What exactly is prejudice?

Blogdom,

The simplest answer to a relevant question is oftentimes the most difficult to apply. This post is an attempt to give the simplest possible answer to the titular question and show why it is the best, but also the most difficult answer.

Prejudice etymologically means judging in advance. I propose, with no political goal in mind, to take this breaking up of the word into its elements as the definition despite the well-known linguistic truism (inapplicable tautology) that etymology does not determine meaning because I don't like the meaning my society is giving the word right now. If I am not to be a slave to others' usage, and thus to let my very linguistic potentiality be dictated by foreign wills and be rendered thereby incapable of thinking for myself, I must use the recourse of the only shared objective fact about the word outside its' usage--its etymology. The danger of newspeak lies not only within the hearts of bureaucratic establishments of perfect totalitarian regimes, but within our hearts. It is a danger that looms over us at every turn, in every choice of words we make. If we lived in a world of pure speech, without guns or enforceable threats, it would be the mother of totalitarian regimes rather than its' offspring. As it is, the situation is much more complicated, but the danger of totalitarian regimes lies in our speech as well the arms we bear or find thrust in our face. Wishing to avoid newspeak, I'm defending myself with a natural ally against it--call it oldspeak.

If prejudice means judging in advance, as I am bidding it to mean, it can bear no necessary relation to bigotry based on race, class, gender, or creed. This is simply not what the word would then mean. Any judgement made about presented evidence concerning an event or person in advance of the presentation of the evidence would be a prejudice. This is simple enough. Why don't we just avoid such a habit?

Judgements must be made randomly or from a basis. This is an applicable tautology. We know that making judgements completely at random is both difficult and dangerous. That leaves the question of what basis we are to form jugdements upon. We arrive at the scene with our previous materials, which we know not the shape of, and receive evidence we know not the shape of. We come, we see, we judge what exactly is before us. The question is by what we are going to be directed in our judgement. Surely something, but what? What about this: judge by no thing but by your wits. We can argue about whether man should be the measure of all things, but we cannot argue that she/he can be. That is a simple fact. Here's why I think the should clause also belongs in our after-the-fact judgement of this particular sentence.

"Whatever comes to mind" is not only an acceptable basis of judgement, but the only basis of judgement that is not prejudice given there are no other prejudices present (a weighty condition, I admit). Any methodical decisions as to how we are to judge what comes our way next, whatever it be, is a prejudice. Saying that we should always judge people by actions, not words, that a sovereign nation always has rights, that people who believe they have a homeland on the basis of their ancestors having lived somewhere are always justified in this belief, that the law of the land should always be followed, and many other sentences that make no mention of distinctions between people based on "who they are", however defined, are prejudices--that is advance judgements. No wonder the trumpeters of these principles don't apply them magnanimously--they're just not as prejudiced as they like to sound.

However, that justice always demands equal treatment of people is not a prejudice, because it is not a judgement. It is a rule for how to apply what judgements we may make. "Do not judge by race, class, gender or creed," is not a judgement either---it merely states that certain other sentences aren't good judgements. So all maxims are not prejudices, but all maxims not based on the usual suspects are not necessarily free of prejudice. If they are judgements, being maxims, that is sentences meant to be applied in the future, they are indeed prejudices.

Judgements concern conceptual entities--be they people, nations, homelands, musical forms, emotions, or anything else. Every mention of a conceptual entity is not a judgement, but every judgement mentions a conceptual entity. "Equal treatement of people" clearly mentions one of these, but it brilliantly fails to tell us either what a person is, or what treatment should be applied in a situation. For that matter it fails to tell who is a person--if we can't tell, we're not fit to make judgements anyways. It may seem paradoxical to say that guidlines for making judgements are acceptable and praise gut instinct at the same time. But gut instinct is trained too; in fact it is precisely what is trained with no particular end in mind. Rawls's veil of ignorance is a veil against self-interest, but not against all prejudice as here defined.

I find Rawls's veil too maxim-driven. Maxims are lessons extractable from situations we've seen before, and expect to see again. Even if reality repeats itself nicely, which I doubt that it does without our prejudiced help, maxim-based ethics requires us to know what situation we are in before acting--a condition that is simply too strong given the speed of the world and mankind's particular abilities. Additionally, they don't allow intermediate cases--there being neither an intuitively obvious space of situations nor an intuitively obvious space of maxims, they don't mix very well.

Our wits have landed us in bad situations before. But our attempts to get around them have fared worse. So if you don't like your guts, change them. Why complain that our categories are vague and amorphomous? They're supposed to be. "Vague" is what we're adding here on this earth. Why complain about limit cases, exceptions, cases that both are and aren't a thing? Categories allowing of such cases are precisely what we are creating that inorganic nature cannot. If we try to decide in advance of any specific event how we are to categorize and judge it by any criteria other than what comes to a mind not under the influence of prejudices, we are, you guessed it, prejudiced. Gentlemen, fire up your neurons. You have no idea what's about to hit you.