Major Contentions

• Prejudice” implies an active premature judgment of a person or a group, but “privilege” implies an unearned and externally granted advantage.
• This difference in meaning carries two implications: first, that error implies both fault and a duty to correct, but receiving an unearned advantage does not imply moral fault, though it might imply a duty to correct nonetheless if the advantage deprives another of justice.
• However, contemporary views of privilege rarely charge transgressions of justice, meaning a failure to meet a standard of what is due each person; rather they assume violations of fairness, which are invariably based on comparisons between persons, but this is an inferior standard.
• The charge of privilege imposes a moral duty to correct an injustice which the person charged may have had nothing to do with whereas a charge of prejudice calls attention to a rational or moral error committed by the person charged.
• Prejudice suggests its own solution: more accurate judgment; but it seems that a person can spend a lifetime working against an inherited privilege without lessening her degree of responsibility so long as the standard of fairness is not met, and this seems to demean both the preeminence of preferential freedom in morality and the individual dignity that it demands.
• Questions of fairness always devolve into definitional confusions about whether fairness means equality of degree or earned merit relative to another; conservatives prefer the latter definition and liberals the former.
• Conservatives charge that perseverance and talent are responsible for the privileges they enjoy, but the implication of that charge cannot fail to result in active prejudice against entire classes of persons who have not risen economically.
• One reason fairness is so often the measure of disparity is that racial bias was indeed founded upon unfair judgments of relative merit, which naturally leads efforts to correct bias to attempt to reverse those judgments using the same standard; current emphasis on privilege does not change that calculation.
• But in this comparison, the goods are absolute, but the harms are all thought to be comparative; but this effort to establish an equality of degree based on fairness is forced to view every unearned privilege as comparative and requiring redress, which is absurd because, if taken seriously, those enjoying even wholesome privileges having nothing to do with bias are asked to feel guilt and redistribute while those who lack them are encouraged to be resentful regardless of these privileges’ connection to prior bias.
• Since not all human needs are subject to scarcity, a standard of fairness ought not apply; but lacking in their fulfillment, citizens are entitled to procure them not as a redistribution of privilege based on past unfairness but as a human right based upon present dignity, and to the degree that civil government has obstructed the satisfaction of these needs in the past because of active prejudice producing a current deprivation, it owes a debt to justice to remediate them.
• But this same standard of needs/rights as determinative of justice goes further, for it establishes a claim-right for all citizens that ought to be the goal of justice regardless of past privilege or active prejudice.
• Another failure of seeing this issue in terms of fairness and privilege is that the absolute harms of deprivation are inflicted on individuals but the implicit duty of correction is laid upon society as a whole; while this may change attitudes, it cannot remediate deprivation because moral action is an operation of moral agency, which does not reside in cultures but in the persons who compose them or in the stranger-writ-large that is government; imposing a vague and generalized “duty of society” to remediate absolute deprivations means no one is responsible to repair them.
• This illusion is responsible for two errors: first that privileged “society” even in consensus can accomplish anything without individual moral responsibility, and second, that persons lacking the fulfillment of their needs bear no responsibility to secure them.
• Notions of generalized privilege and fairness tend toward erasing responsibility rather than focusing it.
• Viewed from the perspective of justice and absolute harm, we find many comparable legacies of harm that continue to be baneful, and the same argument can be made to demand justice in regard to imperialism, environmental destruction, and other systems of deprivation subject to the jurisdictional limits of the institutions and individuals involved.
• The shame has never been that some have an excess; rather than the prejudice that helped produce the excess has also produced a deficiency for its victims in absolute terms of needs/rights.
• Privilege is not the problem; deprivation is.

I really dislike looking into matters of race, but you don’t have to scratch the surface of any American problem very hard to find race eating away just under the surface, complicating understanding by biasing analysis. It is this subterranean process, this rotting under the polished surface of our ideals, that has given rise to the relatively new popularity of the notion of privilege as racism. I wish to examine this view in relation to the traditional notion of prejudice.

Their etymology indicates a major difference that has major implications. While “prejudice” is rooted in the active voice — it means literally “to prejudge” presumably in error, “privilege” derives from French meaning “private” and “law.” To be granted a privilege is a passive, not an active act. Perhaps favor was sought, but its reception was not within the power of the recipient to procure in contrast to the power we have in exercising our judgment actively to show prejudice.

