debitage

18.1.08

"Gay" And "Aborigine" Are Not Mutually Exclusive

One more post before I go to bed. I was struck by this little discussion of intersectionality making it into the Sydney Morning Herald, in a story about efforts by Sydney's (white) gay community to organize a rally against recent gay-bashings, whose perpetrators have been described by police as Aboriginal:

Chris Lawrence, an Aboriginal Redfern resident who is gay, said the posters depicted "a sea of white gay men". He said coverage of gay bashings by a local gay and lesbian newspaper, the Sydney Star Observer, risked inspiring a racist backlash.

"Our concern is that the paper is beating the story up in a racial way and it risks reprisals against Aboriginal people who are homeless and frequent Oxford Street," he said. Mr Lawrence said he had never been abused for his sexuality in 16 years in Redfern. "The only abuse I've had is [for being Aboriginal] from a few white gay guys."

Labels: Australia, LGBT, race

Stentor Danielson, 23:44, |

Huckabee Learns A Fact

I miss the old Mike Huckabee. Back when he was hopelessly languishing at 2% of the polls, he had the freedom to occasionally say something sensible -- like that immigrants are not, in fact, the devil incarnate. But now that it looks like he has a realistic shot at the nomination, he feels like he has to pander to the nativists. His latest salvo is a plan to completely cut off all immigration from countries that harbor terrorists. Perhaps Huckabee would like to go personally tell the Christian refugees from the Middle East that they have to go home, because the same Islamist policies that lead to oppressing the Christian minority also lead to getting in bed with terrorist groups.

I do, however, have to give him a bit of credit. In his first flailing attempt at establishing his nativist cred, Huckabee tried to justify his position with a delusion about a wave of fictional Pakistani undocumented immigrants. But this time around, he's pointing out that all of the 9/11 hijackers entered the country legally (hence, by his logic, the need to cut off all immigration from certain countries). This is not just an actual fact, but a fact that many Americans are either unaware of or ignore. (Perhaps he's raised enough money now that he can afford to hire people to brief him on issues.)

Labels: elections, immigration

Stentor Danielson, 23:37, |

Immigration: A Triangular Affair

(With apologies to J. Baird Callicott*.)

It's easy to slip into thinking of the U.S. immigration debate as a two-sided one, with anti-migrant forces lined up against pro-migrant ones. But I think there are really three positions: nativism, business pro-migration, and progressive pro-migrant. The latter two groups, are both "pro-immigrant" in the limited sense that they want the U.S. to let in lots of immigrants and dislike punitive measures toward those who are here without status under the current regime. But once you get beyond the front lines of the battle with the nativists, the coalition between the business and progressive positions unravels quickly.

To understand the difference between the two views too often lumped together as pro-immigrant, take the following two quotes. The first is a comment left on an editorial in The Oklahoman, and quoted (with tacit approval) by Marisa Treviño:

I live here in Arizona where the infamous sheriff of Maricopa county has the" Immigration Fever" and his politics is beginning to hurt in the county pocketbook.

The illegals that were trying to get a work release and come here to work in the low paying sector has been run away. Now the Unions are sending people in to get these jobs, but they want two thirds of a higher salary. Maricopa county is now in financial trouble.

This is a common argument in favor of immigration. But it's a business-type argument that should be anathema to progressives. It boils down to "immigration is good, because immigrants work for cheap and we can exploit them." This kind of argument may make short-term gains in staving off "deport them all and build a wall" policies. But it perpetuates the destructive dynamic of pitting native and immigrant workers against each other.

Now consider this encouraging story, linked by brownfemipower, about efforts by New York carpentry unions to organize immigrant workers:

While the Carpenters union has struggled to organize immigrant workers, union members supported the walk out. "Part of what you need to do to organize non-union workers is to organize your own workers to support the campaign," said Andres Puerta, who's been organizing immigrant workers for the UBC. "Carpenters in New York are aggressive, proud union members and part of that identity is that they support these campaigns."

This approach is not going to help Maricopa County fix its immediate fiscal crisis, since it would lead to immigrants working for the same union wages as citizens (though the roots of the budget woes in Maricopa -- and other Arizona counties, and the state -- go far deeper than Sheriff Joe running immigrants out of town). But it's an approach that integrates support for migrants as people (as opposed to immigration as a phenomenon) with the rest of the progressive agenda.

*Callicott is an environmental philosopher who wrote a famous article "Animal liberation: a triangular affair," which argued that, contrary to the conventional wisdom that the environmental debate is a matter of anthropocentrists versus non-anthropocentrists, there are actually three positions -- anthropocentrism, animal liberation, and ecocentrism. Ecocentrists like Callicott have nearly as much to complain about against the animal liberation view as they do against anthropocentrism.

