Maybe what we call prejudice is just the result of a confusion of public and private in taste and judgment. I am entitled to prefer people as friends or potential spouses people who share my or some other nationality, language, religion, politics, literary tastes, and preferred weekend outings. But if I declared an opinion about the moral superiority of people who engage boating to those who practice sunbathing that would be a prejudice. (Though it is not a prejudice if I merely preach boating to bathers since then I am treating them as thinking subjects who have still to decide which party to join). The idea of privacy in opinion is that of identifying judgment with taste: I do not have to give a reason, it is not about what we ought to do but what I want to do. Judgment depends on the public sphere. The justification for norms against prejudices is that pre-judgment is applying a theory about what is general to a newly encountered particular and refusing to engage in an inquiry, that is, to think, because knowledge substitutes for it. It is determinant rather than reflective judgment. There is nothing wrong with a white person making generalizations about black people or the French or anything else, but only about applying them to a particular person he encounters rather than regarding them as valid hypotheses and the individual as quite capable of deviating from ones expectations.
Posted on: Sun, 02 Feb 2014 18:46:44 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015