Now the use of these two terms today tracks their etymology, and this distinction is hugely important in the current racial climate for two different reasons, both of which make remedying racism more difficult. First, the concept of personal responsibility for wrongdoing is a bedrock moral principle, and that is difficult to connect to privilege as racism unless we see responsibility as divorced from fault. It is possible to do that. For example, persons who are born with congenital health problems cannot be faulted for handicaps that are nevertheless their responsibility to remedy as they are able. But this only drives home the second question more strongly: are strangers responsible for correcting other strangers’ problems? If so, on what grounds can that claim be staked?

Contrast this haze of shared responsibility to active prejudice. To commit an act of prejudice is to commit an error in thinking. It is within the thinker’s power to remedy. It is not only a cultural offense but also a rational one. It connotes sloppy thinking even when the prejudice is positive. For unless a class of things or persons is definitionally exclusive (“All bachelors are unmarried”), one may not reasonably apply even accurate group classifications to individuals, not to mention the difficulties inherent in forming those classifications in the first place, a danger postmodernists blithely ignore for some reason (see “Stereotypes and Categories“). But to receive a privilege is a gift the recipient has no control over. In the sense social critics use the word, white privilege describes a thing unearned, an accident of birth, a booster rocket for economic and social ascent denied to others. The term is thus not only passive, but also inevitably comparative to others. From its beginning, the private law benefiting some was implicitly to be contrasted with the public law relatively penalizing others. Framed in this way, privilege is invariably evaluated through considerations of fairness, which is an inferior moral quality to justice. Societal fairness can never be adequately calculated because it is influenced by systemic, sociological, psychological, and characterological factors that cannot be isolated and so cannot be calculated and whose cumulative and interactive effects must remain entirely mysterious. And that ignores the necessary act of comparison to another whose contributive factors are equally obscure (see “Economic Justice”). But justice, defined as giving each what she needs, is a standard to which individuals can be compared and held (see “Needs Anchor Morality”). Fairness ignores the standards that justice requires. Fairness must consider circumstances for the obvious reason that they are all that can be seen in relation to the other. Justice allows comparison of deserts without reference to another in comparison to a standard of value, which lifts considerations of justice a bit above context (see “Justice Is Almost Everything“). This is desirable, if only because experience is inevitably privately processed, adding more subjective appraisals to the already personalized comparisons between individuals. Privilege must be chained to conceptions of comparative fairness. Justice asks for a judgment of what is due each person against some standard that at present seems very poorly understood.

The use of the word “privilege” changes the nature of a charge of racism. First, the accused may have done nothing offensive in contrast to the implicit irrationality and injustice of a prejudicial judgment for which she is rationally responsible (see “The Tyranny of Rationality”).  She has not actively chosen her privilege but is instead the beneficiary of an unearned advantage that she may have neither asked for nor wants. Second, the charge insinuates that any advantage thus conferred also must penalize others. Finally, we face the most relevant issue that derives entirely from her degree of moral responsibility: what is she supposed to do about it?  Egalitarians will argue passionately either that these objections do not matter because the initial deprivation nevertheless was unfair or because its unfair effects still linger. The problem with that argument is that it requires us to gauge unfairness or to remediate it by striving for an absolute equality, both of which are impossible.

First, the power of charging prejudice is inextricably linked to the rational error it commits. Racism is morally offensive in part because it is stupid, and holding the moral high ground in the discussion cannot be separated from intellectual superiority. Racists are ignorant, uneducated, unable to grasp nuance. They make sweeping generalizations that are wildly inaccurate and then attempt to paint individuals with them. A long tradition of finding empirical or rational means to justify racist judgments from pseudo-Aristotle to Thomas Jefferson to Charles Murray attempts to invalidate the association between racism and ignorance, but its existence only reinforces the connection, for the act of stereotyping implicit in prejudice reeks of lazy thinking and the self-indulgence of belief (see “Knowledge, Trust, and Belief”). This intimate connection between prejudice and mental defect cannot be carried over to the new racism of privilege, for privilege marks broad societal crimes, not individual failures. Southern freedom riders in the 1960’s were as guilty as the dog handlers who attacked them if both were white and inheritors of the same moral stain. Indeed, the notion of privilege immediately conjures up evils that might have motivated the former and enraged the latter. But should those risking their lives to end racism be guilty because they receive benefits from a system they actively oppose? Is their opposition to their own privilege to be admired? Or are they to be considered as making reparations for evils they are held to be responsible for and therefore to be regarded as morally neutral agents?

