Personally I don’t think it’s a good approach to ask whether you personally are wrong or right for the way you feel, from my perspective it’s a bit of a weird way to approach moral responsibility.
It’s probably better to acknowledge the causes for why you or anyone else would discriminate that way, but to be honest this is not the only kind of preference that we could examine or think has problematic roots.
Are people wrong for not wanting to have sex with someone considered conventionally unattractive? Or what about my example with the amputated breast - would it be wrong to not want to have sex with that person upon realizing they are an amputee?
Even if we acknowledge there is some unfairness or problem with the way we feel, it doesn’t make us not feel those things. Overriding our feelings and carrying through with something we are uncomfortable with seems wrong to me, for example. Especially in the context of sex where consent is so important.
So, I’m not inclined to condemn the individual for their feelings even if they are problematic in some way - we all have problematic feelings, but I am inclined to think we should examine where feelings come from and how society reinforces some feelings and not others, if that makes sense.
The responsibility does not fall 100% on the individual for the way they feel, since individuals do not have perfect control over the way they feel or how their feelings form - they don’t exist in a vacuum where every decision they make is wholly their responsibility.
Instead if we think that discriminating on some basis or another is wrong, we live in a situation where we have to pragmatically acknowledge that people feel this way, and that those feelings aren’t going to go away even if someone acknowledges the feelings are problematic. I also don’t think it’s useful to shout down someone with those feelings even if the feeling comes from a bad place or is wrong in some way.
That said, it’s obvious that some people are more overt in their discriminatory attitudes than others - someone like Andrew Tate who is proudly misogynistic is someone worth individually denouncing since they embrace their discriminatory feelings and promote them in society. But again this is more about the influence on the social norms that are adopted by people - the focus should be on improving social attitudes, rather than policing every individual who is a product of those social attitudes.
Personally I don’t think it’s a good approach to ask whether you personally are wrong or right for the way you feel, from my perspective it’s a bit of a weird way to approach moral responsibility.
It’s probably better to acknowledge the causes for why you or anyone else would discriminate that way, but to be honest this is not the only kind of preference that we could examine or think has problematic roots.
Are people wrong for not wanting to have sex with someone considered conventionally unattractive? Or what about my example with the amputated breast - would it be wrong to not want to have sex with that person upon realizing they are an amputee?
Even if we acknowledge there is some unfairness or problem with the way we feel, it doesn’t make us not feel those things. Overriding our feelings and carrying through with something we are uncomfortable with seems wrong to me, for example. Especially in the context of sex where consent is so important.
So, I’m not inclined to condemn the individual for their feelings even if they are problematic in some way - we all have problematic feelings, but I am inclined to think we should examine where feelings come from and how society reinforces some feelings and not others, if that makes sense.
The responsibility does not fall 100% on the individual for the way they feel, since individuals do not have perfect control over the way they feel or how their feelings form - they don’t exist in a vacuum where every decision they make is wholly their responsibility.
Instead if we think that discriminating on some basis or another is wrong, we live in a situation where we have to pragmatically acknowledge that people feel this way, and that those feelings aren’t going to go away even if someone acknowledges the feelings are problematic. I also don’t think it’s useful to shout down someone with those feelings even if the feeling comes from a bad place or is wrong in some way.
That said, it’s obvious that some people are more overt in their discriminatory attitudes than others - someone like Andrew Tate who is proudly misogynistic is someone worth individually denouncing since they embrace their discriminatory feelings and promote them in society. But again this is more about the influence on the social norms that are adopted by people - the focus should be on improving social attitudes, rather than policing every individual who is a product of those social attitudes.