GLOBAL DIALOGUE
Volume 12 ● Number 2 ● Summer/Autumn 2010—Race and Racisms Requirements for an Ethics of Race
I n The Moral Life of Children, child psychologist Robert Coles relates how he tried to understand the courageous behaviour of black children who were the first to desegregate schools in the United States South during the 1960s. At first, Coles used clinical terminology to describe six-year-old Ruby Bridges, who day after day had braved a gauntlet of jeering white adults to enter her new school. But his wife told him, “You are making her sound as if she ought to be on her way to a child guidance clinic, but she is walking into a school building—and no matter the threats, she is holding her head up high, even smiling at her obscene hecklers.”1
Coles believed that his wife had made a judgement that Ruby Bridges had character. Ruby’s comportment, compared to that of her adult hecklers, dramatises the difference between ethics and mores. Both ethics and mores are normative and can result in distinctive traits of personal character, but they differ in scope. Ethics consists of universal normative ideas and practices that can apply to the whole of humanity. Mores are the customs, historical traditions, and identities of concrete human groups or peoples which can motivate political aspirations as well as shape private life. Ruby’s character was ethical because her determination and courage did not derive from her racial identity and were not limited to it; her hecklers were expressing the mores of white supremacy and exclusion.
The historical and contemporary reality of race in the United States encompasses race relations (interactions between different racial groups and their members), laws concerning members of different racial groups, the mores of these groups, and individual identities based on group membership. This reality is mostly a matter of mores.
It is difficult to render theoretical judgements about race ethically persuasive and obligatory when such judgements conflict with the mores of either the white majority or various non-white groups. What may be genuine ethical judgements about race often sound like attacks on existing mores, because the common ground on which they can be expressed and understood, as ethical judgements concerning race, does not yet exist. Whites object to what could be ethical judgements that identify racism; non-whites object to what could be ethical judgements about racial identities and loyalties.
Mores were not the original ground for racial liberation or social justice in American society. Ethics used to be the primary tool against white oppression. Martin Luther King spoke ethically in expressing his dream about a future in which a person’s character would be considered more important in assessment of human worth than the colour of her skin. And before King, nineteenth-century abolitionists spoke from ethical principles when they inveighed against slavery. The view that slavery was a “moral wrong”—in the public’s sense of an ethical wrong—given fundamental principles of human worth and core human equality, was put forth not only by abolitionists but by some slave-owners, such as Thomas Jefferson.2 Abolitionists could talk about race relations on the same ethical ground that allowed them to talk about harms to whites. Emerson wrote: “I think we must get rid of slavery or we must get rid of freedom ... If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own.”3
Although everyone now agrees that slavery is wrong, it is difficult to make ethical judgements about racial matters in contemporary US society. People may have strong ethical intuitions in single concrete cases, but there is no general ethical system in common reference. As Coles’s example illustrates, real life can serve up disturbing expressions of mores. The biggest problem with mores as a source of opinions and values is that conflicts between different mores very easily reduce to conflicts between the people who belong to the groups that generate the mores. The language of professionals can neutralise high emotion, but sometimes at the expense of ethical judgements. Ethical judgements are risky in the absence of a recognised general ethical system, because they may seem to be mere opinions with the potential to ignite fresh conflict.
Toleration within the same society of different moral perspectives arising from mores is one of the meanings of social, political, or cultural “pluralism”. But the theoretical model of pluralism, in which pluralism is put forth as a democratic ideal, often fails to capture the strife in reality of continually competing groups. Moreover, pluralism is often described as though the views and practices of all striving groups have equal merit. For example, in an April 2010 poll of the views of members of the Tea Party movement, 89 per cent of whom are white and 1 per cent African American, it was found that they were more likely than the US general public to believe that “too much has been made of the problems facing black people”.4 That a question of whether “too much” is being made of a particular group’s problems is considered valid for polling reduces any ethical issues involved in attitudes and behaviour towards that group to mere matters of opinion. The neglected ethical question is whether African Americans have problems based on their racial identities, and whether it is morally obligatory for others to pay attention to their problems.
