Ah, I should have asked: only cognitive? But yes, the body changes everything. Enminded bodies. And once you have enminded bodies, morality must become 'ecological', 'thick' and implanted in the world, rather than thin and deliberative. The OP is the latter. Hence the absence of other people.

Mine would not be suited to children. It would involve a trolly. And it would not be pretty.

Ah, I missed the God stuff. But then, the conceptual problems set in even before the equation of God with the 'subject'. See the sneaky edit of my last post. Or concisely: is morality a cognitive act? Or a result of cognitive acts?

I know I know. I just had a moment when I thought - is this what non-philosophers think we do all the time? One can only be struck by the total incongruence of the OPs concerns to what ordinary folks might be concerned with when it comes to moral questions.

Constructively: the OP might ask after what makes anything said in it specifically moral. Say 'valuing' is indeed 'subjective'. But is all valuing moral? And is morality exhausted by the act of valuing?

The OP is like toy morality. Like a My First Morality Playset™ that you give to undergrads to play with, before slowly introducing them to the things that matter.

So there can't be a moral obligation not to destroy a forest, then? That someone who thinks there is a moral obligation not to destroy a forest is conceptually confused? — Bartricks

Not at all. That other people are wholly absent from your line of thought is not so much a problem as a symptom of a deeper one. When it comes to forests, one can still ask: is it a mind that values a forest? Or is it as one who lives with a forest - walks in it, grows food amongst it, breathes from it, who takes care of the plant life, whose body is cooled by its presence and so on.

I imagine cutting out your brain and putting it in a jar on the forest floor. Then you deliberate. By this point, the moral calculus has already changed beyond all recognition. You would, for instance, probably be quite upset about the whole brain in a jar thing to begin with. But your 'moral' reasoning has no space for even that. It is thin, thin to the point of irrelevance.

You are not doing moral stuff if you are not talking about how you ought treat others. — Banno

Yep. Also others as people: with bodies, capacities, life histories, social situations, desires, and the rest of it. Minds? The least of it.

:vomit:

For an attempt to grasp morality, other people, or rather any account of relations between people - the very stuff of morality - seems conspicuously absent. This ought to be disqualifying from the start. This is one of the things that happens when morality is made a matter of a 'mind': as if minds have moral relations. Another victim of Cartesianism.

Wikipedia is a good first stop: a place to go to find out where to go next. It's also better for some things than others - it's fantastic for history and biography and anything 'factual' (geography, landmarks, basic science) - but once you get into more abstract things, like maths, high-level science, and philosophy in particular, it becomes almost more a hindrance and a help.

The entries on philosophy are particularly poor, and the IEP and the SEP are a great deal better. This is largely not the 'fault' of Wiki itself, but the very medium: philosophy is not well suited to 2-3 paragraph summaries, and in most cases having incomplete information is even worse than having no information. And IEP and SEP have the opposite problem of being very, very dry, and not all that great for popular consumption. Podcasts and Youtube videos I think are far more effective mediums for popular consumption of philosophy.

I've split all the comments regarding Wikipedia into its own thread, which can be found here:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/6653/on-the-value-of-wikipedia

Please post further comments on that topic there, and not here.

I think that identity politics can be a primary mode of political engagement regardless of what other avenues are available -- because recognition is an important part of doing politics. — Moliere

Two things I guess: first, that identity politics is a 'subclass' of the politics of recognition, and does not exhaust it. One can be recognized for one's achievements and contributions, or else one can be recognized for one's "humanity", regardless of one's specific identity. In fact, you'll often find liberals - those who advocate for the universality and equality of rights - as being among the first to denounce identity politics, precisely insofar as the the recognition demanded by identity politics is not universal but particular. This is why those who say that 'identity politics is about equal rights' couldn't be more wrong, and just plain stupid: equality swamps identity, it de-particularizes and liquifies it. Nothing unites a liberal front quite like identity politics: From Mark Lilla to Martha Nussbaum, Christopher Hitchens to Stephen Fry, you'll find each inveighing against the apparent horror that is identity politics at each and every turn.

