Allies are extremely important to LGBT rights. Though we don’t often enumerate what tasks we expect allies to do, a fairly common conception is that allies “support the LGBT community.” In the first section I introduce three difficulties for this position that collectively suggest it is conceptually insufficient. I then develop a positive account by starting with whom allies are allied to instead of what allies are supposed to do. We might obviously say here that allies are allied to the LGBT community, but I will argue that this community is better thought of as a loose coalition because there are often intersectional issues and conflicting interests that challenge any unified sense of community. I argue that people typically become allies because a friend or family member is experiencing some kind of specific harm; if that harm or discrimination is what causally explains why people become allies, then allies are required to do more than we commonly think. Although allies have a prima facie obligation to honor what members of a subcommunity identify as a harm, this obligation is defeasible if an ally believes fulfilling the obligation would be harmful. I conclude by looking at how we can understand what an ally is in terms of a larger discussion about moral obligations. If people already have these obligations, whatever they are, because morality requires it, then the status “ally” is redundant. I conclude by showing that certain social statuses can not only transform or reprioritize prior moral commitments, but can also introduce new kinds of responsibility that an agent did not have before.
shot and killed fifteen people at their high school in Columbine, Colorado. National media dubbed the event a "school shooting." The term grimly expanded over the next several years to include similar events at army bases, movie theaters, churches, and nightclubs. Today, we commonly use the categories "mass shooter" and "mass shooting" to organize and classify information about gun violence. I will argue that neither category is an effective tool for reducing gun violence and use empirical data to show how these categories perpetuate a moral panic that harms already vulnerable demographics. I conclude that we should instead favor a narrower description of individuals and events, (e.g., "X shot Y people at Z") because we can talk about all of the relevant cases without contributing the undue harms.I will begin with two orienting remarks. Social categories are useful because they help us quickly classify and organize information. We create social categories by grouping individuals or objects together according to a descriptive and normative standard. The descriptive component identifies current members of the category, simultaneously giving us a way to predictively pick out future members. Descriptions can change over time in response to technological advancements or political pressure. Ian Hacking (1999) details how these developments can make the description more or less accurate and so evaluate how well a descriptive component identifies current or future members of a social category.The normative component of a social category explains why the identifying description matters. We can distinguish between normatively "thick" and "thin" social categories (Haslanger 2012). Thick social categories, like gender, race, or class, have a tremendous impact on our lives, whether we want them to or not. Thick social categories play a major role in the kinds of jobs (if any) we can have, the housing we have access to, or which political rights and resources we are American collective memory is because of how we experienced it: real-time and unedited media coverage conceptually transformed Columbine from a place into an event.Although Americans were transfixed by the violence and location, they were also disturbed by the shooters. As news footage aired, people began to fearfully wonder what made their schools different from Columbine and what made the students in their schools different from Harris and Klebold. The unnerving implication reveals a third racialized background premise about expected violence in schools: White teenagers were not expected to be violent and so there had to be a further reason why these two were aberrant (Leavy and Maloney 2009). 2 Shifting public attention to teenagers as new paradigmatic cases ushered in other predictive profiles. Warnings about teenagers who were goths, bullied, wore trench coats, listened to violent music, or played violent video games displaced prior concerns about loner middle-aged counterparts by listing new kinds of people to beware. 3 Columbine, then, further changed our co...
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.