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The most common objection raised to the liberal position that we should not evaluate people’s worth by their race is that taking such an attitude results in not being able to see or counter racism (aka evaluating people’s worth by their race). This is absolutely bizarre.
There doesn’t seem to be another context in which we worry that by committing to not doing a certain harmful thing, we lose the ability to see other people doing the harmful thing and object to it or protect the people being harmed by it.
We don’t, for example, hear someone say “If you consistently refuse to hit people with a baseball bat, how will you be able to recognise when someone is hitting someone else with a baseball bat & defend the person being hit?”
In reality, the person who consistently refuses to evaluate people’s worth by their race because they believe it is morally wrong is not only more likely to notice racism than someone whose position on it is relative, they also have a firmer moral ground to oppose it from.
Some people also seem to think that applying the principle of not evaluating people’s worth by race consistently means you will then not be able to recognise different severities of impact, but that doesn’t follow either.
For example, holding consistent principles against gratuitous violence does not mean that we’d not be more concerned about a 90-year-old being shoved to the ground than a 20-year-old.
We’d know the elderly person could sustain much more injury & have much more difficulty in healing from it & consider it a particularly reprehensible act of violence without any need for theories about how only old people can experience violence.
In short, I utterly refuse to feel embarrassed or naive for advocating for consistent liberal principles. Far from being too simple a framework to properly understand complex social issues, they are the solid base necessary for identifying illiberalism in the first place.