So yeah, the first point is not to confuse the politics of recognition with identity politics. The former casts its net far wider, and in a manner that can be diametrically opposed to identity politics. That being said, precisely because the politics of recognition can be understood to be a more generic (in the sense of species-genera) form of identity politics, it too shares in some of its more unsavoury elements. In particular, the same blindness to the participatory dimension of politics, generally taking for granted the agency of recognition ('what' or 'who' does the recognizing - usually the state), without making it a site of political contestation in itself (consider some of the responses in Frank's recent thread on democracy: almost all the commenters there take the state (and law) as the only site of democratic agency. As of this post, the word 'power' hasn't been mentioned even once. It is a catastrophic failure of civic education and understanding. Reading it is an excercise in shame).

So I want to both 'defend' recognition as encompassing far more than identity politics even as I still reckon recognition is itself a limited paradigm of politics. That said, your point is well taken: recognition is indispensable. Recognition provides points of orientation, like little stable flags in shifting sands, and which serve to help make sense of the social relations we compose us. But everything turns on how we use recognition: whether we cluster around those points of recognition (identitarian or otherwise) because we're too scared or too incapacitated to do anything else (recognition becomes the end of politics, both as goal and as termination), or if we use those points as starting blocks, places from which to create and alter the relations of power which determine which flags of recognition are planted where. The point is not to abolish recognition - as if that would possible or even desirable - but to put it to use in a different way.

Without going too much into it, what's at stake in all of this is nothing less than the exercise of political freedom, one that cannot be guaranteed or fixed in advance by any agency of recognition, liberal or otherwise.

Imagine rolling a ball in a straight line. If space itself is curved, the 'straight line' itself will be bent. Or obversely, if you really wanted the ball to move in a straight line, you would have to actively correct its trajectory as it rolled.

If space was curved enough, it would mean that going in a straight line without turning would evenutally lead you back to where you began (just like travelling in a straight line on Earth would). There are probably some cool youtube videos on this, if you search for space-time curving, or the geometry of the universe or something similar. Probably good to visualize it.

now there is no space in that corner — elucid

There isn't any corner either: the corner's moved with the space. Or: the space moving is the corner moving.

(I edited by posted in response to your edit! Now things look strange).

This discussion was merged into The Ethics of Eating Meat

Do you believe that a person who ascribes to the belief "All politics is identity politics" thinks of identity politics in this way, or in the other way? — Moliere

There's no rule. But that's half the problem: the equivocation and indistinction, intended or not, between the two senses of 'identity politics'. I mean, you can almost describe the pattern in which this plays out: some idiot - say, Jonathan Haidt - rails on about identity politics, and then some well-meaning lefty chimes in with 'but all politics is identity politics!', and then the Haidt gets flustered, and by this point the audience is thoroughly confused, and everyone is worse off.

I take it that your target is not a person who ascribes to identity politics, then, but a person who -- perhaps on the periphery of political action -- calls this mistaken move of flipping process for product identity politics. Am I right? — Moliere

Well, a bit of both. The confusion itself is dangerous, insofar as it makes people politically incapacitated. But, so too is there alot of danger in identity politics itself, which is reactionary in a literal sense: identity politics becomes a primary mode of political engagement when other avenues of such engagement dry up - deprived of any meaningful ability to engage in the process of creating or participating in the creation of identity (shaping the power relations which give rise to them - Deleuze's 'minority becomings'), one falls back upon shoring-up and entrenching already established identity labels.

This is something I quoted from Patchen Markell earlier in the thread: "In the face of ... resiliently undemocratic distribution(s) of political power, I suspect, we increasingly seek solace in an interpretation of the principle of democratic legitimacy that focuses on recognition rather than action: cultivating identification with the state may help to secure at least de facto democratic legitimation by enabling us to recognize these remote and alien institutions as ours (and vice versa)—while still doing little to render them more accountable to us. In other words, the experience of identification comes to supplant the experience of action as the ground of whatever sense of connection many people now have with the states that claim them."

