Minstrel Shows and Murderous Tautologies

Moral understanding is, Lars Hertzberg writes, “absolutely personal” (2022, 105). Alas, this understanding is attacked and obfuscated by what Simone Weil called “the commonest of crimes” in the moral-existential-spiritual realm: the “idolatry” of attributing “a sacred character to the collectivity” (2005, 76). My theme is how this difficulty manifests in Raimond Gaita’s ethics. After introducing Gaita’s essentially (inter)personal view of the moral understanding revealed in remorse, I argue that his account of racist dehumanisation conflicts with that view. I then outline an alternative perspective on racism as a determination to exclude-and-denigrate-in-the-name-of-collective-belonging and a fantasy of escaping-one’s-own-humanity-through-denying-the-other’s. My worry is that Gaita’s account, rather than analytically exposing racism’s moral-existential confusion, unwittingly comes to echo it.