Philosophers use the terms “ethical/ethics” and “moral/morals” synonymously.5 But the public restricts the words “ethical/ethics” to behaviour in civic or work life, whereas “moral/morals” are reserved for private life. For example, Americans talk about “ethics” in business, medicine, and politics, and philosophy obliges this discourse with “applied ethics” for these fields and others, yielding “professional ethics”. But in ordinary life, individuals who misbehave sexually or abuse drugs are criticised for their “morals”. Those who take care of their families and obey the rules of their religion are considered “morally good”, or even just “good” or “moral”. Those undeserving of such approval, on account of their deliberate actions, are “immoral”, whereas those who are oblivious to moral values and rules are “amoral”. This usage is closer to mores than ethics. Ethics and Mores ComparedPart of the difference between ethics and mores is an individual versus group distinction. Philosophers have concentrated on the hearts, minds, and actions of individuals, whereas mores and the morality arising from them are group-based. Individual perspectives can accommodate greater abstraction than group perspectives can. In their rhetorical address to individuals as readers, Western philosophers have been able to construct abstract and ideal ethical systems, requiring for their validation only the comprehension and agreement of individuals, who do not have to be in the same place and time as either one another or the philosopher being read. Moral systems in society, by contrast, are closely tied to understanding and agreement within groups, occurring at the same time, often defined by place. Mores and morals are concretely historical, compared to ethics. Mores need not be ethical and ethics does not require a foundation in mores. Although recent progressive scholarship has questioned the ideal and impractical nature of the lone, self-sufficient individual as a subject, ethics, as based on individual reflection, assumes a freedom to criticise what is and call for change, which freedom is very often lacking in mores.
Both mores and ethics are normative: the common subject is right action and the nature of the good. Philosophers work with the moral systems constructed within their discipline—virtue ethics, deontology, and consequentialism. They call “moral theory” that discourse which compares and contrasts moral systems and analyses the value terms (“good”, “right”) used within those systems. The substance of philosophical work in ethics is theoretical inquiry. In contrast, the public continually demonstrates that its morals do not come from this or that abstract system, but from religion, tradition, and family. Its inquiries into morals are more likely to involve recourse to role models, memorials, and retelling of group histories, than to abstract or theoretical considerations.
Ethics and mores are frequently in conflict. Practical applications of professional ethics or an ethical policy such as school desegregation may occur as interventions in practices taken for granted. We can say now that racial segregation is part of American mores, even though it is held to be unethical, not only philosophically but in the official, formal public domain to which ethics are relegated by non-philosophers. But this has been true only after the civil-rights movement successfully challenged the practice of segregation, on ethical grounds. It has been taken for granted over the history of Western philosophy, beginning with Socrates, that ethics will diverge from mores. And mores may diverge from ethics, for example in the campaign slogan: “I’ll keep my guns, money, and freedom. You can keep ‘The Change’. Sarah Palin for President in 2012!”
Overall, there remains a big rhetorical and social distance between philosophical and formal ethical treatments of race, and what race means in practice and how ordinary people think about it. This is mainly a normative distance between race theorists’ judgements that some practices and beliefs are unethical, and the acceptance or approval of those same beliefs and actions in private, social, and official life. For example, most race theorists consider unethical the ongoing practice of white privilege, or the way white people continue to benefit from race-based advantages in comparison to non-whites. But in private and social life, white privilege is taken for granted, is difficult to broach in non-controversial ways in formal official contexts, and is apparently impossible to explain.6
In real life, including the most formal public contexts, there is no recognised ethics of race, and to a large extent even theorists of race advance the mores of the groups to which they belong, or with which they have the most sympathy. The absence of an ethics of race and the dominating practice of mores contribute to a failure to regard issues of race in ethical terms. For a consideration in such terms, we must turn to philosophy. Philosophy’s Problematic LegacyEthics in a universal secular sense is a creature of philosophy. The history of ethics as we understand it today is found in the history of philosophy. However, in terms of race, or any other site of present injustice or inequality, the history of philosophy must be reread critically. In such a retrospective, there are ingredients for universal human equality, but not, strictly speaking, a self-aware proclamation of it before philosophers and other intellectuals were inspired by the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in 1948 (1948!). I will not attempt to provide even a compressed summary of the failures of philosophers on this point, but several key moments can be noted.