So in some sense identity politics is a 'weapon of the weak': I don't necessarily mean this in a disparaging sense - when you're out of options, you make do with what you have. But it's important that it's understood that it's a weapon of the weak, to understand its specificity and the tactical danger of it's employment. Wendy Brown makes a similar point, although she puts it in terms of 'postmodernity':

"In the absence of orienting instruments, to avert 'existential bewilderment" inhabitants of postmodernity - substituting (poorly) for more comprehensive political analysis - resort to fierce assertions of "identities" in order to know/invent who, where, and what they are. Drawing upon the historically eclipsed meaning of disrupted and fragmented narratives of ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, region, continent, or nation, identity politics permits a sense of situation - and often a sense of filiation or community - without requiring profound comprehension of the world in which one is situated ... Identity politics permits positioning without temporal or spatial mapping. ... In this respect, identity politics, with its fierce assertion and production of subjects, appears less as a radical political response to postmodernity than a symptom of its ruptures and disorienting effects". (States of Injury)

If the thread has so far focused more on 'what' identity politics is over the nature of it's effects, that's mostly because there's been confusion over the former, even though the latter is important and interesting too.

Worth considering before looking down on them. — Snakes Alive

Nah they're all fucking idiots.

Probably.

Maybe. But that doesn't seem borne out by the rather, er, unstudied opinions held by many here.

Then why not use that word? — Snakes Alive

Couldn't say. Although I like to imagine that its something to do with watching certain people squirm.

Just invite people to understand "majority" as dominant. — frank

Apparently this is hard for some people.

It may not be what you're talking about -- but doesn't that make sense of why someone might say "All politics are identity politics"? — Moliere

Because what happens is basically a confusion of process for product: identities (black, woman, gay, American) are results, products of an articulation arrived at in the course of complex social, historical, and cultural negotiation and development. One of the (necessary) means by which this negotiation takes place is politics, making it one (inescapable) ingredient that goes into the final, baked cake that is identity. Now, politics does alot more than just bake identity-cakes (not all politics, not most politics, aims merely to shape identities), but that it does, is inescapable. In is in this sense that one might say that 'all politics is identity politics': if you engage in politics (or if politics engages you), you end up, whether you like it or not, articulating the contours of identity (among other things).

But this is very different from taking identity as the explicit site of political action, of taking identification itself as a kind of political process: "I am woman, therefore, vote for me"'; "We put rainbow flags on our advertisements, so buy our products". This obscures process for product: this is what it means to engage in 'identity politics', where identities themselves are taken for (stand-in for) the very process which produce them. There's a interview with Deleuze where he talks about the difference between what he calls 'majorities' and 'minorities', which, for our purposes can be understood as those with established identities ('majorities'), and those who remain in the process of articulating theirs ('minorities'):

"The difference between minorities and majorities isn’t their size. A minority may be bigger than a majority. What defines the majority is a model [read: identity -SX] you have to conform to: the average European adult male city-dweller, for example … A minority, on the other hand, has no model [Identity - SX], it’s a becoming, a process. ... When a minority creates models [Identities] for itself, it’s because it wants to become a majority, and probably has to, to survive or prosper (to have a state, be recognized, establish its rights, for example). But its power comes from what it’s managed to create, which to some extent goes into the model, but doesn’t depend on it. A people is always a creative minority, and remains one even when it acquires a majority [an identity]. It can be both at once because the two things aren’t lived out on the same plane." (source, my bolding)

This confusion of process for product is what confuses so many people about identity politics, which is in many cases just assumed to be 'any kind of politics which has any bearing at all on identity'. Which is completely stupid because it's a confusion that ends up just equating identity politics with politics tout court, and then you end up in the disastrous situation where politics itself is taken for 'the problem' (because 'everyone knows' identity politics = bad boogeyman). This is why anyone who thinks this is just merely a verbal dispute is pretty dumb, insofar as the stakes for thinking politically - for understanding what it is we are even talking about when we talk about and of politics - are pretty high.

