Correctness, Intuition and
Logic
About a week ago I commented
on a newspaper report from North Lanarkshire, one of the Labour-controlled
councils in Scotland where STV is used, a form of proportional representation.
The council had axed an
annual taxi outing for children with special needs. The Monklands Taxi Drivers’ Outing had been running for
almost 40 years – but North Lanarkshire Council halted the yearly fancy dress
road trip. According to them, such
outings didn’t “fit in with current thinking on inclusion and equality and that
parading children with additional support needs is inappropriate.”
To my mind, thinking is
merely thinking, and that formulating such hypotheses is an initial stage. Indeed one can say that inclusion and
separate activities are not mutually exclusive. I have written before about the
importance of the intuitions of the people for whom political correctness is
supposed to benefit. People who
speak an accent, say Indian, have an intuitive judgement as to whether an
attempt at an Indian accent is racist.
I for example have no objection to the metaphor ‘short-sighted’, for
example our government’s short-sighted attitude toward climate change. If somebody who was not short-sighted
tried to tell me how I should react to such a metaphor, my intuition would be
that they were bloody patronising and the only reason I didn’t thump them was
because my glasses might get broken.
When such people try to be
logical, they often use emotive and subjective terms, often in situations where
it is not ‘either... or’. Using
the term short-sighted in a derogatory context supposedly tells short-sighted
people they are inferior. Not when
we have glasses and choose to use them, which the metaphorical short-sighted do
not.
Attempting to be politically
correct can only be meaningful if you listen to those you are trying to help,
and are ready to learn from their intuitions. And indeed inclusion does not exclude separateness, when of
course neither is imposed.
Martin Prior
The Philosophy Takeaway Issue 53 'Open Topic'