Plato invented philosophical ethics as a form of discourse detached from prevailing mores. Aristotle devised a technology for the self-development of human character. These are our philosophical originators of ethics. However, both Plato and Aristotle had elite Greek men as their audience, and both viewed ethics as derivative of politics or political theory—man was a social animal in the political, governing sense. The detachment of ethics from mores or custom remains very important for our purposes. But the lack of equality and the enmeshment of ethics and politics are exclusionary for some, and provide no foundation on which to criticise politics. Diogenes the cynic, a contemporary of Plato, and Demosthenes the orator, a contemporary of Aristotle, both expressed beliefs in natural law that were egalitarian in principle. But both Plato and Aristotle avoided this content to pursue ethics and moral theory in terms of theories of knowledge.
Plato’s epistemological move is evident in the Euthyphro. While walking to his trial for practising philosophy, Socrates dallies to converse with Euthyphro, a priest, who presents himself as exceptionally pious for having brought his own father to court on a charge of murder. On the pretext of seeking help for his own defence, Socrates mockingly draws Euthyphro out on his claim that piety is what the gods love. The result of their conversation might be represented as the following problematic:
Is an action pious (morally good/just) because the gods love it, or do the gods love it because it is already pious? If the first, then we have no solution to divine arbitrariness, because the gods often disagree (or there are conflicting religions). But if the gods love pious actions because they are already pious before they love them, then we still need to know what piety (goodness/justice) is.7
After Socrates leads Euthyphro in and out of this nested dilemma, which in effect severs a rational connection between morality and religion, he wants to begin again, by returning to the original question of what piety is. Euthyphro rushes away—“Another time, then, Socrates, for I am in a hurry and must be off this minute.”8 In the history of Western ethics, this problematic has served to divorce religion from ethics in conceptual justificatory terms, as a matter of epistemology. But if what is good is a human construction—which at this time is our only alternative—then it doesn’t matter whence our idea of it originates. What does matter is the content of what is good. In the Euthyphro, the question of content, of what is good, is whether it was right for Euthyphro to bring his father to trial for having allowed a labourer to die in a ditch. Socrates never even takes this question seriously, except to express shock at Euthyphro’s violation of traditional beliefs about the honour and loyalty owed to parents:
Then come, dear Euthyphro, teach me as well, and let me grow more wise. What proof have you that all the gods think that your servant died unjustly, your hireling, who, when he had killed a man, was shackled by the master of the victim, and perished, dying because of his shackles before the man who shackled him could learn from the seers what ought to be done with him? What proof have you that for a man like him it is right for a son to prosecute his father, and indict him on the charge of murder?9
Because we are still so awestruck by Socrates’ aplomb in engaging Euthyphro philosophically just before his own trial, and because the effective epistemological separation of ethics from religion is so compelling, we are apt to overlook two important elements of this dialogue: (1) in expressing shock at Euthyphro’s disregard for traditional filial loyalty, Socrates has a chance to establish that he was not the social revolutionary or radical he was about to be prosecuted for allegedly being; (2) and more importantly, proof is required, and perhaps even especially stringent proof, that “for a man like him, it is right for a son to prosecute his father, and indict him on the charge of murder”. A man like whom? A man like Nexos, who was a labourer on a family’s farm. Socrates does not make it clear whether he assigns a questionable moral status to Nexos because he was a labourer or because he committed the criminal act of cutting the throat of a domestic, in a drunken rage. But the issue between Socrates and Euthyphro seems to be whether it is right for a son to prosecute his father, rather than whether the father was justified in tying Nexos up and leaving him to die. Euthyphro claims that justice, and more than this, holiness, requires that his father not be exempt from prosecution.10
What philosophers often fail to discuss in considering this dialogue is that in the ancient world the line between slaves and free labourers was often indistinct, and the relations of masters with slaves were governed by religion. Hence, Euthyphro’s reference to what is holy was hardly fanaticism. According to Euthyphro’s idea of holiness, his father acted unjustly and deserved prosecution because even criminals who are labourers ought not to be treated unjustly. And that suggests an idea of something like egalitarian higher law, either a principle that positive law should apply to all human beings, regardless of social status, or a principle postulating that all human beings are morally equal, regardless of social status. But if Euthyphro cannot prove to Socrates that his intuition comes from the right source, then the intuition can be rejected and the default mode of traditional loyalties is restored as the proper moral perspective. To interpret Socrates as upholding family loyalty might seem odd given his displacement of the traditional family for the sake of an ideal state in the Republic. But instead of, or in addition to, upholding familial piety, Socrates in the Euthyphro can be read as upholding the tradition of a hierarchical society, in which the life of a labourer such as Nexos was of little account. If Nexos’s life doesn’t matter, then Euthyphro’s prosecution of his father is absurd, as well as morally questionable.