:up:

You'd think so, but then people in this thread :groan:

If identity politics is just politics, then what use is the word, "identity politics"? — Harry Hindu

Identity politics isn't just politics, that's the point. You'll excuse me if I take the word of a political scientist over some internet rando.

Since disliking unclear communication is a dis-qualifier, is there a test I can take so that I know when I am ready to start studying philosophy? — ZhouBoTong

As they say in math, shut up and show your work. No work, no play.

You don't have 'doubts', you can't even get the grammar right, let alone the logic.

Trash, again, as usual.

As distinct from what? Instruments which don't follow Newtons laws? Like you have a choice? What are you talking about?

When communicating with other humans that don't have master's or doctorate degrees, are phrases like "the subject is manifestly in the air" effective communication? — ZhouBoTong

If a relatively benign phrase like that seems like too much to you, you shouldn't be studying philosophy. That something is 'in the air' is, if anything, a pretty colloquial expression.

an instrument that is Newtonian — TheMadFool

There are no 'instruments which are Newtonian'.

This is meaningless.

Don't use a chronometer. Use a ruler, a sand timer, a spring, and a weight. Kids do this in early high school.

What does that even mean?

You can show they are true by running the experiments. You need the equipment. You can't prove them by thought alone.

This isn't an arbitrary quibble about a priori meanings. It matters how identity politics is understood, because its conflation with politics as such - as Haidt and half the participants in the thread are wont to do - leads to calls for nothing less than the suppression of politics, and in its wake, democratic politics. How we understand identity politics matters to how we understand politics in the larger sense. If we don't understand its specificity, we don't understand politics. And if we don't understand politics, we say stupid things about it.

And given that the 'average American' is a black hole of stammering vacuity, its best not to use that as our index of anything worth anything.

Haidt's almost there but he goes wrong at the last minute. He properly recognizes, to begin with, that politics is the space of competing claims. He also gets right the opposition between civil rights and so-called 'bad' identity politics, even though he wrongly classifies civil rights activism as a species of identity politics in it's own right. But he really messes up when he conflates 'bad' identity politics with the institution of a distinction between 'us' and 'them'. This should be so obvious a point that it's amazing anyone misses it: such a distinction is in no possible way a prerogative exclusive to identity politics, let alone a defining feature of it. Even forgetting that such a distinction is itself at the basis of any and all political action, it misses entirely the specificity of identity politics: a politics practised on the basis of identity claims! The bloody name of it.

As Kruks wrote, identity politics works on the basis of particular identities (as she writes, "it is qua women, qua blacks, qua lesbians that groups demand recognition), and not just some generic, unspecifiable distinction between 'us and them'. To equate identity politics with exclusion is to equate identity politics with politics, and argue for the extinction of the latter. Politics is founded on exclusion:

"What characterizes democratic politics is the confrontation between conflicting hegemonic projects, a confrontation with no possibility of final reconciliation. ... To conceive such a confrontation in political terms requires asking a series of strategic questions about the type of ‘we’ that a given politics aims at creating ... This cannot take place without defining an adversary, a ‘they' that will serve as a 'constitutive outside' for the we’. This is what can be called the ‘moment of the political’, the recognition of constitutive character of social division and the ineradicability of antagonism. Theorists who are unable or unwilling to acknowledge this dimension cannot provide an effective guide for envisaging the nature of politics." (Chantal Mouffe, Agnostics: Thinking The World Politically).

No wonder Haidt ends on a bunch of platitudes about 'working together' and 'creating trusting environments'. He doesn't want the end of identity politics. He wants the end of politics. Coming from a social psychologist, it's not that surprising.

