seen as real knowledge production, backed by anything more than our apparent arrogance. It’s really sad to see how many people here have played literally into the right wing playbook on that shit.
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Nothing made by human hands is neutral. Period. Too many white people can’t grok that basic fact. But @orenwolf (dad) has said that we’re off-topic!
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I’m sure there is an algorithm involved – just a crappy, corner-cutting one.
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I do?
I don’t recall saying so, I must say.
The argument was whether saying nasty things about a white person and implying that those nasty things were a direct consequence of them being white was racist. Not about what the algorithm did. And in that respect the definition of racism is the argument. By the definition commonly used by the general public, yes. That is racist. Because it is prejudice based on race. By the definition used by academia it isn’t racist because power+prejudice &c &c. Hence my comment that simply asserting the academic definition as a universal counter-argument smacked of right-wing-ish prescriptivism.
That is, indeed, a tragic state of affairs. Where are these people?
Because, I assure you, I have not defenestrated anyone here. Indeed, I compared the phenomenon explicitly to people who insist on technical definitions for common terms in physics. I might’ve mentioned ‘chemicals’ which mean one thing in common usage and yet another when a chemist uses the term.
I fear you misapprehend my point, badly. My argument is not that this definition of racism as a wholly distinct concept to racial prejudice which academia introduced is bad. It’s, I am sure, incredibly useful for analysis. But, as any linguist will happily tell you, the meaning of a word (as distinct from a meaning of a technical term) is derived from its usage. Nobody else gets to override that, be the technical definition ever so useful, no matter how impeccable their academic credentials. It cuts both ways. One of the most cited psychologists in the world can jump up and down telling you that nonbinary pronouns don’t exist but… no. Clearly they do, if they are used. That’s what makes a word a word and imbues it with meaning.
And so it is with ‘racism’ which for a majority of the English corpus means ‘racial prejudice.’ And that means that’s what the primary meaning of the word is in most contexts. And so, pretending people are making a mistake when they describe a person of race X killing a person of race Y purely because they are race Y as racist no matter the values of X and Y, is ill-considered prescriptivism.
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Absolutely… and not just our social status, but our environment as a whole. I think our behaviour is mostly the result of our genetics and environment, past and present.
If we really want to change the world and influence bigots, we won’t do that by insulting them. That might make us feel better, but to them, it will only reinforce their attitudes. That woman uses homophobic language because she’s ignorant, not because she’s trying to be an evil person. Insulting her continues the cycle, surprising her with empathy is more likely to make her receptive to new information.
You don’t get to pick and choose.
But you’re right, Richard Spencer deserves every bit of respect as, say, John Lewis. /s
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I can’t begin to list them. But we can start with Fox News on the right and anti-vaxxers on the left. Anti-intellectualism has reached epic proportions.
you’re just saying that a random individual can define it just as well.
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