Out of good-faith, I am going to firstly @ @Jamal to ease the moderation process and allow them to censor this if they so choose (despite me fervently disagreeing with censoring such topics). Hopefully I do not get banned and this does not get censored so we can have a good conversation.

The goal of this discussion thread is to discuss race without it turning into racism. To avoid any confusion, I will firstly note that this discussion post is not:

1. Suggesting that any race is better than the other;
2. Holding that race is an essential property of a human; nor
3. That race can be used to segregate, deny rights, or otherwise persecute people of different races.

The only presupposition in this post is that race is real; which by ‘real’ it is to be understood that it is a member of reality in virtue of being biological.

Race is a broad topic, so I would like to restrict the discussion to a thought experiment to discuss; which focuses on comparing the ethicality of biological affinity as it relates to family vs. race. For a lot of people, we have a deep intuition that biological affinity, to some degree, matters for ethical judgments when it relates to biological family. For example, imagine there are two burning buildings: building A and B. Imagine I told you that there is exactly one person in each building and that, all else being equal, they both will die from burning alive. Imagine I told you that you have to save one of them and can only save one. If that’s all the information you are given, then who you save seems to be ‘eenie-meenie-minie-mo’ because there is nothing to ethically meaningfully distinguish each person from each other. However, imagine I told you that the person in A is your biological brother whom you have never known a second in your life nor did any of your family that you know of know about them; and that person B is just a random person you have no family-ties to at all. It seems reasonable, by my lights, to discriminate here based off of biological affinity—that is, this is my brother biologically and, despite me having never known him, that seems at least to some degree relevant to my moral calculation here. I think most would at least sympathize with my position here.

Where it gets interesting, to me, is that I wouldn’t prima facie say the same if instead of the person in A being my biologically brother they are biologically my race. It seems icky and immoral to discriminate here based off of race; and yet my reasoning would prima facie equally apply (as a person of my race will have more biological affinity to me than a random person I have no racial ties with). In fact, the more I think about it, the only difference is the distance of that biological affinity; for my brother is incredibly more related to me than a random person of the same race.

It gets weirder though. Imagine instead of saying the person in A is my race I say they are a extremely distant (biological) cousin. Since I am viewing it through the mode of family now, I would find it perfectly morally permissible to save my cousin merely because I am distantly related to them as family (given I know nothing about person in B other than they are not my family at all). This is weird because an extremely distant cousin of yours is just a member of your race: the thought experiment overlaps in this regard.

Then, I realized that everyone is an extremely distant cousin to all races—it’s just a matter of distance of biologically affinity.

So, where’s the symmetry breaker between the racial vs. family thought experiment here? Is it permissible to pick your race in that experiment because of biological affinity akin to picking your distant relatives you’ve never met?

Let’s dive in and have a productive conversation.