Lawrence Blum

Shaun Nichols is a leading figure in the recent turn toward empirical psychology within moral philosophy. This chapter criticizes his account of empathy and defense of ‘neo-sentimentalism’, and by implication much work in this tradition, for its impoverished view of moral emotions. Empathy, and related altruistic emotions, are necessarily intentional, not mere copies of feeling states of the other; perceptual, involving ways of seeing the world; cognitive in involving ways of understanding others; and expressive on top of being motivational (empathy or compassion are expressed in (helping) behavior as well as motivating it). Although philosophy benefits from attention to empirical psychology, this chapter argues that experimental psychology abandons the rich tradition of philosophical moral psychology, which can be carried out only with the distinctive humanistic methods of philosophy.

A familiar trope in many Hollywood films dealing with race is a symmetry between white and black with respect to some aspect of racism—both blacks and whites are shown to be prejudiced, or discriminatory, or using stereotypes of the other. Generally, this symmetry is false or misleading, as illustrated in _Far From Heaven_, a 2002 film set in the 1950’s. An upper middle class housewife begins a romantically-charged friendship with her black gardener. Her social set disapproves of this relationship, and the film nicely portrays the racism of these well-bred Northerners. But it also shows the black community similarly disapproving, and ultimately running the gardener out of town by throwing stones through his window. This alleged racial symmetry—both blacks and whites viciously oppose a black-white romance—is entirely false to the period in which the film is set. Other films exhibiting or not exhibiting false symmetries in relation to interracial relationships are also discussed.

Claude Steele’s stereotype threat idea has the potentiality for advancing racial equality in education. But it also has some drawbacks. It fails to distinguish clearly between sound generalizations and stereotypes as evidence-resistant overgeneralizations, and thus fails to encourage students to develop the intellectual tools to diagnose and reject stereotyping and to understand its harms. In addition, it could discourage the forming of accurate generalizations that are essential in diagnosing disparities between groups (e.g. in educational performance), and thus of structural and systemic injustice. In doing so it masks the asymmetries in vulnerability to stereotyping that are connected with the role of stereotypes in supporting and being generated by such structural injustices. The masking of these asymmetries is connected with Steele’s poorly defended view that vulnerable groups, such as black students, have not internalized stereotypes of their group. Finally, the lack of political and civic perspective in the analysis of stereotype threat is connected with depoliticized suggestions for reducing it.

Visual metaphors—attention, perception, seeing, looking, and vision—play a central role in Murdoch’s moral philosophy and moral psychology. This chapter distinguishes three importantly distinct phenomena that Murdoch fails consistently to mark: (1) a conscious and successful perception of moral reality (often called “attention”); (2) a focused act of attention that contributes to structuring the world of value as seen by an individual agent, but which can be distorted so that it is _not_ focused on moral reality; (3) the habitual and unselfconscious way of taking in the world around us that has been structured by various forces, including but not limited to (1) and (2). In her account of why people fail to grasp moral reality, Murdoch privileges individual psychological obstacles (illusion, fantasy, self-centered distortion) but neglects social forms of obstacles-stereotypes about race- or class-based groups, for example-that also contribute to (3) and distort moral perception.

The 2005 film _Crash_ deals powerfully with personal racism. Its wide array of story lines raise issues of personal stereotyping, prejudice, racial humiliation, wielding of racial power, and racial and ethnic insensitivity and misconnection. _Crash_ is structured so as to calling its viewers’ own stereotypes, prejudices, and other ill-founded racial assumptions to our attention, then leading us to question them. It is also sensitive to a complexity of racist motivations. The film generally avoids false symmetry about race typical of popular thinking; it recognizes that white people hold racial power and that this matters morally. Yet as a totality the film somewhat undermines its own insights. By including so many different forms and modes of personal racism, involving so many different racial and ethnic groups, _Crash_ somewhat leaves the viewer with the false impression that they are all of equivalent moral seriousness. Finally, the film almost entirely ignores systemic racism.

“Racism” has become, but was not always, the most common term used to condemn behavior and attitudes in the racial domain of life. Yet it no longer has a fully shared meaning in ordinary language (in English, and perhaps in some other languages). Some see racial wrongs such as racial insensitivity, racial ignorance, racial discrimination, or racial disrespect as forms of racism, while others see them as forms of racial wrongfulness that differ from racism. A person saying they have experienced racism should normally be believed, but this does not mean the person always understands the full character of what has happened to them. “Systemic racism” is a useful idea that protects against an overfocus on the individual dimension of racism. But systemic racism often still involves individual complicity and other individually wrongful behavior. “Implicit bias” involves prejudices of which the subject is not aware. Responsibility for such attitudes is a complicated issue, but persons can be responsible for not trying to root out unconscious prejudices of which others make they aware. “Racism is prejudice plus power” is a common definition of racism, but is problematic. It tends to overlook the ways people of color sometimes have power to hurt others, even including whites. Nevertheless the definition is useful in pointing to a moral asymmetry in most (though not all) manifestations of racism, that racism against people of color is generally more morally serious and wrongful than anti-white racism of the same form; for example, while an anti-white racial slur, like “honky,” is wrong and hurtful, it is not as much as the “n-word” used for Blacks.

