Kurt Baier

Moral Reasons and Reasons to be Moral

From the thirties to the sixties the three moralists honored in this volume dominated ethical theory in this country. There are few areas on which none of them has left a lasting imprint. Where they disagree — and that is not infrequently — the controversy continues to be lively and illuminating.

Merit and race

The stigma which the Nazi ideology hasburned into all forms of racism is now beginning to fade together with the memories of Nazi extermination camps. The current wave of revisionist historical thinking about Hitler has also stimulated second thoughts about racism. And, indeed, Nazi anti-semitism was really rather atypical: it is dubious whether the Jews are a race; the racial inferiority the Nazis accused them of lay not so much in their supposed lesser ability as rather in their inferior mores: egoism, greed, sexual depravity, ritual murder, designs to dominate the world, and so on; and finally, Nazi racism was extreme in its discriminatory practice, involving genocide where most other forms of racism are satisfied with more modest aims, such as discrimination in immigration, education, exclusion from certain walks of life and jobs, various forms of segregation, or prohibition of intermarriage. Indeed, in recent years, many people attracted by racism have refrained from appeals to prejudice and hatred. Instead they tried to find rational support for racism in the sciences that study race, anthropology and biology. Unfortunately, as with the proofs of the existence/nonexistence of God, so with the proofs of racial equality/inequality: those who already believe tend to persuade themselves that the available evidence amounts to proof, or (because they want to believe) continue to look for better evidence, meanwhile clinging to their convictions on what favorable evidence they already have or on what they are willing to construe as such. In this paper I am concerned, not indeed to add to the already vast literature about the merits of the relevant scientific findings, but rather to examine the reasoning by which such findings, whether sound or not , can be brought to bear on certain issues of racism. 1 My paper has two parts. The first delineates the