Ancient social hierarchies are not the same thing as hierarchies of race. Race, as a human typology or system of classification based on biology, does not enter philosophy itself until Hume and Kant assumed a biological human taxonomy.11 Nevertheless, the ancient hierarchies of human inequality, enduring into the middle ages and the modern period through the Age of Exploration, were fertile ground for false taxonomies of race and modern forms of slavery, particularly in the New World and especially in the slave society of the American South, where hereditary racial identities created a distinct caste. Slavery itself was first justified in the ancient world by the idea that military victory yielded base captives and by Aristotle’s naturalisation of slavery which asserted that some were born slaves. Acceptance of the institution of slavery persisted throughout the medieval period, when Christian philosophers, such as Thomas Aquinas, were able to accept it by positing the slave’s religious freedom. Overall, Christian philosophy was compatible with earlier inequalities either because ideas of universal human equality were trivial and abstract, or true equality was simply not a temporal matter. Christianity further enshrined ideas of fictive entities and unities that were supposed to represent everyone but in fact furthered the interests of a few: the Church, the state, corporate bodies in the middle ages, and in modern times, derivative fictive unities such as business corporations.
Equality as a posit of natural law, both ancient and early modern, while it raised a possibility, was either untenably teleological in confusing what should be with what is, or else over-dependent on religion. Social contract theorists implicitly invoked ancient political theory in tying ethical ideas of justice to ideals of the best state, and in so doing at most limited equality to select citizens of such states, that is, white males. John Locke’s notion of individual rights was grounded on the sanctity of property, which did not preclude owning human beings.12 John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism should have allowed for equality, but the kind of individual liberty he advocated was explicitly limited to “mature Europeans”.13 Only with Kant’s formulation of the categorical imperative that posits all human beings as “ends in themselves” is there a philosophical notion of equality that supports an idea of universal human dignity, capable of justifying universal human equality across race. Kant grounded a dignitarian tradition that has influenced international organisations and new governments since the Second World War. But subsequent social contract theorists working in rights-based, sovereign-nation formats have not fully taken it up. John Rawls, for example, uses pluralism as a model for international relations.14 Even Rawls’s earlier “difference principle” does not guarantee that measures which do not harm the disadvantaged will bring them up to full moral equality with the advantaged. Moral equality may require material compensation that exceeds fairness as a conception of justice, for example, in cases calling for reparations.15
Despite its shortcomings, the history of moral philosophy inspires specific requirements for an ethics of race. There are two pre-requirements. The first is a cosmopolitan spirit of acceptance of human difference. The second is an address to David Hume’s observation that we cannot logically derive an ought from an is. The solution to Hume’s problem, here, is to avoid it, by beginning with “oughts”. Requirements for an Ethics of RaceThrough a recent inquiry, I have arrived at twelve requirements for an ethics of race.16 Some of these are intuitive, e.g., a presumption of racial equality; others seek to model an ethics of race on assumptions and structures shared by other ethical systems, e.g., that ought implies can; and some of the most interesting requirements, namely VII–XII, arise in critical consideration of key ideas in the history of moral philosophy. The results are three egalitarian requirements (I–III), four formal requirements (IV–VII), and five requirements of content (VIII–XII). Egalitarian RequirementsI. An ethics of race would have as its units human individuals and would assume the intrinsic value and freedom of every human individual. All individuals would have the same human rights and be worthy of respect from one another. It would be morally wrong, and on that basis legally wrong, to violate anyone’s rights.
