--- Julio Huato <juliohuato at gmail.com> wrote:
> You are a yet-to-be-born, but discerning,
> enlightened, self-interested
> individual. God lays it out for you: You are going
> to be born today
> somewhere in the U.S. and you have a 13% chance of
> being born Black.
> God is not telling you location, parents'
> socio-economic status,
> educational level, etc. You can observe life as is
> in the U.S. now,
> so you now exactly what being Black entails. What
> you don't know is
> your race and how you'll do in the future as an
> individual.
[WS:] Your argumet is fallacious. It commits a form of ecological fallacy by comparing the status of an individual to an average of a large and rather arbitrarily constructed group. By that logic I may ask what it entails to be born a white wimpy guy like myself vs group average of Black professional athletes, or for that matter the Kennedy or the Bush clan, and then conclude that I am owed a compensation by your egalitarian deity.
Furthermore, you seem to change the subject. I did not say that there is no diffrence, on average, between blacks and whites, which your argument is trying to show. I argued that this difference is caused, for the most part, by individual life choices rather than structural systemic factors - a theme that you a priori dismissed by your (fallacious) assumption of random districbution of status. So your metaphor does not realy address the issue that I am arguing.
Regarding your comments on parental choices - you again missed what I said - that while it is subject to
debate whether these respresent individual choices from the point of view of children, they are individual choices nonetheless, rather than systemic structurtal conditions. There are no laws or other structural factors telling parents to neglect their children or forbidding them from making sure that their children to get education and experience needed to succeed in life.
To reiterate, while it certainly takes far more than individual choice to ascend to the position of power or wealth in this society, it fundamentally requires nothing more than individual choice to reach the plus/minus average standard of living or failing to reach that level by avoiding certain choices. Whether the failure to reach that average was actually a conscious choice i.e. tradeoff between reaching that average and other pursuits, or a result of structural constrains imposed against individual will is a matter of individual case by case investigation and cannot be decided apriori based on group averages.
Wojtek
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