The problem with your belief is that you are assuming that it's easy to define sexism, racism, homophobia. The reality is that what a lot of people think are ex one of those three just aren't. Very few people are any of those things in any meaningful way.
In fact I would claim that your belief is exactly part of the problem in that you confuse empathy with some ethical/moral idea and end up thinking that you have the right interpretation and can judge whether someone is racist, sexist etc.
It’s very easy to define sexism, racism, homophobia. I think the thing which makes it hard to spot is that we normally treat questions as boolean yes-or-no things.
For example, a police department which is 10% more likely to let one race off with warnings than another race is racist (and that’s not a moral judgement: if warnings are effective everyone should get them), but it’s also an example deliberately chosen to be as far as possible from racially motivated genocide as I could manage without the risk of people denying it was racism.
It’s a spectrum. How much do you empathise with $person, not do you.
Or look at the various declarations of secession of the southern states in the US Civil War, or the Cornerstone Speech; it's pretty obvious that people were willing to go to war to defend both personal racial bias and a system of racial discrimination.
The people who study racism professionally don't seem to have a hard time defining it. And I don't think most of US history can really be explained without it. It began with rule of, by, and for well-off white men. Even after Reconstruction we had the Nadir [1] and sundown towns [2] and Jim Crow [3] and redlining [4] and a whole lot else.
Racism and sexism, being dominant paradigms in America, are mostly invisible to the people living them. 50 years from now, people will look back on what has changed and be dumbfounded that we thought we were living in an egalitarian paradise. Just like we look back on the people 50 years before.
No I don't realize that and I am pretty sure you can't find much that would back that up. People didn't even think in terms of racism it was just what was normal historically. Today we think like that but that also comes with it's own dangers of becoming another kind of opressor.
> The problem with your belief is that you are assuming that it's easy to define sexism, racism, homophobia. The reality is that what a lot of people think are ex one of those three just aren't. Very few people are any of those things in any meaningful way.
I don't know about that. People face very real, easily definable dangers and risks from being in a marginalized group, which seems to imply there's more than just a few people involved. Is it really so outlandish to say that many parts of Russia are homophobic, for instance?
On the more obvious end of things, people who have participated in hate crimes or voted for laws that restrict marginalized groups are close enough to be deserving one of the -isms, and depending on the time period, they were not at all rare.
> In fact I would claim that your belief is exactly part of the problem in that you confuse empathy with some ethical/moral idea and end up thinking that you have the right interpretation and can judge whether someone is racist, sexist etc.
You're mixing quite a few things in here in a manner I find worrying.
> you confuse empathy with some ethical/moral idea
Please address this directly if you think I am doing so, because I'm pretty sure I am not. I've laid out my views on empathy and it's relationship to morality pretty clearly in the OP, I think.
> you have the right interpretation and can judge whether someone is racist, sexist etc.
I have to think that. It's my fundamental responsibility as a human to judge whether things are objectionable or not. If I do not do this, the default takes place, and the default is much worse than collective judgment errors.
If nobody had the right, like you say here, there would never be anyone to question the default, and I don't want to be anywhere near the kind of norms we used to have.
Being ill suited to the responsibility to judge good and evil, as we are, does not mean we get to shirk it. It does not make it better to wash your hands, say you don't know, and stay out, because the default does not wait. It will catch up with us, and I know for certain it's not on our side, and it is much worse.
The point is once you have to point your finger at someone and say you are racist or you are sexist. You will most likely be wrong in ways that matter and only in ways that doesn't really matter (we are all racist, sexist etc).
And yes it's outlandish to say that in any way that matters. Sure you can say that someone who might be deeply religious. But its much harder once you get into the normal modern westerners mindset. I have seen my share of people being accused of things they weren't. That's were it's really dangerous especially the way you continue to talk about it as if you know when it's sexism or racism etc.
Again hate crimes aren't that easy to ascribe to someone either. I am pretty sure you and I would disagree on many of these matters.
I am not mixing anything at all, what I am saying is that very few people are those things in any way that matter.
I am adressing it directly. You say that if more people have empathy button you would press it because that would make the world a better place. So yes you are indeed doing exactly that.
No one is saying we shouldn't do it just that the way you speak of it scares me because you sound so certain you can differentiate.
In fact I would claim that your belief is exactly part of the problem in that you confuse empathy with some ethical/moral idea and end up thinking that you have the right interpretation and can judge whether someone is racist, sexist etc.