II. An ethics of race, as applicable to members of all racial groups, would be egalitarian in terms of race, meaning that racial difference would not suffice to warrant different moral treatment, including admission to the realm or class of moral agents or beings deemed worthy of the highest moral consideration.
III. Human equality must include an equality of moral authority, and moral authority has material requirements. The most disadvantaged should have a certain degree of material necessities and social status relative to those who are the richest and have the highest social status in a society, so that the disadvantaged can be recognised as moral equals by the advantaged.
Formal Requirements IV. An ethics of race would have to be completely international and include all who were not members of nation-states. Whenever possible, an ethics of race would be more general than its applications to racial difference, racial liberation, or racism. An ethics of race would not mention specific races or racial groups and its language would be race-general.
V. An ethics of race is a mode of discourse and practice and the principles or rules governing both of these. It is independent of politics and political theory. It allows for the ethical assessment of laws and government practices, of the state, and of all other social organisations.
VI. An ethics of race must be possible for human beings to practise by applying its principles and constructing virtues related to those principles: ought implies can in an ethics of race.
VII. In constructing an ethics of race, ideas of unity, whether physical or spiritual, over groups and individuals, should be subject to critical empirical examination before acceptance and application. Do they represent the interests of all in an egalitarian way? Or do they impose the interests of some on others through fictive “wholes” that are used to mediate the interests of those who are not being fully represented? Requirements of ContentVIII. Slavery, or the ownership of entire human beings, must be held to be an absolute moral wrong. The moral wrongfulness of slavery would follow from (I) and apply to all individuals, regardless of race. The moral wrongfulness of slavery is more important than any and all protections of property rights, and this wrongness extends to control over labour in employment that interferes with autonomy, respect, and wellbeing.
IX. There should be humanitarian goals of alleviating human suffering, particularly suffering that distinctively accompanies the circumstances of people with disadvantaged racial identities.
X. New governments or revisions of existing governments should not intentionally cause those who are disadvantaged to become worse off, either in terms of material wellbeing or civil status; if the disadvantaged do become worse off as the result of government founding or revision, the founding acts should be revised and the revisions themselves revised or else there should be new corrective legislation.
XI. Every moral unit, government body, and social organisation should always act in such a way that the intent and practical effect of the action supports every human being’s (subjective) ultimate valuation of his or her own life, with the possible exception of cases in which persons have acted and shown intent not to obey this principle.
XII. An ethics of race ought not to privilege the mores—including the legal systems, traditions, and culture—of any human organisation smaller than the whole of humanity. No one should be excluded from an ethics of race because of national, geographical, or historical contingencies. Further Questions and IssuesCan there be one and only one universal ethics of race? I think the answer is No. Race itself is a bogus taxonomy on exactly those biological grounds that it has been assumed to rest for about two hundred years. Race was first developed as an idea in science, followed by its acceptance throughout cultures. The scientific foundation for biological ideas of race has fallen away as the biological sciences have developed, leaving a foundation for race in what can be studied by the social sciences (history, anthropology, sociology, and psychology) and in beliefs in popular culture (i.e., among the populace) itself. Race and racism remain socially real, but their varieties are highly dependent on context. For example, an ethics of race that addressed illegal immigration in the United States would not be the same as one addressing the plight of poor, native-born African Americans who were disaster victims.17 There would be a number of micro-ethics of race to address issues such as mixed-race identity, questions of whether race is relevant in a given context (e.g., medicine), questions of when race terms should be used or eliminated, and criteria for racism.18
There has been so much variation in racial categories as a taxonomy, in the nature of racism, and in material and psychic resources for correcting racism, that we should expect and allow for multiple ethics of race. Nevertheless, for any set of principles to be a valid ethics of race, the assumption that it would have to meet certain general ethical requirements stands as a foundation for race-based justice. Requirement IV, that the language of any specific ethics of race be race-general rather than race-specific, merits special attention. Race-neutral language usually extends equality without mention of race; race-general language mentions race without specifying a race; race-specific language mentions specific races. All of the official liberal documents pertaining to race and racism in the United States and internationally (through the United Nations) use race-general language, mentioning specific races only as examples justifying the principles they propound.
