Bias and Evil

Debate and discussion on racism and related issues

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Purple Knight
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Bias and Evil

Post #1

Post by Purple Knight »

Question for Debate: Are we doomed to be evil if bias is evil, because we can't get rid of our biases entirely?

And a better question: Are we morally accountable for our own failings?
A good example: You see someone killing your child so you pull him forcefully off the child. Turns out, you were wrong, he was giving your child CPR. But you really thought within a very reasonable margin of error for the human condition that he was killing the child, so you acted, and it turns out you were wrong. You've at least assaulted someone and may have even hurt them more.

Now you may say, bias is not evil. But it is clear that in some instances at least, it is. If you genuinely believe Jews are scammy moneygrubbers, an action that seems justified to you (because it would be justified if they were as you perceived them) and you in turn commit, may easily add up to evil.

It's seen as good to expect people to overturn their biases but it's simultaneously claimed (probably because it's true) that one can never get rid of biases entirely.

Now as for the Nazis Holocausting off Jews, there's one of two things to believe about them really.

1. The first is that he well knows there's nothing wrong with Jews and that there is something wrong with him, and he's convinced himself somebody else is the problem so he gets to win, when he doesn't deserve to. He knows he's not as hardworking as an average Jew let alone a top one, and he says to himself, the reason they're so rich is that they do these despicable sleazy things to get ahead. It's easy to call this fellow immoral because a little honest self-reflection would put his head right.

2. But what if he actually believes the first fellow's lie? There are a lot of that first guy. Not only do they tell one another these stories and reinforce amongst themselves, but you may get a couple people whose experience with the defamed group has genuinely been wholly negative. You may have folks who happened to get scammed every time they met a Jew, and this is especially likely since everybody treats their in-group better. So he's feeling pretty justified because if the world was really how he saw it, he would be justified.

Modern morality holds fellow #2 fully morally accountable for not realising that how he sees the world is wrong, and wants him to assume a superior perspective to the one he actually has, so that he can correct his behaviour. I'm not sure this is fair.

If we are morally accountable for our own failings, and when we've put together all the evidence we have, it seems like someone is killing a child, but he wasn't, and we're fully accountable for the wrong we do in response, then the only tenable position is absolute pacifism. You can't defend the child, ever, because you might be wrong and then you're accountable for what happens. The twist is that it's a pacifism that means we must allow the Nazi to do his evil, because we always might be confused about the situation and we have to assume we are and avoid doing potential harm.

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SacredBishop
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Re: Bias and Evil

Post #2

Post by SacredBishop »

[Replying to Purple Knight in post #1]

I'd say yes. Think of the Salem witch trials, and ask yourself: if you truly believed witches had the power to curse your crops, your wife's pregnancy, your child's health. If you truly believed you would burn them at the stake. Maybe that explains police brutality, and every other bad thing in our country. :x Though all of this is assumption of ill will, and a tad off topic.

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Purple Knight
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Re: Bias and Evil

Post #3

Post by Purple Knight »

SacredBishop wrote: Sun Feb 05, 2023 12:55 amThink of the Salem witch trials, and ask yourself: if you truly believed witches had the power to curse your crops, your wife's pregnancy, your child's health. If you truly believed you would burn them at the stake.
This is an even better example. Are people morally accountable for burning witches at the stake if they really believed witches had that power? If you hold him to that, the only way we can do what morality asks of us... is to do nothing at all. Ever. I might be wrong that the police are brutal. I might even be wrong that they have the power to arrest and/or suffocate people.

Outside chance, I know, but if we're morally accountable for what we don't know, we can't act.

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Re: Bias and Evil

Post #4

Post by Difflugia »

Purple Knight wrote: Sat Feb 04, 2023 10:10 pmAre we doomed to be evil if bias is evil, because we can't get rid of our biases entirely?
Why is bias evil? Even at worst, bias as such just makes us wrong. Bias means we're not evaluating the evidence impartially.
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Re: Bias and Evil

Post #5

Post by Purple Knight »

Difflugia wrote: Tue Feb 07, 2023 3:59 pm
Purple Knight wrote: Sat Feb 04, 2023 10:10 pmAre we doomed to be evil if bias is evil, because we can't get rid of our biases entirely?
Why is bias evil? Even at worst, bias as such just makes us wrong. Bias means we're not evaluating the evidence impartially.
It can also mean (in the modern not necessarily 100% scientific sense) that we have bad evidence. Everybody is tribal. That means you absolutely can have people who think Blacks are violent because they went to a largely Black school and all the other kids beat them to a pulp every day because they, as one of only one or two white kids, were on the outside of that group.

What lack of bias means in the scientific sense (just that it's random, not unbiased, and that we designed the experiment in a way that the researchers' bias was not allowed to taint the result) is not up to snuff in the moral sense. Usually we have a P-value of .05, meaning that even if it scans scientifically, there's a 5% chance that our results were biased - that we saw a trend that does not exist in the sample of every single thing that we did not measure. In the moral sense, lack of bias would mean something like evaluating not just one data group impartially, but looking at the result through the lens of having evaluated all the evidence in the world.

We can, for example, also have more bad evidence because the system is biased against Blacks so the crime statistics can back them up in their bias.

And if I tell them, "The system that generated that evidence is biased, and you're not likely to see hard evidence of that bias because of the bias," then I'm calling on them to discard what they know and just trust me instead. If this sounds a bit religious to you, it's because that's what I'm expecting: Faith.

Modern morality tells me I ought to expect this faith and I'm willing to give it (I was that kid) but I'm not sure expecting it of others is fair or right.

The reason I'm willing to extend faith is that I want to be more moral than I possibly can be. If I take in all the evidence I have and reach the only conclusions I can, I'm limited by my limitations. But if I discard all of that and happen to pick right, I get to be sort of angelic. I get to exceed the limits of how moral I can be. I know I routinely say morality can't be a lottery, but frankly, if it is a lottery, I want to win it. I see "the best I can do" and "utterly evil" as the same thing. Only better than I can do is admirable or worthwhile to pursue.

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