No it’s not. Your inability to recognize this indicates your moral system is profoundly defective.
The social compact requires you to help a slave just as much as to help someone else who truly needs help.
Claims of all types about correlations between innate behavioral traits (personality characteristics, intelligence etc.) and skin color are both false and racist, because they are falsehoods that originated and were promulgated within a racist culture. I’m not sure where this myth about innate swimming ability originated - are you saying it’s racist (rather than just false) for similar reasons? Obviously there are some real innate physical differences that do correlate with skin color, so all claims about physical traits are not necessarily racist.
This is a factual claim - thus debatable and not subject to moderation under the new guidelines.
~Max
Ok. So the social contract between the slave and the Antebellum South, or the Jewish person and Nazi Germany, falls apart when the government strips them of their rights.
Now, that “First they came” poem is almost cliched at this point, but it certainly applies.
When I see my state break its social contract with downtrodden minorities, my reaction isn’t “well, at least they’re not coming for me”. A state that mistreats one group will mistreat them all.
Even if that WAS NOT the case, I don’t want to live in a state where there are second class citizens. It’s morally wrong, and it’s a recipe for disaster. The social contract that I made with my state is that it treats ALL people equally. If it fails to protect people who are not me, it is STILL in breach of this contract.
If we all stand by and allow the state to mistreat the weak, it will do so. Maybe that is the sort of state that some people want to live in, so long as this mistreatment is in their favor; I am not one of them.
My mom was under the belief that Black people can’t float. We both said that was crazy, humans float, and Black people are humans. If a person has a very low body fat percentage, they might not be able to float by lying still (I had that problem when younger, my legs would sink no matter what which would frustrate my swimming instructors). But obviously you can’t say that there are no overweight Black people. It was just wacky.
Yes, it’s true that there are some things based on genetics that differ based on heredity. Black people are prone to Sickle Cell Anemia. People of European heritage are more likely to be tolerant of lactose as adults. But something like “not being able to float” goes against common sense; buoyancy is a matter of physics.
Not all “factual claims” are equal.
As I’ve said in the post preceding yours, this claim about swimming may be racist, if it’s a well known falsehood that originated within and is associated with a racist culture.
Whereas some factual claims about physical characterstics that are correlated with skin color or ethnicity do not carry this baggage, such as the incidence of the sickle cell trait, or why East Africans are overrepresented among distance runners.
Max, if everyone were like you during the time of slavery, few or zero slaves would have successfully escaped, because no one would have helped them and many would have turned them in. Do you believe that would have been a better and more moral outcome than what actually happened in history (i.e. Many slaves escaped due to assistance from abolitionists and others)?
If not, then you already recognize that your moral system is unacceptable to some degree.
This is the vibe I get from Max’s philosphy:
With the added step that everyone needs to formally agree on it by passing a law.
Add “due to no fault of their own”, and I agree. But the way I see it my remedies are to either work within the system for change or to leave it entirely. I don’t think it’s right to reap the benefits of being a first class citizen while breaking my obligations as a citizen.
~Max
So George Washington and his ilk were deeply immoral terrorists who should have been hung by His Majesty, King George III?
Being compared to Belkar is not a good thing.
Now I’m expecting this comment:
This is a broken moral doctrine. It implies that you have no capacity for moral reasoning of your own.
You can fix it be recognizing a hierarchy of “wrong”.
In a very simple example, it’s wrong to run a red light. But it’s more wrong to allow a person to die when you could save them. So if you find yourself driving to bring a person bleeding to death to a place where they can be treated, and you come to a red light – I believe that you should treat it as a stop sign, and not as a red light. Check for oncoming traffic and continue on your way as soon as it’s safe to do so. Don’t just sit there and wait for the light to change. EVEN THOUGH THAT’S ILLEGAL.
When I say “should”, I am almost always making a moral, not a legal, statement. If I believe the legal action and the moral action conflict, I will generally try to disambiguate, but I would never say you should do the legal thing when it is immoral.
They declared independence - they left the compact wholesale. If the rebels had been quashed they probably would have been hung.
~Max
Gonna answer this question? Pitting Max_S - #427 by iiandyiiii
Not only that, but if morality derives infallibly from the law, how is it logically possible for a legislature to incorporate moral principles into the laws that they pass?
Blow jobs were once illegal. Just saying
I do recognize a hierarchy of morality. In the traffic scenario I’m comfortable treating the light as a stop sign. And in the runaway slave scenario, if circumstances make it safe to do so, I would let the fugitive go rather than turn him in.
~Max
Atamasama, I thought your post contrasting people like your mother with people like her ex-boyfriend — and how this relates to the Dope — a helpful summation.
So, you recognize that saving a life is more important than a street light. But not that saving a life is more important than the property rights of a slave owner to his slave? Really?
Thank you. I was just trying to explain to Max why we can’t just say whether racist comments are hate speech or not. They aren’t always hate speech and shouldn’t all be bannable. But there is a lot of nuance, and it’s something that the community needs to be careful with. I think being able to talk about racial issues is important but we can’t be too lax about letting people say what they want, or it makes this place toxic to minorities.
It’s like being in a wilderness survival class, and demanding, “Just tell me if it’s okay to eat berries that I can find out in the woods!!!”
Maybe it’s easier just to say, “It’s not okay for you to do it.”