The craft involved in translating race-specific concerns into race-general language involves describing problems faced by specific races and stating remedies for, or preventions of, those problems in general terms. For example, if only blacks are enslaved and suffer from slavery, then the stated remedy makes slavery illegal. If black and Hispanic children disproportionately attend poor schools, then the standards for all schools have to be clearly stated, with provisions for their implementation. If only, or primarily, undocumented Mexican immigrants are subject to specific searches and seizures that would violate the rights of citizens, then citizens’ rights in this regard need to be extended to undocumented immigrants. If there is to be a legal basis for reparations for the descendants of slaves, then parallel to the Fifteenth Amendment, it is not necessary to state the matter any more specifically than this: that the descendants of slaves are entitled to reparations. If whites misrepresent the ideal of racial egalitarianism by calling it “reverse discrimination”, then an ethics of race would hold that where there has been previous discrimination and disadvantage based on race, reactive racism by subordinate groups towards dominant ones is not necessarily racism (although it can be)19 and that compensatory affirmation of subordinate groups is not racist either.
Race-general language has been not only the language of law in attempts to correct racial injustice, but also the language of ethics or morality: it is in principle “race-blind”, although its appropriate construction has effects with acute “race vision” in terms of specific racial identities. To use that language to correct for racial injustice requires a special use of syntax to cover particular cases, while the content of the language is based on a common human identity. If specific race-based moral assessments of injustice are to find legal remedies, it is not only strategic to meet the law halfway in language, but it is also just that laws not discriminate for or against specific racial groups as a matter of bare identities (i.e., black, white, mixed, Asian, Native American) in a bogus biological taxonomy. This says nothing about people’s liberty to preserve cultures and identities associated with social races, although as an obligation such preservation is a matter of mores rather than ethics, and as such, subject to ethical assessment. Such ethical assessment, on a presumption of egalitarian humanism, is the primary philosophical contribution to the subject of race, at this time. Endnotes
2. Jefferson thought that liberty was the gift of God and that it was only a matter of time, given that “his justice cannot sleep forever”, before slavery would end, perhaps even by “an exchange of situation”. See Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, ed., Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 96, 97.
3. The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 6, ed. Ralph H. Orth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1966), p. 215.
4. Kate Zernike and Megan Thee-Brenan, “Poll Finds Tea Party Backers Wealthier and More Educated”, New York Times, 14 April 2010.
5. Until the early twentieth century in the United States, “moral philosophy” encompassed all of the humanistic subjects in philosophy and included political theory, aesthetics, philosophy of religion, philosophy of language, psychology, and philosophy of mind. But today, the part of moral philosophy that addresses choices and values towards the general end of human wellbeing is known to philosophers as “ethics”, “moral theory”, and “moral systems”.