Identity Politics per Merriam Webster:

politics in which groups of people having a particular racial, religious, ethnic, social, or cultural identity tend to promote their own specific interests or concerns without regard to the interests or concerns of any larger political group — Merriam-Webster.com — Harry Hindu

This is not at all a good definition of identity politics. Identity politics is not at all about groups promoting particular interests over general ones. If anything, that's just a definition of politics as such: all politics is the advancement of particular, competing claims in and of society. What is new in identity politics is the basis upon which such claims are advanced, a basis precisely understood as 'identity'. Here is an actual political scientist writing on the topic:

"What makes identity politics a significant departure from earlier, pre-identarian forms of the politics of recognition is its demand for recognition on the basis of the very grounds on which recognition has previously been denied: it is qua women, qua blacks, qua lesbians that groups demand recognition. The demand is not for inclusion within the fold of “universal humankind” on the basis of shared human attributes; nor is it for respect “in spite of” one's differences. Rather, what is demanded is respect for oneself as different" (Sonia Kruks, Retrieving Experience).

Or else to quote yet another political scientist, Corey Robin: "[Identity politics] tries to sidestep the critical role and need for argument, the need to craft a coalition and mobilize around a set of ideas and interests. Rather than build a case, people appeal to a condition. I'm not against a politics based on conflict, on arraying one group against another. I'm against building those conflicts on spurious appeals to "you're one of us." Even if that "us" is an oppressed group. ... All of us are divided in multiple ways, first and foremost within ourselves. That's what politics at its best does: to craft a commonality out of that preexisting division. Identitiarians begin with the most spurious identity of all--the undivided self--and build from there."

This is a reprise of what I said earlier: "There's a difference between "I advocate X because I am Y", and "I advocate X because of problems A, B, and C, that affect Ys". That there are issues that disproportionally affect, say Indigenous Australians, or First Nations people, and to engage in political action to address those issues is not identity politics." People - and apparently dictionaries - often confuse the two, and it is harmful and mystifying.

It is not identity politics to argue on the basis of particular interest. That's a vapid understanding of identity politics. Democracy itself is the accommodation and adjudication of particular interests, without which it would not have any raison d'etre. Identity politics is to argue for particular claims on the basis of identity, rather than the articulation of concrete problems: the imbalances of power, of unjust social burdens, inequity of participatory access and so on. All of these can disproportionally affect particular identity groups, without attempts to redress those issues as being identity politics. Simple rule: if you're arguing on the basis of identity, that's identity politics. If you're arguing on the basis of an injustice that affects who you are and who you can be, that's just politics as such.

I don't really understand the definition of identity politics — frank

That much is clear.

So we're just not talking about the same thing. What is the goal of the kind of identity politics you're talking about? The goal is to just be separate? Could you give an example of that? — frank

I've written plenty in the thread. You're welcome to read and engage.

politics is a path to a united voice. If you want to be separate, you don't engage in politics, you move to Liberia. — frank

This too is utterly wrong and bizarre. The very essence of politics is the management of antagonism between competing claims. There is no politics without this disunity. It's no accident that one of the most famous - if not still hotly debated - definitions of politics was Carl Schmitt's declaration that politics begins with the demarcation between friend and enemy. Politics is as much exiling your minorities to Liberia or confining them to ghettos as it is in achieving a 'united voice'. Unity is anti-poltical. There's a good reason why fascist politics is very much about the elimination of politics - all the better for 'unity'.

Hardly. The bright-light topics of identity politics - cultural appropriation, representation in media and history, political correctness and so on - have almost never been about civil rights. And besides, the disjunction between the two is almost analytic: if one is arguing for an expanded regime of rights for inclusion, then that's not identity politics because the grounds for that inclusion is equality and not specificity of identity. One is hard pressed to think of any two more diametrically opposed political discourses.

If you're looking for a historical antecedent to identity politics, you'll find in good old nationalism.