We must assume that such privilege derives not from the absolute advantage conferred by being white but by the relative disadvantage the privilege implies for being non-white. We will call this kind of privilege disparative privilege. Now this relationship requires some investigation on three counts: first, what constitutes the privilege; second, how does it redound to the disadvantage of people of color; and third, must any conception of privilege be built upon comparative relationships?

Conservatives wish to dismiss the whole notion of white advantage — and with it the notion of white guilt  — by insisting that whatever advantage they received was earned rather than given, though they wish to be vague about whether they earned it or their forebears did. At most, they point to cultural values that encourage their success: family structure, emphasis on education, and work ethic. They rightly accentuate the self-discipline their success required, the acceptance of deferred gratification and commitment. But the essence of privilege-as-racism is precisely the charge that advantages were not earned, that they accompany skin color as a gift. So we step into a minefield of moral ambiguity, for I cannot be responsible for a harm I did not commit, nor can I be asked to feel guilt for a benefit I earned. It is obvious that these desirable character traits are not confined or exclusive to “white culture,” and to say they are is simply prejudice. To claim that being non-white automatically results in cultural disadvantage in regard to these prerequisites for success is a claim I can’t imagine any unbiased cultural observer would wish to make. Nor are these automatic socioeconomic markers, for lazy scions of wealthy families and ungrateful second generation Americans are clichés that belie any guaranteed conferral of virtue, particularly in an age so moved by a denial of the possibility of virtue (see “The Death of Character”). That being said, the broad charge of inequity remains valid. The conditions for success are certainly better established in some socioeconomic environments than in others, and of the multitudinous strands in the tapestry of any success story, many are woven without effort, simply by the expectations of others that form our horizon of possibilities. Still, it is a gross act of prejudice to see white privilege as an unearned gift which white America takes for granted… at least until one compares it to being a person of color in America.

A requirement of racial bias is that it is entirely comparative. It is active, social, disparative: a group violation of fairness as well as of justice. Here we see a species of unfairness as glaring as it is gross because it is by definition based upon group characterizations that deny justice to the individual. Racial prejudice is unfair on its face, leading its opponents quite naturally to conclude its repair to require a rebalancing on a wholesale basis, putting entire groups on the same scales that disadvantaged some so as to benefit others. White guilt derives not from privilege but from prejudice as surely as the tail of the coin implies a head. Compared to the lot of non-whites in this country — not only in the past but in the present — every white person now living was born on third base, and whatever her positive efforts, all potentials were built to a degree upon a scaffold of exploitation. There is no denying that any comparison of white and non-white privilege will lead to one conclusion: whites still reap unearned benefits and non-whites unearned privation because of skin color, and this legacy of active prejudice is the true moral stain. White persons are like the boss’s son who may start in the mail room and may work hard but who will never know how much of his success is due to the accident of birth nor to what degree that success has kept less lucky fellow workers from rising as they might have. Who can doubt that the future occupant of the corner office will pass on the fruits of his success to his children just as his future underlings will hand off their lesser luck to theirs?

But note in the example that the while the goods are absolute, the harms are all considered to be comparative ac. When we separate privilege from disparity, our perspective must change. Considered as an unearned gift, we are awash in privileges. We did not earn our talents or intelligence, the social order that benefits us, the political and economic systems that enable rather than suppress our freedom, the family that nurtures us, the knowledge that guides us, the beliefs we value, and on and on. While it makes sense for us to be grateful for these blessings, I can think of no reason we should feel guilty for them and try to tabulate individual responsibility for their conferral or denial. In this large sense, anyone who lives in conditions allowing her to meet her human needs in the world is privileged, for it is by the satisfaction of our needs that our lives are fulfilled. The conditions for that satisfaction have been well-established thanks to the conventions of civilized life, all of which are privileges that civilized life confers (see “Where Do Rights Originate?“). If we have a loving family, dear friends, education, civil order, productive work, and the like, we have the goods we are by nature designed to have, and the moral response to that is satisfaction and gratitude, not guilt. What is more, these are not limited goods. There are more than enough of these blessings to go around and my having a sufficiency in a working civil society in no way limits your access. We do not compete for all privileges. They constitute the standard by which justice may be said to have been delivered or denied.

