If You Could Cure Racism, Would You?
Posted: Wed Apr 11, 2012 4:18 pm
Suppose we found out that racism was a mental illness. And further suppose we found a cure. Would it be ethical to force people to take the cure?
no. Because racism is philosophy, it is even indicated in the word: "-ism".
It's like anti-communists should cure communists of their communism or anti-capitalists cure capitalists of their capitalism.
It just doesn't make sense unless you are some kind of fundamentalist who thinks you have all the right answers.
On a different note: what if you could cure violent behaviour? They already do, indirectly or as an emergency, by tranquillizing people. I guess if I had a spray which I could spray on a crowd of racists showing off hatred I could, but only severely conditioned, spray them with anti-racism until they cooled down and became reasonable, that is, not stop being racists, but stop being racists showing off actions of hatred.
It doesn't matter if racism is a "mental illness" because it would anyway be a silly category for it. A person can have schizophrenic paranoia making them think all arabs are conspiring to, for instance, turn England into a Muslim country ruled by a theocratic police state government. This kind of paranoia could be caused by the combination of schizophrenia and prior racism beliefs, but it would just be the colour or taste or odour of a schizophrenic condition, it couldn't itself be a mental illness or even be called a real "part" of it, just a random trait of personality.
All people are conditioned to be some kind of person, and even if a racist suffers psychologically or socially through his/hers life because of his/hers belief it is still that person's choice and all we can do is try to disprove of his or hers prejudices. A cure would just set an example for dictating each other's thoughts. However, we could cure the person of "causes" of the racism that are also causes of social and psychological bad conditions. Like, having been beaten up by a black or yellow kid or gang while young and found brotherhood in racism. The situation would then be "having been beaten to social exclusion and psychological trauma" and not "conditioned to racism".