@Toothy_Maw @AmadeusD I’m intervening to end your dispute, which has become too hostile and destructive. Please stop posting in such an aggressive manner. I suggest you ignore each other if you are unable to treat each other with respect. NOTE: This is not up for discussion here, so do not reply to this. Thanks.
(I have deleted several posts)
Thank you, Jamal. Appreciate that.
Much of this relies on empirical claims I don’t agree with.
Besides that, I agree that there is always a disagreement about normative superiority - as, somewhat, there should be - and I also agree this is going to be somewhat secondary in terms of tangibility. But unfortunately, as far as I can tell, given I don’t accept the empirical claims, that puts an end to what we can say to one another.
In your deleted post you dismissed out of hand that white supremacy is at all extant and responsible for outcomes. While this indicates that we might disagree on the specifics of the outcomes we see as a result of grievance built on value-specificity, I think we can agree that my model at least addresses the problem I set out for it and that it is uniquely prepared to deal with factual, experiential claims. That is, it is inherently practical because the mechanic by which the theoretical apparatus is established depends entirely upon a very specific, practical measure associated with identity.
Do you at least think that such a thing could be used to guide us? Even if you have no confidence that white supremacy is even worth addressing?
So if I’m reading you correctly: Your end goal in positing value-specificity is to give you a means for judgment in order to build up particular groups of people. In particular your focus seems to be on racial difference, and a defense of utilizing different standards for different groups because of the particular context of said group.
Do we need a hierarchy of values or a double standard in order to address minority issues? Do we need a philosophical theory to dismiss white supremacist talking points?
My thought is that a standpoint is not a double standard; I’d hesitate to put it in those terms, at least, because rhetorically double-standards are bad, and I think standpoints are good with respect to social issues and social justice.
Material struggle with people in a similar circumstance.
Not necessarily. There are many kinds of justice: punitive, procedural, or distributional as some clearly different examples of justice.
I think that it’s an easy standard to apply which even if it did not result in perfect justice looks a lot better than what we have now, and is ostensibly universalizable regardless of one’s social identity. Here I’d note that racial segregation is largely enforced by property claims, for instance - - we have material measures we can point to which show that Black Americans have less wealth than white Americans, and we have some very good reasons to believe that this is because of the way our country has treated (in a way, created) Black lives in America as a separate experience from White America.
Also I can imagine, much like our current situation, even if everyone had an apartment and food, for instance, democracy could be overshadowed by large disparities in power resulting from wealth. So it’s even plausible that what I say is not enough to attain justice - - but it is a simply stated dream that most people can understand and would be better than what we have now.
I did not. I denied that it’s largely resosponsible or particularly widespread (particuLarly in contrast to other nefarious views). Perhaps you over read some of that, but the above is my position.
No, I don’t agree. I made comments explicitly to that effect in the longer post. It is in principle unjust imo
I think I need to describe the process of addressing grievances as altering outcomes for different groups dependent upon situational factors. What I propose in the OP would only include applying a different standard in select circumstances and only to correct for a more arbitrary and harmful sort of double standard. That is, when all or many of the valuations assigned to a group (almost certainly by those with power) that dictate a disparate and undesirable outcome for that group are shown to be either irrelevant or arbitrary in determining that outcome, trying to alter that outcome according to situational factors becomes justified. I don’t think that counts as a double standard across identities because those arbitrary and irrelevant qualities are almost certainly not part of any groups’ self-reported identities were they to be substituted for the underprivileged group. Thus, altering that outcome becomes justified largely independent of who is asking for it. As such, I believe it could be argued that there would be a net decrease in harmful double standards were my process to be adopted.
I had no end goal in positing value-specificity other than to address what looked like the underlying mechanic enabling the flaws in how I saw justice being applied. I ended up applying the model in the way I did because it seemed to support some of my assumptions about what would be fair given the existence of this mechanic. One important part of that is establishing a basis for combating the misvaluing of underprivileged groups of people by those groups with power.
Do we really need half of the philosophical theories we have?
