More troubles with Normal

[alias_sqbr]

So I was woken out of bed at 11pm by a plot bunny, and in my search for a bit of paper found the rest of my notes for The Trouble with Normal.

And here they are:
There is no sex/love dichotomy. Pretty much everyone is in favour of both sex and love, under the right circumstances. Yes, even fundamentalist christians and prostitutes (respectively).

Members of oppressed groups are divided into "good" and "bad".

Good: conventional, don't rock the boat, polite, asks for small easy changes, express appreciation for status quo
Bad: unconventional, make people uncomfortable

The subtext is: Being in group X is inherently bad, but some members manange to transcend this by being good in all other ways. EDIT: Obviously this is only bad if being in group X is not inherently bad eg as in the original example of queerness. See comments.

It's important to distinguish this from simply dividing people up into good and bad people by a measure genuinely unrelated to Xness. (Assuming you do so objectively and fairly)

Normally I don't post at such an absurd hour, but it's just typing stuff I wrote up already.

Comments

[melberon.livejournal.com]

If you acknowledge that society should encourage or enforce any kind of moral principles, it is necessary to divide minorities into "good" and "bad". (I'm not entirely sure whether you were claiming otherwise, or even claiming anything in particular. It's late for me too!)

e.g. Let X = "being a murderer". Should we divide people up into good and bad based on X-ness?

I'm not convinced that you can find an "objective" and "fair" measure with which to divide people up morally. Moreover, if you could, then there would exist a predicate X for which it would be equivalent to dividing people up based on X-ness.

[alias_sqbr]

Ah..sorry, this post is a bit unclear without it's context: here X is not-inherently-bad-but-gets-discriminated-against stuff like being queer, female, non-white etc.

And that's what I'm talking about in my second last sentence: there's nothing wrong with saying "All murderers are bad. Therefore disabled people who commit murder are bad"(*). But it is wrong to say "All disabled people who want to be on tv are bad" unless you apply the same standard to all non-disabled people too. (This is not a hypothetical example :/)

And yeah, I gues there are issues with any attempt to divide the world into good and bad people. But some are much worse than others!

(*)Well, you could argue it's a bit dogmatic. But it's certainly not ablist.

[melberon.livejournal.com]

Oh, I was taking an even more radical stance: arguing that even things like murder are not inherently bad.

If you're going to be arguing for changes to the way society treats groups of people, you run into a problem: there is no single logical principle which everyone will agree on for deciding what changes should be made. People are going to disagree on what is wrong and right when it comes to interacting with other people. A sociopathic serial killer may argue that people like himself (or herself) should be treated with respect and admiration. Hard-line fundamentalist Christians may argue that homosexuality is a sin and should not be tolerated in a civilised country.

Most arguments in this area are going to boil down to "I have different fundamental values from that person"; at which point society has to decide which values it accepts and which it does not. And it's far from a binary accept/reject decision, too - traits like greed are generally unpunished by the law but frowned upon by individuals in many social groups.

there are issues with any attempt to divide the world into good and bad people. But some are much worse than others!

Sure, but people are still going to disagree about which are better and which are worse! It is impossible to please everyone and (I think) unwise to even attempt to do so. Choosing who gets to be unhappy is necessarily difficult and controversial.

(Hm. This still feels kind of waffley-without-a-point. For which I apologise.)

[alias_sqbr]

Oh I'm not defending black and white simplistic good/bad dichotomies. And if you don't have one of them at all, well that's fine. But my post is criticising certain sorts of dichotomy which I think are particularly flawed, and I wanted to make it clear that this isn't meant as a general argument against dichotomies. Such arguments exist, but are beyond the scope of my post.

Sure, but people are still going to disagree about which are better and which are worse! It is impossible to please everyone and (I think) unwise to even attempt to do so. Choosing who gets to be unhappy is necessarily difficult and controversial.

I could be wrong, but it seems like you're arguing that since it's impossible to come to a complete consensus about the best way to behave or to make everyone happy we should never criticise other people's behaviour/moral framework at all, which I strongly disagree with.