Re: [Fwd: Re: Shaming Redux (was Re: [Fwd: Culture and Technology (was Re: Abortion, Killing etc)]]

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

Carrol wrote:
>Most of what Doug and Katha have said on this expresses my own
>views -- but that is mostly because of the particular cases at issue,
>which have involved the question of whether someone should be
>gratuitously shamed for behavior that most of us think is either
>strictly or merely private. I'm wondering, then, how generalizable
>the perspective is. Don't most of us, for example, react in some
>fairly negative (shaming?) way to racist or homophobic jokes?
>The attack on "political correctness" (i.e., the attack on simple
>decency) is, among other things, an attempt to shame people into
>not shaming racism or sexism. So there are contradictions
>involved here at some point.

Perhaps anti-racist and anti-sexist efforts inevitably involve a double
standard, for instance if we focus on the practice of shaming per se: we
are against shaming women and blacks in a manner that produces sexist and
racist effects, and yet for shaming sexism and racism.  I'm entirely
comfortable with this double standard, and I think we should go by it in
leftist practice, and try to make it, in any way we can, a part of the
mores of American people, even though the individualist assumptions of
American legal practice may rule it out in the realm of the State.

Yoshie