6. Consider this example: soon after President Barack Obama nominated Judge Sonya Sotomayor for the US Supreme Court, the media reported that she had said in the past that a wise Latina would make better rulings on the bench than a white male. During the Senate hearing for Sotomayor’s nomination, Senator Lindsey Graham (Republican, South Carolina) remarked, “If I said anything remotely like that, my career would have been over.” Graham’s indignation could have been enabled by his ignorance of what some observers of race in America see as white privilege or the ways in which being white is in itself a social advantage. He was apparently unaware that statements of expertise based on race or ethnicity have different meanings when made by non-whites from when whites make them, because of the history and ongoing reality of non-white disadvantage in US society. In denial of this history and reality, he purported not to know that non-whites may be justified in saying things about their race that would sound racist if uttered by whites about whiteness. While progressive commentators grasped all of this intuitively, as Graham’s remark was circulated, they did not explicitly refer to white privilege. Some of those same progressives went on to fault Sotomayor for telling the senators that good judges were and should be neutral vis-à-vis their own race, or any matter of race, in making decisions, thereby displaying their own apparent ignorance of her ongoing disadvantage as a Puerto Rican nominee for the US Supreme Court. They wanted her to assert that sometimes race-neutrality is not just or appropriate for judges because of the existence of ongoing racial discrimination and prejudice. But she could not have asserted that to interlocutors who did not believe that there was ongoing racial discrimination and prejudice in American society and who, to put it bluntly, viewed Sotomayor’s racial/ethnic identity as something generally negative. In other words, the success of Sotomayor as a Puerto Rican candidate for the Supreme Court depended in part on her ability to reassure her interlocutors that she shared and approved of their assessment of the current absence of racial discrimination and prejudice in American society. The progressives who criticised Sotomayor for this very ability were either naive about the different perceptions of the existence of racial discrimination and prejudice in American society, or else they wanted her to take a public stand on that issue, which would have defeated her candidacy.
7. The “problematic” as I have described it above is an overall result of the dialogue. It is possible to go further—as, for example, in Lane Cooper’s interpretation that Socrates establishes that “the good is not good because the gods approve it, but the gods approve it because it is good”. See Lane Cooper, trans., Euthyphro in Plato: Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New York: Random House, 1964), p. 169.
8. Ibid., p. 185.
9. Ibid., p. 177.
10. Ibid., p. 172.
11. See Naomi Zack, “Philosophical Racial Essentialism: Hume and Kant”, chap. 1 of Philosophy of Science and Race (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 9–25.
12. Locke explicitly accepted slavery as legitimised by defeat in a just war. See his Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 284. But this conceit strained what was known about the African slave trade in his time. More than his theoretical acceptance of just-war slavery, there is historical evidence that he crafted the constitution of the Carolinas, which allowed for slavery, and that he invested in the African slave trade. See J. R. Milton, “John Locke and the Fundamental Constitution of Carolina”, Locke Newsletter 21 (1990), pp. 111–34, and K. G. Davies, The Royal African Company (London: Longmans Green, 1957), pp. 58–74.
13. See J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism in Utilitarianism, Liberty and Representative Government, ed. A. D. Lindsay (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1953), p. 77, n. 1.
14. See John Rawls, The Law of Peoples, with “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited” (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).
15. See Charles Mills’s critique of Rawls’s ideal theory concerning the issue of reparations for black chattel slavery in the United States: Carol Pateman and Charles Mills, Contract and Domination (Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2007), pp. 114–33.
16. See my forthcoming The Ethics and Mores of Race: Equality after the History of Philosophy (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011).
17. The actor Sean Penn, while aiding disaster victims in Haiti after the devastation of the 2010 earthquake, pointedly said that a “white island” would have received different treatment. Contemporary natural disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina and the Pacific Rim Tsunami, visibly have a disproportionately devastating effect on poor non-white populations.
18. Properly speaking, there are racisms (plural) rather than one uniform type of bias. Thus, there is institutional racism or bias that is inadvertent as opposed to contempt or intentional discrimination. For a discussion of the typology and sources of racism, see my Thinking about Race (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 2006), pp. 44–54.
19. Shirley Sherod, an African American official at the US Department of Agriculture, was fired for remarks she made about a white farmer, on grounds of racism, with approval by the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People. Then the media and others looked at the full context of her remarks and apologies were forthcoming. See Karen Tumulty and Ed O’Keefe, “Fired USDA Official Receives Apologies from White House, Vilsack”, Washington Post, 22 July 2010.
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