Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague
Sigh... do I really have to do this?
Okay. Driveway's premise is as follows.
Here is why intentions are what really matter to moral judgments of people, a la "this person is a racist". Let's take four examples: Person A, Person B, Person C and Person D.
Person A supports a policy throughout his life because he believes it will help the community. He has no expectation that it will have disproportionate effects on the black community, and his entire focus is on what it will do to help society at large. He spends his entire life fighting for this policy, and dies still supporting it. Shortly afterwards, it becomes clear through a series of studies that the policy has had widespread negative effects on black people.
According to Driveway's premise, Person A was a racist. He never had any motivations even tangentially related to race, but it doesn't matter, because the results were bad for a racial minority.
Person B supports the same policy, but he lives longer than Person A. He comes to learn that the policy has a negative impact on the black community, which is surprising and dismaying to Person B. However, Person B decides that he still supports the policy notwithstanding its negative effects, because the studies also show that the policy helping society in many other important ways. However, he spends the remainder of his life trying to mitigate the harm that the policy is disproportionately causing to racial minorities. He isn't particularly successful, and when he dies, the policy, which he still supports for its broader good outcomes, is still disproportionately harmful.
According to Driveway's premise, Person B was also racist. He actively tried to make things better for the black community for years, but because he also supported a policy that disproportionately harmed them - albeit for other reasons - he was only slightly less racist than Person A. Perhaps if he'd been more successful in mitigating these effects, we could consider him less racist, but as it turned out, his best efforts did not produce results. Because results are what matters, those efforts don't matter in our analysis of his racism.
Person C is an alt-right troll. He thinks that black people get a leg up in modern society, and resents the very concept of affirmative action as prejudice against white people. He thinks that most of the issue with black policing is that black culture is violent and thuggish. When he gets into a position of power, he supports a couple of policies that he knows will have a small, but measurable, harmful effect on black people, just out of spite, and to produce a response from his political opponents. He's just trying to "trigger the libs", and he doesn't much care about the harm he's doing to black people. After all, it's relatively minor.
According to Driveway's premise, Person C is also racist, but is clearly not as racist as Person A or Person B. His motivations are selfish and demonstrate a disregard for the interests of minorities, but his motivations are not what's important. The results of his policies harm a racial minority, but not as much as the policies supported by Person A or Person B, and those results are what we're basing our assessment of racism on.
Person D is a white supremacist. He would proudly describe himself as such. He hates black people, and his fondest wish would be the extermination of their race from the face of the Earth, which in his view should be the sole domain of whites. So, he spends his life attempting to carry out this ethos, including by securing a place in politics. Unfortunately for him, he is not even slightly successful in achieving his goals. He manages to get certain policies enacted that he thinks will be harmful to black interests, but it turns out that they have the opposite effect of what was intended, and actually improve the lives of black people on a broad scale. Moreover, his hatred for black people is so revolting that his world view simply produces a backlash against white nationalism. He ends his life still hating black people, bitter and angry at his failures to harm them on a societal scale.
According to Driveway's premise, Person D is not remotely racist. Just the opposite. His motivations were clearly hateful, but again, motivations are not the concern, and the results - unintentional as they may have been - were uniformly good for racial minorities, and particularly the black community. You can call him a bitter, hateful person, but, apparently, not a racist.
Obviously these results are absurd. Judging someone to be racist is a moral indictment of their character, first and foremost. If I call someone a racist, and the charge sticks, that has implications for their employment and social standing, just as it would if you convincingly called someone a pedophile. These are judgments about the type of person someone is, what they care about, and what they think is right or wrong.
Intentions are what matter when we judge someone morally. The simplest example I'm aware of is the house fire scenario. My house burns down, and my neighbour's house with it, killing my neighbour. What you think about me depends on to what extent I intended that result. If I had no intention whatsoever - say the house fire started from a freak short circuit that I couldn't have foreseen - your moral judgment of me follows. If I left the stove on, I was careless, and that produces a different moral judgment. If I intentionally burned down my house to collect the insurance money, and my neighbour was unintentional collateral damage, that produces yet another moral judgment. If I burned my own house down because I knew it would cause his to catch fire, and I was really just trying to murder my neighbour, that's another case still. The only difference here is the motivations - the results are the same in each case. But the label applied to the person in question - in the case we were talking about, "racist", but here, "innocent" "careless", or "arsonist", or "murderer" - is dependent entirely on motivations.
In short, the attempt to re-define "racist" to allow it to be applied to people despite their motivations preserves the moral stigma of that label, but allows it to be used against anyone you like, destroying their reputation in the process. The goal is to be able to treat person A and person B like we generally treat person D. That project simply needs to fail.
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