Quote:
Originally Posted by Makarov
Rejecting group identity would seem to ignore tens of thousands of years of human history.
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Hundreds of thousands, actually. But it is a central tenet of classical liberalism - that individual rights are what is important, and that rights are to be given equally to each individual, regardless of personal characteristics. Historically, that's been the best means to ward off oppression of minorities; e.g. black people are not denied rights by virtue of being black.
That's precisely where the tension is in this discussion. Rube disagrees with this and doesn't think it's effective, because he believes that systemic factors require some overcorrection to achieve what he's referring to as "substantive" equality. Cliff believes that this is prone to abuse because there's no fair judge to tweak the knobs of social justice here and decide which groups warrant the overcorrection and to what degree. Further, he's suggesting that there is something inherently dehumanizing about placing peoples' group identity on this sort of pedestal; the notion being something like "you're your own person; the fact that you're black or gay tells me almost nothing useful about you in and of itself".
Not trying to misrepresent but that seems to be where the disagreement lies, and it's a fundamental one, philosophically. It is likely heading to a point where it's going to cause a major identity crisis on the political left. We've already started down that road.