In “Racist Value Judgments as Objectively False Beliefs: A Philosophical and Social-Psychological Analysis,” Clough and Loges “argue that racist value judgments express beliefs that are objectively false” (77). Drawing on Donald Davidson and social science, they argue that racist value judgments are beliefs made from empirical evidence, that these judgments can be assessed as true or false, an that beliefs can be reassessed and changed based on rational assessment. Clough and Loges believe that it’s problematic to have a rigid “split between descriptive and moral claims […] such that the descriptive features are viewed as inherently free of moral content, and the moral features are viewe as free of descriptive or empirical content” (80). “Insofar as value judgments express anything,” they write, “they too are beliefs that have been acquired through the usual process of practical engagement in the world through communication with others” (87). They argue that it is important to be able to assess racist judgments as objectively false, because otherwise — to separate the moral from the descriptive — “places values beyond the reach of rational discourse — ironically privileging value-based claims by removing them from argument” (92).
To me, one interesting concept from this article was the idea of being “responsible to evidence.” Clough and Loges write about the moral indignation we feel when we hear something racist: “we believe that the moral indignation is evoked primarily because of the failure of the person making the racist judgment to be responsible to evidence, and because failures of this sort are inconsistent with other meta-value judgments that we have good empirical reasons to associate with human flourishing” (78). Two other factors that influence our moral outrage are the seriousness of consequences (78) and historical contingencies (79). Clough and Loges offer examples: we are not as outraged at a 3-year-old making a racist statement as we are at a teenager or adult because the consequences are not as serious; we are not as outraged if we hear someone say all Lutherans are lazy than we are if we hear all African Americans are lazy because there is not the same historical contingencies that make the consequences serious.
Clough, Sharyn, and William E. Loges. “Racist Value Judgments as Objectively False Beliefs: A Philosophical and Social-Psychological Analysis.” Journal of Social Philosophy 39.1 (Spring 2008): 77-95.
