The colonial period of U.S. history contains a variety of interesting lessons. One of these pertains to the concept of a "virtuoso." The virtuoso was primarily characterized by curiosity. Rather than being overly specialized, the virtuoso explored a wide range of interests. The study of nature, art, literature, and theology all would have been pursuits common to this stereotype. This blog aspires to take this early category and use it as a point of departure for exploration and reflection.
Monday, August 29, 2016
Collective Blame and Ethnic Groups
"A collective agent can be responsive to reasons in the sense that I have described, and hence be a possible object of blame in the sense I am proposing, only if there are procedures through which it can make institutional decisions. Mere collections of people that do not meet this condition, such as ethnic groups, cannot be objects of blame on the account I am proposing. Since they do not make collective decisions that indicate responsiveness to reasons, there is no basis for attributing attitudes to such groups in anything other than the distributive sense, in which saying that the group holds certain attitudes is simply to say that most of its members do. This is just stereotyping." ~ T.M. Scanlon, Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press) p. 165
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