Why it is so hard for people of privilege to understand what people without those privileges are trying to say?
David Hume was a Scottish philosopher who argued famously that you cannot argue from “is” to “ought.” In other words, there is no set of natural facts that will move a neutral observer to ethical action. Values are not only thought, they must also be felt.
Another philosopher, G.E. Moore, also rejected the idea we can look objectively around us and deduce what we should do. He called the assumption we can reason from some self-evident set of facts the “naturalistic fallacy.”
We see examples of this fallacy every day. A few years back, Jimmy Kimmel made a tearful plea for affordable health care by talking about his newborn baby needing heart surgery. Kimmel had been moved by the poor parents he saw at the hospital and wondered what would happen to them if they lost health insurance.
At one point, Kimmel basically said that taking care of sick children is something we can all agree upon regardless of our political stance. In response Republican Joe Walsh, tweeted, “Sorry Jimmy Kimmel: your sad story doesn’t obligate me or anybody else to pay for somebody else’s health care.”
I can’t remember the exact quote but Hume somewhere said in so many words, “There is no logical reason I should care about the pain of the whole world more than the pain from my own hangnail.”
So it should be no mystery that so many white people hear the cries of “Black Lives Matter!” and find no logical reason to care. It should be no mystery that so many males hear women’s cries for reproductive healthcare and just shrug. It should be no mystery that so many American citizens are indifferent to the cries of undocumented people in terror of deportation.
Ethics are not something we can reach by reason alone. The empathy necessary for a sense of justice must also be FELT.