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ChristianKl comments on Open thread, Oct. 5 - Oct. 11, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Anybody who treats family members such as cousins differently because they are family is a bigot?
Look at all the effective altruism and utilitarian arguments that basically imply that you should consider the welfare of all people in the world equally and that putting more weight on yourself, your family, and people who are close to you or who resemble you is just not something that rational people are supposed to be doing.
And then they get called bigots, and then bigots get banned....
My aunts resent me for this, but you guessed right: I do not hold the accident of genetic closeness alone as a valid reason for preferential treatment. To quote Gabriel García Márquez,
That's not the point of the question*. The question is whether anybody who doesn't see things that way is a bigot.
*: Unless of course you define being a bigot as having different preference than you have.
In itself, treating your relatives nicely because they're family doesn't seem to sound too bad; it sounds like the obvious and natural thing everybody would do. The problem I have with it is that it means you're intentionally treating everybody else less nicely because they're not family, which to me is a very weak reason to withhold your good will. When taken to the field of real-life decisions, it takes the form of nepotism, which can be seen as bigotry against the entire rest of humanity.
How is that even relevant? I don't see anything about genetic closeness up there. I do see a reference to family, which is not the same thing and can easily include people with "friendship formed".