The Motives Fallacy and 1619 — Minding The Campus
www.mindingthecampus.org
The accusation that the United States of America was “founded on slavery” is advanced to discredit the nation. Accordingly, if some people were oppressed at the time of the Founding, then somehow the entire American project is illegitimate to this day. Or, in another way, if some people who wrote or signed the Constitution also […]

Minding the Campus’s About Us:

Minding the Campus hopes to change that by fostering a new climate of opinion that favors civil and honest engagement of all ideas, offering an engaged debate for readers concerned with the state of the modern university and the society it serves.

They are, in short, a more conservative take on education issues and policy.

Quote from the article:

When race becomes an issue in a public forum in the United States, we almost always embrace the motives fallacy. It’s an embarrassing display of national ignorance. Other cultures have variations of this, but it’s our peculiar mania to accuse others of racism in order to end debates. We no longer need to think about the reasonableness of an idea or policy because somebody affiliated with it has been deemed guilty of the most egregious sin we can imagine. Someone is morally flawed beyond repair by way of the accusation alone. At best, we’re now arguing about the charge of racism, and the accuser has won the original debate by default. In that still puritanical corner of our national consciousness, if someone is morally flawed, it means their idea or policy is wrong, no matter how universally beneficial it might be, and no matter how many people it helps, no matter how antiracist it is.

But if an idea—in this case, the governing structure known as the United States of America—is a good one, then why should the nature of its origins matter?

  • PeepinGoodArgs@reddthat.comOP
    1·
    1 year ago

    Holy crap, this dude buried his thesis pretty deep into the article.

    So, if somebody back in 1787, for reasons that might strike us today as disagreeable, even for racist or sadistic reasons, thought the franchise should be limited and restricted—that the mob should be given shock absorbers, or even, heaven forbid, actual barriers—then perhaps that was not an entirely bad thing. Instead of calling those people racists, we might debate the merits of their system.

    Because the Founders had to contend with the realities of slavery, and intentionally excluded slaves and women, then the merits of the system that derive from those realities should be considered rather than their being exclusionary. Because exclusion isn’t necessarily bad…and, in fact, he argues, keeping some people out of America and outside our politics maintains our rights.

    I like this.

    I don’t think he’s wrong, overall.

    He’s certainly wrong that a system derived from disenfranchising people it directly affected isn’t somehow suspect at the very least, or even compromised at a fundamental level. The motives fallacy it might be. Motivations for a system inform how it’s used. That is, they are relevant to the system.

    But excluding people that aren’t directly affected isn’t bad, and is even desirable. That’s why excluding foreigners makes sense in many cases, as he argues.