LawTalkers  

Go Back   LawTalkers

» Site Navigation
 > FAQ
» Online Users: 226
0 members and 226 guests
No Members online
Most users ever online was 4,499, 10-26-2015 at 07:55 AM.
View Single Post
Old 08-10-2018, 10:33 AM   #2262
sebastian_dangerfield
Moderator
 
sebastian_dangerfield's Avatar
 
Join Date: Mar 2003
Location: Monty Capuletti's gazebo
Posts: 26,077
Re: icymi above

Quote:
An example: European Jews were persistently discriminated against. Some Zionists relocated to Israel and then did some things for which they might be held responsible. Are Zionists a "group"? Is Zionism to blame for anything that followed? Not sure, but perhaps. So my answer to your last question there shouldn't be "no."
I hate the whole concept of "groups." Recall, I'm the one coming to this critical of identity politics.

But that's an aside. We agree that a "group" (since we must lump individuals together for reasons I'm still not certain of) can be responsible for certain of its disadvantages.

Quote:
But your idea of a "study," somehow "scientific," is total nonsense.
I agree it'd be difficult as all hell. But the framework for such an analysis (determining when certain disadvantages are more or entirely attributable to behaviors of the group rather than outside oppressive forces) exists. The notions of superseding cause, and comparative negligence, are not that complicated.

Quote:
You do something tricky with an unclear distinction between "oppression" and "disadvantages" here. What's the difference? If what you say is right, why couldn't a Nazi in 1945 have said, hey, Gypsies in Europe suffer, sure, but one can test over time the extent to which their own actions have contributed to their current situation? And the Nazi might say that this could be done with a study, scientifically. Why would that have been wrong?
The difference is oppression either ends, as in the case of Nazi persecution, or it decreases over time, as in the case of bigotry and racism. (Please don't argue "It has not!" I'm measuring relative to the past.) At a certain point following the end of the oppression or the decrease of the oppression to a certain level, the victims begin to bear some personal responsibility for circumstances. (Again, I hate this analysis, as personal responsibility is an concept focused on individuals, not groups [another of many reasons the concept of identity politics is built on sand]). If you disagree with that point, necessarily, you support the following: "The victims of oppression, even when that oppression ends or decreases, never again share responsibility for their circumstances." That cannot be true, of course.

I don't think your Nazi study analogy works because you cannot say that Roma people were at all responsible for Nazis murdering them. If fifty years following those murders, Roma people remained uniquely disadvantaged relative to others murdered by Nazis, you can credibly assess how much of that remains attributable to Nazis and how much of it is attributable to Roma culture. (I think you have to drill down to each person in Roma culture to determine if outliers aren't causing an unreliable assessment [80% of Roma doing fine, and 20% dragging them down], but if I do that, I'm abandoning the conceit that assessing people based on their "group" holds validity.)

I'll end this with the repeated caveat that all of these analyses assume a "group" is either responsible or not responsible for the circumstances of its members. People within these groups, however, are impossibly complex. To use these labels to assert who's at fault for or deserves credit for their circumstances is dangerous. But if one is to concede that "groups" are useful categories for purposes of determining responsibility or non-responsibility of individuals, as Harris and Klein did, and people here seem to agree, then a clinical/scientific/anthropological assessment of "group responsibility" can be performed.
__________________
All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

Last edited by sebastian_dangerfield; 08-10-2018 at 11:14 AM..
sebastian_dangerfield is offline  
 
Powered by vBadvanced CMPS v3.0.1

All times are GMT -4. The time now is 05:03 AM.