And it is certainly true that we as individuals do compete for those that are limited. That forces us to face both the universality of our needs and the pain their absence produces. The most impoverished citizen in this country is privileged compared to the 84% of Liberians living on less than one dollar per day, and the most unjust political jurisdiction here is utopia compared to life in Syria. If comparative privilege imposes a consequential guilt or if disparative privilege connotes the responsibility for strangers to ameliorate the conditions of other strangers who lack the satisfaction of their needs, then we all have a moral duty to ameliorate the living conditions of the poor regardless of their location. But do we? Let us put religious injunctions aside for the moment, though they impose their own moral duties, so that we may confront the central question that a relativistic concept of white privilege and white guilt implies: does relative economic and political privilege inevitably impose moral obligation? Let us refine the question: does privilege impose an obligation even when disparity is not a consequence of the privilege?

I acknowledge and laud the sentiment evoked in kind-hearted persons by seeing suffering. We wish to make it better. But a clear-eyed view of this natural desire also compels us to see how conditioned it is by our degree of privilege, as exemplified by the coat-drives-for-pets mentality of some wealthy enclaves. And just as any suffering tugs at the heartstrings, another nearly universal response is simply to turn away. What we happen to see disturbs us, so we simply refuse to see it so as not to be disturbed (see “Empathy: A Moral Hazard”). This accounts, I think, for at least a part of the gated community mentality that seems so prevalent among the wealthy. The moral principle of ought-implies-can-argues that moral obligation only follows the ability to act. An indiscriminate and wholesale equality of goods would be impossible to conceive much less to achieve (see “The Riddle of Equality“). The Soviet Union was a case study of that failure. Despite the efforts of thinkers like John Stuart Mill to objectify sentiments of pleasure and pain and thereby impart to them some moral valuation– an effort that collapsed in a thicket of comparisons of fairness– we would do well to remember that justice does not require an equality of degree of all desired goods. For we perceive many things as good and value them differently and there are too few Maseratis to go around. Rather, it is the sufficient acquisition of goods necessary to meet our human needs that is required, otherwise called an equality of kind. Recognizing and achieving it is a profoundly rational effort, the tugging at our heartstrings notwithstanding. We are left then with the suspicion that some kinds of privilege and guilt are not handmaidens of well-being and some are and that some well-being is earned rather than gifted. Some is impossible to gift regardless of intent. So why should guilt be intertwined with privilege like snakes on a caduceus?

But that is just the issue, isn’t it? For in our times and in America and for economic and political privilege especially, the relationship is always partly causal. Some linkages are as thick as wisteria vines squeezing the columns of antebellum mansions. Some family wealth that produced all the goods it is capable of securing for succeeding generations was built on the direct foundation of the importation and perpetuation of slavery. Other privileges are less easily traced. It is said the target of the fourth hijacked plane on September 11, 2001 was either the White House or the Capitol. What kind of loss to our national pride would that inflict? Both edifices were built by slaves. When a group of people are disadvantaged by color and so denied an equal wage or vote or voice in social policy sufficient to deprive them of the satisfaction of their needs, someone will reap the benefits, and the misalignment of power being what it is, the odds are that someone already has the sufficiency that justice requires. To the degree that persons continue to profit from this kind of prejudice in the present, they deserve to feel white guilt. And so long as the privilege is maintained, so too is the guilt, and so too is the moral obligation to correct the moral harm. But that is a societal stain, incapable of being gauged as present individual responsibility, and so in itself incapable of individual repair. “Society” is not a moral agent. “Culture” is not sentient and is incapable of moral responsibility. It doesn’t move with a single intent or speak with a single voice or ever act from any one preference (see “Cultural Consensus“). Culture and society,  have no moral capacity and so have no moral responsibility. That contention jangles because it disputes at its most basic level the presumptions of human sciences like cultural anthropology and sociology which stake their status as empirical studies on precisely the opposite presumption, producing the identity politics that see responsibility and moral agency as plastic products of environment, economic class, gender or race (see “The Calamity of the Human Sciences”). Prizing a positive group identity so as to refute a negative one seems as natural as rebalancing the scales, but it is as much an error of lazy thinking as the original prejudice that prompts it. I ought to feel guilty for my own prejudice because I am responsible for it. I cannot feel guilty for the sins of my forebears or for the continued harm they produce.

Yet recognizing that past disparities still affect persons’ ability to satisfy their needs imposes its own claim-right on me, not as individual but as citizen and inheritor of a government whose duty is to deliver distributive justice (see “Functional Natural Law and the Legality of Human Rights“). This is no different from the more general claim-right all citizens make upon their government in its sole responsibility to deliver justice, excepting only that any acquaintance with history will reveal the depth of its failures in regard to persons of color. Societal responsibility apart from government is illusionary because responsibility imposes claim-rights upon individuals, and as individuals, our relationships with individual strangers is largely composed of exemption-rights, the right to have space to fill our needs. It is only through government that citizens can exert claim-rights upon each other as strangers, and that means only government can repair the legacy of disparative privilege. And these reparations concern more than economic injustices, though these are the easiest to quantify. Reparations for slavery would not clear the slate, for the vestiges of racism would continue, producing continuing disparity and white privilege even were active prejudice to end today (see One-Armed Economics and Wealth Creationism“). Reparations would allow white Americans to wash their hands of responsibility to engage governments to remediate present harms.