Labels: immigration, labor

Stentor Danielson, 22:42, |

Utilitarians And Brain Damage

Going through some old blog carnivals, I came across a post by Wesley Buckwalter provocatively titled "Are Utilitarians Brain-Damaged?" The post describes an interesting experiment* in which normal people and people with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (known to play an important role in emotion) in their brain were both asked to evaluate various moral dilemmas. Both groups tended to make utilitarian judgments about moral dilemmas that were impersonal (involving strangers and actions separated from the decider by some chain of cause-and-effect). But when faced with personal moral dilemmas (which required direct actions on known individuals), only the brain-damaged people continued to make utilitarian judgments. (Note that in studies like these, there is typically a good amount of variability between people -- so there were probably plenty of "normal" people who made utilitarian judgments in all cases.)

This study confirms some interesting things about how our brains work. But I'm not sure it says as much about how we should make moral judgments as Buckwalter suggests. He concludes his post:

If it is true that we have experimental proof that in certain circumstances intuitions and emotions are necessary to bring about normal moral judgments, what are the implications for popular consequentialist theories, which, it could be argued, sometimes rely on the absence of emotion in the decision making process? Further, if it is the case that a particular part of the pre-frontal cortex is responsible for the emotions that in some cases give rise to moral judgment, can Utilitarianism account for the fact that it may require something of its agents that is just contrary to their mental
architecture?

That the demands of utilitarianism often run contrary to our intuitions about particular cases is nothing new. Bentham and Mill were, after all, social reformers. And indeed, what's the point of a moral philosophy that never tells us we ought to do something we didn't already think we should do (or more precisely, that sets out to make sure it never asks us to do such a thing)? In any event, since the study showed both kinds of people making utilitarian judgments in some cases, it's equally challenging to consistent anti-utilitarians. This study might have raised problems if it had shown that the normal patients couldn't reason, or act, in a consistently more utilitarian way than their intuitions led them to. But it showed no
such thing, and in fact we have good reason to believe that people can alter or recallibrate their intuitive judgments.

Moral psychology is an important pursuit, but interpreting its results requires caution about the is/ought divide. After all, if someone did a study showing that nomal people are susceptible to the Gambler's Fallacy but people with damage to a certain part of the brain are not, we would not take that as evidence that the Gambler's Fallacy is correct after all and statisticians are brain-damaged, nor that trying to teach people to be more statistically literate is a fool's errand.

I would note as well that it's questionable to take this study to demonstrate that people with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex necessarily always reason in a utilitarian manner (nor that normal people always reason the specific way the control group did). After all, if you are entirely devoid of emotion, why would you care about saving the greater number of people or causing others less harm? I think a more culturally sensitive interpretation of the results is that they confirm the dual-process theory of judgment (that we have a quick intuitive, affect-based process and a slower methodical, cognition-based process) and that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is critical in applying the quick process. The specific content of
those processes, however, may be (to a greater or lesser extent) culturally variable, so it's only in certain cultures -- such as the dominant culture of the modern West, where something like utilitarianism is deeply engrained as the very definition of
rationality -- that the slow process would produce specifically utilitarian results.

*I don't have access to the original paper at the moment, so all of my discussion is working from Buckwalter's summary.

Stentor Danielson, 09:46, |

14.1.08

Respect In Theory Versus Respect In Practice*

I mostly read and link to blogs that would fall in the broad category "political." I find it easier to get into and engage with posts that are written as philosophical essays addressed to the world at large. But the same kinds of issues come up on "personal" blogs -- sometimes even more powerfully for being shorn of abstract theory. A case in point is Frankie's description of some fat-bashing comments made by some friends:

The rest of the evening, I couldn't forget the tone of distain in their voices even though we had moved onto other topics. I felt worthless and invisible. Disrespected. Even the people I consider my friends don't really respect me because of my weight. I bet if I asked them whether or not they respected me they would say they did. But to speak like that in front of me was a blatant disregard of my feelings, of something I struggle with every day.

The kind of "present company excluded" thinking she describes here is deeply pernicious. A number of commenters replying to her post seem to me to miss the point, by reassuring her that while her friends may hate fat, they probably don't think of Frankie as fat.

The problem with that is that Frankie is fat. She knows she's fat, she has the objective physical characteristics that would meet any reasonable definition of fat, and people she interacts with, from strangers to family, reinforce that judgment. And so fat-bashing stings even when the basher would claim not to apply their comments to her personally. By the logic of their language, they're still talking about Frankie's body. The "oh, but you aren't fat" dodge makes things worse -- it in effect says "we know you're a good person -- smart and funny and caring and hot -- so you couldn't possibly be one of those fatties." That makes the person to whom it's directed invisible, refusing to see a significant aspect of who they are and what they have to deal with in their life, forcibly redefining them as part of the "in group" so as to avoid having to question the hostility directed at the "out group."

Even if Frankie could interpret her friends as using some definition of "fat" that excluded her, there are still lots of people out there who do count as fat. To ask anyone to accept a "present company excluded" type caveat is to demand selfishness, to demand that they accept hurting others as long as they (and/or those close to them) are spared. That's wrong, and all the more so when you know what it would be like to not be spared in that way.

*Some day I'm going to go count up the proportion of my posts whose titles are "X and Y" or "X versus Y."

Stentor Danielson, 09:46, |