Educational aims for societies comprising multiple ethnic, cultural and racial groups should involve three different values—recognizing difference, national cohesion and equality. Recognition of difference acknowledges and respects ethnocultural identities and in educational contexts also encourages mutual engagement across difference. National cohesion involves teaching a sense of civic attachment to a nation and to one’s fellow citizens of different groups and identities. ‘Multiculturalism’ has traditionally been understood to support the first value but not as much the second, a charge made by ‘interculturalism,’ a newer idea in Europe and francophone Canada. But Tariq Modood, this year’s Kohlberg Memorial Lecturer, has argued that national integration has always been a goal of multiculturalism. However, neither multiculturalism nor interculturalism has placed sufficient emphasis on equality as a social and educational ideal. Equality is a complex idea that involves both equal treatment by teachers of students from different groups, and also relative equal student outcomes among different groups.

Although Almond argues that the contemporary West has lost touch with the value of tolerance, I argue that that value applied to those of different religions and sexual orientations is too minimal a standard for a pluralistic society. I suggest, in the spirit of the work of Charles Taylor and Tariq Modood, the more robust standard of respect and acceptance. In addition, I have criticised Almond’s privileging of parental values over school values, seeing in that privileging a failure to recognise both the civic function of schooling in a pluralistic society and the professional responsibilities of teachers to provide a safe and stigma‐free environment of learning (a goal both educational and civic in character). I argue that Almond’s briefly presented rejection of same‐sex marriage and privileging of ‘biological’ families is insufficiently defended. Moreover within the philosophical framework of her own concerns about the weakening of a commitment to marriage in Western society in the past several decades, I argue that she should be more supportive of same‐sex marriage. Finally, I argue that her account of the problems occasioned by new immigrant groups, especially Muslims, in the West is very sketchy and fails to connect with her critique of secularism.

Two trips to Auschwitz (in 1989 and 2003) provide a context for reflection on fundamental issues in civic and moral education. Custodians of the Auschwitz historical site are currently aware of its responsibility to humanity to educate about the genocide against the Jews, as a morally distinct element in its presentation of Nazi crimes at Auschwitz. Prior to the fall of Communism in 1989, the site's message was dominated by a misleading civic narrative about Polish victimization by, and resistance to, Naziism. In this article, I discuss the attempts of many Polish intellectuals during the past twenty‐five years to engage in an honest and difficult civic project of facing up to their history, as it is entwined with anti‐Semitism, with the centuries‐long presence of Jews in Poland, and with their current absence. An interaction with a tour guide who took me to be criticizing Poles for their failure to help Jews during the Holocaust prompts further reflections on the difficulties of grasping the moral enormity of genocide, on the dangers of stereotyping, on the conditions under which it is appropriate to proffer and to withhold well‐founded moral judgements, and on the moral importance of appropriate feelings and attitudes when moral action is extraordinarily risky or dangerous.

Literature on moral education has contributed surprisingly little to our understanding of issues of race and education. The creation of inter-racial communities in schools is a particularly vital antiracist educational goal, one for which public support in the United States has weakened since the 1970s. As contexts for antiracist moral education, such communities should involve racially plural groups of students learning about, and engaging in, common aims, some of which must be distinctly antiracist: an explicit concern to institute racially just norms within the community (reflecting, yet going beyond, Kohlberg's own communitarian justice focus in his Just Community schools) and to foster social justice in society generally; and an appreciation of distinct cultural and racial identities within a community. Popular culture has an important role to play in providing salient cultural imagery of inter-racial co-operation and antiracist activity. In this regard, several films of Stephen Spielberg, a film-maker who takes his responsibilities as moral educator seriously, are promising yet ultimately disappointing.