But just to be clear, should I feel guilty for having parents who valued education and instilled a work ethic because others were less fortunate in their parents? Social scientists may attempt to lay all cultural differences at the feet of some ancestral economic exploitation, but such an indictment seems too sweeping to be justified by science and too Marxist to be embraced by reason, though it is consistent with postmodern emphasis of culture as the creator of identity (see “Postmodernism Is Its Discontents“). If a narrower difference maps the battleground of white privilege and white guilt, then fight it there. But let liberals leave out injunctions of religious duty, emotivist objections to inequalities of degree, and claims that all privilege imposes guilt. Let conservatives put away their blind pride in winning a rigged game and their contempt for those losing it. While privilege may broaden our view, it shouldn’t change our focus. Prejudice is still the villain of the piece, still a moral obloquy and intellectual failure. So long as its absolute effects ripple through the culture, white guilt is its proper consequence and government its proper agent of repair.

That conclusion applies also to other kinds of privileges. To the degree that they were unearned benefits at the costs of sexism, colonialism, imperialism, and the like, we expect to see coinages of terms like male privilege, first world privilege, heterosexual privilege and the like with their attendant trains of guilt. And to the degree that these disparities still hinder exploited people from satisfying their needs while easing the lives of their exploiters, active amelioration by government is the only morally justifiable response. I should add that today’s corporation is also an intentional agent like individuals and government, and if corporations are to be considered as citizens, they share the responsibilities of citizens to correct the legacies of disparative privilege and active prejudice. As we broaden the argument, we ought to also consider that the power of institutions and individuals to remediate is dependent on the scope of their authority, or more properly, the sanction that their members grant them. Here again, the principle of ought-implies-can is a limiting factor, for governments, for instance, can only effectuate justice in their own jurisdictions, though they can have some slight impact on others through their values. The same can be said for corporate entities and the individuals who compose them.

So what claim-right can citizens exert upon government for justice? Since it is defined as “to each her due,” it seems clear that the solution must be in the present tense, not the past. Historical injustice can only be acknowledged. It cannot be repaired. Its legacy can. For if all vestiges of individual prejudice were magically removed from our society today, we would still be left with the inequities it has long produced, both privilege and privation. Repairing these inequities is not so difficult as egalitarians might imagine since justice requires not only an equality of kind but also the inequality of degree that the exercise of our preferential freedom produces (see “Our Freedom Fetish“). The shame has never been that some have an excess. Rather it is that the prejudice that helped produce the excess has also produced a deficiency for its victims, the measure always against a categorical standard of human rights.

It is daunting to accept that “white guilt” arguments hold sway in regard to other kinds of privilege, leading to other moral obligations, but there it is. The corrective must take on the problem at three levels, two guided by justice and the third, unfortunately, steered by the principle of ought-implies-can. In our individual dealings with strangers, a strict justice based upon claim-rights and exemption-rights operates (see “The Moral Bullseye“). In our dealings as citizens with the ultimate stranger-writ-large, government, distributive justice must be the primary consideration. In considering our responsibilities to justice in regard to persons outside of the civil constraints of our own nation, we cannot as individual citizens or fellow human beings satisfy distributive justice. It does no good to deny our limitations or exaggerate a responsibility we cannot satisfy. Small efforts from afar do some good and they make us feel like we’re trying, but they are not enough. Pushing our government to work for universal human rights is a moral duty, but one government no matter how responsive cannot meet when measured against the standard of universal justice. Those same requirements must move us to satisfy our own needs and those we love and work for justice for our fellow citizens, so the scope of our obligations to justice in regard to other polities must always be less than sufficient. Since the exercise of influence over other sovereign nations is a governmental function, we as citizens should move our government to act on our behalf in accord with the limitations of the ought-implies-can principle of morality.

This is what is to be done: we have the obligation to root out deprivation of rights in all of its other manifestations by actively opposing prejudice in our own thinking and by favoring governmental action to produce the equality of kind that justice demands. And let us remember also to be thankful for the absolute privileges we all enjoy.