Someone who murders a fellow person is a murderer; they cannot murder without being a murderer. Just because they murder someone, though, does not make him or her sexually or nonsexually sadistic, emotionless, or sociopathic. None of this logically follows, as it is possible for a murderer to have some or all of these traits--or to not have any of them at all. There is no logical necessity in having done these things and simultaneously having certain ideological or personality characteristics. With murderers and many other types of people, however, there are legions of stereotypes that plenty of people hold to out of sheer stupidity.
It is not stereotyping a murderer to think that they are/were willing to illicitly take lives and act on that willingness, as that is exactly what being a murderer is, and this is a truth about logic and concepts rather than the mere language of the term murderer. It is anything beyond or unrelated to this that would be a stereotype, and all stereotypes are inherently false and also epistemologically invalid. Though it is Biblically sinful to carry out homosexual acts, being homosexual does not make a person a pedophile or promiscuous, not that a lack of these things makes acting on homosexuality morally permissible (that would pertain to matters other than individual or societal preference, comfort, or persuasion).
To give more examples of the distinction between stereotypes and the nature of a person, someone who is old is only by necessity old, not mentally vacant, stubborn, oblivious or uncaring about the problems facing younger people, or any other stereotype. Someone who is young is not impulsive, emotionalistic, or philosophically apathetic because they are young, but they are young. Perhaps they have some or none of these other traits. Likewise, a woman is only a woman and everything else about her has to do with her humanity or individuality: she is not kind, selfless, selfish, or vain because she is a woman. The only traits she has as a woman are anatomical or physiological (she has certain genitalia, internal organs like the womb, the capacity for giving birth, and so on).
A white person (or black person, among others, with their respective skin color) by default is just a person with white skin, to give another example. He or she is not racist, of high moral character, rational, or stupid because of the color of their skin, no matter what positive or negative stereotypes some people might confuse for reality. Even if an individual white person is one of these things, it is never because they are white. The same is true of someone who is a man, poor, mentally ill, beautiful, and so on. Nothing other than the characteristic in question is by necessity among their traits. Due to social pressures, even irrationalists who might naturally avoid stereotyping others left to themselves are directly and indirectly encouraged to make false or irrelevant assumptions about people, though of course any assumption about anything is irrational in itself already.
Irrationalists do not believe stereotypes by default, but because they have a voluntary, avoidable lack of alignment with rationality, they are of course more likely to stereotype (a consistent rationalist would never do such a thing). There is no exception to stereotypes being irrational, for they misrepresent the metaphysical qualities of a person as an individual with a given gender, race, personality, age, economic status, physical appearance, or some other such thing. Falling into one of these categories has absolutely nothing to do with a person's worldview, talents, or personality. What one individual is like does not reflect another person and whatever is not by logical necessity tied to a characteristic like gender or age is never related to such things as it is.
Logic, people. It is very fucking helpful and inherently true even when hated or unrecognized.
No comments:
Post a Comment