Do tell (#60). If I broken a rule by offering a relevant link to a non-profit Website, I am certainly willing to be corrected.
Kant is obsolete.
The scientific knowledge we have acquired in the past 100 years have pushed wasteful mental meanderings of past centuries’ philosophers to the margins of history. They may be interesting for sociological study, but not a philosophical one.
The ancient Greek philosophers are excluded from obsolescence, of course.
Everyone else is obsolete, unless they have addressed current cosmological scientific facts, and the universal truth that human beings are irrelevant to the universe.
I might have something to say about that.
It’s your site, isn’t it? We ask that you not use the SDMB just to steer web traffic your way.
You may, but it’s irrelevant.
(#64) Indeed it is my site. I stand corrected, thank you. For the record, I didn’t post “just” to steer traffic. God knows what a terrible thing that would be. Kant too.
I’m just explaining what the rule is for future reference. Your post was on topic and that’s welcome.
For reasons that have been pretty thoroughly covered by now, what she is saying does not in any way contradict the position that Western knowledge is careful inspection, etc. Nor have any relevance to it. for that matter.
Yes
Well, yes, he does. Hume wasn’t a world traveller either. Kant taking Hume at his word is a sign of intellectually laziness and probably his inherent privilege, not because he has gone into a rigorous investigation into the matter.
But that’s irrelevant, anyway - even assuming Hume was right and Africans completely lacked any art (which is just a Scotsman argument, anyway, since Kant goes on to mention fetishes etc. which are clearly works of art, so it’s down to “what is superior art”, which no philosopher worth his sponge should be touching, IMO), that does not mean a conclusion that Africans are inferior* in every way* is supported. But that’s what Kant goes on to do.
A less intellectually-lazy philosopher might ask the hard questions like “y’know, why am I assuming that just “freeing” this heavily-traumatized and culturally-raped individual tells me anything about what he would be capable of as a human being if he had been nurtured from the start” and “is it *possible *that the colonist’s viewpoint on what the colonized are like may just be a little biased?” and “I wonder if I need to get some perspective from a representative of the race in question, and maybe I should just shut my fucking trap until then?”
But that requires the Other to start speaking for*themselves* and turn philosopher.
Or, in other words, to summarise: “Check your privilege” should not be something a leading philosopher *needs *to be told, ever.
Well - do you rely on first-hand accounts by Australians, or Crocodile Dundee, Mad Max and Home and Away and Neighbours? Because that’s the level that Kant is at.
The same way we do - principle of reciprocity and all that. “judge not lest ye be judged” could apply, too. “Assume nothing I’ve been told is true” is also a good principle
immoral =/= evil. IMO, it is immoral to spout off about something you don’t know the truth about. It’s* not* evil, but it is small-minded and can have evil consequences, should someone else take your words as truth. So there *is *a moral responsibility to not just mouth off uninformed.
As to the opinion that one race is inferior - sorry, no, evil from the get-go. The evils being those of “hasty reductionism” and “failing to do your research properly”. They’re small evils, really, compared to the “applied evils” of pogrom and colonialism, but they’re not “good” for all that.
And you have to be one or the other.
That’s pretty much the standard I hold dopers to.
It would certainly be wrong of me, today, to rely on Crocodile Dundee as an anthropological account of Australians.
But then, today I have much, much better sources of information on Australia than that. Relying on a comedy-adventure movie would be inexcusable.
Things were, however, somewhat different in the mid-18th century. The only accounts of Africa were likely to be those brought back by slavers and the like - this was before the Euro age of African exploration. Sub-saharan Africa was, for information purposes, as remote from Koningsburg as the moon - the average German person whould have had close to zero chance for ever going there and seeing for themselves. There were no objective, scientific anthropological studies of Africans because the very notion of applying objective scientific analysis to humanity had yet to be invented - all that existed was traveller’s tales, and most of those “travellers” from europe were involved in the slave trade - and thus, quite aside from their natural tendency to view other peoples with different ways of life as “inferior”, they had a vested interest in making their dispicable livelihood more palatable by depicting Africans as brutish sub-humans (thus enslaving them not a crime).
In sum, what would be unforgivable for people to believe today, is much more understandable in people at that time. Even giants of scientific thought like Sir Issac Newton believed in stuff like alchemy - that doesn’t make his work in mathematics and physics worthless, because he must have been a credulous fool to believe in something so obviously silly as alchemy, though any scientist today doing major work in alchemical studies would be considered a nutter.
Well, no, he’s quoting Hume in saying that. I don’t think any of it is Kant’s conclusion. He’s just citing Hume. And since Hume is one of the preeminent thinkers of the day, Kant is just relying on his expertise. This is what Hume said:
I think it came down, for Hume, to a simple thing, even though he never actually states it. If blacks were capable of independent thought; if they could actually be raised to a level of mental, civilizational and moral equality with the white man, then racial slavery would be an unthinkable moral evil; a transgression against humanity of such magnitude almost unheard of in human history. Since the British, and French, and Spanish were not so tremendously wicked, then blacks couldn’t become equal to whites. For him, it’s simple logic: “If X is immoral, and I do X, then I’m acting immorally. Since I do X and I’m not acting immorally, then X isn’t immoral.”
:rolleyes: It cannot be evil, because it could be true. It is not logically impossible that different racial groups of Homo sapiens should have different hereditary psychological characteristics, including differences in average intelligence levels. If scientific research actually supported that, there would be no virtue in ignoring it and no evil in accepting it. There might be much evil in how people act inspired by that knowledge – just because A is more intelligent or whatever than B does not mean B has no rights A is bound to respect, but A might well read it that way – but, that really, really is another discussion.
If so, then that is a quite astonishingly unnoticed subconscious rationalization coming from the skeptic Hume, of all philosophers!
Depending on what standard of ‘knowing the truth’ one uses, a moral person might be a very silent person…
I think one should be careful in delineating what one means by ‘inferiority’, i.e. if it’s a judgement of value, or merely a judgement of capacity. Somebody might be less intelligent than another person, and thus, of inferior capacity; but that does not mean that they are of less value (I’m not saying that you implied that it did, but I think it’s an issue of confusion on this point). Calling that person ‘inferior’ is thus susceptible to (mis-)interpretation.
On this issue, I would say that considering an individual, racial or ethnic group inferior in the value-judgement sense is in principle wrong, but considering them inferior in capacity is something in principle to be decided empirically. The question remains, however, what sense Kant was using…
This is probably the first time I’ve really agreed with you outside of Cafe Society.
Different =/= inferior.