Rogue Expectations: An Ethical Intervention for Political Philosophy of Race
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2018
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Haverford College. Department of Philosophy
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eng
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Open Access
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Abstract
Contemporary political philosophers studying the effects of race approach it as being fundamentally a force of differentiation and oppression, taking a thoroughly Rousseauian approach to inequality as based in society rather than basic social interaction. This situation arises from the starting point of the debate, past a discussion on human perceptual and evaluative capabilities. One is left with promises of potential freedom should the structures of society that enforce race fall, leading only to another politics that understands humanity as inherently free from immediate evaluation. When thinkers do take questions of identity formation and association into account, such as Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Ethics of Identity, they simply reiterate the Rousseauian form for a liberal reformation. A critical eye must once again be turned upon the construction of the human and its perceptual capabilities when creating a political model. J. Reid Miller proposes an ethical model that denies a gap between the perception of a person or action and an ethical judgment regarding it. He notes the necessity for race and embodied characteristics to hold evaluative weight as a method of determining the value of a phenomenon. In tying human perception to racial expectations, Miller rejects both any potential value-neutral observation and any promise of equal judgment, as the action of a white person will not be defined as the same action when performed by a black person. From these expectations arises the possibility to challenge those bodies of knowledge perpetuated by political structures in favor of subversive “rogue expectations”.