Monday, April 30, 2007
Hate Crime Philosophy - A Praxis of Injustice and Inequality - Part 1
Why is only the beating related to the homosexual victim enormously more morally wrong than every one of the above examples and so many more that we could conjure? Why does this case justify an abnormally privileged category?
The truth is that it is absurd to rob the other victims of their equiponderation of the harm of the crime they suffered or from the perspective of degree of evil of the crime that was perpetrated. All of the above examples would require a set of problematic attitudes from the part of the gang that would cause them to perpetrate the beating, and in all of the cases these sets of attitudes are equally bad. Furthermore, labeling the motive a mere “prejudice” is oversimplifying it.
But the most fundamental problem is that there is no moral ground to make the distinction that the prejudice against the homosexual is worse than any of the others, it is clearly the result of an “Animal Farm” logic, a distinction based on power privileges, discourse inequality, and profound injustice.
The truth is that it is absurd to rob the other victims of their equiponderation of the harm of the crime they suffered or from the perspective of degree of evil of the crime that was perpetrated. All of the above examples would require a set of problematic attitudes from the part of the gang that would cause them to perpetrate the beating, and in all of the cases these sets of attitudes are equally bad. Furthermore, labeling the motive a mere “prejudice” is oversimplifying it.
But the most fundamental problem is that there is no moral ground to make the distinction that the prejudice against the homosexual is worse than any of the others, it is clearly the result of an “Animal Farm” logic, a distinction based on power privileges, discourse inequality, and profound injustice.