Yes, I do think a philosophical theory and its systemic underpinning might be necessary if the impetus for justice for minorities and vulnerable groups becomes too distal to the main discourse - even if the discourse is itself largely composed of the sentiments of mostly well-intentioned but perhaps somewhat uncommitted people. That is, I’m just not sure if the relevant well-intentioned people will truly be invested in seeing it through. While it seems that progress is largely being made in the right direction, the decisions of the Trump administration and the efforts of actual ideological fascists seem to indicate that at the very least the otherwise upward curve is not actually monotonic; we can have major setbacks that are really difficult to recover from. In fact, I contend that there are slumps that we might never be able to overcome without the efforts of enough like-minded people, and when the people are absent, what remains? Whatever writings and ideas we can put together to inspire people. That’s pretty much it.
Furthermore, If I thought that many people were not already inclined to dismiss white supremacist claims on the grounds of them being obviously odious without philosophical examination, there wouldn’t be much reason to write about value-specificity as it kind of presupposes that people will be agreeable to addressing factors exasperating disparities between groups of people.
Fair enough.
I agree with all of that, I would just go further and say that what you describe is a minimum, or at least an intermediate step, not what our endpoint should be.
That sounds fruitful to me.
I agree.
Fair point.
I’m not grasping what you’re getting at with the idea, yet. I’m trying as best I can while also being critical.
The materialist in me thinks that you’re proposing something like an idealism, but of course we need standards of thought too.
I still worry about trying to isolate groups, though. It could become something “from the outside” rather than listening to people and learning what it is they have to say. Rather than an act of political listening we could invent standards which specify what is right, and insofar that a group does not meet that standard they are thereby wrong, by that “objective” measure.
I don’t think that value-specificity is somehow fundamental to reality or the reality of how justice is applied except insofar as it is a product of human behavior and psychology that can be abstracted enough for us to discuss. It is very much compatible with materialism. I myself am a materialist.
I get what you are saying, I think, but it only becomes something from the outside if we let it. The process I described in my previous post could easily go wrong, yes, but not so much on the grounds of what is objectively best being imposed if we orient the solutions towards achieving what underprivileged groups want for themselves. These measures would need to be robust, but I think it is doable.
Not to mention I don’t think one can extrapolate what is an objectively right course of action from a series of subjective (although experientially supported) grievances anyways, so trying to do that is on shaky ground from the start.
Isn’t justice ultimately whatever a society or intersubjective community holds as it works to reduce harm and treat people more fairly? Isn’t this always context dependent and reflective of values? Do we have access to justice as a pure idea?
What I’m saying when I say that justice is contextual is that there is no immutable universal standard by which we can judge everyone that is truly fair. This is because, as you might have read in the OP, we all have values attached to us that make that universal standard effectively give rise to disparate outcomes for different groups under that universal standard. That is, justice in the US is very much not oriented towards reducing harm and treating people more fairly but rather exploits value-specificity to reinforce privilege.
What I’m doing is contrasting universalized, static criteria of justice with a process that takes into account value-specificity. Your suggested version of justice is more in line with the latter and is not what the OP is intended to address so much.
Yep, that’s pretty much what I’m saying. Although I am not sure what “truly” adds to fair.
On what grounds is a static, universalized standard unfair? What underlying mechanics enable the continued existence of those standards? How do we move to a more contextual justice from what we have? The suggestion that justice is:
implies a greater project than just claiming that justice is the way you define it in your post. How and why does a particular model of justice reduce harm? What kind of values should inform the application of justice?
Justice is not as conceptually simplistic as you seem to treat it, and the conversation merely begins at the juncture you are at.
No worries. Thanks for the chat.
It occurred to me a while ago that the net effect of the application of value-specificity to practical matters including the bolstering of minorities and vulnerable groups would likely create (very?) different outcomes for those groups given there are cultural or other circumstantial factors that, to a large degree, affect what people want. This could come into conflict with many different views on human nature and psychology - such as that we all basically want the same things even when culture is factored in, we always act in our own favor, etc. It also seems counterintuitive that allowing differential treatment leads to greater equality in the application of justice.
