Many people who sincerely assert that all races are equal nevertheless exhibit tendencies to treat blacks differently from whites. For example\, they tend to prefer a white a job applicant over an equally qualified black applicant\, give a black person less speaking time than a white person\, and make less eye contact with a black person than a white person.
\nNeil Levy has recently introduced what he takes to be a new mental state kind: patchy endorsement. He also argues that mental states of this kind explain the racist tendencies that many people exhibit.
\nIn this talk\, I argue that we should not explain the tendencies in terms of patchy endorsements. I start off by suggesting that we should only appeal to such states in our explanations of the tendencies if we have a case for thinking that the states can provide better causal explanations of them than states of kinds that we are already familiar with. I then consider the ability of patchy endorsements to provide causal explanations of the tendencies\, and suggest that that we have no such case. Finally\, I conclude that we should not explain the tendencies in terms of patchy endorsements.
ORGANIZER;CN=Sebastian Lutz: METHOD:PUBLISH END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR