out-group
Blaming victims, individuals or social structures?
When the Swedish politician Erik Hellsborn of the rather xenophobic Sweden Democrats party blogged that the massacre in Norway was really due to mass immigration and islamization that had driven the killer to extremes (link in Swedish), he of course set himself up for a harsh reprimand from the party chairman Jimmie Åkesson: “I do not share this analysis at all. One cannot blame individual human actions on social structures like this.”
While it is certainly politically rational for the party to try to distance themselves as far as they can from the mass-murderer Breivik (who mentioned them positively by name in his manifesto) this is of course a rather clear deviation from many previous comments from the party that do indeed seem to blame bad actions by people, such as terrorism, as due to Islam or other (foreign) social structures.
It is of course always enjoyable to see political movements you disagree with struggle with their internal contradictions. But this is an area where most of us do have problems: how much of the responsibility of an action do we assign to the individual doing it, and how much do we assign to the group the person belongs to?
Recent Posts
- Mummification and Moral Blindness
- Stoicism as a foundational component of ethics and existentialism
- Guest Post: Body Shaming is Unacceptable, Even if Directed at Vile People. An Intersex Critique of “Small Dick Energy”
- The New Relevance of Rationing
- Moral Psychology at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics
Popular posts
- Stoicism as a foundational component of ethics and existentialism
- Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics: When is Sex With Conjoined Twins Permissible?
- If you’re a Conservative, I’m not your friend
- Guest Post: Body Shaming is Unacceptable, Even if Directed at Vile People. An Intersex Critique of “Small Dick Energy”
- What if schizophrenics really are possessed by demons, after all?
Recent Comments