However, I don’t think that the latter is too much of a problem, because if we lead by granting each group the benefits they claim to need to actualize their preferences, then we should end up in a system built on the realization of preferences of different groups to a similar extent. I think that is more desirable than existing in a perpetual state of needless inequity, and, while I wish we could just be entirely colorblind, I think it is clear that that approach doesn’t solve the problem. So, I would present value-specificity as one of the betters of the different paradigmatic approaches taken with regards to enacting justice insofar as it realizes people’s preferences along (group) lines that we cannot seem to escape.
To be clear: none of this is to say we need, or ought to, change the way many laws work based upon race, gender, socioeconomic status, etc. Furthermore, there are limited resources, so not everything can be done at the outset for minorities or vulnerable groups, but I think that there should be a sort of escape velocity at which point these groups will be uplifted enough that advocacy by them and solely on their own terms will be sufficient for realizing equity in the application of justice. I think that the effort and resources it would take to realize this would be quite manageable.
An interesting thing: one might argue that if we were to apply value-specific, corrective measures for long enough there should be some sort of conjunction at which point everyone achieves mostly what they want for themselves in terms of status - and if we all want the same things deep down, we should also eventually end up in a system in which everyone’s general preferences more closely align along the relevant group lines; my theory might just be a fancy way of arriving at a more uniform, meritocratic society given the valuations of individuals in groups evens out a good bit. So, it seems even this theory, partially intended to render grounds upon which to counter the idea that we already have a functioning meritocracy, could lead to something functionally more meritocratic than what we already have. This seems to indicate the robustness of meritocracy as an idea.
I do think such a state is desirable.
How much interest do you currently have in unraveling this?
It’s an interesting topic.
Justice is relative to a given ethical framework. The underlying problem is that there seems to be a myriad of ethical frameworks being applied in the US alone for example. Therein lies the complexity which you observe.
Note: Haven’t read through the thread. Just the OP and your last post.
Quite a bit, actually. If you have some thoughts on the OP and such, please share them.
For sure. But at the same time what might be claimed to be justice could be just laundered bigotry and attempts at exacerbating existing inequities due to in-group bias or whatever. In such cases we can dispense with the relevant claims and structures reinforcing that “justice” probably without positing fundamentally new or unique ethical frameworks to fill the void - although some theory would still need to help create the basis for the application and/or extension of such frameworks (preference-based value specificity?). Thus, the complexity of the task I suggest isn’t quite as insurmountable as it might appear.
It is like knowing one is dealing with a (probably) solvable puzzle and is aware of the pieces - along with a vague idea of the solution - as opposed to only knowing that one could be dealing with a solvable puzzle and its potential pieces.
The bigots have their own frameworks. They are part of the myriad. That is the underlying problem.
To remove the complexity they need to be distilled down to one. To do that the essence of morality needs to be understood. There is a core common to the frameworks that are at least reasonably sound. Therein lies the key to understanding the essence.
Selectively addressing individual groups’ grievances in many cases may only lead to further contradictions when other groups’ grievances are not also equally addressed.
To use an example from a thread I started recently, consider women’s grievances and the example of Sheryl Sandberg versus a poor Black man. If you address women’s grievances and do not equally address Black people’s grievances or poor people’s grievances you will be helping Sheryl Sandberg, who frankly does not need helping, while only increasing the disparity between people like Sheryl Sandberg and poor Black people.
A common theme along these lines, to go further, is that common belief systems centered around groups’ grievances frequently actually have only a privileged subset of a given group in mind. For instance, feminism frequently is really a bourgeois White women’s ideology. Likewise, anti-racism frequently is with Black men in mind. Implementing the according visions of ‘liberation’ is only to help some within these groups. This is why ideas like Black and Chicana feminism and, to go further, intersectionality have arisen.
To go back to what was being discussed earlier in the thread (which I honestly have skimmed), if we do not consider the grievances of poor people as being equal to the grievances of particular other identitarian groups, by helping those other identitarian groups we will only be leaving poor people behind.
What kind of liberation is it when rich women, Black people, queer people, trans people, etc. get to be ‘equal’ and people who were poor remain with their lot? Obviously in reality most women, Black people, queer people, trans people, etc. are not rich, but bourgeois feminists and anti-racists frequently overlook this.