Charles Mills began his career as a Marxist but at a particular point shifted to a focus on race, deliberately leaving behind an explicit concern with class, though implying that both class and race (along with gender) constitute distinct, interacting, domination systems in society. I argue that Mills’s permanent contribution to political theory is to see white supremacy as a sociopolitical order with its own character and logic, but that his specific account of race and white supremacy is faulty because class processes are internal to the racial domination system, and “racial injustice” already incorporates some aspects of class injustice. Thus Mills fails to recognize that white supremacy can fail to benefit and indeed can positively harm some white people. More generally, he fails to theorize class as a pervasive domination system. This argument does not reduce race to class, as Mills was correct in criticizing Marxism for (sometimes) doing. Some aspects of race do not concern class, while others do. Mills also fails to consistently articulate the specific normative character of current racial injustice, misleadingly conflating it with the “subperson” view of Black people dominant in the earlier colonial, slavery, and Segregation periods of white supremacy. For example, people of color now are accorded (if sometimes imperfectly) a panoply of rights denied in those earlier periods, and for Mills denial of rights is a core criterion of subpersonhood. The current period, better characterized by the idea of “racial disrespect” than “subpersonhood,” involves a form of wrongfulness much more similar in character to contemporary class injustice than the sub-personhood period did. Mills thus gives a misleading picture of the severity of class injustice in relation to racial injustice; they are much more similar than he says. And he also fails to recognize that racial injustice also incorporates forms of class injustice.

The Brown vs. Board of Education decision’s central affirmation, “separate is inherently unequal,”(the “inherency statement”) is literally false—separate facilities, for different racial groups, can be equal, even if they are often not. The inherency statement has contributed to confusion about integration, (educational) equality, and the relation between them. (1) Schools with one-race-dominant demographics(“separated”) are not necessarily “Segregated” (in the Jim Crow Segregation sense). The forms of racial injustice and subordination involved in separated schools are not necessarily of the same moral character and severity as those of Segregated schools. (2) The Brown decision did not make clear that what was being declared unconstitutional and in violation of the “equal protection of the laws” was precisely the white supremacist system of Segregation itself, in its educational manifestation. (The 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision did so). Separation is “inherently” unequal only within a Segregation system, where the separation reflects a socially recognized stigmatization and assault on the dignity of one group (3) The inherency statement falsely implies that all-Black or all-Indigenous (and thus “separate”) educational institutions cannot be excellent. (4) The existence of an “egalitarian pluralist” tradition, especially in African-American educational thought(but present in different forms within Indigenous, Latine, and Asian American educational traditions), which promotes both equality and separation, is unrecognized as a normative framework in Brown and in subsequent school separation/integration cases. (5) By its misleading touting of integration as the linchpin of equality, the inherency statement masks the vital role of outside-of-school factors, especially concerning students’ socio-economic background, that hinder the achievement of such equality, and closes out an inquiry into what would be required to bring about equality in light of those conditions. The inherency statement implies this because it says we already know that separation is the cause of inequality and integration its remedy. (6) The inherency statement expresses a failure to recognize that integration can be educationally valuable for reasons other than its (alleged or actual) links to equality, in particular as a distinctly favorable setting for civic education that prepares students for life and participation in a multiracial democracy. (The Court recognized the civic importance of education itself, but not specifically of the integrated form of education they mandated.)

The years since the world-wide demonstrations in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020 have seen a significant embrace of antiracist education as part of moral education, followed by conservative rollback of such efforts. The article discusses both, and is applicable to the further retrenchment in the second Trump administration (in 2025). Antiracist moral and civic education should educate about both interpersonal racism (racism of individuals toward other individuals) and institutional racism (systemic racial injustices). Each of those areas involves both “negative” values—avoiding racial wrongs—and “positive” values—promoting race-related goods. Negative interpersonal values include stereotyping, antipathy, and demeaning the other. Positive interpersonal values include respecting racial others as equals, recognizing positive racial differences, respecting cultures associated with racial groups. Negative institutional values are the most familiar—ending, mitigating, repairing systemic racial injustices. Positive institutional values include promoting racial justice, understanding, harmony, and a culture of respect throughout society represented in its institutions. Institutional racism requires civic education, in order to recognize patterns of injustice, to analyze their causes, and to be able to measure them against both morally sound and nationally salient ideals (such as equality, liberty, and justice). Antiracist education must be sensitive to students’ particular racial identities, and to asymmetries between the way white and non-white identities function morally and civicly. Although sometimes it is important to ignore someone’s racial identity in interacting with them, “color-blindness,” promoted as an overarching principle by the Trump administration and the retrenchment legislation, cannot play that role. Antiracist education requires that we often take account of people’s race, and the issue is how to do that properly, not to ignore it entirely.

Different socioeconomic backgrounds and barriers to education have contributed to low­er educational achievement among blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans, compared to American whites and Asians. The failure of legal integration to close the racial achieve­ment gap is the result of prejudice on the part of teachers, as well as a scarcity of cultur­ally relevant curricula materials for nonwhite children. As a plausible solution to these problems, recent studies show that poor children do better in classes where middle-class children are also present. Middle-class children already have habits and values that sup­port success in the educational system. Integrated schools are not sufficient, because they are often divided in “tracks” that reproduce racial segregation. Racial diversity in the K-12 classroom is fruitful preparation for civic engagement in a pluralistic society made up of citizens from diverse backgrounds.